Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

Our parents still live in the house we grew up in, on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. They bought it the year I turned ten with a deposit lent to them by my mother’s sister Winsome, who married money instead of a male Sylvia Plath.

Ingrid says it’s thanks to hard work and determination that I have been steadily descending the career ladder ever since.

On holiday one year, I read Money, thirty pages of it until I remembered that I do not understand Martin Amis.

Arriving at the house, Hamish agreed to come inside for a drink because he had enjoyed being talked at by my sister, for most of the way, so much.

jeans and a Primark sweatshirt that Ingrid bought two of because they were £9 and had the word University printed on the front, which, she said, made it clear to people that we’d been educated at tertiary level but weren’t so desperate for approval we needed them to know where.

DYING

“Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.”

I have a little pied-à-terre, purchased many years ago for the girls. I’d imagined them Zelda Fitzgeralding their way around Montparnasse or at the very least Jean Rhysing the time away in a darkened room, but the Beautiful and the Damned preferred the suburbs of Woking and so it sits, furnished and vacant.”

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.

I said I am so sorry. “I’m the worst person in the world.” “No you’re not.” Patrick’s hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. “You’re not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You’re the same as everybody else. But that’s harder for you, isn’t it. You’d rather be one or the other. The idea you might be ordinary is unbearable.”

death blow