by Nicki Reed
Now what? I’ve sent the paperwork off with Mark. He’ll have signed it. He’ll have accepted his second divorce. I am difficult sometimes, it’s true. There’s a saying about difficult women, but it’s difficult for me to remember it right now. And yes, Mark worked for the ‘other side’ on this one, but he’s not always on the other side. I’m often proud of the work he does. I don’t get a lot of detail, the ins and outs, but I’ve watched the news with him more than once and been pleased when he said, ‘We provided support on that decision.’ I guess that’s the trouble with the Law: you don’t always get to personally agree with the law you’re making.
‘Two lines.’
‘Meaning?’ I call out over my shoulder.
‘Pregnant.’ Her voice has a small-room echo.
I’m up and moving fast. ‘Let me look.’ I nudge Jus out of the way.
‘Two lines,’ Jus says. ‘The control and the new line, pink, strong.’
‘For real?’
‘Two lines, pregnant.’
Is she a robot? Stop saying that.
‘For real, really?’ Could we have made a baby the night I beat him up with the tennis racquet? Am I going to have a baby? Could it be that easy? That means I’m about four weeks. Only thirty-six to go. I ask again, ‘I’m pregnant?’
We’re still standing in the bathroom.
‘Two lines, pregnant.’ Justine grabs me round the waist.
‘I’m having a baby.’ All my smiling hurts my face.
‘And if BJ gets pregnant, too, your baby will have a playmate roughly its own age. That’s so cool,’ Justine says. ‘Except for the impending divorce. But you guys are used to shared parenting. When are you going to tell him?’
We move from the bathroom to my bedroom and I ransack the place for the pair of boxer shorts Mark left. If I can’t be with him, I want to wear his clothes. When freedom fighters are pregnant, there’s all the more to fight for.
‘As soon as I’ve been to the doctor’s. At least we know when it happened, the conception, I mean.’
‘You could tell him tomorrow, in the flesh.’ She squeezes my waist and I think to myself, that’s not just chocolate you’re feeling. ‘If you want to, I mean,’ Jus says. ‘I know where he’s going to be.’
‘Where?’ I’ve had crying covered in the last few months and here I go again. But these are the best tears I’ve ever cried and I let them drop off my chin onto my unmarryme T-shirt.
‘He’s coming to the breakfast.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s my job to make sure you get there. Todd put me on it. He put Stuart on getting Mark there. He’s an achiever, that Todd.’
‘Why do they want us both there so badly?’
‘Because it’s the first Poverty Project and unmarryme thing.’
‘I was going to the breakfast anyway.’ I sniff, rub my face, flick a tear off the end of my little finger. ‘Damian said I had to.’
‘You don’t always do what people say. You still haven’t put undies on.’
I step into Mark’s light-blue boxer shorts. ‘Neither do you, Jus, I told you not to leave wet clothes in the washing machine all day.’
Things are coming together. Justine’s with me, and Mark is going to move in with Stuart when Keith and Catherine come home. And now a baby.
‘I feel like a bloody idiot. All this time I thought I was one of the unlucky ones, like my aunties. All I had to do was fuck him right and at the right time.’ I smile at the memory of steering clear of Mark’s fat lip but the rest of him being up for grabs. ‘And I did fuck him right, Jus. I mean, you should have been there. Sorry, you know what I mean. You definitely shouldn’t have been there.’
‘I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself, Ruby. I worked with a woman who was told she couldn’t have kids, who went to hospital with a stomach-ache and came home with a baby.’
Imagine that. She’d have come home and had nowhere to put him. Would have had to sit in an armchair with the baby in her lap until somebody showed up.
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Darling.’ Justine is beautiful when she smiles. ‘I know.’
The whole world is beautiful right now. ‘Yeah, but Jussy, I’m pregnant.’
‘Shall we call The Girls?’
‘Nope. I’m telling Mark before I tell anyone else.’ I wipe my eyes on the neck of the T-shirt. ‘Jus, did you hear?’
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘Yep.’ I’m going to play this tune all night. I’ll play it during the dishes, our nightly walk, brushing my teeth and dreaming my dreams. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Shit. I know.’
43.
The big unmarryme-slash-Poverty-Project breakfast is in a park north of the city and, for the middle of winter, it’s a great morning. There’s a breeze, nothing that would bother a cyclist, and it’s like the sun’s come out just for us. There are hot air balloons. What do you call a bunch of hot air balloons? A flotilla? A drift? I know, a wonder.
