by India Knight
‘I don’t know. And no. No, I haven’t.’
‘Are you feeling sick, darling? Because, ginger biscuits.’
‘What?’
‘Ginger biscuits by the bed – they help with the sickness, and also they’re quite yummy, plus if you put on biscuit weight nobody notices. They still want to pat you.’
‘I haven’t been that sick – actually, I only really feel nauseous in the evenings – but thanks, I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘Oh, Tamsin.’
‘Oh, Clara.’ There is a long pause. Then: ‘What am I going to do?’
‘Fuck. I don’t know.’
‘You know how much I want a baby… Clara, are you in a tunnel?’
‘No, I’m right down under the eiderdown. With worry, Tam. I’ve burrowed. Yes, of course I know about you wanting babies.’
‘But I don’t necessarily want a baby by myself. I mean, how am I supposed to work it? Pay someone all my wages so that I can go out to work and never see it? Stop working and not be able to pay the mortgage? And surely I wouldn’t be the first single mother – Clara, how do other people do it?’
‘They do it by not ever asking themselves those kinds of questions. Honestly, Tam, no children would ever be born if one approached the whole subject with any kind of logic. Or rather, children would only be born to people who had pension schemes and Tessas and savings imagine the creepiness.’
‘Savings!’ Tamsin says wistfully. ‘Ha!’
We both fall silent again, imagining what it would be like to have no overdraft.
‘Don’t you think you ought to tell him – what was his name, again?’
‘David. And his penis was called “Little Dave”.’
‘Don’t remind me, Tam, or yourself. Oh, God, I don’t know what to say.’ I think for a bit. ‘The thing is, he was good-looking, right?’
‘Ish.’
‘And intelligent? I mean, not actually simple?’
‘No, intelligent, as far as I could tell.’
‘Well, then. It’s nurture, anyway, not nature.’
‘But, Clara, what if he’s passed on the crap-shag gene? Or the crapping gene, full stop? More to the point, what about me being a mummy on my own?’ She is beginning to sound tearful.
‘Oh, Tamsin.’
‘Oh, Clara.’
I feel panic-stricken on her behalf, I really do. I pop my head out of the eiderdown and reach for a cigarette.
There’s a small silence for a while, during which we both sigh, which I do extra loudly, to show my support.
‘I’m racking my brains, Tam.’
‘Me too.’
I take a sip of tea and spit it out again with excitement.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘Tamsin! I know what will help. You need to do Madonna.’
‘I don’t think…’
‘Darling, doing Madonna never failed us. Remember?’
‘How could I forget? We did it for years. It was our life.’
‘Exactly. And did it ever, ever fail?’
‘Umm… No, I don’t suppose it did, except when you came to my dad’s fiftieth birthday wearing a rosary and a dirty nightie, remember?’
‘I’d forgotten, actually. God, imagine wearing that.’
‘That was the Madonna thing.’
‘Yes, but that was a sartorial aping, Tam, which is not the same thing. Doing Madonna has never failed. And we haven’t done it for years. I really think it’s your best option.’
‘Okay,’ says Tam, with a sigh. She’s stopped sounding weepy, though. ‘Let’s do Madonna. Let’s do it now. Or shall I come round?’
I sit up again, drawing the quilt around me.
‘No. I think in emergencies it’s okay to do it on the phone.’
I feel like I’m travelling back in time. Tamsin and I spent our entire teenage years – actually, it went on well into our twenties – doing Madonna. It’s perfectly simple: you hum a bit of ‘Express Yourself’ to cheer yourself up, and then ask yourself, What would Madonna do if she were in my shoes?
The marvellous thing was you could apply this simple question to everything and it always gave the right answer. The day Tam and I started playing it was the last time any sweating weirdo ever tried to press himself up against us on the tube on the way to sixth-form college. Pre-Madonna, faced with this unhappily frequent circumstance, we’d move away, or give feeble dirty looks. Post-Madonna, we started hurling very loud abuse (it took a couple of goes before we decided there was no real need to do this in an American accent): ‘Don’t ever do that again. Don’t fuck with me, or I’ll cut your balls off.’
