Angels

by Marian Keyes

  I awoke choking on a jet of water – the sprinklers had started – and came back inside to find Emily still on the phone. She was getting directions from someone. ‘Oh, I know it. The block where all the plastic surgeons are? Right.’ She hung up. ‘Coming out for dinner tonight?’

  ‘Who’ll be there?’ I tried to sound casual.

  ‘Lara, Nadia, Justin, Desiree, you and me.’

  No Troy?

  ‘Troy’s got to work,’ she said kindly, sensing my unasked question. ‘He’s meeting some producer guy. And you know what he’s like about his work.’

  I didn’t, but anyway. I was disappointed – and still no word from Mort Russell. Although, while I’d been asleep, Helen had phoned. I was touched by her concern. Until I discovered there wasn’t any. All she’d done was try to discuss sexy surfers with Emily. ‘And she wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know any!’

  As we drove through the dazzling evening to Beverly Hills, we came upon a little commotion outside a mini-mall. Two boys were being arrested. They had their hands on the roof of the black and white and one officer was frisking them, while another swung handcuffs, ready for use. I’d never before seen someone being arrested. It gave me a little living-on-the-edge thrill, of which I was immediately ashamed.

  The restaurant was mostly outdoors, the tables beneath a pretty green and white striped awning, separated from the street by a white trellis. Nadia and Lara were already waiting at our street-side table. As Emily and I wove through the tables to get to them, I felt there was something slightly odd about the place, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until Justin arrived, Desiree trotting by his side.

  ‘Thanks a lot, guys.’ Thin-lipped and high-pitched, Justin chided Lara and Nadia. ‘You invite me to a dyke restaurant. I could get lynched.’

  And then I realized what was so strange: the clientele were all women. Justin was literally the only man. Suddenly the open staring, the two winks and the one wide smile I’d received all made sense. And I was beset with anxiety; had I been wrong to wink back? Giddily, Nadia ‘fessed up that coming here had been her idea. ‘I love this place. Isn’t it the greatest?’

  ‘The greatest,’ Justin muttered, mortified. ‘Let’s eat.’ As he perused the menu, every now and again he flashed an ‘I’m just an expendable fat guy, you have nothing to fear from me’ look about the place, but he couldn’t relax.

  We ordered, everyone except me asking for things that either weren’t on the menu or for the menu description to be customized. It seemed to be the LA way to be as awkward as possible in restaurants. Then, just as I was about to tuck into my dinner, my fork froze in my hand as I saw something that didn’t fit with the rest of the world. A woman, her entire head and face swaddled in bandages, was being led along the sidewalk by a young, great-haired babe. As they got closer, we could hear the girl murmuring tenderly, ‘OK, Mom, there’s a step coming up. Two more steps, then down again. OK, here’s the car.’

  They stopped at a four-wheel drive parked only a few yards from our table. In silence, we watched the woman stand blind and passive, waiting for the car door to be opened.

  ‘What happened to her?’ I muttered queasily. ‘She looks like a burns victim.’

  Instantly I was fixed with indulgent smiles all round. Even Desiree’s liquid eyes looked kindly and amused.

  ‘Plastic surgery,’ Lara said, sotto voce. ‘ Looks like she got her whole head lifted.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure.’

  But why not? LA was a shrine to beauty and every paper I opened urged me to GET those saddlebags sucked conveniently away, HAVE every hair on my body burnt off with a laser, DEFINE those blurry cheekbones with no-fuss collagen injections. (And who CARES if after six months the collagen slips down to your chin and you look like the ELEPHANT man and you have to have LIPOSUCTION on your COLLAGEN?)

  ‘Take it easy, Mom.’ Gently the woman was being guided into the passenger seat, but she didn’t lower her head enough and managed to bump her face on the door surround. A little squawk escaped the mouth slit and a spontaneous flinch rippled through the entire restaurant. Everyone had stopped eating.

  Then the woman was in. As her daughter scooted round to the driver’s side, she sat in her four-wheel drive, looking like Return of the Mummy. I had to be careful about slagging off plastic surgery, what with Lara’s fake jugs, but what must that face be like under those bandages? A raw steak? I couldn’t help wincing, ‘It looks barbaric.’

