Suzy shakes her head. “Art is a feminist.”
I look at Art. “Thank you.” My mouth is saying it on behalf of all of womankind. My eyes are saying it on behalf of My Disbelieving A-hole. “You’ve started laughing with just the bottom half of your jaw,” I say to him. “Like a ventriloquist’s dummy.”
“You’re just being vindictive now,” Art says. I look in his eyes. There is nothing of him in there as he says this. He is Art imitating Life.
“And please stop leaving comments on my posts,” says Suzy. “It’s inappropriate.”
I punch the air and scream: “I KNEW YOU FUCKING KNEW ME!” I look at Art. “VOILÀ!” Then I regret speaking a French word because of Suzy’s perfect French.
“I think I wouldn’t mind so much if you weren’t so … sales-y,” she says.
“Sales-y?”
“You are quite sales-y, yes.”
“This from the woman who has her name on a black scented candle from Bergamot Brothers, the UK’s foremost maker of scented candles. ‘The Suzy.’ I even fucking bought one. It’s going in the bin now. Why didn’t you just mute me? Or did you want me to know?”
“It felt inappropriate to continue following you.”
I stare at her and try to split her with my compound eyes. The water in my inner bowl has evaporated into a desert whirring with locusts.
My mother says, “My daughter and I are leaving now.”
She leads me by the arm down the street. I still have things to say, but I can’t formulate them properly so I allow myself to be led.
“You always get the chance to say everything you want to someone,” my mother says. “It’s okay. There’s no hurry. Let’s get home.”
“Okay,” I say quietly.
Art follows us. My mother hails a cab.
“It was always your show, Art,” I say, gesturing to the building. “I thought it was mine for a while, but now I see I was just opening for you.”
A cab stops. My mother opens the door.
Art puts his hand in his pocket and grimly hands the cabdriver a twenty-pound note through the open window. He is a Decent Man doing the Decent Thing.
“Thank you, Art,” my mother says, pushing me into the cab.
“No, no thank you.” I throw his money out of the window. “Stop trying to be Charlie Fucking Big Potatoes.”
“I am not trying to be Charlie Fucking Big Potatoes!”
“Drive on!” I say to the driver. “Drive on, driver, please!”
Art pats the side of the taxi.
“Go pat something else, you patronizing bastard!”
The cab drives off.
“No more wine for you,” my mother says. “Ever.”
“You can fuck off as well.”
“It’s sixty quid if she soils the vehicle,” says the driver.
“I am not going to soil the vehicle! I love the vehicle.”
I put my head on the deliciously cool window. It is so nice and cold and glaaarrrgggggggymmmmmmm. We drive over the Thames, where the river is swirling and churning. The city passes in bursts of gray and yellow.
“I don’t believe them,” my mother says. “This is a rushed, desperate affair. It’s all wrong. All very wrong.”
I raise my head, which is hard. “How can he be playing happy families with her? Layers of duplicity!”
My mother sighs. “Well, darling, maybe he just hadn’t met the rich girl.” I look at her, hurt. She continues: “I mean, right girl.”
She laughs—and I laugh. Despite myself, and everything.
* * *
Back at the house I go up and wash my face and then I change into my pajamas and get into bed.
My mother follows me up silently, still with her coat on. “What are you doing?” she says.
“This is an act of hibernation.”
“It’s barely November.”
“It’s going to be a long, cold winter.”
“You’re just drunk, darling. I’ll make you a melba toast.”
She goes downstairs to the kitchen. I put on a nature documentary and watch it until I fall asleep.
OUTGROWN
Art was antsy in the waiting room at Whipps Cross. He kept pacing and scratching and going outside. After half an hour or so, he asked me if he could leave and get back to his studio because he had a big job on for an advertising agency, which I already knew. There was no point the two of us staying, was there? I could see the logic in that. The proud part of me hustled forward inside and I heard myself say, “Okay.” Because—also—(and I know I’m letting myself off the hook here, as well as being philosophical) how can you allow yourself to need someone who refuses to be needed? Don’t you just know that they are not right for you, that they don’t love you enough? The answer is in the question, is it not? They do not love you enough. If you make them stay, under duress, it changes the nature of any possible fulfillment. Best to turn off the need. Best to let the need do what it will, inside.
So he left, and I watched him go—through the revolving door, out into the sunshine. I think my heart broke in that moment. It snapped clean in two, like a cookie; a brittle, little, domestic thing.
The room where I had the blood test was windowless, with gray walls. There was a single small bed with gray sheets and a plastic bucket in the corner. The heavy door swung shut with a clank. They took the blood out of my arm, which was funny because so much of it was falling out of me anyway. They took me for a scan.
“There’s nothing there,” the sonographer said. “There’s nothing there.”
Back out in the waiting room, I sat far apart from anyone else. There were pregnant people in there. It didn’t seem right, to put my particular curse amongst them.
