‘I wanted to say –’
‘Hang on.’ My sister got off the table and retrieved a Matchbox car from a puddle, took out her phone and sent a series of messages before she came back and started drying a different section of table with a tissue she took a long time to locate in her pocket.
‘Ingrid?’
‘What? Go. I said go.’ She didn’t sit on the table again, just perched on its edge.
I apologised. It was a version of what I’d composed in the car, except circuitous and halting, with endless repetitions and false starts, more and more excruciating as I laboured on. I felt like a child at a piano lesson, stumbling over a piece I had played perfectly at home.
My sister became visibly more irritated the longer I went on. Except for saying, ‘I already know all this’ as I returned again to the section about wanting children, before my anticlimactic finish. ‘So that’s it probably.’
She said right and pressed her fingers into a rib on one side. The thing was, she told me, staring ahead, I had worn her out. I had worn everybody out. It had all got to be too much. She couldn’t care for me any more as well as her children. She said that she was going to forgive me at some point but it wasn’t now.
I said okay, and thought to go, but Ingrid shifted along and asked me if I was going to sit down or not. For a minute we watched her sons who were by then trying to make a ramp from planks of wood and a brick. Then I said, ‘They’re so amazing.’ Ingrid shrugged. ‘No really. They’re amazing.’
‘What are you basing that on?’
‘Because they were babies five minutes ago and now look at what they’re doing.’
‘I guess. Riding bikes.’
I said no. ‘I mean repurposing the shit out of found objects.’
Ingrid covered her face with her hands and shook her head as if she was crying.
I waited. A minute later she said, ‘Okay fine’ and took her hands away. ‘I have forgiven you.’ Her eyes were red, and rimmed with tears but she was laughing. ‘You are still the worst. Literally, you are the worst person there is.’
I told her I knew that.
‘Why,’ she said, with sudden sadness in her voice, ‘why did you lie to me about not wanting children? Why couldn’t you trust me?’
‘I could trust you. I couldn’t trust myself.’
She said why not.
‘Because you could have talked me into it. Like Jonathan. If you had told me I would be a good mother, I would have let myself believe you.’
Ingrid leaned against me so our arms were touching.
‘I never would have said that.’
‘You did say it. You told me all the time I should have a baby.’
‘No, I never would have said you’d be a good mother. You’d be shit at it.’
She kicked my foot and said God, Martha. ‘I love you so much it actually hurts my body. Can you get me that?’ She pointed to the plastic bag. I picked it up off the ground and Ingrid said, looking into it, ‘This is the expensive kind. Thank you’ and for a minute I felt like we were together inside our force field.
Then, shouting. A fight had broken out over the brick.
Ingrid said well this is over and told me I was welcome to go and sort it out, she needed to go inside and make their tea.
We both got up and I went over to the boys, all now holding sticks.
She was nearly at the house when she called my name and I turned around and saw her, walking backwards over the last bit of lawn, and I just remember as she reached her arms up to tighten her ponytail, a cloud crossed quickly in front of the sun so the light was flickering on her face and on her hair as she shouted, ecstatically, to all of us, ‘My famous pasta-with-nothing-on-it.’
*
Later, while they were in the bath, we sat outside the door, leaning against the wall. We were talking about something else when Ingrid said, ‘If you have been better since June or whatever, why are you still behaving like you used to? I mean, to Patrick. I’m not judging. It’s just that, if you’re feeling more rational, why isn’t it necessarily, you know, manifesting outwardly.’ She winced like someone anticipating an explosion.
‘Because I don’t know how else to be with him.’ I said I know it’s not an excuse.
‘No, I get it. However many years versus seven months. But you need to figure it out.’
I told her I didn’t feel ready to do that, to see him, and I knew that I would not be able to forgive him anyway.
‘Do you know where he is?’