It worked. But that’s only one example of literally dozens. If we fancied a boy but felt too shy, as ourselves, to do anything about him, we’d do Madonna and ask him right out. That worked too, more often that not. Treated badly by a friend or boyfriend? Well, Madonna wouldn’t lie around sobbing on her Snoopy duvet, and neither did we. Doing Madonna worked brilliantly later too if anyone ever bullied us at college, or later still if people were mean at work. Doing Madonna quite literally shaped our lives. The last time I did it was on my wedding morning.
‘She’s never failed us before, Tamsin. Ready?’
‘Ready. But, Clara, she has evolved a bit since then, don’t you think? She might not have knee-jerk reactions any more. I mean, she might have stopped saying “Fuck” and going for it and putting her hand down people’s pants.’
‘Bollocks. She’s fundamentally the same, except older. Like us.’
‘I feel silly doing the singing.’
‘Okay, do it in your head. Or I’ll do it. I’m going to do it, Tamsin.’
The lyrics pop out of my subconscious, fully formed. I start singing, quietly at first. But although I am embarrassed, I have faith. I sing Madonna’s words – I think of her more as Maddie, at time like these, or even as Madge – as though they were my own.
‘Wooh, baby,’ I tell Tamsin. ‘Let’s go.’ And I sing the first line. Surely I don’t need to tell you how it goes? ‘Express Yourself’? The pink corset peering out of the pinstriped suit? The blonde curls? Our youth, if you’re anywhere near me in age. Course you remember it. Unless you were busy dissecting frogs while breathing through your mouth and cursing the hussy Maddie, who’d anyway look much nicer if she wore something sensible in easycare Crimplene. In which case, please stop reading: you’re banned.
Tamsin sings along, quietly. Then she interrupts herself.
‘Clara?’
‘Uhh, mmm, mmm,’ I say, carrying on.
‘Why are you making those sorts of squeaks? You sound like Michael Jackson.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I say. ‘I’m moaning provocatively, Tamsin. Do you remember nothing? Moaning provocatively is part and parcel of the Maddie experience.’
‘It’s a bit off-putting,’ Tamsin says. ‘And besides, she doesn’t moan in “Express Yourself”. She moans in “Like a Virgin”.’
‘Hardly an appropriate track for you, darling. Bit late in the day.’
‘Don’t be mean,’ says Tamsin, giggling.
‘Touch Litt-el Dave,’ I sing, to the tune of ‘Like a Virge’, as it’s colloquially known to us aficionados. ‘Go on, you know you want toooo… Touch Li-i-i-tlle Dave… He’s a penis… With a na-a-a-a-ame. A-a-a-aaaame.’ I emit a manly, Dave-style – I imagine – grunt.
‘You’re the most juvenile person I’ve ever met,’ says Tamsin, snorting with laughter. ‘Can we get on with it now?’
‘I’m only trying to cheer you up, sweetheart. Besides, she always moans,’ I say. ‘But you go first then. I’m listening,’ I add, like Frasier Crane.
She does, shyly at first, then with mounting enthusiasm as she reaches the bit about making him – and I paraphrase loosely – pipe up and share his emotions. I join in, and within a couple of seconds am bellowing down the phone and gyrating on my own sofa.
‘Clara?’ Tamsin says, interrupting a second time.
‘Now what?’
‘We’re singing the w
rong bit. That bit’s about boys. My quandary isn’t about boys.’
‘It is, kind of,’ I point out. ‘No boy, no boy-penis. No boy-penis, no boy-spermatozoa. No boy-spermatozoa, no baby. Quod est demonstrandum. Express yourself!’ I growl, in a fairly impressive approximation of Ms Ciccone.
We really get into our stride round about verse three, which informs us that – I paraphrase again, for reasons too tiresome to go into here – all we need is to feel like queens on thrones, all the time. ‘Too right, Mads,’ ad-libs Tamsin.
‘Yes!’ we both scream in unison as the song ends.
‘I feel so much better,’ says Tamsin.
But I don’t, momentarily. For some reason the lyrics make me think, fleetingly, of my marriage. Well, I say fleetingly – actually, they make me think, and think, and think until it feels as if my head is going to burst.
Is that really what I used to do, not believe in second best?
‘Clara?’ says Tamsin. ‘Clara? Have you gone off to find your Gaultier corset dress? Clara? The old MAC Russian Red lippy?’
