by Tony Parsons
Michael and Naoko and Jessica and Paulo laughed until their sides hurt.
‘This is a highly amusing baby,’ Michael said, snatching her up and placing a kiss on Chloe’s impassive face. Her eyes never left The Wheels on the Bus. ‘A highly amusing baby.’
When they were back in the car, about to go back to their big empty house, Jessica and Paulo sat in silence for a while. He waited for her to find the words. Finally she spoke.
‘All you get is me,’ Jessica said.
‘That’s all I ever wanted,’ Paulo said.
Eighteen
He came into the surgery with a shy smile, a big man, with a slow, easy grace to his movements.
He looked different from the other men who came into Megan’s surgery, and not merely because, in a neighbourhood where beer bellies and junk food pallor was the norm, he was physically fitter than the rest of them. What made him different was his old-fashioned courtesy, the gentleness of his manner, almost unknown in these streets.
The boxer.
‘Who are you fighting this time?’ Megan said.
‘Mexican kid. On his way up. I’ve seen his films.’ Megan knew by now this meant he had watched his opponent on video. ‘Good technical boxer more than a scrapper. Unusual in the Mexicans. They usually like to mix it up.’
‘Sounds dangerous.’
That shy smile. ‘We’ll see.’
‘Is your daughter coming to watch – Charlotte?’
‘Charlotte. No, she’ll be with me mum.’
The boxer was a single father. His wife, also a patient at the surgery, had walked out on her husband and child. There was another man, and another baby on the way. Charlotte was cared for by the boxer and, while he was training, by his mother. Without the grandmothers – the nans – it would have been a neighbourhood of orphans.
The boxer had to see Megan for a full medical before every fight. The last time he had a bout, Megan had found traces of blood in his urine sample, signalling internal damage to the kidneys. She had no choice but to note it on his medical records, and prevent him from fighting. He had been bitterly disappointed, but accepted it silently, as one more hard blow from fate. Most of her patients were quick to rant and rave when they didn’t get what they wanted. But not the boxer.
Now she took his blood pressure, tested him for HIV, examined his eyes for signs of damage. Listened for signs of slurring in his voice, or an erratic drum beat in his heart. Then she gave him a little plastic tube.
‘No problem,’ he said.
Megan felt for him. The only way he knew how to support his daughter was by fighting. But the years were taking their toll, the brutal training without end probably more so than the actual fights, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to pass his medical. What could she do? She had to test him. It was the law.
The boxer returned from the toilet with his urine sample in the little plastic tube. Megan picked it up to write his name and the date on, to prepare it for testing in the lab.
And it was stone cold.
She looked at him, and under his coffee-coloured skin, he blushed.
This wasn’t his urine sample. If it was, it would have been still warm. And this one felt as though it had been prepared a lot earlier. Megan knew that when the urine was examined, it would contain no traces of blood.
But Megan said nothing, and a few days later she confirmed to the boxer that he had passed his medical.
Because Megan was starting to understand what you would do for your child.
Anything.
‘There’s something I never told you,’ Jessica said.
There was no reason why she should tell him now. No reason why she should tell him tonight. And no reason why she should tell him at all – except she felt that this thing that had gnawed at her for so long should not be a secret between them. There was no reason to tell him, apart from the fact that he had the right to know.
Paulo rolled over on his side, propped himself up on one elbow.
‘What is it?’
‘I had an abortion.’
Silence between them in the softly lit bedroom. That hard word, hanging between them. And, slowly and painfully, he started to understand.
‘You mean – what? You had an abortion before we met? Before me?’
She nodded. ‘It was long before us. When I was still at school. Sixteen.’
He tried to take it in. The fact of the thing, and the savage irony. This woman, the woman he loved, who wanted nothing more than she wanted to be a mother, terminating a pregnancy in another lifetime. No – in the same lifetime she had shared with her husband.
‘Why are you telling me now, Jess?’
‘Because I want you to understand – this is my punishment for the abortion.’
‘Your punishment?’
‘The reason I can’t have our baby is because I killed that baby.’
‘Jess, that’s not true. This is not your punishment.’
‘I messed up my insides. I know I did.’ Her voice was totally calm. She had thought about this thing for so long. There was no doubt in her mind, only a bleak acceptance. ‘Nothing anybody can ever say will convince me otherwise. It’s my punishment. And I deserve to be punished. But I am just sorry you have to be punished too.’
‘Jessica – you are not being punished. It’s just one of those things. What were you? Sixteen? You couldn’t have a baby then – you were still a child yourself.’
‘Cat took me. My dad never knew. I was meant to be on a school trip. And I just think – we screw around with our bodies. We kill babies. And there’s a price to pay.’
‘You didn’t kill a baby, Jess.’
‘And then we act all surprised when our bodies don’t work. I don’t know what it is with me, Paulo – whether my insides are messed up, or if God is teaching me a lesson.’
‘God’s not so cruel.’
‘But I know all my problems – all our problems – date back to that day. It’s a punishment. What else do you call it?’
‘So – what? You loved this guy?’
