The Push

by Claire McGowan

  Ah yes, Anita. Around forty, I guessed, and not obviously pregnant. She was sort of a faded version of Monica, rich but in a kind of hemp and tote-bag way, all nervy, darting little glances at our swollen bellies. It was so weird, this many pregnant women together. Like a milking parlour at a dairy farm. All those extra people who were in the room and yet not.

  Nina, the leader, looked round at us, her eyes startling in her tanned face. Something a little piercing behind them. I was aware that I’d sat up straight, wanting her to like me. ‘So. Let’s all tell the stories of how we came to be here.’ I tried to catch Aaron’s eye – what did she want, positions? – but he was staring at her, determined to take it all in. Bless him. So worried he wouldn’t do the right thing, like whoever his parents had been.

  I squeezed his hand, then realised everyone was staring at me. ‘Oh! I’m Jax, Jacqueline, and this is my partner Aaron, er . . . it’s our first.’

  ‘Both of you?’ asked Nina, and I flushed because I realised she meant I was so much older than him that I might already have kids. I could have kids in their twenties, really. ‘Yeah.’ I turned my eyes to Anita, willing Nina to move on.

  ‘Oh hello,’ Anita twittered. ‘I’m Anita, this is Jeremy.’ Jeremy was a rumpled tweedy type, with longish greying hair and a fashionable scarf. He appeared distracted and didn’t look up when she said his name. ‘Obviously we’re, I mean, I’m not pregnant – we’re using an adoption agency. In America.’

  ‘So . . . you won’t be around the baby till it’s born?’ This was Monica, hands on her own smug bump.

  ‘Um, no. They don’t encourage contact. They think it just . . . complicates the issue.’

  ‘Goodness,’ laughed Monica. ‘It’s taking a lot on trust, isn’t it? I’m not sure I could do it.’ I decided I might hate Monica.

  Nina was taking notes; I wondered what she’d written about me. ‘How far along are you, Monica?’

  Monica paused. ‘Isn’t it a group for people eight weeks off? I’m eight weeks off.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Although they can’t always tell for sure. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ was all Nina said.

  Next was Cathy. Hazel spoke for them both, hand never moving from the bump, explaining that they’d used a donor from Denmark and conceived via home insemination. Nina: ‘Cathy, you’re also eight weeks off your due date?’

  ‘Um, yes.’

  A short silence while Nina wrote that down. ‘In your situation of course, it’s quite certain when you conceived.’

  ‘Um . . . right.’

  Nina made another note, then her gaze moved on to Kelly, who was sitting beside an empty seat. She mumbled that her partner Ryan had to work today, but was ‘dead excited about being a dad’. She looked so young, and I realised she could be my daughter at a push. How depressing. There was also Rahul and Aisha, and they looked unsure when called on and spoke over each other.

  ‘This is Ai—’

  ‘I’m Aisha – oh, sorry. You go.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m Rahul. It’s our first. Er. Yeah.’

  Then there was Nina. I felt a surge when I looked at her, almost like when I’d met Aaron two years before. I knew I could either hate her or worship her. She could have been any age from twenty-five to forty-five. The toe rings. The artful curly hair, the tattoos on her taut brown arms. My own tattoos had begun to sag and discolour as I stretched, exactly as my mother had warned me they would. ‘So,’ Nina said, once we’d all introduced ourselves. Her eyes seemed to bore into mine, though it must have been an illusion. ‘Let’s begin.’

  Six couples, twelve people in the room. Thirteen if you included the absent Ryan. Unlucky for some.

  Monica was the kind of woman I sometimes wished I could be. She packed the Tupperware container of cupcakes – empty now of course, Aaron had eaten three – into a cotton tote printed with I Shop Local. ‘So lucky to have such a diverse group,’ she trilled to me. Monica had already told us several times that she was forty-four. Forty-four and pregnant. I’d thought I was getting on a bit. And yet she looked great. The rest of her was trim, her ankles unswollen, her face unpuffy, her breasts unsaggy, as far as I could see anyway without staring. I could tell she’d had her hair cut and coloured recently and her flashy rings still fitted her fingers. Aaron had half-heartedly proposed to me when I got pregnant, but I’d have felt too stupid standing in a big white dress next to my child-groom. Anyway, he couldn’t afford a ring. If I wanted diamonds, I’d have to buy them myself.

