by Jackie Clune
“Right, just Jules and Angela now,” said Soph, testing the vegan cheddar crust of her bubbling lasagna.
Bang on cue, there came a tentative rat-tat-tat on the door.
“That’ll be Angela,” said Soph, as she shoved the gurgling gloop back into the blackened chasm of the oven. It looked like it had served as an emergency crematorium for the vegetable world; pieces of charred carrot and cindered parsnip cracked in the gaps between oven and door each time it was opened, and there was always a faint echo of disappointment as the door slammed shut, as if the oven knew what culinary death it was party to. Amy smiled fondly at the familiarity of it all. She felt herself beginning to relax as the wine and the good company took hold. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad birthday after all.
“Hello, all!” shouted Angela as she squeezed her overflowing bosom through the cluttered hallway. Unashamedly fat and forty, mother of five children, and Amy’s oldest friend, Ang’s substantial presence always grounded Amy in a crisis. Ang’s big diner-lady arms had enveloped her on more than one critical occasion, and although she didn’t have much in common with Amy’s more middle-class friends, she was an essential and enthusiastic guest at Amy’s table.
“Look who I bumped into on the path!”
“Hi,” muttered Jules, slinking straight to the back door and parking herself on the rickety deck chair, silently lighting up the first of forty cigarettes.
“Would you open the back door, Jules, please? It’s just that Greg and me don’t really allow smoke in the house,” said Soph, visibly flinching in preparation for the backlash.
“Yes, yes, yes—it’s OK, I don’t mind if you eat while I smoke, it doesn’t put me off,” replied Jules, hauling herself up to wrench open the rotten back door.
“Oh, happy birthday, Amy,” she remembered, tossing a plastic bag at the birthday girl. It was a bit unimaginative, but she’d not felt much like shopping after the latest boob-job consultation. Another four grand for one measly cup size. That was two grand per extra handful. If only she hadn’t listened to Amy’s advice the first time round and gone for the double-D right off.
“Thanks, Jules!” said Amy, unwrapping the small, hard, flat package.
“It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“What is it?” shrieked Angela, clapping her hands together delightedly, so grateful to be out of the house for a rare night of adult company that she had already regressed to the age of six.
“It’s a silver business-card holder,” replied Amy, pretending to examine it minutely so as not to have to show the horror on her face. Great. Just the monogrammed hankies now and she could ritualistically impale herself up both nostrils with the gold and gold-look pens.
“Thanks. I really like it.” She was getting good at this—no one seemed to even notice.
“My turn! My turn!” skipped Angela, pulling a hastily wrapped bundle from her large, saggy handbag.
“Oh, Angela—you shouldn’t have,” said Amy, taking the gift guiltily. OK, so they weren’t the best gifts in the world, but they were from her friends, and Angela more than anyone could ill afford to throw money away on gifts.
“Oh, it’s not much—but you’ve got to have something to unwrap on your birthday,” gushed Angela, grabbing a tumbler and filling it with wine.
With a sense of impending prophetic closure, Amy peeled back the hair-covered sticky tape on the Barbie paper to reveal a small expanse of crisp, white cotton. Folding back the last corner of paper, her heart preparing for a deep-sea dive to the floor, Amy finally revealed two curly-swirly embroidered letters: AS. Never had two simple letters seemed to portend so much to Amy. AS. The machine-stitched monogramming seemed to be signaling something. AS: All Spent? Alcoholic Spinster?
It was all too depressing.
“Thanks, Ang—they’re really . . . perfect. They’re perfect,” said Amy, leaning over to plant a kiss on her friend’s cheek.
If only I had a novelty paperweight, too . . . I could glue it to the wall and run head-first at it, she thought.
