by Tony Parsons
Cat stared at her. ‘It will be bloody awful, Jess.’
Jessica shrugged. ‘I suppose you prefer all these men walking about carrying cows. I suppose that’s atmospheric, is it?’
Megan arrived, glancing at her watch, already dreading the dash back to the East End and morning surgery. She snatched up a menu.
‘Did you get your results?’ she asked Jessica.
Jessica nodded. The black-shirted waiter arrived, and they placed their orders, pointing at the menu as he couldn’t understand their English. When he was gone, Megan and Cat watched Jessica, and waited for her to speak.
‘It’s endometriosis,’ she said, pronouncing the word as if it had been new to her until quite recently. ‘The results of the laparoscopy say that I’ve got endometriosis.’
‘That explains the pain you get,’ Megan said, taking her sister’s hands. ‘That terrible pain every month.’
‘Endometriosis,’ Cat said. ‘That means – what? That’s to do with your period, right?’
Megan nodded. ‘It’s a menstrual condition. Fragments of membrane similar to the lining of the uterus are where they shouldn’t be – in the muscles of the uterus, the Fallopian tubes, the ovaries. Basically, all these horrible, inflamed bits that bleed when you bleed.’
‘It stops you getting pregnant,’ Jessica said. ‘And it hurts like hell.’
‘They can’t cure it?’ Cat said.
‘It disappears after the menopause,’ Megan said.
‘That’s something to look forward to then,’ Jessica said.
‘You can control it by taking the pill. You stop the periods, you stop the pain. And stop the condition from deteriorating. But the best cure for it…’
Jessica looked at her, smiling bitterly. ‘This is the funny bit, Cat. I love this bit.’
‘The best cure for endometriosis,’ Megan said quietly, ‘is getting pregnant.’
‘It stops you having a baby,’ Jessica said. ‘But it only goes away if you have a baby. Isn’t that perfect?’
‘Symptoms disappear when you get pregnant,’ Megan said. ‘But it’s true – the symptoms make conception difficult. Not impossible, Jess. Please believe me.’
Megan put her arms around Jessica, and her sister pressed her head against her. Stroking Jessica’s head, Megan glanced out of the window, and saw the slabs of bloody meat being carted into the fleet of white vans. All the headless, yellow-white carcasses and the panels of bloodied flesh. The men with their bloody, Jackson Pollock-splattered white coats.
Their breakfasts arrived at that moment and Megan gasped, the vomit rising in her throat. She pushed her sister away and quickly fled from the table. When she returned from the bathroom, Cat was tucking into her sausage sandwich, but Jessica hadn’t touched her pancakes.
‘What’s wrong with you, Megan?’
‘It’s nothing.’ She looked at her porridge and felt like being sick again.
‘Megan,’ Cat said, the stern elder sister demanding the truth. ‘What’s happening?’
Megan looked at her sisters and knew that it was madness to think she could keep this thing from them. They were her best friends. They would understand.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Megan said.
Cat put down her bagel. ‘How long?’
‘Eight weeks.’
‘How does Will feel about it?’
‘It’s not Will’s.’
‘Okay,’ Cat said. ‘Okay.’
Jessica struggled to speak. ‘Well – congratulations,’ she said eventually. She stroked her sister’s shoulder, smiling through a thin film of tears. ‘I mean it, Megan. Congratulations.’
Cat shot Megan a look.
Megan shook her head. ‘No.’
‘You’ll be a terrific mother,’ Jessica said.
‘But you’re not…’ Cat’s voice trailed off.
‘No,’ Megan said. ‘I’m not keeping it.’
Jessica looked at her.
‘I’m not keeping it, Jess. How can I? I hardly know the father. And even if I did, I still wouldn’t keep it. I’m not in love with him, Jess. And this is the wrong time. It’s just completely the wrong time for me to have a baby.’
‘The wrong time?’
‘I’ve just started work. I just did six years at medical school – six years! – and another year as a house officer in hospitals. I’m not even fully registered for another year.’