  Monica leaned in – expensive perfume – and said, ‘So. Where did you find him?’ I turned, saw her nod at Aaron, who was chatting to Kelly. They’re closer in age, I thought with a pang. If Kelly looked too young to have a baby, did that make Aaron too young to be a dad?

  ‘Oh. Well, we just met, you know. In a bar.’ That was the official story, even if the truth wasn’t quite that.

  ‘Lovely.’ I blinked at her naked admiration of him. Was this the way men talked about their trophy wives? ‘How old is he? Twenty-one?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  She cackled, digging me in the side. ‘Good on you, girl! Isn’t it funny, Ed’s son from his first marriage is twenty-four.’ I glared at her, and despite the undeniable deliciousness of her cupcakes, decided I did hate her after all. She didn’t seem to notice the glare – how I envied that, the ability to not see real slights, let alone not imagine fake ones. ‘Must dash, I have prenatal yoga and then a spot of acu, have you tried it? I’ve got a wonderful lady if you want the number, byeee.’ She beckoned to Ed, who I hadn’t heard speak yet but already knew I wouldn’t like – I didn’t trust men who wore pastels – and they went out, and Kelly followed them, zipping a hoody up to her acned chin. She looked about fifteen. I saw Aaron was now talking to Nina the facilitator, and as I watched, she squeezed his upper arm, which I knew from experience was firm and muscled, and although it was probably just an encouraging gesture, something about it made my heart lurch, and I crossed the room to them a little too fast. ‘We should go. Don’t forget your jacket.’

  He looked surprised at my tone. ‘OK, babe. Nina was just recommending me some parenting books.’

  ‘It’s wonderful he’s so involved,’ said Nina in her husky voice, as if Aaron was some precocious child. ‘Not all young fathers are the same.’

  ‘Yes, well, I was two by the time my dad was his age,’ I said, taking the car keys from my bag.

  She saw this. ‘It’s hard to drive at this stage of pregnancy. Dad should think about doing it, if possible.’

  ‘Hmm, yeah, shame Dad doesn’t know how.’ It embarrassed me that he didn’t have a licence, though lots of people didn’t drive these days, especially in London. It made him seem even younger, I felt. My mother always commented on it whenever we saw her.

  Nina was watching me. ‘Jax, may I give you a piece of advice?’ Aaron had moved just out of earshot to get his jacket from the chair.

  I wanted to say no, but why else was I here? ‘What?’

  ‘It’s hard for the younger guys. Especially when there’s . . . an age gap. Look after him too, yes?’

  Before I could think of anything to say, Aaron was back, his arm around my shoulders. ‘Thank you, that was great! See you next week!’ He was so polite. I just gaped at her. Was she supposed to say things like that to me?

  Nina let us go with a sort of namaste gesture, and I saw that she, like Monica, had the kind of unaffected confidence no one could pierce. I was jealous of that. Aaron might have been young, but I was the one who so often felt like a sulky teenager, stuck forever with my mother’s criticisms echoing in my head.

  I still couldn’t believe I was joining this new group. Mothers. My friends had started to drop off into it, sidle off quietly to the other side of the curtain, ever since I was in my early twenties. Some of my school friends had teenagers, grown from tiny babies in what seemed like months, to semi-adults with massive feet and sulky faces. Time was speeding up. When I met
Aaron I was thirty-six, and it was like I’d woken up one day and realised – oh my God. This maybe isn’t going to happen, this whole motherhood thing. I wasn’t the kind of person who’d been desperate for a baby, for marriage and nurseries and soft plush bears – I was more MDMA and festivals and tantric sex workshops just for fun. I was afraid I’d miss something if I settled down. But when I turned thirty-six I realised – I did want that. Or rather, I didn’t want to never have that, and if I didn’t do it soon there was a good chance it wouldn’t happen at all. I tried to imagine being in my forties, knowing it was too late. If I’d be peaceful, still enjoying my life and my disposable income, never having to wipe up anyone’s vomit (unless it was a particularly hard-core night out), being able to pick up and travel as the whim took me. That could be a lovely life. The trouble was I just didn’t know. I didn’t know if I’d regret it, and that tormented me.