He wanted to comfort her, he really did. But there was also this rage, this jealousy – someone else with the woman he loved. He wasn’t a violent man, but he could have cheerfully hurt this man. No, not a man – a bloody boy.
‘He was the school stud. Big football star. Every girl was mad about him – I don’t know if you could call it love, although that’s what it felt like at the time. God, yes. Sorry, sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
He was touched. It didn’t stop him loving her. Because nothing could stop him loving her. It wasn’t that weak, conditional kind of love.
‘We only went together the once. My first time. And then when I went back to school, he had told all his friends, and they were all laughing at me. Laughing about what a slag I was, although I’d been a virgin. Even when I was still bleeding, they were looking at me and laughing.’
He took her in his arms. ‘I love you, and he was never good enough for you, and this is not your punishment.’
As the weeks and months went by after her confession, Paulo felt something change between them. He had feared that the lack of a child would drive them apart. Instead, they felt closer than ever. They stayed close to their home and the people who knew them best. Because once they strayed beyond that orbit, even when they went to visit his parents out where the East End meets Essex, there were too many questions that infuriated them.
‘So when are you two love birds going to start a family?’ his mother would ask them with a grin, usually after she had told an anecdote about the wonder of her granddaughter Chloe.
‘We’re a family already, Ma,’ Paulo told his mother, told her again and again until she finally got it. ‘A family of two.’
In the cot at the end of the bed, Poppy slept.
She looked tiny in there, as though she would never grow enough to fill it – her bald head sticking out of her Grobag and resting on one side, showing off her bulging baby forehea
d, her arms lifted level with her ears, like a little weightlifter flexing her muscles, her hands the size of matchboxes curled into miniature fists. No sheets on this modern baby’s bed – the Grobag was like a sleeping bag with gaps for Poppy’s head and arms, completely safe, and yet Megan couldn’t escape the sheer terror of believing that her daughter could die at any moment.
So she sat in the kitchen drinking camomile tea, sleepless for the third night in a row, as out in the early-hour streets of Hackney the residents laughed and bellowed and fought. And as the hopeless tears rolled down her face, Megan thought, postnatal depression. What man came up with that one?
She was exhausted, scared witless and feeling like a total failure. How was she meant to feel? Who wouldn’t be depressed?
Another blow to her self-esteem was the breast-feeding fiasco. Poppy had been too small to breast-feed at first, her tiny, bud-like mouth not strong enough to make that sucking motion, but the jolly fat health visitor had told Megan – she had told Megan, this health visitor lording it over a future doctor – that ‘baby’ (the horrible familiarity of the bloody woman, thought Megan, the infuriating unearned intimacy) was ready to feed directly from ‘mother’ (oh fuck off, you old cow!).
But Megan – who shamefully remembered all the pious speeches she had made about the glories of breast-feeding to the mothers from the Sunny View Estate who flocked to her surgery (‘Full of nourishment and antibodies and completely free, ha ha ha!’) – just couldn’t get the hang of it. It was supposed to be the most natural thing in the world to a nursing mother, but Megan felt like she had been commanded to sprout wings and fly.
She knew the theory, of course. Knew it inside out, from tit to tonsils. You were meant to get the whole shebang areola as well as nipple – into the back of the baby’s mouth. But whenever Megan attempted it, Poppy acted as though her mother was trying to choke her. Then she screamed blue bloody murder. Megan begged, pleaded and swung her rock-hard breast back into place, catching Poppy in the side of the face and knocking off her little woolly hat. Mother and baby sobbed in perfect harmony.
The baby acted as though she would have called the NSPCC, if only she had been big enough to crawl to the phone, and Megan reached for the bottle, fearing that her daughter would starve to death if she didn’t.
It was a different kind of life from the one she had known before. There was no sleep now. When she was a child, Megan remembered how her father had gently admonished his daughters when they were weepy and fretful. Overtired, he had called it. That’s what I am, Megan thought. Overtired. Too knackered to sleep, and never knowing when the next noisy demand for bottle, cuddle or clean nappy would come.
She had gone back to work two months after the birth. As a doctor, she would have insisted on at least a three-month break before a new mother went back into the working world. But as a new mother herself, she found that all the rules were changed. Beyond the demands of what remained of her year as a GP registrar, Megan discovered she needed work, she needed to remind herself who she had been before her daughter was born.
Her sisters had been great. Cat took Poppy when she was in morning surgery, because Mamma-san didn’t open until lunch time, and Jessica was there in the afternoons. Kirk came round with nappies and various pieces of baby equipment – covers for electrical sockets, dummies galore – but sooner or later they all went back to their lives, leaving her alone with her baby and the night, and the overwhelming feelings of disappointment in herself. This mother business – she just wasn’t any good at it. It couldn’t go on like this for ever, could it? Her sisters standing in for her, the tears when the baby wouldn’t stop crying, the crappy little flat and the records played too loud downstairs. Megan was going to have to find a more permanent way of living.
She loved her daughter – there was no question about that. But she couldn’t do this thing, it was not in her nature, she was more like her own mother Olivia than she had realised, and the baby deserved someone better. Megan felt like she was giving her all, and her all was pathetically inadequate.
