I said no. ‘We just assumed we weren’t allowed. I don’t know why. Probably because we never heard anyone in your family mention it and,’ I considered it, ‘I think, for me, it was like I didn’t want to be the one to break the bad news.’
‘It’s not like I didn’t know I was adopted though is it?’
‘No. The bad news you weren’t white.’
He said what? so loudly that people turned around, then grabbed me by my shoulders. ‘Why am I only hearing this now Martha?’
‘I’m so sorry Nicholas, I thought you knew.’
He released me with a little backwards push and said he needed to keep walking, to process. Maybe, he said, on a level he’d suspected but still, it’s a massive shock, hearing someone say it. I told him I understood it would be a huge blow.
Out of the gate Nicholas put his arm around me and said, ‘Martha you are a fool.’ We walked like that for a while, back through Fitzrovia. Later, we turned up towards Notting Hill. I asked him if he thought we should be eating more carbohydrates. He said Martha, we should be getting jobs.
*
There was a sign in the window of a small organic supermarket we passed on Westbourne Grove advertising casual vacancies in all departments. Even though we lacked essential retail experience, we were both hired, I think, because as a recovering addict and spurned wife who walked for miles every day, we both had the requisite pallor and wasted bodies of health shop employees.
Nicholas was put on night fill. The manager asked me if I would prefer register or café. I told her that, as an insomniac, I was also interested in evening work. She glanced at my biceps, said, ‘Register,’ and sent me home with a sample of herbal sleep tonic that tasted like supermarket salad leaves that had decomposed in the bag.
We didn’t go on walks any more. On breaks, I ate ham sandwiches from Pret and drank the ultimately best flavour of Lucozade, hiding in the stockroom because meat is murder and, I overheard the manager telling a customer, sugar is microbial genocide basically. Even though Nicholas was still at Goldhawk Road, I missed him.
11
THE LAST TIME I saw Jonathan was at his office. I went there to sign our finalised annulment papers. It had been six months by then since I had skedaddled. I stood in front of his desk waiting as Jonathan checked every page with uncharacteristic diligence then pushed them towards me, smirking. ‘All I can say is thank God you didn’t manage to get pregnant. Someone with your tendencies.’
I snatched up the papers and reminded him that it had been his idea. ‘But yes, thank God you didn’t manage to get me pregnant, Jonathan. A baby I didn’t want in the first place turning out to have a genetic predilection for cocaine and white jeans.’ I left before he could say anything else.
*
Outside, on my way to the bus, I walked past a rubbish bin and tossed the papers in without stopping, unable to imagine a situation that would require me to present a hard copy record of my abortive marriage or where I would keep them in my bedroom at Goldhawk Road unless I dragged one of my father’s filing cabinets upstairs and put them under A for Agonising Fuck Ups ’03 – ’04.
At a set of lights, I got off the bus and walked half a mile back to the rubbish bin. The papers were still there, under a McDonald’s cup that had been tossed in full and split its lid. Without them I had no proof that I wasn’t married to a man who, Ingrid told me while evacuating me from his apartment, scored nine out of ten on an online questionnaire she had done on his behalf called Are You a Sociopath?. I lifted them out, the pages now a single clod, and carried them by one corner to find another bus, dripping Fanta down the side of my leg.
For half an hour, the bus crawled along Shepherd’s Bush Road. Traffic lights changed, and changed again, without admitting any cars to intersections already jammed. There was no one else on the upper deck and I sat with my forehead against the glass, looking down at the footpath and then, as it came into view, through the wide front window of a café where a woman was breastfeeding a baby and reading. To turn the page, she had to put the book on the table and keep it open with the heel of her hand while swiping her fingers right to left. Before she began reading again, she would drop her face enough to kiss the baby’s hand that had got a tiny grip on the edge of her shirt. After a few minutes, I saw a pregnant woman get up from another table and go over. They started talking to each other, the one touching her stomach and laughing, the other patting her baby’s back. I could not tell if they were friends, or like-strangers compelled to acknowledge their shared fecundity. I did not want to be either of them.