  ‘Hey!’ Lara playfully shook my arm. ‘Don’t faint on us. She’s happy. She’ll spend a couple of days in bed, then she’ll have a launch party for her new face.’

  ‘What about her daughter?’ I don’t really know what I meant by that. I just thought it must be terrible for her to see her mother in such a state.

  ‘Don’t worry about her!’ Emily comforted. ‘She’ll be OK soon. At Beverly Hills High they get nose jobs for their sixteenth birthday present!’

  ‘I got a nose job,’ Nadia announced proudly. ‘Not just for me, but so my kid will be born with, like, a totally great nose.’

  A paralysed silence descended. Desiree actually got down off her seat and trotted away. Lara smiled at me but she looked a little sick.

  ‘What? WHAT?’ Nadia had picked up on the atmosphere and was looking from one of us to the next. ‘What’d I say?’

  Then, ‘Oh, I get it. It’s because I’m gay. You think gay women can’t have children. Well, get over yourselves.’

  ‘Sperm donors!’ Emily declared and conversation erupted, a bit too enthusiastically.

  20

  There was something I’d forgotten to put on my list of bad things about Garv. Now, what was it? Putting empty orange-juice cartons back in the fridge? Pronouncing ‘certainly’ as ‘certintly’?

  No, it wasn’t either of those, it was:

  7. Wanting to have children when I was afraid of it.

  Claire had been bang on the money when she’d remarked that the rabbits were almost as much trouble as children. Of course Garv’s fondness for Hoppy and Rider was something to do with wanting children. Even an amateur psychologist who’d failed all his amateur psychologist’s exams could have figured that one out. And I sort of knew it myself, even if I did my very best not to know.

  Before Garv and I got married, we’d discussed the subject and decided that, while we both wanted children, we also wanted a few years on our own first. That suited me fine, because at twenty-four I felt too young to be a mother. (Even though I knew other twenty-four-year-olds had lots of kids; the only explanation I could come up with was that I was immature.)

  The thing was – and I’d have been the first to admit it – I was terrified by the thought of having a baby. And I wasn’t the only one. Most of my friends were of the same mind, and we spent many happy hours perplexed by the notion of natural childbirth. Occasionally a horror story was produced about some girl – a distant cousin, someone one of us worked with, no one too like us, if you know what I mean – who’d recently had a baby without pain relief. Or stories of nice, normal women who’d had epidurals lined up for months, but who got to the hospital too late and had to have an eight and a half pound baby without so much as a junior aspirin to take the edge off the agony. Such conversations usually came to an abrupt conclusion by someone begging, ‘Stop! I’m going to black out!’

  But the ink was barely dry on my marriage certificate before both Garv’s and my parents mounted a round-the-clock Pregnancy Watch. Soft cheeses were whipped away from in front of me. If I so much as belched (not that I ever dared to in front of his mum and dad), it generated a Mexican wave of pleased, knowing eyebrow raises. When I ate a dodgy mussel and spent two wretched days lying on the bathroom floor, they were practically knitting bootees. Their expectations made me feel panicky – and resentful. Just because I’d never stepped out of line before didn’t mean that, just to please them, I was going to start dropping sprogs like I was shelling peas.

  ‘They can’t help i
t,’ Garv said. It’s just because we’re the first one in each family to get spliced. Humour them.’

  ‘Will it all be OK?’ I asked anxiously, bothered by visions of my in-laws holding me down and forcibly impregnating me with a turkey baster.

  ‘It’ll all be OK,’ he reassured.

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Everything everything?’ (You know the way you can get, sometimes.)

  ‘Everything everything.’

  And I believed him. Broodiness, I was sure, was one of those things that belonged Sometime in My Future. A change that automatically occurred with the passage of time; like all of a sudden wanting to sit down in pubs, when standing up, being goodnaturedly pushed and shoved, had been fine – indeed enjoyable – for years. I’d watched it happen to other people –I saw no reason why it wouldn’t happen to me.

