The Family Way

by Tony Parsons

  ‘I saw that,’ Michael said. ‘Yeah. It’s going to be pretty big.’

  ‘I thought I would take Jessica. If you can manage without me. It would do her good to get away for a week or so. I’d call it my holiday for this year.’

  ‘Go ahead. There’s not much happening here. We’ll be fine.’

  Paulo nodded. It was settled. He went to turn away, then suddenly stopped. He would have one last try to stop this madness. Before it was too late.

  ‘I watch you with your daughter, Mike. I know you love her. I know you want to be a real family man.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a family man. I am a family man.’

  ‘But if you lose Naoko, you’ll lose everything. You know that, don’t you? Your marriage. Your daughter. Your family. You don’t want that, do you?’

  Michael was watching Ginger in her little glass box. You would never guess she could fuck someone’s brains out in a Hilton. And all before tea time. Paulo saw his brother wince, as if these proceedings gave him physical pain.

  ‘I can’t help it, Paulo.’

  ‘Of course you can!’

  Michael shook his head.

  ‘You think it’s going to end when you fall in love. Or when you get married. Or when you become a father. But it never ends – that hunger.’ Michael looked at his brother with a sad kind of love. ‘You think it’s babies that make the world go round. You think that’s what it is all about. It’s not, Paulo. It’s desire. It’s fucking. It’s always fucking somebody new. That’s what is at the heart of it all – the whole great game. Wanting it. Desire. Call it what you like. The babies are just a by-product.’

  ‘Not for me. Not for my wife.’

  Michael shook his head.

  ‘You think women are any different? They are the same as us. That’s the big secret. Women are the same as us. They take their pleasures where they can. And nobody will fuck your brains out like a bored housewife and mother.’ Michael paused in thought, and stared out across the empty showroom. ‘Unless you’re married to her, of course.’

  Poppy smiled up at Jessica.

  It was a winning smile, gummy and wide, a little shaky at the edges, but definitely aimed at her aunt. For an encore she kicked her legs, as if attempting a backstroke in her cot.

  ‘She recognises me, doesn’t she?’ Jessica said. ‘She’s starting to recognise me!’

  ‘Look at the little cow,’ Megan said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. ‘All sweetness and light now you’re here.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not a little cow!’ Jessica reached into the cot and lifted Poppy into her arms. The baby gurgled with delight. ‘She’s a little angel!’

  ‘The little angel’s been up screaming half the night. It was so bad the guy downstairs turned up his 50 Cent CD. But there’s not a gangster rapper alive who can compete with Poppy.’

  The baby regarded her mother with an impassive stare. Kirk came into the room towelling his wet hair.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of this place,’ Megan told him.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Is there anything wrong with her?’ Jessica said, holding Poppy up for inspection, stroking her wispy hair.

  ‘Colic,’ Megan said.

  ‘Colic? That’s what horses get.’

  Megan nodded. ‘Horses and babies. She screams like it’s the end of the world. Then she sleeps – but by now you’re wide awake. And just as you’re finally going off to sleep, she starts screaming blue murder again.’

  Jessica said nothing, holding her tongue. She rocked Poppy in her arms, the baby making appreciative noises. And then she said, ‘You’re so lucky to have her, Megan.’

  ‘I know that, Jess,’ Megan said with a tight smile. She wanted to acknowledge the love she felt for her baby girl. But that wasn’t the whole story, and she needed her sister to know that it wasn’t all happy endings when you had a baby. ‘I do know I’m lucky. But I never thought I could be this tired.’

  Megan went into the kitchen and came back with two dummies designed to look like the mouths of animals. One featured a smiling bear, the other a tiger licking his lips.

  ‘If she goes absolutely crazy, stick one of these in her gob.’

  ‘Dummies?’ Jessica said, as if Megan had produced a couple of spliffs. ‘I thought you were against dummies? I thought babies became addicted to dummies, and that they weren’t good for their teeth, and all of that.’