  It tormented me so much that I went speed dating. I let my friend Mariel, who’d been divorced for three years and was similarly panicking about the future, drag me along to an over-thirties meet-up in some smelly City bar that reeked of bleach and spilled beer, and I felt my heart sink when we walked in. The men had a hopeless, hunted look in their eyes, sweat patches blooming under their arms. Not one was under forty. Mariel all the same threw herself at a soft-bodied, hard-faced banker with a Rolex, tinkling laughter at his sexist jokes. I went through the motions, smiling and chatting to each man – several hadn’t even turned up so there was just empty air in their slots – and filling in my thoughts on a little scrap of paper. Each time I ticked: Just friends. Just friends. I had no intention of being friends with any of them. As Mariel resolutely failed to let me catch her eye, I drifted to the bar, determined to drink till I felt less hopeless. I didn’t feel old. I’d always imagined there was still love and passion out there for me, and yes, a baby too when I felt ready. Maybe I was wrong.

  ‘Rough night?’ I hadn’t looked properly at the barman as I ordered my gin and tonic, but I did then. He was very cute, mixed race with blue eyes and close-cropped hair. But so young. So very, very young.

  ‘Do these things ever work? Do people hit it off that way?’ He shrugged, placing the drink in front of me. I watched the shift of muscles in his shoulders, the long, lean span of his back. He was delicate. A boy, really. ‘You probably don’t know. I guess your generation does it all over the phone.’

  He looked me right in the eyes then, and I gasped a little, corny as it sounds, the air punched from my lungs. ‘Personally, I like to meet people analogue-style. Offline.’

  ‘Oh? And how do you do that?’

  He shrugged again, ironically. ‘I work in a bar. I meet people all the time.’

  ‘I bet you do. I bet pissed-up middle-aged women are always trying to grope you. Hen dos pulling off your trousers.’

  He blushed. ‘A bit like that sometimes, yeah.’

  ‘And you? What kind of girls do you like?’ Nineteen-year olds, I was thinking.

  ‘I like women,’ he said, wiping the bar with practised swipes. ‘Older. Mature, you know.’

  I wanted to call Mariel over and laugh (though she was by now practically wearing the banker as a scarf). The barman was hitting on me! Maybe he thought I’d be easy, a desperate older woman who couldn’t score with the sad divorcés here, or that I had money. That I’d finance his band or stand-up comedy career. Little did he know I worked for a charity and barely ‘earned my age’, as we had once been earnestly encouraged to benchmark ourselves against others. I laughed. ‘I bet that line works a treat as well. Bye.’

  I took my drink away and nursed it for a while in Mariel’s eye line, until she reluctantly came over, trailing laughter at the hilarious jokes of Simon, who, it would later turn out, wasn’t divorced at all, or at least not to the knowledge of the wife and children he very much still had. ‘I want to go. This was a bust.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad.’ She looked back at Simon, as if she could shape this unpromising man-clay into something workable. Into love, into hope.

  ‘Come on, Mar. You can do so much better than that suit.’

  She drained her white wine. ‘Can I?’ Disappointment seemed to radiate off her in waves, and I was worried I’d catch it.

  I went home disconsolate and lay awake wondering where the middle ground was between twenty-something pick-up artists and older men cheating on their wives. But the next day after work, I found myself walking past the same bar, and thinking about the young barman with the blue eyes, the simple unaffected way he’d spoken to me. Something genuine about it, not awkward-flirty or just plain awkward like the single men I met at my age. I could call in for a drink, couldn’t I? I was an independent woman in my thirties with no one to go home to; what was to stop me popping in for a small cocktail or a glass of Merlot? So I went in, on one of those small whims that change your life, and there was Aaron working again. The smile he gave me made me ashamed of my cynicism, that a young man couldn’t treat me with respect and admiration without me throwing it back in his face. ‘You came back,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. That was it. Sometimes it is very simple, if you can just get out of your own way.

