Angels

by Marian Keyes

  But Garv said, ‘I do understand how you feel.’ And I knew he did. ‘But if we thought that way all the time, we’d never love anyone.’

  For a moment, I was afraid he might suggest that I had therapy. But of course he didn’t – he was an Irish man.

  Unlike most of my friends, I’d never had therapy. Emily said it was because I was too afraid of what I’d find out. I agreed –I said I was afraid of finding out that I’d paid forty pounds a week every week for two years to entertain a stranger with the story of my life.

  ‘Can you see anything positive at all about getting pregnant?’ Garv asked.

  I thought long and hard. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’ The hope in his voice shamed me.

  ‘Chocolate.’

  ‘Chocolate?’

  ‘Food generally. I could eat as much as I liked and never feel guilty.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, with a heavy sigh. ‘It’s a start, I suppose.’

  Another year passed, I turned thirty-two and I still didn’t feel ‘ready’. More than I had, admittedly, but not quite enough. Until one day, feeling like I was giving up after years on the run, I just crumbled. I knew I had to. The silent struggle was exhausting and I suspected that things with Garv and me had gone a bit weird since Hoppy and Rider had arrived. I loved Garv and I didn’t want things getting any worse.

  When I turned myself in, Garv almost burst with happiness. ‘What changed your mind?!’

  ‘I don’t want you becoming one of those women who steal babies from outside a supermarket,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t regret this, I promise,’ he enthused.

  And while I suspected that I probably would, my resentment was defused by the knowledge that he didn’t understand how great my qualms were. That he genuinely thought that once he’d knocked me up, all my trepidation would be washed clean away in a great tide of oestrogen.

  ‘So will I buy a thing that tells me my temperature and all that?’ I asked.

  Garv looked startled. ‘No! Can’t we just…?’

  So we just…

  The first time we had sex without contraception, I felt as if I’d jumped out of a plane without a parachute, and even though we’d been told it could take between six months and a year, I was still watchful of my body.

  But despite the risks we’d taken, my period arrived, and not even the squeezing cramps could dampen my relief. I relaxed a little – I’d bought myself another month. Maybe I’d be one of the women who could take up to a year.

  Not a hope. I conceived in the second month; and I knew about it within minutes. I didn’t immediately start demanding peanut butter and wasabi sandwiches, but something in me didn’t feel settled, and when I abruptly took agin Tesco Metro BLTs, I knew.

  Mind you, I’d been fairly sure the previous month too, when I hadn’t been. But within days it was clear that this was no neurotic imagining. I really was up the pole. How was I so sure? It might have had something to do with the fact that until after eight in the evening I couldn’t even keep down water. Or if anyone passed within three feet of my boobs I wanted to kill them. Or that I was chalk white. Except for when I was mint green. It was all wrong. When Shelley had been five weeks pregnant, she’d gone on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees (Why, indeed? Your guess is as good as mine), covered ten gruelling miles a day and never once felt lightheaded. Claire hadn’t even known she was pregnant for the first month and was out partying day and night, without recourse to a single bucket.

  But I was the sickest person I’d ever met, which was especially hard for me because I didn’t usually get sick often. Even my brain was affected – I couldn’t think straight. Just to make it official, we did a pregnancy test and when the second blue line rose to the surface, Garv cried, in a manly, I’ve-an-eyelash-caught-in-my-eye sort of way. I cried too, but for different reasons.

  Sick though I was, I just about managed to keep working –though God only knows how much use I was to them, and the only thing that kept me going was the vision of my bed at the end of the day. By the time I reached home, almost whimpering with relief, I’d make straight for the bedroom. If Garv had got home before me, he’d have already flung back the covers and all I had to do was crawl in between the cool, forgiving sheets. Then Garv would lie beside me and I’d grasp his hand and tell him how much I hated him.

  ‘I know,’ he crooned, ‘I don’t blame you, but I promise that in a few short weeks you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered, gratefully. ‘Thank you, yes. And then I’ll kill you.’