  We hadn’t been married long when we moved to Chicago, and suddenly I was studying at night and we were both working very long hours, trying to get a toehold on our respective career ladders. Having children would have been out of the question; we’d barely have had the time or energy to conceive the poor creature, never mind take care of it.

  Then, astonishing news came from London: Claire was pregnant. On the one hand, it was a blessing because my mother would have her longed-for grandchild and the pressure would be off me. But on the other hand, I felt peculiarly usurped. It was Claire’s job to reduce my parents to hand-wringing despair; it was my job to please them. All of a sudden, she’s puking day and night and cutting my most-well-behaved-daughter’s legs out from under me.

  And Claire had been one of the greatest party animals of our time, so what had prompted the decision to have a baby? I asked her, hoping she’d confide that James, her husband, had said it was a good tax break. (That’s the kind of man James was. It was a godsend when he had the affair and left her.) But the hardest fact she could come up with was that it ‘felt right’. This I liked the sound of: if it ‘felt right’ for a wild woman like Claire, the time would definitely come when it would ‘feel right’ for me.

  A few days before Claire’s due date, I happened to be in London for one day’s work. It was months since I’d seen her, what with me living in Chicago, and when she collected me from the tube station I barely recognized her. She was enormous, easily the most pregnant person I’d ever seen – and she was proud, excited and mad keen to involve me in the whole process. The minute we got back to the flat, she ordered gleefully, ‘Look at me, I’m HUGE!’ Then she whipped up her sweatshirt and gave me a full frontal.

  I was delighted for her happiness, but as I looked at her gigantic, blue-veined belly, I felt a little squeamish at the thought that there was a human being in there. But what made me even more squeamish was that it had to get out, through an orifice which it was clearly far, far too big for.

  I found myself wondering just what had Mother Nature been thinking of? The process of gestation and giving birth was definitely one of her poorer ideas – the biological equivalent of being painted into a corner.

  However, one of the plus sides of being around a heavily pregnant woman was that her flat was full of food. Cravings food – an old biscuit tin was an Aladdin’s cave of different chocolate bars, and there was a freezer crammed with ice-cream.

  We parked ourselves before the biscuit tin and ate our fill (this took some time), then we were ready to lie on her bed and watch telly. But before we did so, Claire pulled off her sweatshirt. And why not? It was her home. And why should she have a problem undressing in front of me? I mean, I’m her sister. But as I stretched my neck to see over her bump to the screen (put it this way, if it had been a subtitled programme we’d been watching, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on), I tried to blank out the colossal belly which rose, like Ayers Rock, from her body. I began to wish we lived in Victorian times. Modesty, there’s a lot to be said for it.

  ‘I shouldn’t have eaten that second-last Bounty. The baba’s got the hiccups,’ she said tenderly. And indeed, before my aghast eyes, her bump convulsed with rhythmic twitches. ‘Do you want to feel?’ she said. If she had asked me if I’d like to stick my hand in a blender I’d have been as enthusiastic – more, probably – but I couldn’t think of any way to refuse without giving offence.

  I produced my hand and let it be guided, and when she placed it on her stomach a shudder shot up my arm to my scalp. I couldn’t help it. I’d have preferred to take the giblets out of a turkey.

  She passed my palm over something bumpy. ‘Feel that? That’s her head,’ Claire said, and it was all I could do to suppress a whimper.

  Then, as if I wasn’t finding things hard enough, Claire remarked idly, ‘She could come at any minute.’

  Sweat popped on to my forehead. Not tonight, God, I prayed. Please God, don’t let her come tonight.

  Claire had always sworn that if she was ever ‘unlucky enough’ (her words) to have to give birth, she’d start mainlining heroin the minute her waters broke. But when I tentatively enquired how many lines of defence she’d prepared for her fight against labour pains – Pethidine? Epidurals? Heroin? – she shook her head and said, ‘Nada.’ My horror must have been stamped on my face, because she roared laughing and explained, ‘Having this baba is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me! I want to be fully present for it.’

  Clearly she’d gone over to the Dark Side – which I found strangely consoling. If someone like Claire could be contemplating a natural birth, then there was great hope for a scaredy cat like me.

