And so, I did a pregnancy test, every day until I got my period, convinced despite the precautions I had taken during and afterwards, despite the fact that every test was negative, that I was carrying a writhing, moon-faced baby. The morning my period came, I sat on the edge of the bath and felt sick with relief.
Without my medication, I was not euphoric any more. I was not depressed, the old me or a new me. I just was.
*
I told Ingrid that I had slept with the student, none of what had followed for me in case she laughed and told me I was paranoid. She said wow. ‘Consider your gaps found and filled in.’ When she asked me what it was like, the first time, I made it sound brilliant because she was actively looking, she said, to have her own gaps filled in.
*
After I graduated, late, I got a job at Vogue because they were starting a website and I said, in my application, that as well as being a qualified philosopher, I was au fait with the internet. Ingrid said I got the job because I am tall.
The day before I started, I went to the Waterstones on Kensington High Street and found a book about HTML, which I stood reading in the aisle because the cover was such an aggressive shade of yellow, I couldn’t bear the idea of owning it. It was so confusing, I got angry and left.
We – me and the one other girl who did the website – sat far away from the magazine people but unnaturally close to each other in a cubicle made out of shelving units. We were both, it transpired, anxious not to annoy the other, which was why I worked out how to eat an apple in absolute silence – by cutting it into sixteenths and holding each piece in my mouth until it dissolved like a wafer – and why, whenever her phone rang, she would lunge for the receiver, lift it an inch out of the cradle and put it straight back down to stop it ringing. The calls could not have been for us since no one knew we were there. We started calling it the veal crate.
In my first six months I lost two stone. Ingrid said I looked amazing in a gross way and could I try and get her a job there too. It wasn’t on purpose – I was told it happened to everyone as though subconsciously, we were all preparing ourselves for the day we’d come in and find that the doors had been modified in such a way that only girls with approved dimensions could pass through them. Like the baggage-sizers at airports; hand luggage must be able to fit in here.
I loved it there. I stayed until they found out I was not au fait with the internet and arranged for me to move downstairs to World of Interiors where I wrote exquisitely about chairs and said very little. Ingrid says it’s thanks to hard work and determination that I have been steadily descending the career ladder ever since.
After her A levels, Ingrid did the first year of a marketing degree at a regional university, which she said left her dumber than she was to start with, then moved back to London and became a model agent. She resigned as soon as she got pregnant and never returned because, she says, she has no interest in paying a nanny so she can spend nine hours a day looking at Eastern European sixteen-year-olds with negative BMIs.
*
On holiday one year, I read Money, thirty pages of it until I remembered that I do not understand Martin Amis. The main character in the book is a dedicated smoker. He says, ‘I started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I am always smoking another cigarette.’
Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed, mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one.
I started a diary on my twenty-first birthday. I thought I was writing, generally, about my life. I still have it; it reads like the diary you are told to keep by your psychiatrist, to record when you are depressed or coming out of a depression or anticipating the onset of one. Which was always. It was the only thing I ever wrote about. But the intervals in between were long enough that I thought of each episode as discrete, with its own particular, circumstantial cause, even if most of the time I struggled to identify it.
Afterwards, I did not think it would happen again. When it did, I went to a different doctor and collected diagnoses like I was trying for the whole set. Pills became pill combinations, devised by specialists. They talked about tweaking and adjusting dials; the phrase ‘trial and error’ was very popular. Watching me dispense such a quantity of pills and capsules into a bowl once, Ingrid, who was with me in the kitchen, making breakfast, said, ‘That looks very filling,’ and asked me if I wanted milk on them.
The mixtures scared me. I hated the boxes in the bathroom cabinet and the bent, half-used blister sheets and scraps of foil in the sink, the insoluble feeling of the capsules in my throat. But I took everything I was given. I stopped if they made me feel worse or because they had made me feel better. Mostly they made me feel the same.