I said, ‘I also consume content, in a private capacity. Not content of my own creation in that instance, obviously. But either way, I am very much a part of the problem.’
She laughed and I went on to tell her that whenever I was out and I saw a mother who was on her phone, I worried that it was my content she was consuming instead of looking into her child’s eyes.
She said, ‘It certainly seems like we’ve lost the ability to not be on our phones, doesn’t it?’ and sounded wistful.
‘But I’m sure at the end of our lives we will all be thinking, if only I’d consumed more content.’
She laughed and touched my arm and whenever, for the remainder of our conversation, she was imparting some information about herself, seeking to emphasise a point or making some observation, she would do the same – touch my arm, and if I said something she thought was funny, she would softly grip it. I liked her so much for that reason and because, although she asked me questions beyond what I did, she did not ask me if I had children.
On the way home, I asked Patrick to find out the name of her husband the psychiatrist.
I had not had a doctor for four years; I was not looking for one. But I made an appointment, I think because I wanted to see what kind of person he would be – if, being married to a woman like that meant he would be good. Therefore, unlike any doctor I had seen before.
*
A female receptionist told me that ordinarily I could expect to wait twelve weeks for an appointment but there had been a cancellation – very rare – and the doctor could see me at five o’clock this afternoon if I thought I could get there in time. I could hear her clicking her pen on and off while I held the phone with my shoulder and looked at the train times, then told her I could.
The waiting room was dark and felt too warm because I had run most of the way from Paddington in a coat that was too heavy for May. The same receptionist said that ordinarily I could expect a long wait but the doctor would only be a minute. Also, she said, very rare. I stayed standing and played a game that my father invented for me at the beginning: how would I improve this room, if I was only allowed to remove one thing? I chose the visible price tag on the cyclamen, then turned at the sound of a heavy door opening across thick carpet. A man wearing moleskin trousers, a white shirt and knitted tie came out and said, ‘Hello Martha, I’m Robert.’ He shook my hand, firmly, as though he hadn’t presumed it would be limp.
In his office he told me to sit wherever I liked, establishing himself in an ergonomic chair that had a wider armrest on one side to accommodate his notebook, open to a page that was empty except for my name. I sat and waited while he underlined it. Then with the other hand he smoothed his tie and I saw that his index finger was wrapped in a very white, professional dressing. It remained straight, separate from his other fingers, exempted from use.
He looked up and asked me to start from the beginning. Why had I come to see him? And to my reply, which felt uninteresting as I delivered it, could I remember the first time I felt like this?
Cyclonic, becoming rough or very rough. Occasionally good.
I started with the day of my last A level, and I stopped at half past nine that morning, when I had gone outside with a bag of rubbish and a woman walking past holding the hands of two toddlers smiled at me and said I looked as tired as she felt. I stood still until she had gone, then went back inside with the rubbish bag and flung it down the hallway. It hit the wall and burst. I told him that Patrick would be the one to find it because I was here, and he would just clean it up, the spaghetti and the eggshells and still, after so much time, pretend that was a normal thing that wives did.
Robert asked me if I threw things a lot or did anything else that I wouldn’t consider, ‘in your word, normal’。
I told him about the time I had lifted a terracotta pot and shattered it against the garden wall. I told him about smashing my phone so many times against the kitchen tiles that pieces of glass got in my hand, about throwing the hairdryer at Patrick, the bruise it left, about driving my car on purpose into a metal guard rail in a car park, about standing with my back to the wall and banging my head over and over because it felt better than I did, about the days I could not get up, the nights I couldn’t go to sleep, the books I’d ripped up and clothes I had torn apart by their seams. With exception of the hairdryer, none were unrecent.
I apologised to him and said it was completely fine if he couldn’t think of anything, in terms of helping me. As an afterthought I said, ‘The funny thing, not funny ha-ha but as in funny terrible, is that once it finishes and I feel normal, I see the leftovers, smashed bits of plate in the bin or whatever, and I think, who did that? I truly can’t believe it was me.’ I told him about Ingrid’s fashion crises. That he continued taking notes was peculiarly affecting to me. The grace of it, I think, his acting as though it was something worthy of his writing down.