She knew that plenty of women went through pregnancy and motherhood without help. She saw them every day in her surgery. Maternity for one was becoming the industry standard. So why was it so hard for her? Or maybe they all felt this way, all the poor cows going solo. So now she knew what life felt like on the Sunny View Estate.
The end of her GP registrar year was approaching. She had to sit a three-hour exam, which was widely considered to be the easiest part of the summative assessment.
‘But what if I fail?’ Megan asked Lawford.
‘Nobody fails,’ he said. ‘Only the people who have really screwed up their lives.’
‘How do you feel?’ Cat said.
Rory arched his back and closed his eyes, his face the same colour as yesterday’s bandages. He groaned softly. The painkillers were not working, or there were not enough of them for a man who had just had invasive surgery on his testicles.
He felt like throwing up, but his stomach was empty. Something was ominously wet down there. He could feel the blood seeping through the dressing on his poor, swollen balls. My God, he thought. Those poor bastards have had a few adventures.
‘How do I feel?’ he reflected. ‘Like somebody just sliced open my bollocks and then stapled them back together. As you’re asking.’
‘But it’s worth it, isn’t it?’ Cat said, taking his hand. ‘It’s all worth it?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, all worth it.’
She placed a soft kiss on his parched lips.
Despite feeling like a freshly neutered torn – ironic really, as the aim of the operation was to make him once more a torn with fully working reproductive torn apparatus – he ran his hand up her leg. On and on it went. The length of those glorious pins never ceased to amaze him, and he loved to wander from knee to thigh. Measuring me, she always called it, laughing.
‘What happens now?’ she said.
He groaned, shifted his weight. ‘When I’m healed up, I come in and, you know, ejaculate into a pot of some kind.’
‘Talk to my brother-in-law Paulo. I know he’s done that lots of times.’
‘Cat, if there’s one thing a man doesn’t need lessons in, it’s – oooh!’ He gasped and flinched with the eye-watering pain. ‘Masturbation.’
‘Then they count your sperm?’
‘Count ‘em. Tickle ‘em. See if they can jump through hoops. See if they are there.’
‘They’ll be there. I know it.’
He smiled at her beautiful, expectant face. And, yes, it was all worth it to have her back in his life. But she acted as though this part, the sperm-meets-egg part, was the difficult bit.
The really difficult bit, in Rory’s experience, was keeping a relationship together over the long years that it took to raise a child. Staying together when you were a father and mother was the truly difficult bit, and, in some secret chamber of his heart, he really wasn’t sure if he could do it all again.
The thought of becoming a parent once more both excited and appalled him. Because he knew what it took, and it took so much. But he couldn’t deny her. If she was going to have a baby with any man, then, please God, he wanted it to be with him.
Later his son sat on the edge of his bed, eating his grapes and wearing a frown.
‘So, like, Cat wants children, does she?’ Jake said.
Rory moaned, tugged at his bandages to relieve the fire down below.
‘In the end,’ he said, ‘they all want children.’
It seemed to Kirk that the female attitude to the blow job had changed over the years.
When he was a boy, a blow job had been the ultimate prize – bestowed only when a girl (and back then, they were girls not women) decided that you were the one she was going to spend her life with – or at least the next few months of it. When you got a blow job back then, you felt like it was your lucky day. It wasn’t like that any more.
Now a blow job felt like you were being fobbed off with some kind
of consolation prize. Blow jobs were handed out willy nilly, while real sex, penetrative sex, vaginal sex, old-fashioned sex, was withheld, the dangled carrot, the Holy Grail.
It wasn’t as though women enjoyed giving a man a blow job. Unlike the other kind of sex, the penetrative kind, you never heard any of them complaining that a blow job was over a bit too quickly.
‘Oh, that blow job was over a bit fast.’
You never heard them say that, did you?
When he was a boy, a blow job felt like a gift. Now that he was a man, it felt more like an act of charity. What had changed? The rise of the blow job couldn’t be attributed to a fear of pregnancy, because the teenage girls he had known in suburban Sydney had a sheer terror of becoming pregnant that was not shared by the capable, independent women he knew now, with their coils, caps and morning after pills.
Perhaps the blow job had become a bargaining chip, a way of ensuring that you found it hard to walk away, and a way of giving the woman the power. If a woman would do that for you, then why would a man ever leave her? What could be better than that?
He touched the hair of the woman kneeling before him. She was from Perth, in London for two years after a period of wandering, getting ready to go back to Australia and her real life.
She had been in Mamma-san on a large drunken table, some kind of birthday bash, and their accents had been like a green light to conversation, a trip to an after-hours bar he knew, and then finally back to his place.
Now the telephone rang and she lifted her gaze to him, making them wide, holding eye contact. A lot of them did that during a blow job. Eye contact was often the trigger that – oh, sweet Jesus. Kirk struggled to breathe. It seemed to work. But the telephone kept ringing, and he realised that nobody should be calling him at this hour.
The answer machine clicked on and he heard Megan’s voice. She was upset, he realised with alarm. Something bad had happened.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you…I need your help…if you could come over…it’s Poppy…if you get this message –’