‘You just started work?’ Jessica said. ‘Wait a minute – you’re going to have an abortion because you just started work?’
‘That’s right,’ Megan said, angry that she had to justify herself.
‘Do you know what it means to go through an abortion?’ Jessica said.
‘Jess,’ said Cat, trying to stop her. ‘Come on.’
‘I almost certainly understand the procedure better than you do,’ Megan said.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Jessica said. ‘Some things you can’t get from books. They hoover the baby out of you. That’s what it amounts to. They get a fucking hoover, and they hoover this baby out of you, then stick it in a bin, or they burn it, they throw it away like a piece of rubbish. That’s how they will get rid of the baby, Megan, just so you can carry on with your precious career.’
‘And do you know what it means to go through a pregnancy without a father?’ Megan said. ‘Or to go through life as a single parent? I see them every day in my surgery – women with the life sucked out of them. You sit out in Highgate waiting for Paulo to come home, and you have no idea what women are going through in the real world. I’m sorry, Jessica – that’s not going to happen to me.’
‘So selfish. So bloody selfish. You think I’m not in the real world? What makes you think that Hackney is any more real than where I am?’
‘This is not about you, Jess,’ Cat said. ‘It’s not about you and Paulo and your baby. This is Megan’s decision.’
‘It just makes me sick,’ Jessica said. ‘These women treating abortion like it’s just another form of contraception.’
‘These women?’ Megan said.
‘As though it’s no different to a condom or a pill or something. Why did you let it get this far? Why did you have to make a baby? Why did you have to do that?’
‘It’s not a baby,’ Megan said. ‘Not yet. And I can’t cope with my work as it is – it just wouldn’t be fair on the baby.’
‘You think that killing it is fair on the baby? You don’t care about the baby, Megan. You care about your career.’
Jessica stood up. Cat tried to stop her, but Jessica shook her off.
‘That poor little thing, Megan. That poor little thing.’
Jessica threw some money on the table and walked out. Megan and Cat let her go. A couple of porters whistled at her.
‘It’s natural, isn’t it?’ Megan said. ‘Not to want this baby?’
Cat stared out of the window at the meat market. All this would be gone soon. She suddenly felt exhausted.
‘It’s the most natural thing in the world,’ she said.
Six
Far above the South China Sea, Kirk suddenly felt the plane jolt, drop and his stomach fall away.
The fasten seat belt sign pinged on and flight attendants began passing through the cabin, waking the sleepers and making them strap themselves in. The Aussie captain’s calm, reassuring voice began murmuring over the intercom, as soothing as a lullaby.
Kirk closed his eyes and touched the fastened buckle of his seat belt. The plane shuddered, more violently this time, and again seemed to sink through the sky. Now there were cries of mild alarm, and the unspoken paranoia of the modern traveller – what if? Kirk took a deep breath, his eyes shut tight.
It’s just a bit of turbulence, he thought. I am a seasoned world traveller.
But he again touched the buckle of his seat belt, and did what he always did when he felt there was a faint possibility that he could die on a plane within the next few minutes. He tried to remember all the women he had ever slept with.
&n
bsp; He had started early, at fourteen, with the family’s babysitter. One. Then there had been a fallow period of a few years until he was seventeen, and started with his first proper girlfriend. Two.
By the time that ended three years later, he was a dive instructor, and every day at the office there were women in swimwear. Three to ten.
Then he spent a summer in the Philippines, and discovered bar girls – eleven to nineteen, or was it twenty? When he got back to Sydney that September, there was an older married woman whose family owned a flower shop. He met her there every Sunday morning between eight and nine o’clock, while her husband and sons slept on upstairs, and he was dressed and gone by the time they got up and started getting ready for church. Twenty or twenty-one.
Then there was a surfer girl he really liked and the sister of a friend…but hadn’t he forgotten someone? He knew there had been the odd brief encounter that sometimes slipped his mind, but faces and bodies and beds seemed to blur and merge, and some names were already lost for ever.
