The sun was sinking on the other side of the slag heap as we drove past it again on the way home. Ingrid, gazing out the window, said, ‘Boys, no matter what befalls us as a family, I will never let your father move us to Merthyr Tydfil.’
*
Later, her children in bed, my sister and I sat on the sofa drinking canned gin and tonic and watching the fire, which had been dying since the second we lit it.
I said, ‘When you have a baby, do you automatically turn into someone who can cope with seeing a woman with bags on her feet scream at a child who isn’t hers? You’re suddenly just strong enough to be in a world where that happens?’
Ingrid swallowed and said no. ‘It makes it worse because as soon as you’re a mother, you realise every child was a baby five seconds ago, and how could anyone shout at a baby? But then, you shout at your own and if you can do that, you must be a terrible person. Before you had kids, you were allowed to think you were a good person so then you secretly resent them for making you realise you’re actually a monster.’
‘I already know I’m a monster.’ I wanted her to tell me I wasn’t.
She turned on the television. ‘I guess you’ve saved yourself a job then.’
It was a movie we had both seen before with an actress who was, in the present scene, trying to force all her shopping bags into the back of a yellow cab. In real life, she had just leapt off a roof. During the advertisements, Ingrid said the thing everybody says. She couldn’t understand how anyone could feel so bad they’d want to do that. I was scratching something off my jeans, not really listening, and said without thinking that I obviously could.
‘No but like, not that bad, that you’d genuinely want to die.’
I laughed, then glanced up to see why she had suddenly turned off the television. Ingrid was just looking at me.
‘What?’
‘When you’re depressed, you don’t genuinely want to die. When have you ever felt like that?’
I asked her if she was being serious. ‘Every time, I feel like that.’
Ingrid said, ‘Martha! You do not!’
I said okay.
‘You can’t just say okay. Okay what? Okay you don’t feel like that?’
‘No – okay you don’t have to believe me.’
She pushed all the cushions that were between us onto the floor and made me shift my legs so she could sit right next to me. She said if that was true, we had to talk about it. I said we didn’t.
‘But I want to understand what it’s like for you. Feeling like that.’
I tried to. For the first time, I told her about the night on the balcony at Goldhawk Road. The way I felt when I was standing out there, staring down at the dark garden, then stopped because she looked so upset. Her eyes were enormous and glassy.
I said it’s not something you can really explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
She cried, a single, aching sob, then said sorry and tried to smile. ‘I suppose it’s the ultimate had-to-be-there.’
For a while we sat like that, my sister holding my wrist, until I said she needed to go to bed.
*
I heard her get up in the night and went into her room. She was sitting up in bed feeding the baby, beatific in the half-light of a lamp she had dimmed with a towel that was still damp from the leisure centre floor.
She said, ‘Come and keep me awake.’ I got into bed next to her. ‘Tell me something funny.’
I told her about the time when we were teenagers, that our house – for no reason and as if by some force outside the four of us – began to fill with African tribal art, masks, juju hats, in such quantity that the downstairs of Goldhawk Road started to look like the gift shop at Nairobi international airport. I told her the only piece I could remember exactly was a bronze fertility sculpture that was in the hallway for a while, directly inside the front door, and only because its phallus was so pronounced that, as she said at the time, when it inadvertently got turned ninety degrees it was like a fucking boom gate.
Ingrid said she remembered it as well. ‘I started hanging my PE bag on it.’
Neither of us knew when and how it disappeared. Just that, one day it was all gone. The baby hiccoughed. My sister laughed.
I said, ‘What’s the best thing about it?’
Without taking her eyes off her son, Ingrid said, ‘This. All of it. I mean, it’s shit, but all of it. Especially,’ she yawned, ‘the time between finding out you are pregnant and telling anyone, including your husband. Even if it’s just a week or one minute in my case. No one talks about that part.’