  Sooner or later, I struggled to sit up and Garv knew the drill. ‘Puke bowl?’ he’d ask solicitously, as we prepared for yet another round of dry retches.

  ‘Watching the game, having a Bud,’ Garv murmured, as I Whassup’d into the pretty fuchsia basin he’d bought specially for the occasion.

  It was after the first month that something began to ripple through me, a sensation so unfamiliar that I couldn’t categorize it.

  ‘Indigestion?’ Garv suggested. ‘Wind?’

  ‘No…’ I said, in a daze. ‘I think it might be… excitement.’

  Garv cried again.

  Call it hormones, call it Mother Nature, call it whatever you want, but to my great surprise I suddenly really wanted the baby. Then, at seven weeks, when we went for the first scan, my love just exploded. The grainy, grey picture showed something tiny, a little blob that was slightly darker than the other blobbiness around it, and it was our baby. Another human being, new and unique. We’d made it and I was carrying it.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ I whispered to Garv as we studied it.

  ‘De murkil’ f new life,’ he agreed solemnly.

  In wild, celebratory mode, we took the rest of the day off work and went for lunch at a restaurant that I sometimes went to with clients and consequently had never been able to enjoy before. I even managed half a chicken breast without barfing. Then we wandered around town and he persuaded me to let him buy me a JP Tod’s handbag (the one that Helen now covets). It was so expensive I’d never have been able to buy it for myself, not even out of my Ladies’ Nice Things account. ‘Last time we’ll have the money for this kind of thing,’ he declared skittishly. Then I bought him a CD of some saxophonist whom I knew nothing about but whom he loved. ‘Last time you’ll get the chance to listen to music,’ I declared, also skittishly. It was one of the nicest days of my entire life.

  That was when we decided to give Hoppy and Rider to Dermot. He’d become very fond of them, and though we were sad to lose them, we’d decided they’d have to go anyway when the baby arrived. We’d heard enough horror stories about jealous animals attacking babas, and even though Hoppy and Rider had never shown signs of narkiness, we felt we couldn’t take any chances. So, tearfully, we waved them off to Dermot’s, promising to visit them regularly.

  Around then, other things changed too. I’d never been mad about my body. I mean, I didn’t hate it enough to starve or cut it, but it had never been something to celebrate. But with my pregnancy came a profound shift; I felt ripe and gorgeous and powerful and – I know this sounds funny – useful Up until then, I’d regarded my womb in the same way as the keyring on my Texier handbag: it was neither decorative nor useful, but it came with the rest of the package, so I was stuck with it.

  Another by-product of my pregnancy was that I felt blessedly normal; for so long, my lack of maternal instincts had had me thinking I was almost a freak. For the first time in a long time, I felt in step with the rest of the world.

  You’re supposed to wait until after the twelfth week to tell people, and I’m normally very good at keeping secrets, but not in this instance. So on week eight we broke the news to our families, who expressed delight – most of them, anyway. ‘I reckoned you for a Jaffa,’ Helen coldly told Garv.

  ‘What’s a Jaffa?’

  ‘An orange which doesn’t have any seeds.’

  He still looked confused, so she elaborated. ‘I thought you were firing blanks.’ Then she add
ed, ‘When I could bear to think about it at all.’

  Next I rang Emily, one of the few people who’d known the full extent of my reluctance to get pregnant – and only because she’d been of the same mind. She was one of those people who, if you asked if they liked children, would reply, ‘Love them! But I couldn’t manage a whole one.’

  I broke the news that I was eight weeks pregnant and when she asked me, ‘Are you happy?’ I heard myself reply, ‘I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I was a fool to have waited so long.’

  There was silence, then a sniff. ‘Are you crying?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘I’m so happy for you,’ she wobbled. ‘This is wonderful news.’

  It was on a routine visit to the bathroom one Saturday afternoon when I saw it. This wasn’t the spotting they’d talked about. This was crimson and everywhere.