At twenty-five, he was already unsure of the number. He guessed it was somewhere in the high twenties. Not that many really, when you considered that sometimes a period of monogamy had lasted for years, sandwiched between bouts of wild promiscuity.
And now he came to think of it he recalled the days of madness when, as one relationship ended, and another began, and a limited offer suddenly presented itself, he had somehow squeezed in three women in one day. He still didn’t understand how he had done it. It wasn’t the physical demands that took the toll. It was all that travelling.
But for the last two years he had been faithful to his girlfriend back home. Remarkable really, when he remembered that his travels had taken him to bars in Bangkok and clubs in Tokyo and parties in half a dozen European cities, including Warsaw and Stockholm, where there was a beauty on every corner. He had been faithful to the girl back home through all those temptations.
Up until the night he met Megan.
What was it about this one? Why was she special?
Because he was keener than she was. That was a first. She ticked all the boxes – she was hot, funny and smart (although ‘smart’ was a box that Kirk didn’t necessarily need ticked). But the clincher was that she just didn’t care as much as he did, and that had him hooked.
As his plane trembled and shook somewhere over Indonesia, Kirk asked himself all the questions that are the stirrings of love in the male heart.
How can I win her? How many have known her?
And when will I see her again?
Digby walked into Mamma-san with Tamsin on his arm. Cat glanced across at Brigitte drinking with a couple of regulars at the bar and saw her visibly flinch, as if she had been slapped.
Cat glared at Digby, and thought, how could you? But the terrible thing was, she sort of understood. Not how Digby could come here and rub Brigitte’s nose in his new relationship – such casual cruelty was beyond her comprehension – but she could understand how Digby had ended up with Tamsin. Cat had seen Tamsin in Mamma-san back in the days when she was just another party tart hoping to bump into a footballer at the bar, and she could see the appeal.
If Tamsin’s body language could be summarised in two words, it was fuck me. Whereas Brigitte’s natural demeanour – proud, strong, glamorous Brigitte – suggested fuck you.
Cat watched Digby and Tamsin at the lobster tank, choosing their main course. When she looked back at the bar, Brigitte had fled into the kitchen. She decided she wasn’t going to allow anyone to humiliate her friend. Not in this place.
Digby, who Cat thought was good-looking but with charm so oily you could fry noodles in it, had the self-consciously puffed-up look of the older man with the younger woman. Steeling himself for applause, or laughter.
Tamsin also did her bit to fit her sexual stereotype, clinging to his arm as if he were the hot one, not her, as if a black American Express card was superior to gilded youth. She was really that stupid.
Abbreviated skirt. Strangely immobile breasts. Unfeasibly blonde. Digby had dumped Brigitte for this little fuck puppet? It was like choosing an inflatable doll over a real woman.
Cat crossed the restaurant with a friendly smile, knowing that the promise of staying friends was impossible for a man like Digby. It wasn’t enough to break up with a man like that. They had to make sure their ex was unhappy.
‘Digby, how good to see you.’
‘I know the one I want, Cat,’ Digby said.
Tamsin bent over, pressing her snub nose against the fish tank, her skirt rising up her golden thighs. Men at the adjacent tables held their breath, their chopsticks quivering with longing. A gang of lobsters waved their pincers at Tamsin in slow motion.
‘But I thought they was pink,’ she said.
‘Only when boiled,’ Cat said.
‘I like them when they’re fresh,’ Digby said, pressing his fleshy face against the tank, considering the lobsters. ‘I’ll take that one, Cat,’ he added, pointing at the biggest crustacean.
‘I’ll make sure it’s as you like it, Digby.’
After indicating to the chef the lobster they had selected, Cat found them a good table. She took their orders for drinks – white wine for Tamsin and Asahi Super Dry for Digby. Cat watched them whispering their giggly secrets, and Digby slipped his tongue in Tamsin’s ear, giving it a good clean. Then she went into the kitchen to check on Brigitte.
‘Are you all right?’
Brigitte attempted a laugh, but didn’t quite make it. It sounded more like she was clearing her throat. Cat was shocked to see her this undone. The unencumbered life was meant to be pain-free.
