Sorrow and Bliss(67)

‘Why not? If you’re fine with it, why wouldn’t you just tell everyone?’

‘Because it’s still fucking embarrassing.’

‘I wouldn’t have judged you. Nobody would have. They shouldn’t anyway.’ Then, sounding so completely unlike herself I worried I was going to laugh, my sister said, ‘We as a society have to break down the stigma around mental illness.’

‘Oh my gosh Ingrid. I’d rather we as a society built it up a bit so we could talk about something else.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘Okay.’

‘What does Patrick think?’

‘Ingrid, I just said.’

‘What?’

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘What? Oh my God, Martha. Why the fuck would you decide to tell our parents instead of your own husband?’

‘I didn’t decide. I told our father by accident. Our mother, it transpired, did not need to be told.’

‘What? Why not?’

I asked if we could talk about her later.

‘Fine. But –’ Someone screamed Mum and started banging on the bathroom door. Ingrid ignored it. ‘I still don’t understand why you don’t want him to know. You’re having a horrible time and apart from the fact that it would probably help if he had this fundamental information about his wife, secrecy is extremely shitty married-person behaviour.’

‘He should have known.’

‘Why? You didn’t.’

‘I am not a doctor.’

‘And Patrick’s not a psychiatrist. And you know now so does it still matter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

There was another loud noise in the background, the door being flung open too hard and hitting the wall, followed by the voices of her children. Ingrid told me to wait. I heard her say, ‘Out, out, out,’ but they wouldn’t go and the interchange dragged on for minutes. By the time she came back, she had forgotten her question.

‘Martha, you need to tell him. You can’t just keep going indefinitely, thinking you can be happy on any level, ever, if you’re not telling him this giant thing.’

‘I don’t think we can be happy on any level.’ Ever – it was the first time I had heard myself say it, plainly, aloud.

‘Martha, seriously.’ Ingrid was worn. ‘Where is he now?’

I told her he had gone to get the paper. From where I was sitting, I could see into the kitchen, the clock on the oven. We had been talking for two hours. I had no idea where Patrick really was.

‘Please promise that you’ll tell him as soon as he gets back. Or even, I don’t know, write him a letter. You’re good at that.’

I said I would and that I had to go because my phone was on four per cent. I did not know if either was true.

*

I sat there for a bit longer, until my guilt became annoyance or the other way around. Either way, a feeling powerful enough to compel me off the sofa and upstairs. I had a shower and dried the floor with my dress, still there from the night before. I went downstairs to the kitchen and tipped Patrick’s coffee out, peeled a banana and did not eat it, and by the time I had done all those small, stupid things, I didn’t care about anything. I got a pen out of a drawer and wrote the letter, standing up, the paper pressed against the wall until the ink ran out and I decided to go to London.

*

The oil light came on as I started the car. I walked to the station. On the platform, I got a text from Ingrid. I read it, with no instinct to throw my phone against something or grind it into the ground with my heel, then got on the train, not sure where in London I was going.

In my seat, I put my bag against the window and leaned my head on it. Someone had scratched the word Wrekt into the glass. I went to sleep wondering why they had chosen that word, spelt that way, and where they were now.

When I opened my eyes, the train was coming into Paddington. My sister’s message said, ‘I meant to tell you on the phone. I’m having another baby. sorry x 100000000.’





33

I GOT A Tube to Hoxton, to a place I’d gone to a year before when Ingrid had decided to get her sons’ names tattooed on the inside of her wrist by a man she found on Instagram. She said he had 100,000 followers.

A girl behind the desk said the studio didn’t do walkins, playing with her septum piercing as she spoke. ‘But he’s got a gap in five minutes and could do you something small, i.e. not this,’ referring me to her exposed clavicles, tattooed with a pattern of leaves and vines. I said it was very impressive. ‘Yeah, I know. You can wait over there if you want.’

I pretended to study the menu of terrifying body art options on the wall until the man with all the followers came and took me out the back, directing me to a reclining chair, drawing up next to me on his saddle stool. I showed him a picture on my phone.

I said, ‘Not coloured in. Just the outline of it. As small as possible.’

He took the phone and made the picture bigger. ‘What is it?’

I told him it was a barometric map of the Hebrides. I wanted it on my hand, I didn’t care where.

He said cool, picked up my hand and rubbed his thumb over the fine cross-hatched forty-year-old skin of mine. ‘Yeah, I reckon just below the nail.’ He let go and pulled a trolley towards him, picking things out of its small drawers.