  ‘Garv,’ I called, surprised at how normal I sounded. ‘Garv! I think we’d better go to the hospital.’

  Out by the car, I decided I wanted to drive myself. I was quite insistent, something to do with control, probably. And Garv, who rarely loses his temper, stood in the street and yelled, ‘I’LL FUCKING DRIVE.’

  I remember every part of the journey to the hospital in almost hyper-reality. Everything was acutely sharp and clear. We had to go through town, which was so thronged with Saturday-afternoon shoppers we could hardly get the car through the streets. The sheer number of people made me feel entirely alone in the world.

  At the hospital, we parked in an ambulance bay and to this day I could still tell you what the woman on admissions looked like. She promised that I’d be seen as soon as possible, then Garv and I sat and waited on orange plastic chairs that had been nailed to the floor. We didn’t speak.

  When a nurse came for me, Garv promised, ‘It’ll be OK.’

  But it wasn’t.

  It was a nine-week foetus, but I felt as if someone had died. It was too early to tell the sex and that made me feel worse.

  A shared loss is harder, I think. I could handle my own pain, but I couldn’t handle Garv’s. And there was something I had to say to him before the guilt devoured me whole. ‘It’s my fault, it’s because I didn’t want it. He or she knew where it wasn’t wanted.’

  ‘But you did want it.’

  ‘Not in the beginning.’

  And he had nothing to say to me. He knew it was true.

  26

  On Sunday evening, Lara came over.

  ‘Not out with Nadia?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Nah, she got her butthole bleached and can’t sit down.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I spluttered. ‘Her butthole? Bleached?’

  ‘It’s the latest thing in plastic surgery,’ Lara explained. ‘Lots of girls do it. To make it look pretty.’

  ‘Like getting your teeth whitened,’ Emily chipped in. ‘Except it’s your butthole instead.’

  ‘You’re making this up!’

  ‘We’re not!’

  ‘But who’d see… when…?’ I stopped. I was better off not knowing.

  ‘I got me a present.’ Lara thrust a box at us.

  ‘Lovely,’ Emily enthused. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s my new state-of-the-art caller display. So sophisticated it can almost tell me what my caller is thinking. Listen to the functions!’

  As she listed out all the things it could do, she reminded me of Garv – boys and their toys – and I wondered whether there was a link between loving gadgets and wanting to have sex with girls.

  We took ourselves and a bottle of wine out to the sunloungers in the fragrant back garden, where Lara tried to quiz Emily on her thirty-six-hour date with Lou. But Emily tetchily dismissed him: ‘I had a good time but he’s not going to call.’ She was far more interested in analysing her work situation.

  ‘The new script just isn’t coming together, so if Mort Russell passes on Plastic Money, that’s it. Game over.’ She blew into her hands and her face was pale. ‘I’ve got no other choice, I really am going to have to go back to Ireland.’

  Lara shook her head. ‘I’ve been thinking about this. There must be other work you can do.’

  ‘Yeah, I hear they’re hiring at Starbucks.’

  ‘No, other writing work. Script polish.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked Emily.

  ‘I take a poxy script that’s about to go into production, make it coherent, add jokes and make the main characters three-dimensional and likeable. For that I get a pittance and someone else gets the credit.’ Emily sighed. ‘Obviously I’d love it, but there are so many writers in this town and we’re all chasing the same pieces of work. David says he’s tried for me.’

  ‘Agent, schmagent. The time has come to get out there and hustle yourself,’ Lara encouraged.

  ‘I do!’

  ‘You need to do more than look pretty and give out your cards at parties. You’ve got to bother people. That’s if you really don’t want to go home to Ireland.’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Orsquo;ca. I’ll see if I can swing something and so will Troy. And what about that Irish guy? You know the one from Dark Star Productions. Shay something? Shay Mahoney?’

  ‘Shay Delaney.’ Beside me I could feel Emily’s sudden awkwardness.

