by Jackie Clune
“Have you ever seen this?” he asked brightly, shoving the disc into the slot.
“It’s brilliant. It’s Citizen Kane. Marvelous. Although the cognoscenti all seem to support the pretentious notion that The Magnificent Ambersons is a superior film. Nonsense.” Amy was so stunned by the sudden change of direction that she shook her head numbly and settled back on the couch to watch the film. This was bizarre. Still, at least they were on their way to a night of baby-making passion. They’d kissed. He wanted her. It was just a matter of when.
Three thirty a.m. Amy’s eyes stung. Orson Welles continued to blob around on the screen. This was getting ridiculous. Amy decided she had to confront this head-on. Perhaps he just needed a gentle final shove to get him off the practice slopes. Even if it failed and he recoiled in horror, she had to do something either way. She leaned forward and touched the back of his head. He didn’t move.
“That’s nice,” he murmured as she stroked his bristly neck. “Gosh, you’re giving me goose bumps! Look at the next bit—Orson’s such a bloody genius, don’t you think?” he asked, leaping forward on the couch.
“What’s the matter?” she asked softly.
“Nothing—why?” he responded, just a little stiffly. Amy paused. How to tackle the situation without undue heaviness? How to show her own hand without seeming needy or pushy?
“Well . . . it’s just that I keep getting mixed messages from you. I’m not sure if you want this or not.”
“But we’re having a lovely time, aren’t we?” he asked, looking directly at her for the first time in three hours. A steeliness in his eyes told her not to push any further. Not quite threatening, but nowhere near inviting. Amy couldn’t let it go.
“Yes, great, but I thought you might have wanted something else to happen between us, or did I misread the situation?” offered Amy, despite the fact that she knew she had not. He couldn’t have been more clear in his intentions when they stood at the buffet table all those hours ago.
“Oh, heck,” sighed Stephen, switching off the TV.
“What? What’s the matter?”
“The Conversation,” said Stephen with mock seriousness. Amy felt inexplicably guilty, as if she’d somehow dragged him into an arena he had no intention of entering. But no, he had definitely given her clear signals. She would get a response.
“Look, it’s fine, it’s just that I thought you were up for it, you know, we were clearly attracted to each other, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? And you kissed me, so I just thought . . .”
“You just thought what? That I’d be your next boyfriend?” He lent the word a sneer. The sudden vehemence in his voice alarmed her.
“Erm, well, no actually, I wasn’t really looking that far ahead,” she stuttered, checking that she remembered the route out. His face was contorted with disgust. He no longer looked like the affable chap she’d met that evening.
“I’d better go,” said Amy, gathering herself. How could she have gotten him so wrong? He was clearly a bit odd at best—at worst, a complete psycho. Suddenly, the thought of any intimacy with this lumpy, balding, autistic man was repellent.
“Look, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that was dreadfully rude of me. Please forgive me. Please—sit down.”
Detached enough now to feel simple curiosity, she sat waiting for his explanation.
This had better be good, she thought. I’ve wasted a month on this freak in one evening.
“It’s not you, it’s me. . . .” he started.
Here we go, thought Amy.
“I, erm, I always end up in situations like this. I suppose I must have led you to believe that some intimacy, if not some bodily fluids, would pass between us tonight. . . .”
“Yes, you did, but it doesn’t matter,” said Amy, ruffled at his unnecessarily sincere apology. Had she looked that desperate? Baby or not, she would never lose her dignity.
“And that from then on we would become a couple and go to dinners and so on.”
“Er, well, I wouldn’t go that far!” Blimey, had she looked like a mantrap?
“Don’t demur, there’s nothing wrong with all that, apart from the depressing normality of it. The thing is, Alice . . .”
“Amy! Christ almighty!”
“Amy, is that I can’t do it.”
“Do what? It?”
“Good heavens no, I can do that, in certain rather strictly defined circumstances. But I can’t do it—the relationship thingy.”
Amy straightened.
“How can you just assume that I—” She started, but he raised a silencing hand.
“It’s all right. I’m well aware that I am in the minority here. There’s no need to protest your innocence. It’s what you all seem to want, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But I can’t do it. And from bitter experience, I just thought it fairer to head you off at the pass, as it were. I don’t want to lead you a dance.”
Enough. She was too tired and too long in the tooth to listen to the eternal bachelor monologue. The arrogance of it! The assumption that all women want is a man to hold on to, tie down, and drown in a sea of dull domesticity. It wasn’t as if he was that much of a catch anyway, despite his obvious intelligence. And besides, what sort of man belonged to a spoddy organization like MENSA, for God’s sake! True, she’d gone there looking for super-bright semen, but not at this cost. High IQ or no, being lectured at four in the morning by a pudgy man who seemed to have an overblown sense of his own desirability was too high a price.
“I don’t know what sort of woman you’re used to meeting,” said Amy, “but I can say with all honesty that when I dressed for this evening, all I wanted was to find a man to have sex with. You know, good old-fashioned shagging. So if that’s not on the agenda—”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then let’s just call it quits, OK? Perhaps there’s a nice Enid Blyton by your bed you’re simply dying to finish.”