  Megan laughed.. ‘I was anti-bottle feeding. I was anti-dummy. I was anti-running to the baby every time she cries. Then I had Poppy and you know what changed? Everything. The good intentions, the baby books, the firmly held beliefs about breast-feeding all went straight out of the window. It’s all bullshit, Jess. The lot of it. You just have to get through it. You just have to survive.’

  Megan placed a hand on her daughter’s bulging baby forehead. Poppy snuggled in Jessica’s arms, coolly averting her face from her mother.

  ‘Real baby,’ Megan said, withdrawing her hand. ‘Real world.’

  The best thing about teaching people to dive was that moment when a beginner surfaced for the very first time.

  A small percentage of first-timers were panicked – tearing off their mask, sucking in air as though they had just been exhumed from some claustrophobic watery grave – but most of them were ecstatic. Raving with joy about the teeming marine life, the psychedelic coral, the sensation of flying that scuba diving so closely resembled.

  It was another world down there – a better world, a freer world – and most people loved it at first sight. But you didn’t see that feeling in his new job. Seven mornings a week Kirk taught beginners to dive at a swimming pool in the back of a private house in Battersea. And in Battersea everything was different.

  No fish, no coral, no sense of all that limitless space containing the shipwrecks of the centuries and mountains taller than Everest and waterfalls bigger than Niagara.

  Just a little blue box full of heavily chlorinated water where young women and men – and they were almost entirely in their twenties and thirties, doing the prep for two weeks of summer fun in the Indian Ocean or the Caribbean or the Red Sea – struggled with neutral buoyancy, mask clearing and all the other basics.

  In the back room of a dive shop on the Edgware Road, he steered his students through the theory necessary to get their PADI dive card, and it was like trying to explain magic.

  There wasn’t much money involved. There never was with diving. You did it out of love. But love wouldn’t pay the rent so in the afternoons Kirk got on a racing bike that didn’t belong to him and delivered sandwiches and coffee to addresses in the City until it was time to go home and take over from Jessica.

  Megan knew all about his job teaching in the pool of a house in Battersea. But he didn’t tell her about his second job delivering snacks to stockbrokers and bankers and insurance salesmen. He didn’t tell her, because he wanted her to be proud of him. The way he was proud of her.

  Megan was what he wanted. Poppy was what he wanted – she was a beautiful child and he knew that the endless crying would eventually stop, and things would get better.

  But this life in London – the grey streets, the unsmiling faces, the longing to escape even among the people who wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else – this was not how he imagined his life would be.

  Sex, sleep, sunshine, real diving – all these things, his very favourite things, had somehow been consigned to his past. And he wondered. He really wondered.

  How much can you give up for the person you love, and still keep loving them?

  Jessica pushed Poppy through the filthy, crowded streets, thinking that most of the mothers around here looked completely worn out.

  Old before their time. Stains on clothes that Oxfam would reject. Greasy, untended hair. Knackered beyond belief. They reminded her of someone. With a jolt, she realised that they reminded her of Megan.

  But her sister didn’t have their anger. These women were angry with the world, with their children – th
e language they used when the little ones tarried by the sweet counter! More like sailors on shore leave than young mothers out shopping with their children! – and with Jessica herself when she clumsily steered Poppy’s trendy three-wheel baby carriage through the mobs of young Hackney mothers and their bawling, whining, underdressed, filthy-faced brood.

  ‘Oy, darling, watch them bleeding wheels,’ one of them said, not bothering to take the cigarette from between her lips. ‘You nearly run over me fucking foot, innit?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jessica said, smiling politely.

  With her trim figure, immaculate clothes, careful make-up and quiet decency, Jessica looked nothing like the effing and blinding brood mares of the Sunny View Estate. And yet she knew they took her to be one of their number, and it made Jessica’s heart thrill with joy.

  A young mother, on her way to the park, a bit of fresh air for the baby, out in the world with her own flesh and blood.

  Twenty

  In the late morning the playground was taken over by the young mothers of the Sunny View Estate. With their toddlers waddling with solemn purpose between them, and their babies dozing in the prams, the women lounged on the roundabout and swings, and leaned against the climbing frame, talking and smoking.

