Sorrow and Bliss(81)

I sat down on the floor and wrote for a long time until I realised, turning over, that I had reached the last page. I did not know how to finish it. When, after minutes of thought, no suitable ending had presented itself, I went back to the beginning and started reading. I hadn’t until then, knowing that whatever I’d find in my writing – self-fascination, banality, descriptions of things – would make me go outside and set it on fire.

It wasn’t that or, at least, I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.

I could see what I’d had now. Everything people want in books, a home, money, to not be alone, all there in the shadow of the one thing I didn’t have. Even the person, a man who wrote speeches about me, and gave things up for me, who sat beside the bed for hours while I was crying or unconscious, who said he’d never change his mind about me and stayed even after he knew I was lying to him, who only hurt me as much as I deserved, who put oil in the car and would never have left me if I hadn’t told him to.

It wasn’t my final revelation. That I desperately wanted him back wasn’t a revelation at all by the time I reached the last page. It was the small, awful reason why I had lost him. It wasn’t my illness; it was nothing I had said or done. I wrote it down and closed the journal, finished, although most of the page was still blank because the reason our marriage had ended didn’t fill a whole line.

At the far end of the corridor, the lift opened.

I got up off the ground and put the journal on top of my bag.

Patrick walked towards me, so slowly, or it was such a long way, that before he was half way I could not remember how people stand. When someone you know beyond all being, who you have loved and hated and have not seen for months, is coming towards you, avoiding your eye until the last minute, then smiling at you like he’s not sure when or if you’ve met, what are you meant to do with your hands?

*

Our conversation was two minutes long, a confusion of sorrys and hellos and thank yous, unnecessary questions and even more unnecessary instructions about locks and how they’re opened. It seemed like a joke. A game to see who could last the longest pretending to be other people. Neither of us gave in and the conversation ended with a slew of okay greats. Patrick took the key and I left.





40

I WAS NOT conscious of the wrong weight of my bag until two stops were left on the long trip home. I looked inside, as though it could possibly be in there when the bag felt empty on my shoulder. It was not on the seat beside me. It had not slipped out onto the floor. I made a scene. I tried to wrench the carriage doors open before the train had come to a full stop at the next station, then shouldered through the packed crowd on the platform and forced my way into the carriage of a train about to leave on the other side. It would have been too full with half the number of people already in it. A man shook his head at me. I didn’t care.

On the way back, it kept being held in the tunnel – I stayed standing, as if doing so would make the journey faster, imagining the journal lying on the footpath somewhere between the station and the storage facility, a passer-by picking it up, checking for a name inside, seeing there wasn’t one, walking off with it anyway, tossing it in the first bin they came to. Or taking it home. The idea was so much worse – what felt like my singular possession being put next to the pile of takeaway menus and mail to be dealt with in their kitchen, it being read in front of the television, ‘another funny bit’ out loud to an uninterested husband during the advertisements.

*

I was told by a station attendant when I finally arrived that nothing like a diary had been handed in but if I wanted an umbrella I could take my pick. I went out and walked back to the storage centre the way I had come, crossing in the same places I had an hour and a half earlier, still empty-handed at the end of it.

As I entered, the clerk pointed out that I was back again. Evidently I couldn’t get enough of the place. He was sitting behind his desk, as before, leaning back with hands laced behind his head, watching his CCTV screens like there was more to see than deserted corridors from a host of angles. I signed his stupid entry book again and as I got into the lift I heard him saying, ‘Your boyfriend is still up there. He’s going to regret pulling the lot out at once.’

*

All our furniture was in the corridor, removed a piece at a time by Patrick and arranged by accident in the simulacrum of a room. An armchair, a television, a standard lamp. He was sitting on our sofa. His elbow on the armrest, reading.

He glanced up and seeing me said hi like I’d just got home, then went back to his book. There was no point in asking for it back. If he’d read from the beginning, he was now almost finished. I sat on the sofa, at the opposite end, and waited.

Patrick turned a page. Had it been anyone else – if it had been Jonathan, it would have been an act of rare and ingenious cruelty, reading my diary in front of me. Jonathan would have pretended he was too deep in concentration to brook an interruption – he would have put one finger up if I’d tried to speak, shifting his expression from sadness to amusement, intrigue, a little shock, devastation, in the course of a single page, and making intermittent comments on my portrayal of things.

But it was Patrick. He was concentrating. His expression was earnest and his reactions were slight, a small frown, an occasional almost imperceptible smile. He didn’t say anything until the end. And then, only, ‘I can’t read your writing. I never what?’