‘Look!’ I point to the balloons. ‘Months ago I looked into hot air balloons for unmarryme. It’s ridiculously expensive.’
We’re in Justine’s car because I plan to go to work with Damian after the breakfast. I’m ankle-deep in junk food wrappers. Do babies like Skittles and Smarties? I’ll have to check.
The park is not that far from my place. A fifteen-minute drive, twenty-five minutes on the bike, I don’t know what it’d be on rollerskates and I hope never to find out. Rollerskating is the last thing a pregnant woman who can’t skate should do, because you can’t get helmets for embryos.
‘There they are.’ Justine nods at the big white marquee with the huge unmarryme sign. ‘What a crowd.’
We park and walk up. There seem to be at least two bike clubs here, one of them might be an unmarryme bike club and for a jealous second I wonder why I wasn’t made president. I have got to get one of those bike tops, black with the pink love heart, small on the front, big on the back. Todd has been busy. There’s a dog club, too, by the looks. The bigger dogs wear unmarryme T-shirts. Normally I think dog-dressing is naff, but today it’s the best idea on four legs.
Coming up the path from the car park are about twenty or so mothers with prams and pushers. Peta and BJ and Celeste are with them. And bagpipes. Bloody bagpipes that sound like glorious petrified cats. Somebody in unmarryme must have a tartan connection.
A bus parks close by, unmarryme and Poverty Project signage all over it. People in pink T-shirts pile out of it. The bus is like an oversized clown car and the pink T-shirts keep coming and coming.
‘You know what I love, Jus? How unmarryme is right across the community. People on bikes, mothers, Scots, doggy people. I always knew marriage equality was an everyone thing.’
‘Pregnant people, too,’ she says, as if I’m going to forget.
BJ and Peta walk up, Celeste between them, the three of them holding hands like a human daisy chain.
Peta kisses me hello. ‘Rube, what’s happening?’ She looks at my face, too close and too long for my liking, another minute and she will guess about Mark and BJ just from the curl of my lip.
‘Success, by the looks of it, Peta.’
BJ doesn’t look pregnant. At the moment nothing bothers me. I have Mark’s baby in my belly and he’s around here somewhere. Suddenly, I’ve forgiven them: I’m thinking that if real sex is going to get BJ and Peta a baby, if BJ wants to feel like I do today, then she and Mark better have another go at it.
‘Well, you look great,’ Peta says. ‘Doesn’t she, Beej?’
‘Sure does,’ she says, and smiles a smile that tells me that, for the first time, we’ve got our own secret. ‘Let’s see if Celeste wants to make some doggie friends.’ The daisy chain heads off.
Justine organised one of the photographers from the paper and she’s snapping away. Shots of the sky, the trees, the tent, a bird, faces, T-shirts.
Todd is selling unmarryme merchandise and people are wearing their new hoodies over what th
ey arrived in. Unmarryme looks great this morning, community-minded, decent, modern.
‘Hi Todd,’ I say.
He leans across his merchandise table to give me a kiss hello. ‘Ruby, so good to see you,’ he says, winking at Justine. ‘Really rapt you came.’
‘Todd, is that Kelly?’ I point to a bloke grabbing a box of unmarryme T-shirts from the boot of Todd’s mum’s car. ‘I told you he liked you.’
Todd blushes. ‘He does like me, doesn’t he? He called me after the show and asked me out. We’ve had only one night apart since.’ Todd breaks into a gorgeous smile. And here I was thinking he was happy and doing well before. This is a happy Todd.
‘That’s great news, the best.’ Almost the best. Where is Mark?
Hot air balloons like a sky full of Christmas decorations, unmarryme, and the secret of a baby in my belly, I can’t stop smiling and my cheeks are in danger of getting RSI.
Todd’s folks appear alongside their son. ‘We’re so thrilled,’ Tori announces. ‘Kelly’s a lovely guy. Not that Todd is ready to share him, yet.’ She’s in a black unmarryme hoodie and Dave’s in a pink one.
‘It’s wonderful news, Tori,’ I say. ‘But, Todd, I need to talk to Mark, kind of urgently, and Justine said he’d be here. Have you seen him?’
‘He texted, just then, and said he’d be about ten, give or take.’
Since when does Mark talk in give or take about the time? ‘Have you seen Damian?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I could have slept in.’ I turn to Justine, who’s slobbering on a sausage in bread with onions. ‘We could have slept in, Jus.’
‘And miss this?’