  Afterwards, Mariel loved to tell the story of how I went speed dating and picked up the young barman instead. I didn’t love it as much. In fact, I didn’t really see her much nowadays.

  Alison

  She stared at the little stick, fighting a desperate urge to pee on it.

  Tom’s voice came through the door. ‘It’s too soon, mate, I told you.’ He always called her mate, just like he had when that was all they were, friends, partners, colleagues. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it.

  ‘I’m not doing it!’ It was far too soon, he was right. It would only be negative, even if she was, technically, pregnant. Alison peed – not on the stick – flushed, washed her hands, using the towel to push down the cuticles on her hands as her mother had taught her. She needed a manicure, but the chances of finding the time for one were up there with spotting Sasquatch on Beckenham High Street.

  She opened the door to find Tom hovering. ‘You’ve got to chill, mate.’

  ‘I am chill,’ she said, in a very non-chill voice. ‘But . . . what if we can’t . . . ?’

  ‘Then we get the IVF.’

  ‘And if that doesn’t work? We only get one free round.’

  ‘Try again, I guess.’

  ‘Just lob five grand at it, like?’

  He shrugged. That was always his attitude – do the thing to fix a problem or accept it as it was. Men. So infuriatingly practical. ‘How’s the case, then?’

  She was grateful to change the subject. ‘Jealous, are you? What’s it you’re stuck with, petrol fraud?’ It had been a long day at the site of the death, a suburban house in Beckenham, going over forensics and taking initial eye-witness statements, and she was sweaty and tired but despite all this, fired up. It was a good one.

  He scowled. ‘It’s so boring. And everything stinks of petrol now. Tell me about your exciting one.’

  They moved into the kitchen, where dinner was cooking. She stirred the pot. It was still a surprise to find herself living like this, domestically coupled up, buying cushions and making Nigella meals, and with Tom Khan of all people, once her irritating partner when she worked in Sevenoaks, barely even a friend. Everything had changed when Alison got the offer of a promotion, but with the Met in Bromley instead of Kent, and when she announced it Tom had declared himself in a surprisingly romantic way and now they were a thing. A couple. He was still working in Sevenoaks, and they lived somewhere between the two, clinging on to the very outer edges of London, which every day extended to surround and engulf them. ‘Well, there’s ten possible suspects. If you don’t count the babies.’

  His face changed. ‘There’s babies?’

  She stirred, not meeting his eyes. ‘Well, yeah, did I not say? It was some antenatal group meet-up. Babies sort of come with the territory. I think that’s the only reason they know e
ach other.’ It was strange, the diverse make-up of the group, social, racial, and age. Where else would you find such different people socialising like that? Tom turned down the dial on the hob; she swatted his hand. ‘Stop back-seat cooking!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Are you going to be alright with that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Babies. You know.’

  ‘I can be around babies. I’m not some crazy barren woman.’ She wished she hadn’t said the word, even in jest, because it made it more real. Barren. Barren. She was only thirty-six, not even that old. Some of those women there were years older than her, she was sure. She had time, whatever her mother said. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt monumentally unfair that even though human lives were stretching, that she could expect to live to a hundred, her fertile years were still so short. Whereas Tom’s would go on and on.

  ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  ‘You don’t know that. There’s only a twenty per cent chance it’ll work, even with IVF. That’s pretty crap, isn’t it?’

  ‘I got twenty per cent on a maths test once,’ he reflected, fiddling with the hob again.

  ‘And? Did you pass?’

  ‘Ha. Nope.’

  ‘And they still let you do the job. Her Majesty’s finest.’

  He went to set the table. ‘Who’s your new me, then?’

  ‘That Diana Mendes – she’s come down from North London. Young but good, I hear.’ Alison had yet to work with her new partner, which was just another thing to worry about.

  The cutlery drawer rattled. ‘So what happened then? One of the yummy mummies snapped and pushed them over the edge?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Things were very confused. I’ve had ten different versions of the story so far. Most of them insisted it was an accident. A fall, a slip, no foul play, honest officer.’

  ‘What did Colette say?’

  Alison’s boss was inclined to the accident angle, which meant less officer power for the case, less urgency, less budget. ‘She thinks probably that, yeah.’