All my life I’ve believed that things happened to me. The awful things – childhood, my mad/dead mother, disappearing father. That because she had to raise me, I lost Winsome as a sister. Your father not succeeding, this house, living somewhere I can’t stand, my drinking, my becoming a drunk. On and on it goes, all of it happening to me.
And then – you. My beautiful daughter, breaking when she was still a child. Even though you were the one in pain, even though I chose not to help you, in my own mind it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like. Nobody can be held to account as long as they’re suffering and I made you my unassailable excuse for not growing up.
But then I did grow up – age 68 – because you made me.
I know it hasn’t been that long but this is what I have been able to see since then: things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.
I always thought your illness happened to me. Now I choose to believe that it happened for me because it was why finally I stopped drinking. I did not start drinking because of you and your illness, as I’m sure I let you believe, but you are the reason I stopped.
Perhaps what I think is wrong. Perhaps I’m not entitled to think of your pain that way, but it is the only way I can think of to give any of it a purpose. And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something?
Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?
And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn’t in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are which is, in part, a product of your pain.
You do not have to believe me about that but I know – I do know, Martha – that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on. If you want to, you can put all of this right. Start with your sister.
*
I put the letter in a drawer and picked up my phone. There was a message from Ingrid. They had been back for days but we hadn’t spoken since she drove to Oxford. I had texted but she never replied. Her message said, ‘Get drain unblocker stuff on the way home because the bath isn’t emptying. sorry for sexting you while you’re at work.’ Eggplant emoji, lipstick mouth.
While I was still looking at it, the grey dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.
‘That wasn’t for you obviously.’
I sent her the rosary, a cigarette and the black heart. I started another one, the road and the running girl, and didn’t send it, because if she knew I was coming, she would be gone by the time I arrived.
*
She was in the front garden, sitting on a neglected outdoor table, legs dangling, watching her sons ride their bikes into each other on purpose. In spite of how cold it was, all three of them were wearing shorts, and T-shirts from Disneyland. She turned around when they called out to me, but showed no reaction as I walked over waving stupidly until I was all the way there.
‘Hello Martha.’ It felt like being stung, my sister greeting me as though I was a friend, or no one. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To give you this.’ I handed her a plastic bag with the drain unblocker stuff in it. ‘And also to say sorry.’
Ingrid looked in the bag and said nothing. Then, ‘Excuse me –’ leaning sideways to see past me to where her sons had started skidding their bikes on purpose, which they knew they weren’t allowed to do – she started shouting at them – because they knew it wrecked the grass.
There was no grass, it had been wrecked since the afternoon they moved in and, although they ignored her, she repeated her warning to them at the same volume every time I thought she had finished and tried to say something.
The rain that had been falling all morning had stopped as I was getting out of the car, but the sky was still dark and each small gust of wind shook water from the trees. I waited.
Ingrid gave up and said, ‘Go then.’