I feel sick – I could vomit, since you ask – but it passes, as does the simple-minded, two-D-ness of youth. It passes. Sympathy vomiting… I must love Tamsin a lot.
‘Here I am,’ I say. ‘So. Let’s cut to the chase. What would Madonna do?’
‘Clara, she’d have the baby,’ says Tamsin happily. ‘I know it. If she wanted to have a baby, she would have a baby, and sod the consequences.’
‘My feeling entirely,’ I agree. ‘She wouldn’t have an abo, anyway – she’s Catholic. She’d have the baby and somehow end up having a fabulous time.’
‘I’m keeping it!’ says Tamsin. ‘I’m gonna keep my baby, ooo eee.’
‘Different song, but same thing, I suppose. Have you cheered up, darling?’
‘You bet,’ says Tamsin. ‘You can be godmother, if Madonna says no.’
‘See you later, darling. I told you it would still work.’
‘Oh, it does, it does,’ says Tamsin, sounding like she’s tap-dancing. ‘It still works.’
A baby! Tamsin’s going to have a lovely little baby. Which doesn’t stop the fact that, personally, I think those lyrics are adolescent and simplistic, I reflect, as I put the phone back into its cradle.
God! I think to myself. God, we were such intensely silly girls. Thank Heavens we grew up.
*
That’s it. She’s gonna keep her bay-bee, oo ee. And I’m going to Paris with my husband of eight years, oo err. And I’ve got to sort myself out; I’ve got to take myself in hand. And speaking of oos, what’s this? I have butterflies and my breathing is hard and… Well, if I didn’t know better I’d think it was a panic attack! Ha! Imagine. Me – a panic attack. As if. As if. I really should cut down on my smoking though. It’s disgusting to breathe like that, in tiny breaths, like you’ve been punched.
Anyway. Anyway. Speaking of song lyrics, Le jour de gloire est (presque) arrivé. I’ve got to get my Paris self in gear. I’ve got a leg wax at 4, plus the bikini thing, and Robert’s taking me out to dinner in Islington. Robert, Robert, Robert whom I love and who loves me, and look at our life, how could he not, how couldn’t I?
Speaking of dinner, I seem to have mislaid my appetite over the last few days. Nerves, probably. France nerves. My face, as reflected in the hall mirror, actually looks quite nice.
I phone Charlie’s friend Rollo’s mother to make sure she’s okay about picking both the boys up and having them to play, give the kitchen a quick wipe and hoover – I don’t understand what happens to my kitchen, I just don’t get it; it’s not like I while away the hours staging my very own dirty protests – and get in the car.
It’s funny. I actually used to be a high-maintenance girl, by my own standards, if not by my mother’s. When Robert and I met, I weighed the right kind of weight and had nice arms with a hollow down the underside and went for manicures when I could afford it. I was so nicely dressed all the time. I could spend entire Saturdays shopping for an outfit to wear that night – a feat which I considered deeply sad the second I got married and had children and preoccupied myself with casseroles and educationally sound toys instead, like a grown-up.
And now I’m not so sure. They were such fun, those shopping expeditions, blowing half the week’s wages on a hot little dress that I thought might make him want to kiss me. He used to tell me he loved the way I dressed, in between telling me he loved me.
Is my period due or something?
17
Fuck. Fuck. I am lopsided. I am wrong Down Below. Now what?
There are many conspiracies of silence in the world – the fact that no one, not even your mother, ever tells you how much childbirth hurts springs to mind, for starters. And now this: the bikini wax. why did no one tell me? Why did Amy, the beautician, not say, ‘And now I’m going to traumatize your pudenda with hot wax’? Why do people even have this stupid treatment performed, unless they’re yetis?
Anyway, I couldn’t go through with it. It hurt too much. It hurt so much that I grabbed Amy by the hair and pulled, while screaming a primitive-sounding kind of scream.
Amy said, ‘Uh, oh dear, is it that bad? I’ll try and do the other side quicker.’
I said, ‘Amy, if you ever fucking try that again, I swear I’ll kill you. Don’t come near me. Pass me my pants.’ (A hard sentence to utter in a dignified manner, incidentally, that last one.)
Amy: ‘But I can’t let you go home with one side done and not the other.’
Me: ‘I forbid you to do the other side. I’ll sue you if you try.’
