by Tony Parsons
‘First off, they should have told you that the procedure is designed to be irreversible.’
‘They did.’
‘Secondly, you should never have had it done if you thought there was the remotest possibility that you would live to regret it.’
‘I know. I do.’
‘All that said – of course life changes. You wake up one day and the world looks different. You don’t want children with the woman you are married to. Years later, you meet someone you think you would like to have children with. Like, possibly, I don’t know – my sister.’
‘So they can reverse this operation? They can do it?’
‘Happens all the time. Reversing it is not a problem. But it’s far from certain that you would be able to produce a child. Your sperm are unlikely to have the degree of motility they had before. Maybe, maybe not. But there’s one thing I’ve learned since I left medical school.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You never know your luck. I have to tell you, in all honesty, it’s a long shot. That’s the reality. I’m sorry I can’t be more positive.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘And anyway – oh, this has got nothing to do with me.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I don’t think my sister wants children.’
‘That’s fine. That’s great. Because you know what? Neither do I.’
Nine
Endings sneak up on you, Cat thought.
You think you are in control. You think you can decide when it’s all over. And then suddenly it all slips away, and you are reminded that you are not in control at all.
It was just the two of them now. Just how she liked it. Jake was back with his mother, his stepfather and his half-sister – complicated or what? – and Cat could sleep over at Rory’s place without bumping into anyone with acne.
But late one night, as he poured two glasses of something red and full-bodied, she noticed that he had cleared out his spare room. This was where he kept the stock for his business – the white karate tops and trousers, the coloured belts in their cellophane wrappers, the black and red leather pads for kicking and punching. Now it was all gone, replaced by a flatpack from IKEA. A single bed.
‘I thought I’d prepare a room for Jake,’ he said, joining her in the doorway. ‘It’s not fair on the boy, expecting him to always sleep on the sofa.’
‘But – but what about all the stuff you need for your business?’
What she meant was, but what about us?
Rory handed her a glass, and shrugged. ‘I can keep it at the dojo. The important thing is that Jake feels welcome here.’ He stared at her, his face hardening. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on, Cat. You’re pissed off because I’m making a room for Jake. I can tell. I’ve got a son – can’t you understand that?’
‘And I haven’t got a son. Can’t you understand that?’
‘I’m not going to argue with you. I can’t apologise for having a child.’
‘I’m not asking you to apologise.’ Suddenly she felt an overwhelming sadness. This wasn’t what she wanted. ‘Just – I don’t know. I just wish the present mattered to you as much as the past.’
‘Look – it’ll be fine. The pair of you used to love each other. It’s just a difficult age.’
‘For him or me?’ Cat shook her head. ‘This is no good, is it? Of course you want to make your boy feel at home. There’s nothing wrong with that. What kind of heartless cow could object to that? I just think – we should maybe not see quite so much of each other.’
His face fell. ‘Because I want to make some space for my son?’
‘Because I need some more space for myself. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. Wanting your son to feel at home – it’s only natural.’
And leaving him then felt natural too. If she was going to find something else in her life, then she had to allow herself – what did they call it in all the magazines?
Search time. They called it search time.
As part of her vocational training scheme, once a week Megan caught the bus to the local hospital and sat around with a dozen other GP registrars, discussing their problems.
Trainee quack coffee mornings, Megan thought, though she could see their value. She always came away from these gab sessions thinking, oh, it’s not just me then. It’s a screaming nightmare for all of us.
The other GP registrars were from every class and race – almost half of them were from Asian backgrounds – and yet Megan had no doubt that they were all people like her. Late twenties, bright-faced high achievers, academic virtuosi who were starting to look a little worn around the edges. Megan thought it was wise of their masters to set up this ritual. Because they couldn’t talk to their friends and family about what they were going through. Nobody else would understand.
‘I’ve got this patient who is being bashed about by her husband,’ said one young woman, a blonde with pony clubs and privilege in her every vowel. ‘Comes in once a week, cuts and bruises, the occasional cracked rib. I don’t know whether to alert the authorities or not.’
A fat Chinese boy peered at her through black-rimmed spectacles. ‘What’s stopping you?’
‘Arranged marriage,’ sighed the blonde. ‘If the police turn up at the door, I’m afraid that hubby or his family will kill her.’
‘Cultural diversity,’ smirked a smooth young Indian man. ‘Don’t you just love it?’
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ snapped the Chinese. His accent was that strange mixture of Cockney and Cantonese. Everything sounded like a command. ‘She’ll never press charges, and it will just make it worse for her. That’s what they’re like round here.’
‘I hate it when my patients tell me to fuck off and die,’ said a Pakistani girl in a mini-skirt who looked as though she should still be doing her A levels. ‘Have you noticed? They tend to do it when you refuse to give them their pill of choice.’
‘Temazepam,’ drawled the Indian. ‘They always tell me to fuck off and die when I decline to dish out the Temazepam on demand.’
Megan took a deep breath and blurted it out.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she laughed.
