Sorrow and Bliss(75)

Perhaps what I think is wrong. Perhaps I’m not entitled to think of your pain that way, but it is the only way I can think of to give any of it a purpose. And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something?

Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?

And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn’t in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are which is, in part, a product of your pain.

You do not have to believe me about that but I know – I do know, Martha – that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on. If you want to, you can put all of this right. Start with your sister.

*

I put the letter in a drawer and picked up my phone. There was a message from Ingrid. They had been back for days but we hadn’t spoken since she drove to Oxford. I had texted but she never replied. Her message said, ‘Get drain unblocker stuff on the way home because the bath isn’t emptying. sorry for sexting you while you’re at work.’ Eggplant emoji, lipstick mouth.

While I was still looking at it, the grey dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

‘That wasn’t for you obviously.’

I sent her the rosary, a cigarette and the black heart. I started another one, the road and the running girl, and didn’t send it, because if she knew I was coming, she would be gone by the time I arrived.

*

She was in the front garden, sitting on a neglected outdoor table, legs dangling, watching her sons ride their bikes into each other on purpose. In spite of how cold it was, all three of them were wearing shorts, and T-shirts from Disneyland. She turned around when they called out to me, but showed no reaction as I walked over waving stupidly until I was all the way there.

‘Hello Martha.’ It felt like being stung, my sister greeting me as though I was a friend, or no one. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To give you this.’ I handed her a plastic bag with the drain unblocker stuff in it. ‘And also to say sorry.’

Ingrid looked in the bag and said nothing. Then, ‘Excuse me –’ leaning sideways to see past me to where her sons had started skidding their bikes on purpose, which they knew they weren’t allowed to do – she started shouting at them – because they knew it wrecked the grass.

There was no grass, it had been wrecked since the afternoon they moved in and, although they ignored her, she repeated her warning to them at the same volume every time I thought she had finished and tried to say something.

The rain that had been falling all morning had stopped as I was getting out of the car, but the sky was still dark and each small gust of wind shook water from the trees. I waited.

Ingrid gave up and said, ‘Go then.’

‘I wanted to say –’

‘Hang on.’ My sister got off the table and retrieved a Matchbox car from a puddle, took out her phone and sent a series of messages before she came back and started drying a different section of table with a tissue she took a long time to locate in her pocket.

‘Ingrid?’

‘What? Go. I said go.’ She didn’t sit on the table again, just perched on its edge.

I apologised. It was a version of what I’d composed in the car, except circuitous and halting, with endless repetitions and false starts, more and more excruciating as I laboured on. I felt like a child at a piano lesson, stumbling over a piece I had played perfectly at home.

My sister became visibly more irritated the longer I went on. Except for saying, ‘I already know all this’ as I returned again to the section about wanting children, before my anticlimactic finish. ‘So that’s it probably.’

She said right and pressed her fingers into a rib on one side. The thing was, she told me, staring ahead, I had worn her out. I had worn everybody out. It had all got to be too much. She couldn’t care for me any more as well as her children. She said that she was going to forgive me at some point but it wasn’t now.

I said okay, and thought to go, but Ingrid shifted along and asked me if I was going to sit down or not. For a minute we watched her sons who were by then trying to make a ramp from planks of wood and a brick. Then I said, ‘They’re so amazing.’ Ingrid shrugged. ‘No really. They’re amazing.’

‘What are you basing that on?’

‘Because they were babies five minutes ago and now look at what they’re doing.’

‘I guess. Riding bikes.’

I said no. ‘I mean repurposing the shit out of found objects.’

Ingrid covered her face with her hands and shook her head as if she was crying.

I waited. A minute later she said, ‘Okay fine’ and took her hands away. ‘I have forgiven you.’ Her eyes were red, and rimmed with tears but she was laughing. ‘You are still the worst. Literally, you are the worst person there is.’