Finally, Sophie announced that the gloop was ready to be disembowelled, typically, just at the point at which the wine had run out. Shrugging on her new leather jacket, Amy struggled past the mountain bikes and cat shit and back into the drizzly night. Her birthday celebration had become a ritual, an annual milestone for the whole group. In the absence of any real family life it was all Amy had, and although this thought made her feel queasy—she hated any Waltons sepia glow or Friends “Hey, you guys” bonhomie—it was true. She loved it and hated it in equal measure, just like a family Christmas or wedding. The fact that she could moan and detract her way through the evening gave her a warm and familiar feeling of bittersweet inclusion. These people didn’t expect her to be full of birthday joy. They expected the sour hors d’oeuvres of Amy’s arrival and the looser-tongued main course of her conversation, followed shortly by the wine-soaked opining and general bullishness of her tone. Dessert was always a mess of tears, tantrums, and taxis. Happy bloody birthday. But the presents! The presents were always bad and always just so plain wrong. Any feeling of being known, of being accepted and loved for who she was, had always been viciously wiped out by the extraordinary sense of existential loneliness she felt upon opening the gifts. It had always been this way. Her parents had never really honored the usual traditions of gift-giving on special occasions. Her dad soaked every spare bit of cash there ever was, and her mum was perpetually too anxious and preoccupied to even remember. Once, on her ninth birthday, her mum had absentmindedly handed her a badly wrapped bar of carbolic laundry soap, obviously thinking it was better than nothing. It wasn’t.
Oh, well, fuck it, she thought as she picked out six overpriced bottles of red, and in the time-tested tradition of all borderline avoidant alcoholics, she resolved to get heartily pissed.
By the time Amy had chinked and clunked her way back up the street, Brendan had already made three catty remarks about Angela’s size, Jules had started on Sophie’s ancient bottle of ill-advised, holiday-purchased grappa, and Sophie had lit three noxious, “mood-enhancing” candles (presumably a double-whammy attempt to hide the vile sight of the food and mask the stench of the cat litter trays). Business as usual, then. Greg grabbed the first of the bottles and uncorked it with attention-seeking adeptness while Angela raised a nearly empty glass in a typically ill-timed toast.
“To Amy!” she bellowed. “Happy birthday!”
“Happy birthday,” mumbled the rest of the table, who were busy fending off large portions of gloop and procuring full tumblers of wine.
“Cheers,” said Amy, as amiably as she could allow.
“But it’s not just Amy’s birthday we’re here to celebrate . . .” Angela twinkled naughtily.
“Don’t tell me, you got that gig as Heidi Klum’s body double!” deadpanned Brendan, dribbling a trail of vegan gravy across the Amnesty International tablecloth.
“No, it’s not that. . . . I’ve got an announcement to make.”
“You’re up for the next series of Baywatch?”
“No, not that, either. . . .”
“You’re the new—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up, Brendan,” said Jules, picking over her steaming portion suspiciously.
“I’m going to have a baby!” Angela beamed with all the excitement and enthusiasm of a first-timer.
“Jesus! Not another one!” said Greg before he could stop himself, and before anyone else did.
“But you only had Bernie seven months ago!” said Sophie, who had stopped in her serving tracks to take in the full shock of the news. “I mean, that’s fantastic! I don’t know how you do it!”
“Well, the man lies on top of the lady and bounces up and down and then some fishes swim out of him into her belly button and that makes a baby,” said Brendan in his best annoying four-year-old voice.
Amy took this exchange in with some horror. Angela seemed to be on a one-woman mission to populate the entire planet. This was her sixth child, a
nd Amy could not help but feel that this was becoming an addiction. Whether it was the attention Angela got, the seats offered on the tube, the small kindnesses from strangers, or the fact that she could wear tents all year through, year after year, while stuffing her face, Amy did not know. But it seemed as though Angela had given up any ambition she ever had and in its place had opted to be permanently up the duff. Indeed, because of the weight she piled on during the first pregnancy (weight she could ill afford, due to her already generous proportions), it had become difficult month by month to tell if she had just dropped one or was eight months gone. For fourteen years now, since her meringue-dress wedding to Dave the Plasterer, Angela had been a blob in a frock, her swollen ankles squeezed into old lady’s bunion shoes, her hair a dull frizz. To have one baby might be considered carelessness . . . but to have six? Did anyone still do this anymore?