They stared at her. And kept staring. Megan found herself grinning into the embarrassed silence.
After a few months in general practice, these young doctors thought they had seen and heard it all. The man with a hamster bite in his rectum. Wives who slept with a hammer under the pillow, not to protect themselves from burglars, but to protect themselves from their husbands. The brother and sister who were left to fend for themselves when their parents went dancing.
In Ibiza.
A grotesque parade of feral children, thieving junkies, neglected pensioners, men with their cocks stuck inside vacuum cleaners, more men with assorted fruit and vegetables stuck up their back passage, women who had been beaten and bashed by men who were drunks, or religious fanatics, or jealous to the very edge of murder, all the abusers and the abused.
In rotting neighbourhoods full of baseball bats where not one single person played baseball, the finest minds of their generation tended to the sick, the diseased and the dying. They had seen it all, and written the prescription.
But one of their band of high-flying, straight-A brothers and sisters pregnant? They had never heard anything like it.
‘I think it will be fine,’ Megan said, smiling with a confidence that she didn’t feel. ‘The baby will be born towards the end of vocational training, so I will probably be breast-feeding during the final MRCGP exam, and the father’s out of the picture, but I really think I can handle it. You know?’
They didn’t know what to say.
They had all come so far, and all worked so hard, and seen so much, and were now struggling through their final year before full registration. A baby on top of all that? A baby now? It seemed perverse – like an exhausted marathon runner staggering into the stadium, and deciding to do the final lap on his hands.
The
other young doctors stared at Megan in silence, offering neither congratulations nor commiserations. They had seen some strange sights on the front line of the NHS – but this? It was as if they didn’t quite believe her. Megan looked at all those different-coloured faces wearing exactly the same expression. She’s kidding, right?
Megan knew how they felt.
Sometimes she couldn’t quite believe it herself.
‘Once they’ve got their baby, it all changes,’ said Michael. ‘Not just their body – although there’s certainly that – but their entire outlook.’ He drained his beer and signalled the bartender for another one. The bartender ignored him. ‘The baby becomes the centre of their world. And the man barely shows up on the radar.’
They were in a pub just off the Holloway Road. It was close to their business, but they had never visited it before. Neither of them were drinkers – ‘There is no word in Italian for alcoholic,’ their father had always told them, when their English friends were all growing beer bellies in their late teens – and both of them had somewhere they would rather be. But Michael was increasingly reluctant to go home. Not that staying out made him happy.
‘Do you think that’s what happened to our mum?’ Paulo said. ‘She lost interest in our dad?’
Michael shot him a look. ‘Don’t talk about Mum that way.’
‘I’m just thinking. She always seemed like such a real mum to me.’ Paulo smiled at the memory. ‘Cooking, and bossing us around, and all that stuff.’
Michael smiled too. ‘Yeah, she was good at it. Good at being a mum.’
‘Maybe she changed. Maybe when we came along we became the most important thing in her world. And maybe Dad was glad. They always seemed happy together, didn’t they? Happier than couples now.’
‘It’s different these days. Men like the old man, they courted the first girl that came along, they got married, and that was it. Work and home and no rumpy-pumpy in between. Now we’ve got all these temptations. Now there are all these women out there who like sex as much as men do. Until you marry them.’
Paulo watched his brother staring moodily into the gloom of the Rat and Trumpet, and he realised how close he still felt to him, how much he still cared about this man. How much he still loved him.
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Paulo. ‘It’s not actually your fault you were taking Ginger from behind. It’s your wife who’s to blame.’
‘Keep your voice down, will you?’ Michael glanced around nervously, a hunted man. ‘I’m just saying – they go all mumsy on you. The big difference is not living together or living apart. It’s not being married or being single. The big difference is being childless and then having a kid.’ Michael stared at his brother defensively. ‘I love my daughter, I couldn’t love her more.’
Paulo placed a hand on his brother’s arm. ‘I know that. So stop shagging around. You don’t want a divorce, do you? You don’t want Chloe to grow up with you not around. You want her to have the same sort of family we come from, don’t you? A family as solid as that.’
‘It can never be like that any more.’
‘But it’s madness to chuck your family away for the sake of a quick poke. It doesn’t make any kind of sense. You love your family, Mike. You don’t want to lose it.’
‘Ginger’s very special.’
‘Well, they’re all special when you’ve got a boner, Michael. But it wears off, doesn’t it? That boner. That passion. That – I don’t know – that hunger. It melts away. You know it all better than me, the number of girls you’ve had. But what you’ve got with Naoko is something to build a life on.’
Michael hung his head. ‘I love Naoko. And I love Chloe. But since she’s been born, I just wonder – how can you have so much love in your life, and so little joy?’
‘Is that your idea of joy? Meaningless sex with a virtual stranger?’
‘Well, it’s a start.’
‘You stupid bastard. She’s the one who is supposed to get postnatal depression. Not you.’
Paulo thought, it will be different for us, for me and Jessica and our baby.
