Sorrow and Bliss(80)
38
I STARTED WITH Woolf, her entire back catalogue, reading all day, in a room of my parents’ own, and sometimes when I began to worry I was going mad from so much time doing only that and conceived the thought in Woolfian language, I went out and read somewhere else. At night I read until I fell asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid’s dresser. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.
*
I tried to go running. It is as awful as it looks. At the Westfield, 0.7 miles from my parents’ house, I gave up and went in to buy water. Because it was a Monday morning, shortly after nine a.m., and I was a woman over forty wearing athletic clothing, I did not arouse attention as I made circuits of the ground floor trying to find somewhere.
There was a Smiths. The only route from the front door to the fridge cabinet was an aisle with a sign above it that said Gifts/Inspiration/Assorted Planners and yet it it was, singularly, row on row of gratitude journals. I stopped and looked at them in search of the worst one to buy and send to my sister. Although there were so many individual injunctions on their mint and glittery lilac and butter yellow covers – to live and love and laugh and shine and thrive and breathe – considered together, it seemed like humanity’s highest imperative is to follow its dreams.
I chose one that was inexplicably thick, with twice as many pages as its shelf mates, because it said, on the cover, You Should Just Go For It. It was meant to sound carefree and motivating but for want of an exclamation mark, it came across as weary and resigned. You Should Just Go For It. Everyone Is Sick Of Hearing You Talk About It. Follow Your Dreams. The Stakes Could Not Be Lower.
It was my day, the woman on the till told me. ‘Free pen with every journal.’ She was so old to be working there and breathed heavily from the exertion of crouching down to retrieve the box from under the counter. ‘Whichever one you want.’ The pens were also inspirational. I took one that had a phrase on it misappropriated from third-wave feminism, thanked her and walked to a café kiosk in the centre of the mall that was pumping synthetic bread fragrance into the air.
I ordered toast. It took a long time to come and I reached the bottom of my Instagram feed while I was still waiting for it. The final post was a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, @author_quotes_daily. The caption said, ‘What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.’
My toast had still not appeared. I slid Ingrid’s journal out of the bag and wrote the caption out on the first page, then glanced quickly over my shoulder in case I had been seen. But I was the only person who would judge a woman who was sitting by herself in a shopping centre bakery on a weekday morning, when her running clothes and her gratitude journal testified to an effort to improve herself on two fronts. I shifted in my chair. It was in a spirit of repentance probably that I turned to another page, somewhere near the middle because I did not know where to start. I just did. You Should Just Go For It. Seriously, Nobody Cares.
39
IT WAS THE first week of March. I was sitting on the back doorstep of my parents’ house, barefoot, tugging weeds out of cracks in the concrete, noticing how bright amber my tea looked with the cold sun on it, talking to Ingrid’s eldest son on the phone. They had started ringing me again.
He was explaining the chapter series he was reading, with unsparing detail and, intermittently, a full mouth.
I asked him what he was eating.
‘Grapes and a slavery roll.’
I heard Ingrid ask him for the phone.
‘He means savoury. Sorry, God, there are seven million of those books. I swear they’ve got children writing them in a sweatshop somewhere. How are you?’
I told her about the job I had got. A guidance and careers counsellor at a girls’ school. She did not find it ironic that I’d been offered the position, as I did. ‘You’ve literally had all the jobs.’ She said shit. She had to go. ‘Someone’s playing with doors.’
I went to hang up and saw a text from Patrick. We had not spoken since he left.
It said, ‘Hi Martha, I’m moving back into the flat tomorrow and need some of our furniture etc. Where is everything?’
I hesitated over it for a moment, trying to assimilate the new and extraordinary pain of a message that begins with hi and your name, when it comes from somebody you used to be married to. I rubbed my eye and under my nose and then replied, asking if we could do it tomorrow instead.
He said he couldn’t. He was working.
I replied with the address of the storage unit, wondering as I typed it if Patrick realised it was our wedding anniversary. And then, as I sent it, if you have given up on being married, whether it isn’t wedding anniversary any more.
Patrick wrote back, asking if I could meet him there in two hours. My desire not to was so acute that I could barely induce myself to get up and go inside, after I replied to say yes.
*
He was going to be late. I was already there when he texted to say so, waiting outside the locker, at the very end of a corridor so dark and desolate it felt post-apocalyptic.
Probably, he was still an hour away – he said sorry and something to do with a truck and the North Circular. I could go if I needed to. I said I didn’t mind and got the journal out of my bag. It was stained, coming apart, a now ludicrous thickness from getting wet and being dried on the radiator so many times.