I hadn’t wanted to get Mark involved, but my feelings were in such a maelstrom that I wasn’t even sure why. To begin with, I thought I was keeping him away because I knew I couldn’t rely on him – he had betrayed me. Big time.
And then I thought I was doing it for his sake, because it wasn’t fair to dump all of that angst upon him.
Sometimes I felt like I was avoiding implicating him for both of those reasons at the same time even though that didn’t seem to make much sense.
But when push came to shove, I had no choice. If Mum had still been alive, then she would have been there for me. If Dad, or Freddy had lived longer, or if my relationships with Giles or Ricardo or Nick had worked out, or if Tom had been the kind of person who didn’t have a full time job, or even the kind of person who could put his friends before his job – if any of those things had been different, then I would have had other options. But they weren’t, and I didn’t.
I knew from my first meeting with Batt that I couldn’t do this on my own. I had learnt nothing from that first meeting and I spent the entire taxi journey home trying to work out what questions I should have asked. And crying.
Because the only two questions occupying my mind were, was I going to die from this and if so when? And what would happen to Sarah if I did? That’s three questions, I suppose: if, when, what? And apparently my three questions were the three no one could answer, and so they churned and churned in my compromised brain to the exclusion of all else.
So I let Mark in because I had to. And I justified this – because I didn’t have the energy to feel guilty on top of everything else – using the exact same reasons that had made me reticent to get him involved in the first place: that it was unfair to dump all this on him, but that he had betrayed me: so he owed me.
That will sound mean I expect, but I felt mean. I felt mean and crazy and desperate and all out of options. All I could do was try to find a way through the next day and try to find a way not to add guilt about dumping on Mark to the rest of my worries. But he owed me. And as Sarah’s godfather, he owed her too.