  All the same, the following morning I was awake and dressed a full hour before I needed to leave, and not even the charms of the biscuit tin could persuade me to linger. Claire wandered around the flat yawning and muttering to herself, ‘I’m ready to pop.’ Eventually, she lumbered to the car to drive me to the Tube, and when I saw the underground station, relief made me light-headed. Long before the car had come to a halt, I had the passenger door open and my foot on the road, sparks flying from my heel.

  As I leapt out, I blurted, ‘Thanks for all the chocolate and good luck with the excruciating agony of childbirth.’

  I hadn’t meant to say that. I tried again. ‘Er, good luck with the labour.’

  She had the baby two days later, and no matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t admit that it had hurt that much. It was around then that I realized there was some sort of conspiracy afoot. Whenever I tried pumping any woman who’d had a baby for specifics on agony, pain relief etc., they wouldn’t play ball. Instead they just said dreamily, ‘Ah yeah, I suppose it stung a bit, but afterwards you’ve got a baby. I mean, a BABY. You’ve created a new life, it’s miraculous!’

  I expected that the passage of time would take care of my fear, that I’d grow out of it. So what I did was I told myself I’d have a child when I was thirty. Partly, I suspect, because I thought thirty was so far away it would never come.

  21

  ‘As the crisis in Santa Monica moves into its second day… ‘I woke with my usual horrible jolt to the sound of Emily talking to herself, ‘… conditions inside the house are bad. Morale is low among the hostages…

  So I could take it that Mort Russell hadn’t arrived in the middle of the night, with a contract under his oxter.

  But shortly after I got up, someone rang. Someone who caused Emily to giggle a lot and wind her finger in her hair while talking to him. It was Lou, the guy she’d met at the dinner party where the organ-collecting bloke had been her date.

  ‘I’m going on a date with him tonight,’ she said, when she finally hung up. ‘He’s taken nearly two weeks to call, he’s given me no notice, but I don’t care. I’m going to go out with him, have sex with him, then never hear from him again. That,’ she said with satisfaction, ‘will take my mind off Mort Russell not calling!’

  I was staring out the window.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

  ‘Curtis. He’s after getting stuck again.’ I stared a while
longer. ‘They’re calling us to help.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  After we’d helped dislodge Curtis – this time he’d been trying to get out of the car, not in – we returned home. I’d half-planned to spend the morning taking a turn around the Santa Monica mall – my knees still looked funny in the denim skirt – until I saw Emily producing an armload of cleaning products from under the sink and pulling on rubber gloves. Housework! What with staying with her rent-free and all that, I felt obliged to help. Or at least to offer and hope she said no. But to my disappointment she said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, the floor could do with a wash.’

  Ah well, it’d be good exercise for me. As I filled a bucket with floor cleaner and water, Emily sighed, ‘Thanks. Conchita is coming on Monday. I like to have things nice for her.’

  ‘Who’s Conchita?’

  ‘My cleaning lady. Comes every fortnight. Goes mad if the place isn’t clean.’

  There was no need to challenge this piece of seeming illogicality. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t clean up before their cleaning person comes. I started mopping my way across the wooden floor and was working up a good satisfying sweat when the front door opened and in came Troy.

  ‘Right across my nice clean floor,’ I scolded.

  ‘Whoops! Sorry.’ He laughed softly but there was an urgency about him. ‘Guess what?!’

  ‘What?’ Emily had appeared.

  ‘Cameron Myers!’

  Cameron Myers was a box-office heart-throb. Young and pretty.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You know I met with Ricky the producer last night? Well, I’m in his house, and Cameron Myers pays him a visit! Turns out Ricky’s an old buddy of Cameron’s. But this is the best bit. I tell Cameron my name and he says, “Didn’t you direct Free-Falling?”’ A quick aside to me – ‘That was my first movie, Irish. Then he says that it rocked!’

  Emily went hysterical and I did my best to match her, but Troy silenced us. ‘It gets better. Today’s his birthday and he’s taken the penthouse in the Freeman to hang with his homies tonight. And this is where it gets real good – he told me to drop by! And bring a date!’