She has sauce on her chin and I can’t decide whether to tell her.
‘You have sauce on your chin, Justine,’ Todd says. He points at the sky and grins at me. ‘Ruby, look.’
The hot air balloons are approaching, lower, lower, the usual suspects, Remax, Chandon, De Bortoli, Balloon Sunrise, and a last one, yellow, behind the others, that I can’t see properly. Slow, enormous, they float like whales in the sky. The balloons are quiet, but as they get closer, I can hear the people onboard and the burners, flaring, flaring. The pilot talks via radio to his people on the ground. The last balloon emerges from behind the others.
44.
The balloon is gigantic. When you’re this close—seriously, they’re just a paddock away—you get the scale of these things. Yellow, huge, the balloon turns and I see the green logo of Poverty Project.
‘They didn’t!’ I say to Todd.
He throws his arm around my shoulder. ‘They did, Rube. We did.’
Slowly appearing in the sky close by is the finest thing I’ve ever seen. A pink love heart the size of all get out and unmarryme written across it in the eye-splintering blue.
‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.’ I bawl my eyes out.
‘Don’t cry, Rube,’ Todd croaks.
The crowd goes ape. They film, laugh, point, hug, kiss. Somebody from the news grabs sound bites. I don’t know how they’ll hear anything over the dogs, the kids and the bagpipes.
‘Where’s Mark? He’s missing this.’
‘Look closer, Ruby.’ Justine has my hand. ‘He’s on it. Shall we?’
‘Yes!’ This is the one time, in all the bloody running, that I haven’t minded. Jus said to wear shoes I can get about in.
‘Come on, I’ll beat you,’ she says.
‘No way.’ I pass Jus.
We catch up to the balloon and, if I thought it was big from the marquee, we’re dwarfed by it now. The basket is as big as my car.
‘Ruby! Ruby, can you hear me?’
‘Mark!’ I shout.
‘Ruby!’
‘Boydy!’ He looks good in a hot air balloon.
‘Ruby, can you hear me?’
‘Yes!’
‘Ruby, I love you!’ he yells. ‘I’m sorry.’ He said and said and said he was sorry, but I wasn’t ready for forgiveness. It took until now, listening to him, for me to hear it.
‘Mark, I’m pregnant.’
‘What?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘You’re deafened?’ He shakes his head.
Justine yells it with me: ‘I’m pregnant!’
Mark hears. Beams. He does look good in a hot air balloon.
‘Who’s pregnant?!’ That’s Stuart.
‘Ruby is!’ Justine’s smile is huge and her freckles are sticking out.
‘Yay!’ Stuart says, and I can hear his relief.
‘Mark, we’re having a baby.’
‘Ruby! I don’t want a divorce.’
When I grow up I want to be a hot-air balloon pilot. The burner flares, whoosh, whoosh. The balloon is close. Justine and I step back further and further and further. We’re overcome by its shadow, dark, like an eclipse. The basket drifts towards the ground. The pilot is a gun. There is no X marking the spot but I reckon he could park it on a milk crate, the landing is so soft.
We stand back and let the professionals do their thing. They pin the balloon to the ground, steady, and help the passengers out. Our balloon is so near I have to bend backward to see all fifty foot of the unmarryme banner.
‘Did you know the balloon bit is called the envelope, Jus?’
‘Nope,’ Jus says. ‘I think we can go over now.’
I run over. ‘Boydy, I forgot about love because I was thinking about marriage.’ Swollen, salty, heavy and thick, are the tears you cry when there is a balloon in your name and the man of your dreams climbs out of it.
‘Don’t cry, Rube, don’t cry.’
‘I can’t help it. You’re here.’
‘I am,’ he says.
‘I’m pregnant. I’m having a baby, Mark. I’ve got a bun in the oven.’
‘Rube,’ he laughs. ‘You told me.’
The best kiss ever in the history of the world, a mushy, wet, hot, mouth-opening, hold on to your hats kiss.
If this was a movie, there’d be applause, a double-decker London bus would amble by and all the people on the top level would clap and shout. Elton John and Kiki Dee’s ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ would play because it’s cheesy and it’s right.
‘I never would break your heart, Boydy.’
‘I love you too much, Rube, and you couldn’t if you tried.’
I pull away from the kiss and fumble around in my coat pocket. They’re in there somewhere. Our dog tags. I reach up and put them over his head and it feels like I’m giving him a medal.
And I say it: ‘Mark Boyd, will you unmarryme?’