A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

‘It isn’t daft to say I’m sad without you. So there. I would say that to anyone who asked me. I am sad without Hector.’ Which was, of course, too sentimental a thing to mention in an empty room with a fond dog when you were still slightly hurt in a number of ways and also thinking that you’ve got the definitive statement now — your menopause is here, pretty much here, and that happens to adult women, it does happen — it’s only that you would have wanted to exist as a female person in receipt of tenderness before it did.

It’s not that you wanted children.

You never have given children that much thought.

Your biology — tick, tick — had simply been waiting — unreasonably waiting — for a fondness in touch. Your body had an expectation of mercy and it was unfortunate this had not generally been fulfilled.

Meg’s hand stroked Hector’s warm and silky, spanielly fur — bred for ease of touching, to please. And inside her palm and fingers there was the echo of touching on other occasions — or more likely a hope for her hand after this. She wanted — unreasonably wanted — tick, tick — to be gentle in another setting and another time.

But I’m clumsy.

I might not be able to please anybody.

I might not be able.

She closed her eyes.

I might be rubbish at rubbing a dog’s ears.

Hector might not let me know. His breeding is against him and he wouldn’t let me know if I was doing something wrong.

She kept on, though, practising the shapes and the intentions of tenderness.

A man stands by the door in the Caterham train as it slows and approaches London Bridge. He is holding the handle of a new bright red pram and putting a slight bounce in it for the entertainment of his child. The pram is of the modern and stylish type, one which is a marked, if expensive, improvement on more traditional models: easier to manoeuvre in crowded shops — or in trains — and raising the baby up high so it can look about. The man is half smiling, bouncing the pram handle, glancing in under the hood, bouncing again.

Another man of similar age — early thirties — stands so that he will be ready when the platform is reached. He says to the recent father, ‘It’s like a Ferrari.’

‘I’m sorry …?’

‘It’s like a Ferrari. The red.’ And the stranger points to the pram with a slight hopefulness, as if it would help him greatly should a pram be able to resemble an iconic and thrilling sports car in a meaningful way.

The father nods, maybe because he would also find this helpful. ‘Oh, yes. Like a Ferrari.’ He bounces the handle with slightly more vigour. ‘It’s new.’

‘I have one that age.’ It’s unclear whether the stranger is referring to the pram or the baby.

‘My wife’s choice.’ It’s unclear whether the father is referring to the baby or the pram.

The men smile at each other. Their expressions suggest they both feel they have been assaulted in some vast way, but are now redefining their injuries as pleasures.

MEG WAS WAITING for Laura. When the bloody woman was around, she managed to over-occupy the office, but it was worse when she wasn’t there. Laura being in front of you and looking the way Laura looked was horrible, of course: she was all layers of flimsy cloth and too many colours and a bag that would suit a ten-year-old and which matched the shoes that would suit a ten-year-old and had that indelible, burrowing smell of fags and also hemp and perhaps more than one form of hemp. The whole experience could fill a ballroom to its choking point, should you have a ballroom. Meg was glorying in Laura’s absence right now, but knew there would be an eventual return to put a kink in every bit of tranquillity generated by the blissful absence.

Eventually, the expectation of Laura became worse than having to sit across the desk from Laura and trying to be happy as she clacked randomly away at her keyboard, or chatted to event-arranging people with floral names, while drinking her herbal infusions and — when off the phone — throwing out strange conversational non-starters.

The trouble with Laura was that beyond being naturally irritating — Meg thought it was fair to say that; maybe not, but she was saying it anyway — beyond being fucking annoying …

Which wasn’t fair and wasn’t how to approach the problem.

She’s not a problem, she’s a person.

No, she’s both.

The problem was that Laura reminded Meg of being in the support group and the woman who had run it — someone who had also always managed to make Meg feel afflicted. It wasn’t Laura’s fault that she resembled the group leader, she wasn’t even aware that Meg had tried to be in a support group and, frankly, Laura was never going to find that out because she would have loved having the information way too much and it would have unleashed … Well, it was hard to say: advice about more lunacy Meg ought to try; meditation, or body scrubbing, or t’ai chi. Or else an outbreak of arm patting would ensue, or just …

All of that stuff gets depressing.

I’m sorted out and getting along just fine. Today was an exception, but not a sign that I’m off the rails. I don’t need any more solutions, no more cures. I am in progress. What more can anyone ask? I’m under way.

Being given a solution that didn’t work could end up suggesting your problem was permanent, or else that you were the problem. Probably there wasn’t any problem. Possibly you were being oppressed by unnecessary cures.

In the support group we were the bloody Sisters of the Unnecessary Cure, perched on our circle of chairs — always chairs — and going nowhere. We had to sit in a circle because that’s non-hierarchical. As if I cared. And as if there wasn’t a boss. Molly was our Mother Superior, all right — no mistaking that — ruling over the Aung San Suu Kyi Room in a far too faraway and inconvenient community centre to which I will never return. The place smelled of shit, because of the Parent and Toddler Morning Mingle that was in for a three-hour booking just before us. Toddlers can produce a load of shit in three hours. I’d sit there, inhaling kid shit and being stressed after the journey and bloody angry and …

It was my own fault that I had to travel such a way to get there, though. I didn’t want to find anywhere more local, amongst the not massive array of choices. I didn’t want to be seen turning up, or discover a neighbour who’d think she had something in common with me and need to talk about it later, come round and hold an autopsy on me in my own front room.

So I went to the Sisters and joined them in their circle of pain — usually seven of them and me — which wasn’t enough people to let any air get in amongst us, let it be relaxing, let me coast for a while. Molly would kick off by reading out a piece from a book of special, womanly meditation in her special womanly and extra calm I-love-the-universe-and-it-loves-me voice. Excruciating. I wanted her and the fucking universe to get a fucking room.

Then she’d talk us through one of those going-down-steps-and-into-a-charming-garden bollocksy visualisation scripts, only she had lousy timing about it somehow and so you either felt you were hanging around on your imaginary staircase while waiting for random others to catch up, or else she drove you along your tranquil passageways and over the self-affirming lawns until you began to imagine pursuers, or else your stairs just melted and then you were plunging quick, right down into … I always saw it as a tomb. I didn’t get a garden visualised with any success; only a cellar, or a tomb. I mainly conjured up this Gothic arrangement with bones — a sepulchre — and the basic scene got quite ornate. I enjoyed it after a while: rags and costume jewellery scattered on dusty flagstones, footprints of rats. I like rats. You can always trust a rat — intelligent and faithful. Still, I wasn’t exactly being invited to explore my fucking happy place — it was more about being forced to hang about in a profoundly disturbing and focused-on-death place. For what my opinion would be worth.