I don’t care about the sleepless nights, or the teething problems, or changing nappies, and whatever else it is you have to do. And I don’t even mind if the baby becomes the most important thing in my wife’s life and we only have sex by appointment. I want her to love our baby that much. A baby deserves to be loved more than me.
Whatever is happening with Michael and Naoko and Chloe will never happen to us. We are going to be fine. The only thing we have to do, thought Paulo, is get through the next nine months. That’s all.
Then he left his brother in that miserable pub and went home to his pregnant wife, and gently pressed his ear against her still-flat abdomen, and it was the best thing in the world, both of them smiling and full of unalloyed joy, listening for that tiny heartbeat, waiting for some small signal from the centre of the universe.
Week fourteen, thought Megan, heaving her weary legs down the steps of the surgery. She could hear a shaven-headed man in a grubby vest shouting at the receptionist that he knew his rights.
Week fourteen, she thought, lightly running the palm of her hand across her abdomen, a gesture of reassurance, although Megan had no idea if she wanted to reassure the baby or herself. The bump was starting to show. Her clothes were tighter. The baby was learning to suck its tiny thumb. It was really happening.
In the surgery there was a leaflet called ‘The First Trimester’ for next year’s mothers, full of sensible sound bites for women with a bun in the oven and perfect lives.
Involve Your Partner. Try to Fit in a Daily Nap. Give in to Your Exhaustion. Get Fitted For a Proper Maternity Bra. Get Your Partner to Give You a Soothing Massage. Swim Regularly. Talk to Your Partner. Don’t Suffer in Silence.
Megan often looked at the leaflet when she wanted a good laugh.
‘Megan?’
It was Will, all shy and anxious, and for a few moments she was absurdly pleased to see him. Involve Your Partner, she thought. Get Your Partner to Give You a Soothing Massage. But Will wasn’t her partner any more, and he wasn’t the father of this child. He had sent her a barrage of text messages that she had deleted without reading. What was there to say? And still she felt the sweet and sour pang of regret for a road not taken.
If he had loved only her, they would still have been together. They would probably have drifted into marriage and, eventually, had some sweet-looking children who would have spent Sundays with their doting grandparents in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Now she wouldn’t even look at his text messages. Megan thought, how we rush to forget those we once loved.
‘You look good, Megan.’
They had been so close. That was why she was happy to see him. She wasn’t sure she would ever be that close to a man again. They had all that precious time to waste during their student years. Nights when they talked for hours and told the secrets of their soul and the stories of their life. Nights when they didn’t sleep because they couldn’t stand to be apart. Nights when they smoked and drank and watched the sun come up.
It wasn’t that Megan couldn’t find a better man than Will. It was that she would never again have all that time to waste. She realised how lonely she had been.
‘I want you back, Megan.’
Not possible. Because of what he had done. Because of what she had done. Best to get it out of the way.
‘I’m pregnant, Will.’
His jaw fell open.
‘It’s not yours,’ she added quickly.
Megan had always thought that scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral was a bit unrealistic, the one where Andie MacDowell tells Hugh Grant about her sexual history, and all he does is look a bit sheepish and say, ‘Oh golly gosh, matron, oh bugger me.’
Megan always felt that was a little too enlightened.
‘You slut, Megan,’ Will managed, his face red with rage, not very Hugh Grant-like at all, and trying to stop himself from crying. ‘You bloody slut!’
Men
didn’t expect virginity these days, Megan thought, but they certainly expected the illusion of purity. The truth? They can’t handle the truth!
‘Who is he, you filthy slut? I’ll kill him!’
Virtual purity, Megan thought. That’s what they all wanted.
Impossible when you were in the family way.
Jessica entered From Here to Maternity with shyness and pride.
Women at various stages of pregnancy moved slowly around the store, lifting maternity clothes from the racks – combat trousers with huge expanding, elasticated waistbands, flowery smocks, austere black business trousers, again with one of those expanding waistbands. All kinds of maternity clothes for all kinds of lives, and all kinds of future mothers.
The women occasionally made that protective double or triple stroke of their pregnant bellies, that gesture that Jessica had caught herself doing – the Masonic handshake of pregnant women.
From Here to Maternity was different from other clothes stores. There were no bored husbands and boyfriends sitting around sighing. Nobody seemed to be in any mad rush. The women seemed to have all the time in the world. Occasionally they would talk to the sales assistants, and their conversations seemed like a mixture of the trivial and the momentous. Can you get these combat trousers in khaki as well as green? Oh, I’m due next month. Jessica couldn’t stop smiling to herself. Because she belonged here.
Jessica picked a pink, flower-print dress from the rack. She could see that some of these clothes were no different from what young, non-pregnant women would wear to a bar or club. Okay for Megan perhaps, but not her. But the pink, flower-print number was exactly Jessica’s idea of what a maternity dress should look like.
‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ an assistant asked.
Jessica smiled. ‘I love it.’