40
I WAS NOT conscious of the wrong weight of my bag until two stops were left on the long trip home. I looked inside, as though it could possibly be in there when the bag felt empty on my shoulder. It was not on the seat beside me. It had not slipped out onto the floor. I made a scene. I tried to wrench the carriage doors open before the train had come to a full stop at the next station, then shouldered through the packed crowd on the platform and forced my way into the carriage of a train about to leave on the other side. It would have been too full with half the number of people already in it. A man shook his head at me. I didn’t care.
On the way back, it kept being held in the tunnel – I stayed standing, as if doing so would make the journey faster, imagining the journal lying on the footpath somewhere between the station and the storage facility, a passer-by picking it up, checking for a name inside, seeing there wasn’t one, walking off with it anyway, tossing it in the first bin they came to. Or taking it home. The idea was so much worse – what felt like my singular possession being put next to the pile of takeaway menus and mail to be dealt with in their kitchen, it being read in front of the television, ‘another funny bit’ out loud to an uninterested husband during the advertisements.
*
I was told by a station attendant when I finally arrived that nothing like a diary had been handed in but if I wanted an umbrella I could take my pick. I went out and walked back to the storage centre the way I had come, crossing in the same places I had an hour and a half earlier, still empty-handed at the end of it.
As I entered, the clerk pointed out that I was back again. Evidently I couldn’t get enough of the place. He was sitting behind his desk, as before, leaning back with hands laced behind his head, watching his CCTV screens like there was more to see than deserted corridors from a host of angles. I signed his stupid entry book again and as I got into the lift I heard him saying, ‘Your boyfriend is still up there. He’s going to regret pulling the lot out at once.’
*
All our furniture was in the corridor, removed a piece at a time by Patrick and arranged by accident in the simulacrum of a room. An armchair, a television, a standard lamp. He was sitting on our sofa. His elbow on the armrest, reading.
He glanced up and seeing me said hi like I’d just got home, then went back to his book. There was no point in asking for it back. If he’d read from the beginning, he was now almost finished. I sat on the sofa, at the opposite end, and waited.
Patrick turned a page. Had it been anyone else – if it had been Jonathan, it would have been an act of rare and ingenious cruelty, reading my diary in front of me. Jonathan would have pretended he was too deep in concentration to brook an interruption – he would have put one finger up if I’d tried to speak, shifting his expression from sadness to amusement, intrigue, a little shock, devastation, in the course of a single page, and making intermittent comments on my portrayal of things.
But it was Patrick. He was concentrating. His expression was earnest and his reactions were slight, a small frown, an occasional almost imperceptible smile. He didn’t say anything until the end. And then, only, ‘I can’t read your writing. I never what?’
‘Oh.’ I looked upside down at the last thing I had written. ‘It says I never asked what it was like for him.’
He said, ‘The ——？’
‘No, all of it. Our marriage. Being my husband. I never asked you what any of it was like for you.’
‘Right.’ He closed the journal.
‘It’s the thing I’m most ashamed of now, I think.’ I stood up and put my hand out for it. ‘Out of, obviously, an array of options.’
Instead of getting up, Patrick stayed seated and briefly scratched the back of his head. I waited. He kept the book in his hand. ‘Do you want to know?’
I said no and forced myself to sit down again, ‘I don’t.’ I was not as brave as that. ‘What was it like for you, Patrick?’ My bag was on my shoulder. I didn’t take it off.
He said, ‘It was fucking awful.’
Ingrid said fucking car alarm, fucking pantry moths, an actual fucking sultana in my bra, and it was unshocking. But I had never heard Patrick swear, not once in our lives, and said by him, the force and violence of the word made me recoil.
He said sorry.
‘No. I’m sorry. Keep going. I want to know.’
‘You know already. It’s everything your mother told you.’ He put the journal aside. ‘Just that it was always about you. I know you were sick but I was the one who had to absorb all your pain and have your rage directed at me, just because I was there. It took over everything. I feel like my entire life has been subsumed by your sadness. I tried, God Martha, I tried, but it didn’t matter what I did. A lot of the time it seemed like you actively wanted to be miserable but you still expected constant support. Sometimes I just wanted to go to a restaurant based on the food not on whether the manager looked depressed or the carpet reminded you of something bad that had happened to you once. Sometimes I just wanted us to be normal.’