Sorrow and Bliss(79)

Outside my door, Ingrid told me to move so she could open it for me. Looking in and reversing straight out she said, ‘Why don’t you take my room instead?’ Mine had been pressed into service as a storage room for sculptures that, my mother explained when we enquired later, ‘were not there yet conceptually’.

We went next door and I pushed the bags in the bottom of Ingrid’s empty wardrobe, then went and sat with her on the futon that had come with the birch table and the brown sofa, and borne the brunt of her teenage smoking.

She talked for a while about the particular occasion of each burn mark, her room, things she had written and drawn on the wall, many of which remained including, she showed me behind the curtain, the words I HATE MUM. And then, times she remembered me coming in and getting her when there had been A Leaving. Idly she had picked up my hand and noticing it, rubbed her thumb over my tattoo as if it might come off. ‘Do you ever regret getting this?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘When I see it.’

‘I would judge you, except –’ She turned her wrist up and showed me the very short line. She said anyway. ‘What are you going to do now? Do you have a plan? Because you could –’ Her tone indicated the start of a list but nothing came after her preparatory inward breath, except an outward one. She looked sorry.

‘I know, don’t worry.’

‘I will think of something.’

I told her it was fine. ‘It isn’t your job. I have one anyway or not – it’s not a plan-plan. It’s more –’ I paused ‘– I need to figure out what kind of life is available to a woman my –’

‘Don’t say my age.’

‘– a woman who was born at roughly the same time as me, who is single and doesn’t have children or any particular ambition, and a CV that,’ I wanted to say ‘is shit’ but there was so much concern on my sister’s face, I said, ‘that lacks an obvious through-line.’

‘It doesn’t have to be miserable though. Like, don’t automatically assume it has to be –’

I said, ‘I’m not. I want it not to be miserable. I just don’t know what non-miserable options exist if you don’t like animals or helping people. If you’ve wanted the things women are supposed to want, babies, husband, friends, house –’

‘– successful Etsy business.’

‘Successful Etsy business, envy, fulfilment, whatever, and you didn’t get them, what are you supposed to want instead? I don’t know how to want something that isn’t a baby. I can’t just think of something else and decide to want that instead.’

Ingrid said yes you can. ‘Even the women who get those things lose them again. Husbands die and children grow up and marry someone you hate and use the law degree you bought them to start an Etsy business. Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want.’

‘I don’t want it to be an invented thing.’

‘Everything is invented. Life is invented. Everything you see anyone doing is something they made up. I invented Swindon for fuck’s sake, and made myself want it and now I do.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Well, I don’t not want it.’

‘How did you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just by focusing on – or doing practical things and pretending to enjoy them until I sort of do enjoy them or can’t remember what I enjoyed before.’

I bit my lip and she went on. ‘Like, maybe sort your clothes out or do stupid yoga, and it will probably come to you or you’ll come up with it. You’re so clever, Martha, the most creative person I know.’ She hit me because I rolled my eyes. ‘You are, and I need to go home so can you please pull me up?’

I did and my sister kept hold of my hands for a second, standing in the middle of her bedroom, and said, ‘Little daily miracles, illuminations, something-something, Woolf matches. Do that. Do what Virginia says.’

I went downstairs with her and promised, because she made me, that I would do something practical, but not a gratitude journal because, she said, it would freak her out.

‘Or like, a vision board. Unless it is just pictures of an over-forty Kate Moss on a superyacht.’

‘Bikini askew.’

‘Always.’

‘I love you Ingrid.’

She said I know and went home.

*

My father had left the study light on and the book open and face down on his desk. I went in and picked it up but couldn’t find the bit he had read. Trying to wedge it into a non-existent space on his shelves, I thought of him saying once – the summer I spent in this room – ‘all of life on one wall Martha. Every kind of life, real or made up.’

I stayed there and read so many spines, then one by one I started taking books off, building a pile in my left arm. My selection criteria was threefold. Books by women or suitably sensitive/depressive men who had made up their own lives. Any book I had lied about reading, except Proust because even with everything I had done I did not deserve to suffer that much. Books with promising titles, that I could reach without having to stand on a chair.

They were old. The covers made my fingers feel chalky, and the pages smelled like the boredom of waiting for my father to finish in a secondhand shop when I was young. But they would tell me how to be or what to want and they would save me from a gratitude journal and it was the only thing I could think of.