‘I bet she fucks his brains out,’ Brigitte said.
‘Didn’t know he had any. Excuse me.’
Cat went off to talk to the chef.
And she made sure that she was standing close by when the lobster, sunburn pink now and peacefully reclining on a bed of shredded horseradish, was served up to Digby and Tamsin on a wooden Japanese platter.
There was an instant when nothing happened – when the diners and their beady-eyed meal seemed almost hypnotised by the sight of each other. Then Cat saw the smiles vanish from their faces as, with considerable effort, the lobster lifted itself from the wooden platter and began crawling from the plate, its claws trailing thin white slivers of horseradish.
Tamsin screamed. Digby snatched up his butter knife, as if to defend himself and his fuck puppet. The lobster slowly toppled from the wooden platter and began its slow march across the table towards Tamsin, who was shrieking with terror now, and her inflatable breasts.
‘Do you want some wasabi on that?’ Cat said.
It was scary to be too unencumbered, she thought later. The whole unencumbered thing could go too far. Cat saw that now. You had to get the balance right.
A person needed to be unencumbered but not cast adrift, free but not lost, and loved but not smothered. But how do you manage all that?
‘We’re going clubbing,’ Brigitte told Cat. ‘It’s DJ Cake versus the Glitter Twins at Zoo Nation. Want to come?’
It was almost one in the morning. The restaurant had closed, and the staff were grimly shovelling food into their tired faces. Their minicabs were already lined up outside, waiting to take them home. A brace of pierced, dyed blond young waiters hovered deferentially behind Brigitte, watching Cat expectantly.
‘Oh, come on,’ Brigitte said excitedly. ‘It’ll be fun.’
Maybe a few years ago, Cat thought. Maybe before I had someone to curl up with and cuddle.
‘You have fun with the boys and DJ Cake,’ she said. Through the plate-glass window of Mamma-san Cat could see Rory pulling up outside. ‘I’m going home.’
‘Bring Rory.’
‘He’s more of a Sting man,’ she said.
Cat didn’t feel sorry for Brigitte. She was good at having a good time. But personally Cat couldn’t think of anything that she would like less than being in a black hole listening to crap music with drugged-up peop
le fifteen years her junior.
Cat thought, is this what happens? If you don’t settle down when the world tells you to? Do you end up taking drugs in a club when you are forty?
So unencumbered it hurts.
Jake had moved into Rory’s place.
A purely temporary measure until things were smoothed out with his mother and stepfather, who had apparently – as always, the hard facts about the domestic tiff were somewhat hazy – caught him sacrificing virgins in the conservatory or something.
In many ways, Rory was the most easy-going man Cat had ever known. She came and went from his flat as she pleased, she worked late without explanation or apology,
she felt no inclination to report her whereabouts when they were not together.
Loved without being suffocated – wasn’t that exactly what she wanted? He wasn’t as possessive as some other men had been, or as clingy as many of them, and not as fixated on her sexual history as all of them.
He wanted to make this relationship work, and to last, and to make them both happy. She could see it twinkling in those shy, amused eyes. But she couldn’t utter even the mildest criticism of his son. That was the one thing that wasn’t allowed.
Since Jake’s latest row with his mother, Cat wasn’t even allowed to suggest that Rory slept over at her place. Because Jake – Mr Sensitive – might think she wanted to avoid him (like the plague, actually, for she had come to the conclusion that the sunny-faced twelve-year-old was gone for good). Rory fretted constantly about something called Jake’s self-esteem. Cat wondered if her mother had given her self-esteem a second thought as she turned her back on her three daughters and caught a taxi to her new life.
‘Hi, Jake, we’re home!’ Rory called, as they came into the flat to find Jake fondling the breasts of a thin, droopy girl on the sofa. The place stank of stale pizza, teenage sex and what Cat identified as Moroccan Red. Cannabis had never been to her taste, but a large proportion of her kitchen staff had a spliff during their tea break.
And my kitchen staff are grown-ups, she thought. Not just past puberty.