Amy: ‘But, Clara…’
Me: ‘I said, pass me my pants.’
There followed an awkward silence while I struggled into said underwear, one side of me still tacky with warm wax.
‘Clara?’
‘Please don’t talk to me, Amy. That was worse than childbirth.’
‘But you’re going to look very odd…’
‘I don’t care.’
But, actually, I kind of do. I look mad around the, er, middle. I don’t think this is a quandary that could be solved with the help of nail scissors or Immac. Perhaps I should shave the whole thing off? It seems the only sensible option. But then I’ll look grotesque, like a porn mag. Oh, what am I going to do?
The phone rings. It’s someone called Electra, from some PR company. One of the perils of working from home is that you’re subject to these phone calls all the time. I can’t really pay attention to what she’s saying, because I am thinking about my pubis and feeling depressed. ‘Something something party,’ she says, sounding reproachful. ‘Are you coming? You haven’t replied.’
‘What party is that?’
Electra doesn’t sound like she has lopsided pubic hair. Electra sounds like she’s wearing Gucci heels and a dinky little top for people with no breasts, in a size 6, and probably a couple of glittery butterfly hair clips in her hair. My spirits are, frankly, low.
‘In Hoxton? For Contortions?’
‘Oh,’ I remember, wanting to laugh. ‘Mr Dunphy. I don’t think so, Electra.’ Uninvited, a picture of Dunphy suddenly appears in my head. Dunphy smiling, in a T-shirt.
‘You can’t make it?’
‘No, I can’t.’ He’s still there. I rub my brow with my right hand.
‘Oh.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be great, but, you know…’
‘Oh,’ she says again. ‘I guess I’ll have to rework the seating plan.’
‘I guess you will. And now, if you don’t mind… What seating plan? I thought it was a drinks party. For 600.’
I walk over to the table lopsidedly and fish around for the invite. Here it is: it says ‘champagne, canapés’.
‘It’s drinks,’ I say. Why are these people always so dim? ‘It says “champagne, canapés”. So there’s no need to make me feel guilty over seating plans. And now, Electra, I’ve really got to go.’
‘I’m not talking about the drinks,’ says Electra, sounding surly as well as
thin. ‘There’s a little dinner afterwards, at the Groucho Club. The show at 7, the party at 9 and dinner at midnight.’
I am parked in front of the kitchen mirror. I’ve definitely got cheekbones. It’s a miracle! I wonder if they’ll last. How pathetic of me to get excited about cheekbones, though. Especially when I’ve got horrible deformed pubic hair.
‘You’ve made a mistake,’ I say flatly. ‘I am not invited to dinner. I really, really have to get on with my day now, so if you don’t mind…’
‘Well, you’re on my list,’ says Electra, sounding non-plussed. ‘You’re on my dinner list. What am I supposed to do now?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s just a mistake.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘It must be.’ Mustn’t it? Why would he want me to come to dinner? And why would I want to go? I rub my face again and exhale loudly. ‘Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake, Electra?’
‘I’m certain. I’ve got the list.’
‘How many people at dinner?’
‘Twenty.’
‘And I’m on the list?’
‘Yes,’ says Electra. ‘I keep telling you.’
‘Well… Don’t cross me off yet then,’ I say very quickly, not quite understanding what I am saying, or why. ‘I’ll try and come.’
‘Cool,’ says Electra. ‘See you at the party.’
My heart is pounding and I feel very hot.
‘Electra?’ I say, despite myself.
‘Hmm?’
‘Is, um, Sam Dunphy gay?’
There is a silence. I fill it. ‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘Forget I asked. Please.’
‘Gay?’ splutters Electra. ‘Gay? No, Clara. No. He is not gay.’ She snorts with laughter. ‘Why do you…’
‘See you,’ I say, and hang up.
There’s only one possibility here, I think to myself, and I am not even going to entertain it. I am not even going to entertain it.
I hate to bang on about it, but there is definite bone-action going on about my face. I call Kate, on the spur of the moment, to book an appointment with her facialist – who, fortuitously, has a cancellation on Friday morning. Kate is full of the joys of spring, and full of the joys of Max. Kate is happy (‘Darling, isn’t life bliss?’). For some reason, this slightly throws me.