  ‘Yeah, him. Wonder if he’s got any shit Irish films that could use a polish.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s got plenty of shit Irish films that could use a polish,’ Emily said. ‘But no money to pay for it.’

  ‘You never know,’ Lara mused. ‘Call him. Convince him.’

  Emily made noncommittal noises and I was relieved. I didn’t want her to ring him.

  ‘Oh, enough doom and gloom already!’ Emily declared. ‘We need cheering up. Lara, will you tell us your “I’m OK, you’re OK” story?’ She snuggled into her lounger, like a child preparing for their bedtime story. ‘Off you go,’ she encouraged, with the air of someone who’d heard this many, many times. ‘“I’d been nineteen for seven years and it was starting to show… “‘

  Lara took a deep breath, and began. ‘OK, I’d been nineteen for seven years and it was starting to show. I’d been the prettiest girl at my high school, and seven years earlier I’d come to LA hoping to be the next Julia Roberts.’

  Emily was happily mouthing the words along with her.

  ‘But LA was full of chicks who’d been the prettiest girls at high school and I was nothing special.’

  I began to object that Lara was very special, but she stopped me.

  ‘Tell it to the hand. Look around you, this town is full of babes. They are everywhere and a thousand new ones arrive every week, can you imagine? But at the time I didn’t know this. So I start looking for work, hit a brick wall and end up having to do pay theatre.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Productions you pay for a part in.’

  ‘You pay them?

  ‘Yeah, but there’s always the chance that some hotshot director will spot you and you get to put something on your your résumé Anyhoo, after that, I got a few walk-on parts where they paid me and I thought I was on my way. In between acting jobs, I waited tables and got my boobs and lips done.’

  ‘Biggened,’ Emily explained. ‘And some casting director told her to drop ten pounds –’

  ‘Was her name Kirsty?’ I asked sarcastically.

  At that point, the story of Lara’s life stalled while Emily had a little rant about Kirsty telling me I needed to drop ten pounds. (I had exaggerated to make her seem worse.) Lara soothed and smoothed, then Emily resumed. ‘Right! Some casting director told her to drop ten pounds, though she was already x-ray skinny – so she upped her exercise to four hours daily. Then she began starving herself and only ate twelve grapes and five rice-cakes a day.’

  I didn’t believe her. No one could survive on that.

  ‘It’s true,’ Lara confirmed. ‘I was constantly hungry.’

  ‘Even though you were on pills,’ Emily reminded her.

  ‘That’s right. I knew every
doctor who gave fake prescriptions. I took so much speed – that’s what diet pills are –my mouth was always dry, my heart was racing…’

  ‘… I was permanently homicidal,’ Emily chimed in with the last bit.

  ‘I was so poor and so unhappy. Six days out of seven I managed to stick to my diet. But – and it was like Russian roulette, I never knew which chamber was loaded – on one of the days I broke my diet. And how! Three pints of ice-cream, a pound of chocolate, four bags of cookies… then I made myself puke it all up.’

  ‘Bulimia,’ Emily intoned gravely at me. ‘For all the good it did her.’

  ‘You got it. Instead of graduating to speaking parts, even the walk-on parts stopped happening. They said my look was over. Big, blonde Aryan types were out and wide-eyed waifs who looked like they’d been abused as children were in.’

  She paused and Emily prompted her, ‘“I’d been to twenty-three auditions in a row without a single call-back.”’

  ‘I’d been to twenty-three auditions in a row without a single call-back and I hadn’t had a paying acting job in over two years. ‘I’m stony broke and all the time I’m getting older, my ass is slipping, my face is getting lines, and every week a thousand real nineteen-year-olds are getting off the bus and hawking their fresh teenage bodies round town. I can’t, just can’t go back to waiting tables, so I slept with a director – a man – who promised me a part. It never happened. Then I got so desperate I slept with a writer.’

  ‘Why’s it worse to sleep with a writer than a director?’