The third time, it felt like we had been melted down and made into another thing. We lay for so long afterwards, facing each other in the dark, not talking, our breath in the same pattern, our stomachs touching. We went to sleep that way and woke up that way. It was the happiest I have ever felt.
*
In the morning, after he gets out of the shower, Patrick puts his watch on first. He dries himself in the bathroom and leaves the towel behind. It is more efficient, he says, not having to make a return trip just to hang it up. I was still in his bed, the first time he performed the routine in front of me, coming into the room, wandering from his drawers to his wardrobe. Naked except for the watch. I observed him for as long as I could before he noticed and asked me what was funny.
I said, ‘Do you have the time, Patrick?’
He said yes I do and went back to his drawers.
Men describe themselves as real leg men. A tits man. With Patrick, I found out I am a real shoulders man. I love a good set of delts.
The fourth time, the fifth time …
*
Ingrid wanted to know what it had been like, sleeping with Patrick. We were walking to a park close to her house. It was intensely cold but she had not been out of the house since she was discharged from hospital and had begun to feel delirious, she told me, presumably for lack of oxygen. She was pushing the pram. I was carrying a heavy seat cushion from her sofa because she needed to feed the baby and the only way it didn’t hurt was with the cushion – only this cushion – underneath him. We found somewhere to sit down and while she was getting ready she said, ‘Just tell me one thing about it. Please.’
I refused, then relented because she kept asking. ‘I didn’t know it could be like that.’ I said I hadn’t known that was what it was for. ‘How you were meant to feel afterwards. That the afterwards is why sex exists.’
She said, that’s nice. ‘But I meant an actual detail.’
On the way back to the house Ingrid said, ‘Do you know what annoys me so much? If I got hit by a car while we’re crossing and died, in the newspaper it would say a mother of a something-dayold baby was killed at a notorious intersection. Why can’t it say a human who incidentally has a baby was killed at a notorious intersection?’
‘It makes it sadder,’ I said. ‘If it’s a mother.’
‘It can’t be sadder,’ Ingrid said. ‘I’m dead. That is the saddest it can be. But apparently I just exist in terms of my relationship to other people now and Hamish still gets to be a person. Thanks. Amazing.’
I helped her get the pram inside, re-established the sofa and went to make her tea. The baby was feeding again when I came back from the kitchen. She kissed his head and looked up. I saw her hesitate before she said, ‘I think you and Patrick should have babies. I’m sorry. I know you’re anti-motherhood but I do. He isn’t Jonathan. Don’t you think, with him –’
‘Ingrid.’
‘I’m just saying. He would be such a good –’
‘Ingrid.’
‘And you could do it. I promise. It’s not even that hard. I mean look at me.’ She directed my attention to her unclean clothes, her swollen chest, damp spots on the cushions and looked about to laugh, then like she was going to cry, then merely exhausted.
I asked her what she wanted for her birthday.
Ingrid said, ‘When is it?’
I told her it was tomorrow.
‘In that case, a bag of salty liquorice. The kind from Ikea.’
The baby squirmed and pulled off. Ingrid let out a little cry and covered her breast. I helped her turn the cushion around and once he was on again, I asked if I could get her a kind of liquorice that didn’t require a journey to Croydon. She did cry then, telling me through tears that if I understood what it was like, being woken up fifty times a night and having to feed a baby every two hours when it takes an hour and fifty-nine minutes and feels like being stabbed in the nipple with four hundred knives, then I would be like, do you know what? I think I will just get my sister the liquorice she specifically likes.
I drove directly from her house to Croydon and left on her step the next day ￡95 worth of salty liquorice in the blue bag and a card. It said ‘Happy birthday to the world’s best mother, daughter, wife of a mid-ranking civil servant, neighbour, shop customer, employee, council-tax payer, crosser of roads, recent NHS admission, her sister’s entire universe.’
Days later, Ingrid texted me to say that after the third packet, she’d really gone off it. Then she sent a photo of her hand, holding a Starbucks cup. Instead of asking her name, the person who took her order had just written LADY WITH PRAM.