  They had a proprietorial attitude to the playground, because only a few years ago they had been among the teenagers who gathered here in the late afternoon, idly lounging on the swings, or gently twirling on the roundabout, talking and smoking.

  Jessica and Poppy remained a little apart from them, concentrating on feeding the fierce East End ducks who lived in the park. Jessica tossed them stale bread, and Poppy’s bright blue eyes were wide with awe as the ducks squawked and fought around them.

  ‘She’s a little cracker, your one.’

  It was one of the young mothers. Barely out of her teens, with a pretty face, and two crop-haired boys milling at her feet. Jessica realised with a start that the woman – a girl was more like it – was talking to her about Poppy.

  ‘A real little cracker,’ the woman repeated. She took a long suck on a Marlboro. ‘She’s – what? – ‘bout free months?’

  ‘Five.’ Jessica shooed away the ducks, and clutched Poppy closer. ‘She was a bit early.’

  ‘Premature? They catch up.’ She indicated one of the shaven-headed bruisers in her care. ‘Thirty-five weeks, that one. He looked more like a bleeding Kentucky Fried Chicken than a baby. You’d never guess it now.’

  The young mothers began making delighted, cooing noises at Poppy, and Jessica found herself drawn deeper into the group.

  Looking at the women, you would not expect they were capable of such gentleness. These were, after all, the same women Jessica had seen screaming abuse in the local supermarket. Perhaps, Jessica thought, the children allowed them to show a tenderness that was absent from the rest of their lives.

  She perched on a vacant swing while the women fussed over Poppy, as if every new baby was a miracle they couldn’t begin to explain. And it was funny – they wanted to know the baby’s name, but nobody asked for Jessica’s name.

  Jessica found she didn’t mind at all.

  ‘Don’t look like she’s just had a baby, does she?’ one of the Sunny View mums commented.

  There was a murmur of assent. Jessica laughed modestly, bouncing Poppy on her knee. The baby smiled, fighting to keep its head steady.

  ‘You’re a little sweetheart, ain’t you?’ said another young mum, stroking Poppy’s rosy cheek with a nicotine-stained finger. ‘Do you look like your mum or your dad?’

  ‘Her dad’s Italian,’ Jessica said, her head thrilling with the lie, and more than half believing it herself. ‘He’s crazy about her. He calls us his two girls.’

  ‘It’s nice when they stick around,’ said one of the Sunny View mums.

  ‘Jessie?’

  Then suddenly Cat was there, in the middle of all the smoking women and their crop-haired toddlers and fat-faced babies, and you could almost see their faces hardening in the presence of this well-dressed, well-spoken, conspicuously childfree stranger.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Jessica said, bewildered.

  Cat wagged a bag of pastries.

  ‘Same as you. Feeding the ducks.’

  Jessica gathered up Poppy’s things – mittens the size of matchboxes, a woolly hat with animal ears, her bottle – and carried the baby while Cat pushed the empty pram.

  “Bye, Poppy,’ said the woman who had first spoken to Jessica. ‘Be a good girl for your mum.’

  Cat looked at Jessica.

  And Jessica pulled Poppy closer.

  On the far side of the lake they sat on a scarred park bench, the bread and the ducks all gone, Poppy sleeping in Jessica’s arms. The distant laughter of the Sunny View mothers drifted to them across the water.

  ‘You know that I’ve been on this IVF cycle,’ Cat said. ‘The doctor recommended it because of my age. My age! Rory’s almost fifteen years older than me.’

  Jessica studied Poppy’s sleeping face. She said nothing.

  ‘Anyway,’ Cat said. ‘It’s been like – I don’t know – a marathon with hurdles. All these hurdles, Jess. The injections, the scans.’ She shook her head. ‘Your mood changing with the weather. All that time, all these hurdles, never knowing if it’s going to work.’

  ‘I know what it’s like, Cat. I did it myself.’

  ‘Of course you did. I know you did.’