Amy resisted the urge to flick out her coattails and bid him a crisp “Good day.” Instead, she hobbled down the rickety stairs and tottered up the street in the direction of the main road.
“Phew,” Stephen said out loud. It had been a close shave. He had almost gotten involved with a woman who sniffed too much. Sniff sniff sniff all night long. Hadn’t modern women heard of handkerchiefs? He was never without a crisply ironed plain white hankie folded neatly in his right pocket. No, she wouldn’t do at all. Better rid of her now. His only existing problem was whether to have his cocoa or go straight to bed.
“Now . . . what would Nanny do . . . ?” he asked the dank night air.
. 3 .
Jules? Amy here. Reality check, OK?” “I’m listening—oh, hang on a sec . . .”
Amy heard the by-now-familiar sounds of her friend rushing to the loo and spilling her guts, or what was left of them.
“Sorry, carry on.”
“Are you sure? You’ve just been sick again.”
“Oh that, it’s nothing, just morning sickness, I can do it anywhere now. Barely interrupts a sentence. Just whoosh and on I go!”
Amy felt the bile turning in her stomach. Too much information. And too much bloody port last night.
“You meet a guy at a party—”
“Uh-oh!”
“Yes, it’s one of those conversations.”
“I’m all ears.”
“And you don’t fancy him right away, but there’s something between you that builds.”
“Blimey, what you looking for, a boyfriend or a greenhouse?”
“Shut up. So you go home with him, you flirt a bit, eventually he kisses you, but in the end he won’t sleep with you. Verdict, please?”
“Gay.”
Amy could always rely on her friends’ unswerving loyalty.
“Or married.”
“But I went to his flat. He’s definitely a bachelor.”
“How can you be so sure—ready meals for one?”
“Check.”
“Pants on the radiator?”
“Dirty bed linens?”
“We didn’t get as far as the bedroom.”
“Got to be gay then.”
“I don’t know. . . . He didn’t seem to be . . .”
“Darling, they can be very discreet these days—they’re not all acid queens like Brendan. Some of them even have bad hair!”
“This one had no hair.”
“So let me get this straight—you met a strange bald man at a party who, it turned out, was not after a one-night stand. What’s the problem here? Why are you so bothered?”
“Who said I was bothered?”
“You’re ringing me for a reality check and it’s eight o’clock in the morning, Amy. Oh, hang on. . . .”
Amy smarted as she listened to the distant sounds of vomiting. Jules was right. She was bothered. She’d lain awake all night, trying to work out what had happened. It was the first time she had ever offered herself so openly and been so flatly rejected. It didn’t help that he wasn’t even conventionally good-looking. Compared to Amy, he was a troll, so technically, according to all the magazines, he should have been worshipping at her feet. But it wasn’t just wounded pride at stake here. There was also the ovulation issue. No way could she go trawling for another likely candidate tonight—that would make her feel like too much of a tramp, and anyway, her egg was now past its sell-by date. Now she’d have to get back in the saddle next month. What a wasted opportunity. And why? Hadn’t she looked fantastic, despite a slight snuffly head cold? Hadn’t she been charming and funny and nice?
“I’ll call you later!” Amy shouted to the abandoned receiver at the other end.
Above her head, the magpies cackled.
“You can shut up, too,” she shouted up at the ceiling.
She lay back on the bed and dialed Brendan.
“Hello?” said a gruff voice at the other end of the line.
“Brendan?”
“No, ’ang on, he’s just ’ere,” said the voice. Amy heard stifled giggles and the thud of play fighting under a duvet.
“Hi, bitch.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Because you’re single and only single people phone people having sex at eight fifteen in the morning.”
“You’re single!”
“Ah, yes, but I’m gay. It’s our default setting. Get off!” squealed Brendan to someone in the background. There was nothing Amy hated more than people parading their sexual activity over the phone.
“Look, it’s obviously a bad time—I’ll call later,” Amy said glumly.
“No, don’t you dare hang up! You’ve interrupted me now when I was in full swing, so you might as well say what you want. Stop it!” More wrestling.
Amy took a deep breath.
“I got turned down.”
“What? What for—the police force?”
“No. A bloke. I got turned down by a bloke.”
There was a short pause. Amy pictured Brendan mouthing the words to whoever was there. She heard him splutter before erupting into peals of laughter.
“That is priceless! Who, where, how, tell me everything. No, seriously, stop that now, I’ve got to help a dumped damsel in distress,” he barked at the invisible man.
Another deep breath.
“Well, you know my little project . . . ?”
“Oh, Christ, not the pregnancy roulette.”
“Brendan, you promised to take this seriously. I haven’t even told anyone apart from you, so the burden of support is squarely on your shoulders here.”
“Go on,” he sighed, all fun gone from his voice. She knew he thought she’d lost it, but she wasn’t the sort of person who needed approval for every last decision.
“Well, this was the first month, and I kind of thought it might be good to be a bit systematic about it—you know, have a target, be specific.”
“Right, yes, you have to do that in your strange, straight world, do you? Can’t just go out and get laid?”
