39
IT WAS THE first week of March. I was sitting on the back doorstep of my parents’ house, barefoot, tugging weeds out of cracks in the concrete, noticing how bright amber my tea looked with the cold sun on it, talking to Ingrid’s eldest son on the phone. They had started ringing me again.
He was explaining the chapter series he was reading, with unsparing detail and, intermittently, a full mouth.
I asked him what he was eating.
‘Grapes and a slavery roll.’
I heard Ingrid ask him for the phone.
‘He means savoury. Sorry, God, there are seven million of those books. I swear they’ve got children writing them in a sweatshop somewhere. How are you?’
I told her about the job I had got. A guidance and careers counsellor at a girls’ school. She did not find it ironic that I’d been offered the position, as I did. ‘You’ve literally had all the jobs.’ She said shit. She had to go. ‘Someone’s playing with doors.’
I went to hang up and saw a text from Patrick. We had not spoken since he left.
It said, ‘Hi Martha, I’m moving back into the flat tomorrow and need some of our furniture etc. Where is everything?’
I hesitated over it for a moment, trying to assimilate the new and extraordinary pain of a message that begins with hi and your name, when it comes from somebody you used to be married to. I rubbed my eye and under my nose and then replied, asking if we could do it tomorrow instead.
He said he couldn’t. He was working.
I replied with the address of the storage unit, wondering as I typed it if Patrick realised it was our wedding anniversary. And then, as I sent it, if you have given up on being married, whether it isn’t wedding anniversary any more.
Patrick wrote back, asking if I could meet him there in two hours. My desire not to was so acute that I could barely induce myself to get up and go inside, after I replied to say yes.
*
He was going to be late. I was already there when he texted to say so, waiting outside the locker, at the very end of a corridor so dark and desolate it felt post-apocalyptic.
Probably, he was still an hour away – he said sorry and something to do with a truck and the North Circular. I could go if I needed to. I said I didn’t mind and got the journal out of my bag. It was stained, coming apart, a now ludicrous thickness from getting wet and being dried on the radiator so many times.
I sat down on the floor and wrote for a long time until I realised, turning over, that I had reached the last page. I did not know how to finish it. When, after minutes of thought, no suitable ending had presented itself, I went back to the beginning and started reading. I hadn’t until then, knowing that whatever I’d find in my writing – self-fascination, banality, descriptions of things – would make me go outside and set it on fire.
It wasn’t that or, at least, I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.
I could see what I’d had now. Everything people want in books, a home, money, to not be alone, all there in the shadow of the one thing I didn’t have. Even the person, a man who wrote speeches about me, and gave things up for me, who sat beside the bed for hours while I was crying or unconscious, who said he’d never change his mind about me and stayed even after he knew I was lying to him, who only hurt me as much as I deserved, who put oil in the car and would never have left me if I hadn’t told him to.
It wasn’t my final revelation. That I desperately wanted him back wasn’t a revelation at all by the time I reached the last page. It was the small, awful reason why I had lost him. It wasn’t my illness; it was nothing I had said or done. I wrote it down and closed the journal, finished, although most of the page was still blank because the reason our marriage had ended didn’t fill a whole line.
At the far end of the corridor, the lift opened.
I got up off the ground and put the journal on top of my bag.
Patrick walked towards me, so slowly, or it was such a long way, that before he was half way I could not remember how people stand. When someone you know beyond all being, who you have loved and hated and have not seen for months, is coming towards you, avoiding your eye until the last minute, then smiling at you like he’s not sure when or if you’ve met, what are you meant to do with your hands?
*
Our conversation was two minutes long, a confusion of sorrys and hellos and thank yous, unnecessary questions and even more unnecessary instructions about locks and how they’re opened. It seemed like a joke. A game to see who could last the longest pretending to be other people. Neither of us gave in and the conversation ended with a slew of okay greats. Patrick took the key and I left.