  Jessica stared out across the lake, as if lost in her own dreams, not really listening. Cat was talking more quickly now. Getting it out. Wanting her to know. Wanting to get it over with.

  ‘They put two fertilised embryos inside me.’

  ‘Rory’s working again, then?’

  ‘Yes, Rory’s working again.’

  ‘Good, I’ve always liked Rory.’

  ‘Then I had to wait, I had to wait two weeks, the longest two weeks of my life.’

  ‘And now you’re pregnant.’

  Jessica’s voice calm and flat, with just a hint of irony. It wasn’t a question.

  Cat looked at her sister, and she wanted to hold her, to ask her – do you know how much you are loved?

  It seemed to Cat that Megan had breezed through life, taking everything in her stride – parental divorce, school, boys and men. Even her youngest sister’s postnatal depression, or exhaustion, or whatever it was, had seemed to disappear when Kirk moved in.

  But Jessica, thought Cat – right from the start it had all been so hard for Jessica. Cat felt a flush of shame, because she was here to hurt her sister some more.

  ‘And now I’m pregnant, Jess.’

  Jessica laughed, and it frightened Cat.

  ‘Do you know how I know? Because you wouldn’t come all the way to the East End if it hadn’t worked.’

  Cat exhaled as if she had been holding her breath for minutes. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  ‘I wanted you to be the first to know, Jess,’ grabbing her sister’s arm, suddenly feeling free to touch her. ‘Even Rory doesn’t know yet.’

  Jessica frowned at Poppy, nodding. Then she looked up at her sister, waiting for her to continue. But Cat thought, what else is there to say?

  ‘I never thought it would work,’ she said, aware she was babbling. ‘All those hurdles. Rory having to go through an operation just so he could have one off the wrist. It all seemed so fragile, right from the start. What are the odds of success? Less than thirty per cent.’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘It’s a miracle. I never thought it would work for me.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Jessica said, not laughing now. ‘Because when I had IVF, it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t work.’

  ‘Oh, Jessie. I don’t want you to feel bad about this baby.’

  Jessica took her sister’s hands.

  ‘Congratulations, Cat. And thanks for thinking of me.’ She smiled, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to freak out. I’m not going to run amok. I’m not jealous. I’m not sad. Well, ma
ybe a bit. That’s only natural. But I’m happy for you. You’ll be a good mother.’

  ‘I’m not sure if this is what Rory wants,’ Cat said. She wanted her sister to know – it’s not perfect. Don’t think it’s perfect. She was worried about money, about where they would live. But most of all she was worried about the baby’s father. It’s not perfect.

  ‘Rory will be a good dad,’ Jessica said thoughtfully, her index finger tracing the contours of Poppy’s mouth. ‘He’s like Paulo. Loves kids.’

  Cat was grateful to be the one who needed reassurance, encouraged to spill her heart.

  ‘But I think he’s doing it for me, I don’t know, Jess. It could all be a terrible mess.’

  ‘When the baby comes, he’ll fall in love with it. They all do.’ Jessica stared across the water at the playground. The Sunny View mums had gone. Jessica shook her head. ‘I wish you well, Cat. And the baby. Of course I do. But don’t talk to me about miracles. IVF isn’t a miracle – it’s big business.’ Now her voice was bitter, and her eyes were brimming with the injustice of it all. ‘What are they charging these days? Three grand a go? And you, Cat – you’re just a consumer. You suddenly want a baby just like you’ve wanted a car or holiday in the past. And you get what you want, don’t you, Cat? So spare me the talk about miracles, will you?’

  Cat slowly stood up, wanting to be away from this place. She had been wrong to come, wrong to try to be the caring big sister. They were grown women with tangled lives. You couldn’t just kiss it better any more.

  ‘Jessie, what can I say? IVF gives hope to people with none. That’s good enough for me. What? Babies that are conceived naturally don’t have problems? Women who conceive naturally don’t have problems? Look at Megan. She was ready to top herself. And this isn’t really about IVF, is it, Jess?’

  Poppy groaned angrily. She began to scream, her face turning first pink, then red, then purple.