And then there was the Sophie-and-Greg issue. For three years now, Soph had been battling with her own fertility. Determined to save the planet before adding to it, she and Greg had left it until they were thirty-eight before finally trying for a baby. One year down the line they had gone the IVF route, only to be told they had just a year’s worth of free treatment on the national health plan before each jelly baby-in-waiting would cost a cool three thousand to implant. After a year (and three failed attempts), they were still childless. By this point, they were desperate and had scrimped and saved their way through three privately funded failures. It seemed to Amy that what had started out as a simple desire had become an all-consuming, self-defeating obsession. Mrs. Cummings, but without the cash. From her standpoint, it was difficult to see what all the fuss was about. During her twenties, Amy had watched in lip-curled distaste as more and more of her contemporaries grew fat and estrogen-stupid, each new bump signifying another tomb to a dead friendship. It had started out being just those girls from school whose only capability seemed to be their biological function: the ones who wore lipgloss at thirteen, who endured school with dreamy indifference, and who were always to be found in submissive embraces with hotgroined boys at cider-fueled teenage parties. To these girls, getting pregnant was not creating a new life but creating their own. As their bellies swelled, so did their own quiet sense of self. “I am fertile, therefore I am.” They bore the stretch marks, the sickness, the weight gain, and the sagging breasts with the resigned grace of the virgin herself as they limped to and from their shop jobs. Although Amy felt no misplaced sadness at their lost potential—if everyone was interesting and successful, who would scan her groceries and iron her G-strings?—she couldn’t help the rising anger she felt at these girls.
Amy had since surrounded herself with seemingly like-minded women whose careers and inner lives mirrored her own.
But suddenly, about two years ago, several of her friends had started going all gooey over prams in the park. In one full-moon, crazy-making week, one friend had got married “in order to start a family” and another had ditched her high-flying job to be more attractive to a potential husband and future father to her children. Amy had felt shocked, betrayed, and queasy. As she reached her late thirties, she had begun to feel increasingly isolated—the only sane one left in a sea of ticking biological clocks and ovulation kits. She had numbed this isolation with great gulps of cynicism, washed down with postwork cocktails in exclusively male company.
“Well, congratulations!” said Jules, before downing a full glass of red in one gulp. “What does Dave say?”
“Well, you know Dave. He didn’t say much, but I can tell he’s pleased.” Ang blushed, aware that reactions were mixed but unsure why.
“Did he jump up and hug you and take you out for a double cheeseburger to celebrate?” asked Brendan.
“No, he just sort of rolled his eyes and said he’d take the crib ad out of the classifieds then. . . .”
“Blimey, Ang, that’ll be six!” said Amy, with as little judgment in her voice as she could manage. She added a tinny laugh for good measure.
“I know—we’ll be able to do the von Trapps soon!” laughed Ang, clearly delighted at the idea. Amy mentally pushed away the image of acres and acres of flowery curtain fabric wrapped around the porky family.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” started Soph lightly. “Here I am, trying desperately to get one of my green old eggs to hard-boil, and you just churn them out like a battery hen!”
Greg reached around and squeezed her waist protectively in a gesture so spontaneous and so secret that it brought surprise tears to Amy’s eyes.
“I’m sorry, that sounded terrible. I didn’t mean to say you . . . oh, God, it’s just so hard to hear about other people. I’m happy for you, I really am,” said Soph, as she tried in vain to choke back a well of tears. No chance. Collapsing onto Greg’s shoulder, she sobbed openly.
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Brendan.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Sophie,” said Ang, rising and enveloping both Soph and Greg in her huge bosom. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I just wanted to tell everyone together. . . . I’m so sorry.” She too started to gulp and shake before joining in with the discrete version of wailing now going on.
Lurching drunkenly and uncertainly to her feet, Jules piled onto the grief mountain and added her own woes.
“I’m getting so old, and I don’t even know if I’ve got any eggs!” she wailed absurdly. “And even if I have, who’s going to want to fertilize them? Justin’s buggered off with some twenty-year-old dental nurse, and I can’t even look depressed about it because of all the Botox!” she cried, her face maintaining the neutral, frown-free mask of a privileged adolescent.
“Well, happy birthday to you, Amy,” said Brendan, slyly grabbing his coat from the back of his chair and tipping Amy the wink. In one clean move, they were out of the kitchen and at the front door.
