My mother exhaled and began speaking in the weary tone of someone commencing a list they know is long. ‘Your father’s mother, his sister who you never met. One or likely both of my aunts. And my mother, who you may as well know now did not die of cancer. She walked into the sea in the middle of February.’
She stopped and then, sounding exhausted, said, ‘And probably –’
‘– you.’
She said yes. ‘Me.’
‘Not probably though.’
‘No. Not probably.’
Out the window, the outskirts of London had been giving way to countryside. The train slowed down and stopped on a section of floodlit track. A dense flock of birds rose off a bare tree. I watched them until finally my mother said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
The flock separated into two, looped upwards and came back together. ‘You can stop drinking.’ I hung up, assuming my mother had already done the same.
I felt ragged. For the rest of the journey, my mind ranged through periods of illness. The memories came out of order. I tried to locate my mother in them but she was never anywhere. Coming into the station, I sent her a text message, telling her not to say anything to Ingrid or my father. She didn’t reply.
*
I let myself in to the Executive Home and went into the kitchen. Patrick and some number of colleagues were sitting around the table. There were bottles of beer in front of them. Someone had opened a bag of crisps, torn it open all the way. Now it was a greasy square of silver with only crumbs left on it.
Patrick said hi Martha and got up, making a gesture out of their view, as he came over, to indicate that he’d definitely told me about what was presently happening but I’d evidently forgotten. I moved my head away from his attempt to kiss me and, with an uncertain look, he sat back down.
One of the doctors, opening himself another beer, told me I was allowed to come and join them. Another one said it was a good idea, since they were just chilling. All the other doctors signalled their agreement, all the other useless, useless fucking, fucking doctors, with their doctorly confidence and doctorly way of owning a room and the air in it, telling me what I was allowed to do and deciding for me what was a good idea. I said no thank you and ran upstairs, leaving them alone to talk to each other with surety about what they knew, although no doctor I had ever met, except one, knew a fucking thing. Not even Patrick. My own husband, a doctor, had not worked out what was wrong with me. In all this time.
I had a shower. Afterwards I stood in the middle of the bathroom, dripping without a towel, looking at the plants and the ￡60 candle, the bottles of things. None of it was mine. All of it had been chosen by a woman who as far as she knew did not have ——， a woman who just thought she wasn’t good at being a person.
I pretended to be asleep when Patrick came up later. The next morning, once he left, I took one of the new tablets out of the bottle still in my bag. It was tiny and pale pink. In the kitchen I filled my hand with tap water, Me Cookie, and then went for a walk.
All the way, I thought about my diagnosis. The fact that, in receiving it, the mystery of my existence had been solved. —— had determined the course of my life. It had been looked for and never found, guessed about, never correctly, suspected and disqualified. But it had always existed. It had informed every decision I had ever made. It made me act the way I did. It was the cause of my crying. When I screamed at Patrick, it put the words in my mouth; when I threw things, it was —— that raised my arm. I’d had no choice. And every time in the last two decades that I’d observed myself and seen a stranger, I had been right. It was never me.
I could not understand, now, how it had been missed. Less and less as I kept walking. It is not uncommon. Its symptoms aren’t hidden. They can’t be disguised by the afflicted person in its throes. It should have been obvious to Patrick, the observing person, all along.
*
He came home that night and apologised that I hadn’t remembered about the thing last night. I was standing at the sink, filling a glass. I looked over my shoulder and saw him hovering in the doorway, holding a plastic bag with something in it. He asked me how my day was. I said fine and turned the tap off. He appeared to me, then, with his plastic bag, unintelligent. An uncertain person, unquestioning. I asked him to move and he stepped aside. He said sorry when my elbow knocked into him on the way past and I was filled with disdain for a man who was so kind, and obedient, and oblivious.
30
MY FATHER RANG and asked if I could come into town and have lunch with him. I assumed he wanted to talk about what my mother had told him and our argument on the train because he mentioned straight away that she wasn’t going to be home, as though he knew I’d say no if she was.