“Well, I could but this is a potential child we’re talking about here. I need to make sure I at least like the guy.”
“OK, so where did you meet him?”
“I went to a MENSA social.”
A short pause.
“MENSA?”
“Yeah, you know, the society for people with high IQs.”
“I know what it is, Amy; I just can’t believe you could be so Nazi! So you went to MENSA to try and bag some genius sperm? Freaking hell.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, how else are you supposed to meet intelligent people? I could hardly just stroll into All Bar One and hope to happen upon a reasonably bright bloke on a Friday night.”
“Good God, you know for a clever girl from a council estate, you are such a bloody snob! How can you say that? How can you be so shameless about it? What do you want these sperm to do—read Salman Rushdie novels?”
“No, but—”
“Look, it’s very simple, Amy. You go out, you find the first half-decent bloke, you do the dirty, you get pregnant. If Atomic Kitten can do it, so can you. Forget all this checklist bullshit.”
“Yes, yes, OK, you’re right, of course. Get back to Mr. Muscle or whoever he is.”
“He’s a six-foot hairy-arsed builder with dirty fingernails. Just my type,” whispered Brendan with glee.
“Enjoy,” said Amy, hitting the red button on her phone.
Lying on the bed, she took in Brendan’s reprimand. It had been a pretty unpleasant mini-lecture, but she had to agree. The problem with not having a partner for this “experiment,” this gamble with fate and nature, was that she was able to think coolly about what sort of man she wanted to father her child. Most would-be mums had that part of the deal sewn up—it was just a simple matter of whether or not they could conceive and carry a child to term. But Amy had the onerous luxury of handpicking her mate. Although this was the stuff of futuristic fertility fantasy—the genetic engineers of the world seemed hell-bent on a generation of designer babies—it was actually quite an unpleasant procedure to go through in person. Fine if you were flicking through a catalog of faceless donors in a sperm bank waiting room, but trickier if you had the task of tracking down your ideal donor and doing an on-the-spot appraisal of his genetic merits. She’d tried the intellectual first and where had it gotten her? Back in her own bed with a hangover and a wounded ego. She still couldn’t work out what had gone wrong between her and Stephen. She looked at all the evidence once more. She remembered an article she’d read recently in a women’s magazine at the hairdresser’s. It was about three men who called themselves CBs—Committed Bachelors. All of them claimed to have given up on ever finding the right woman to settle down with and had instead carved themselves a life of domestic solitude. They had nothing but pity for the poor shackled men they drank with on the weekends, the ones who started to twitch at half past ten, wondering if they could squeeze another desperate pint out of the evening before the “Where are you?” phone calls began. Occasionally they indulged in a little affair with a woman, but it would always end in tears—always the woman’s. The CBs had worked out that it was probably wiser to avoid the opposite sex pretty much altogether, as the fallout and e-mail character assassinations following a fling were too exhausting. What did women want? they wondered. They, along with most men, had been delighted that their generation of potential lovers had been so liberated. The women’s movement had delivered a breed of sexually active girls whose first question was not “When do you want to settle down?” but “Your place or mine?” For a while they’d fallen for it, this veneer of free-floating promiscuity, but the CBs had worked out that beneath every ball-busting good-time girl beat the heart of a Doris Day wannabe. There was a very short slip between sex in the taxi home and weekends spent in Bride’s World. Perhaps, thought Amy, Stephen was one of these men. He certainly seemed to be on red alert for any sign of potential intimacy. It made her furious that he could assume she had anything so mundane as mar
riage in mind. Such arrogance, assuming that every woman wanted to bag him for life. And all that tired talk of not “doing” relationships. He’d obviously seen all that crap about quirkyalones in the press and was delighted at the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon.
Never mind. He’d probably die laughing—but alone. Nothing to do but to forget the whole thing and move on. Pity she’d have to wait another month.
. 4 .
Daaaad? Daaadddyyyy!” Joe groaned. A twenty-hour shift was nothing compared to this.
“Where are you, Daddy?”
His peace interrupted, he decided to give himself up.
“On the toilet.”
For most normal children, this would be enough information to ward them off for at least half an hour. Not his two. They knew that if Daddy was in the smallest room in the house, he was a captive audience. Sure enough, he heard the first of two sets of feet thundering up the stairs. Shit. He’d forgotten to lock the door. It was a new initiative now that the girls were eight, and he kept forgetting. They’d always been very open about nudity, but now it seemed a bit inappropriate, to use the social-worker jargon.
Francesca smashed the door open, thwacking the handle into the well-worn groove in the plaster from a thousand other such occasions.
“Daddy—urgh, it stinks in here.”
“Cesca, I’m on the loo! Can I please just have a bit of privacy?”
He knew it was a rhetorical question, but like every parent, he lived in the hope that one day his children would suddenly say, “God, I’m sorry, Dad, you’re absolutely right. You do such a good job bringing us up, and we feel mortified that we can be such a handful at times. We’ll be in our rooms, reading quietly until such a time as you feel refreshed enough to see us again.” Dream on.
“Daddy, I’m going to talk and I don’t want you to say anything until I say ‘End of sentence.’ OK?”