Sorrow and Bliss(9)
At home later, Ingrid came into my room so we could lay out all our presents on the floor to see who had got more and divide them into Like and Don’t Like piles, although we were getting too old for it. She told me she saw Patrick put the rubber band in his pocket when he thought no one was looking. ‘Because he loves you.’
I told her that was gross. ‘He’s a child.’
‘The age gap won’t matter by the time you get married.’
I pretended to throw up.
Ingrid said, ‘Patrick loves Martha,’ and took Hot Tracks ’93 off my Don’t Like pile and put it on my CD player.
That was the last Christmas before a little bomb went off in my brain. The end, hidden in the beginning. Patrick came back every year.
4
ON THE MORNING of my French A level I woke up with no feeling in my hands and arms. I was lying on my back and there were already tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, running down my temples into my hair. I got up and went to the bathroom, and saw in the mirror that I had a deep purple circle, like a bruise, around my mouth. I could not stop shaking.
In the exam, I couldn’t read the paper and sat staring at the first page until it was over, writing nothing. As soon as I got home, I went upstairs and got into the space under my desk and sat still like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying.
I stayed there for days, coming down for food and the bathroom, and eventually just the bathroom. I could not sleep at night or stay awake during the day. My skin crawled with things I couldn’t see. I acquired a terror for noise. Ingrid was constantly coming in and begging me to stop being weird. I told her to please, please, go away. Then I would hear her calling out from the hallway, ‘Mum, Martha’s under her desk again.’
My mother was sympathetic to begin with, bringing me glasses of water, trying to coax me to come downstairs in various ways. Then it started to annoy her and when Ingrid called out after that she would say, ‘Martha will come out when she wants to.’ She no longer came into my room, except once with the Hoover. She pretended not to notice me, but made a point of vacuuming around my feet. That is the only memory I have that involves my mother and any form of cleaning.
*
The Goldhawk Road parties were suspended at my father’s behest. He told my mother, just until I was on the up. She said, ‘Who needs fun I suppose,’ and subsequently cut her hair very short, and started dying it shades that do not appear in nature.
Supposedly, it was the stress of my illness that caused her to get fat. Ingrid says that if that is true, it is also my fault that she began wearing sack dresses; waistless, muslin or linen, invariably purple, layered over one another, so that their uneven hems fell around her ankles like corners of a tablecloth. She has not deviated from the style since, except for acquiring an additional layer for each additional stone. Now that she is essentially spherical, the impression is of many blankets thrown haphazardly over a birdcage.
Before I got ill, my mother’s nickname for me was Hum because as a child I used to sing, one meandering, tuneless, made-up song that I started as soon as I woke up and continued until someone asked me to stop. The memories I have of it are mostly from other people – that I once sang about my love of tinned peaches for all of a six-hour drive to Cornwall, that I could be so affected by a song about a dog without a mother or a lost felt-tip, I made myself cry, so hard on one occasion I threw up in the bath.
In the only memory that is mine, I am in the garden sitting on the unmown grass outside my mother’s shed, singing about the splinter in my foot and her voice comes from inside and she is singing, ‘Come in here Hum and I will get it out for you.’ She stopped calling me Hum when I got sick, and began calling me Our Resident Critic.
Ingrid says she has always had bitch-like tendencies but it was me who really brought them out.
*
Last year, I got glasses that I do not need because the optometrist fell off his rolling stool during the eye-test. He looked so mortified I started reading the letters wrongly on purpose. They are in the glovebox, still in the bag.
*
From the beginning, my father stayed up with me in the night, sitting on the floor, leaning against my bed. He offered to read me poetry and if I did not want him to, he talked about unrelated things in a very quiet voice, not requiring a response. He was never in his pyjamas, I think, because if he didn’t change out of his clothes, we could pretend it was still just the evening and we were doing a normal thing.
But I knew he was worried and because I was so ashamed of what I was doing and, after a month, I did not know how to stop doing it, I let him take me to a doctor. On the way there, I lay down on the back seat.
The doctor asked my father some questions while I sat in the chair next to him looking at the floor, eventually saying that based on the fatigue, the pallor, the low mood, it was so likely to be glandular fever there was no point in a blood test. Likewise, there was nothing he could give me for it – glandular fever could only run its course – but, he said, some girls liked the idea of taking something, in which case, an iron tablet. He clapped his thighs and got up. At the door, he tipped his head at me as he said, to my father, ‘Evidently someone has been kissing boys.’
On the way home my father stopped and bought me an ice cream, which I tried to eat but couldn’t so that he had to hold the melting cone out the window for the rest of the drive. At the front door, he paused and said, instead of going straight back to my room, I could always come and have a rest in his study. It is the first room off the street. He said, for a change of scene, the scene being the space underneath my desk although he did not say so. He told me he had things to do – there didn’t have to be any talking. I said yes because I knew he wanted me to and because I had just done the six steps up from the footpath and needed to sit down before taking the stairs up to my room.