“Bye!” Amy shouted cheerily as the heaving mass of misery continued its snotfest.
“Magpie?” asked Brendan, raising a mock quizzical eyebrow. It was always The Magpie on nights like these.
“Oh, yes,” said Amy, zipping up her new jacket to remind herself it was her birthday more than to shield herself from the Stoke Newington drizzle.
. 4 .
They walked in silence to the pub. There was no need for words between them. Brendan knew what was rattling Amy so much tonight, and it had nothing to do with aging. What was the matter with everyone all of a sudden? Try as she might, Amy just could not get her head round the idea that a woman can function as a rational and self-determining individual for the best part of thirty years but will ultimately be slain by internal biochemical forces beyond her control, even beyond her conscious will. That this archaic and frankly insulting idea was peddled as a sad but beautiful truth—on TV discussion shows, in newspapers and women’s magazines, even by intelligent friends of hers who needed some get-out clause for their sellout pregnancies—angered Amy even more than the idea itself. Traditionally, the “women are ovens waiting to be filled with buns” mantra had prevailed, even among a lot of thinking people. Even the great philosophers of history had been totally unreconstructed on the issue, going all misty-eyed on the existential purpose of womankind as creators of life. It frustrated her beyond measure that women she loved and respected, women with whom she’d marched to preserve abortion rights, with whom she’d agonized, and whom she’d supported through the trials of male-dominated working life, were now starting to bleat this rubbish about feeling “unfulfilled” and “incomplete.” Fine to have those feelings—even Amy sometimes (annoyingly, usually right after a hard-won achievement) felt that sinking surge of “Is that all there is?” malaise. But why then deduce that the hole, the gap, the crater between desire and fulfillment needs to be crammed full of baby? Learn a language! Do something for charity! Be nice to a stranger! Don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that your life will suddenly assume some grander purpose, some cleaner, more precisely defined function, by banging out a few squawking, shitting infants. These days, Amy felt her army of
supporters dwindling. Gone were the days when she would sit joking with friends about ramming any car with a Baby on Board sticker, when they would scribble their own Baby on Roof signs and attach them to their cars’ rear windows just to worry people.
Inside the pub, as Brendan ordered two pints of bitter and a couple bags of nuts, Amy felt momentarily guilty for slipping out of her own birthday dinner. But sod it, it was her birthday and she was damned if she was going to let it be hijacked. They wouldn’t mind, she told herself. In fact, they’d relish the opportunity to share and support one another without the sneering, disapproving presence of a poof and a pathological baby-dodger. She’d known about Jules’s latest relationship trauma already, and besides, Justin had gone off so many times in the past year it was difficult to keep regurgitating the same “you deserve better” spiel every time. She could catch up with Ang next week, which would give her a few days to muster some new-baby enthusiasm. Soph she would call in the morning. She dimly remembered offering to drive both Greg and Soph to the hospital for the final batch of implantation on the following Tuesday. Well, it was an afternoon out.
“There you go!” said Brendan, plonking a frothy pint down in front of Amy with the genuine cheer of the heavy drinker newly arrived at a pub.
“Thanks,” said Amy, casting an eye over the rest of the clientele. A few Stokey types in distressed denim affectedly sucking on limp roll-ups and a couple of therapists from the natural-health center complaining about the smoke. Despite the inauspicious surroundings, it felt good to be out of the party. As she got older, Amy experienced contradictory feelings toward her friends. It was so hard to maintain proper friendships, old-fashioned friendships where you know about each other’s lives in detail, know what each week’s triumphs and disappointments are. Yet despite their failings, these were the old friends she clung to. It was so hard as you got older to put the energy into an unpredictable stranger, to fill them in on your childhood, your relationship history and how that explains your current single cynicism, your phobias, and your joys. If there were a computer chip that she could just insert into a new potential friend and download her CV, transcripts of her dreams, and video clips of formative moments, Amy might more readily entertain the idea of finding new friends. But as things stood the idea was just too exhausting. Better to stick with the crew of depressive no-hopers she’d known for years than risk branching out and putting her stock behind a time-consuming and unsure investment.