Do you want to know the punch line?
As I was sitting there, bleeding, failed, confused, sad, mad as fuck, I glanced up and saw a man I’d got off with once on a drunken night out in Camden. He was sitting opposite with his very pregnant girlfriend. He was holding her hand. He recognized me and I couldn’t bear it, so do you know what I did? I pretended not to be me when he said hi. (This is a woman in her midthirties, remember. Pretending not to be herself. In that moment, I really think I wasn’t.) He probably thought I was crazy. And, in that moment, I suppose I was. I pulled out my phone and I started scrolling. I didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. I composed an e-mail so as to compose myself.
* * *
When I got back from the hospital, I went down to Art’s studio in the basement. I put down my carrier bag. It was full of all the banned cheeses: Brie, blue. I’d bought pâté. Salami. All the fuck-yous to the Unborn.
“Hey,” he said softly, turning round from his computer and coming over to me. He hugged me like I was made of glass. “Are you okay? What did they say?”
“Bizarrely, they said there was so little of the hormone in me it was as though I’d never been pregnant. So I don’t know whether it hadn’t grown much or what.”
His computer switched to sleep mode. Photos of me in different locations appeared in a slow montage. Me feeding a horse. Me eating an ice cream. Me pretending to like the sea. Smiling, always smiling. Smiling on demand. Being fine and nice about it all.
“Can I get you anything? Come on, come upstairs.”
He put me on the sofa, under a blanket.
“I’m still bleeding quite a lot.”
“Let me make you some tea and toast.”
While he was in the kitchen I pulled off a big hunk of Brie and rammed it down my throat.
He came back in and put the tea and toast down.
I said, “Thank you.”
He said, “Listen, babes, I’ve been thinking.”
I looked at him.
He said: “I’m not ready to do this. Start a family. I’m not sure it’s for me.”
I thought of the condoms in his leather toiletry bag, batched in bright foil squares, like confectionery. The way I’d obsessed over them in the early days. Resisted counting them each time he visite
d. We were heading there again. Beating a retreat. To distances. To speculation. To protection.
“Okay,” I said. “So why did you do this with me for so long? Were you just playing along?”
“No,” he said—and then, seeing that was unsatisfactory, added, “My therapist understands. It’s a psychological thing. I also need a lot of artistic headspace.”
Art’s therapist was a piece of work. They bought each other gifts. He had Tony Soprano aspirations. She loved treating a famous photographer. It was all very bad practice. I imagined her like Sharon Stone, sitting waiting for him in a desk chair, legs open, the dark recess of her skirt holding crotchless panties. Early on, he told me that she had advised him to see an older woman, that I was too young for him (I was two years older than him). She, on the other hand, was conveniently a whole ten years older. “Your therapist has an agenda.”
He didn’t say anything. He walked across the room and punched the door. He punched it so hard he made a hole (a frayed, clumsy hole that stayed there for weeks while we both skirted the issue of discussing its repair—and, by proxy, it). We both looked at the hole. It was good to have something real to look at.
“Oh God,” he said. “Jesus!”
He put his head in his hands and stood there for at least five minutes. I stared at him, and as the time passed I started to think, incongruously, how he looked like a child playing hide-and-seek.
DRAFTS
Subject: Notes from Purgatory
Dear Man I Once Snogged,
I am sorry I am ignoring you while you sit opposite me here in this waiting room between worlds—for you, heaven; for me, hell. It has nothing to do with the fact that you were a dreadful kisser. It is just that I am in a bad place right now and can’t handle social interaction of that sort. I hope you have been a good, honest, consistent person since we last facially connected. I hope you have not subjected your nearest and dearest to sea changes of heart. I marvel at men, I really do. The liberty! ENJOY. It’ll hit you like a ton of bricks at sixty-five and then won’t we all hear about it. I hope you have a happy life with your partner and child—who I hope will be a boy-child, so as to have a better chance in this whole fucking shitshow.
Kind regards,
Jenny McLaine BA Hons.
ART SAID
“Are you sure? Like, sure it was actually a man that you knew in there?”
“Yes. Don’t say it like that.”
“You do tend to be a bit paranoid about these things.”
“What things?”
“Knowing people you don’t. Not knowing people you do.”
He was right too. Sometimes I walk down the street and feel like I know everyone; love everyone. Other days, bad days, I can walk right past someone I know.
BODIES OF WORK
The next morning there is an uneaten melba toast on the floor next to the bed, along with the unpuked-in washing-up bowl. It is very much a tableau of self-possession and restraint. I decide I am not going to get up today, or maybe even ever again. I put my nose into my armpit and inhale the sweat-scent feedback loop. I text Nicolette.
I can no longer deny the malaise
Don’t talk to me about malaise—this morning after my shower I couldn’t even be bothered to moisturize my second leg
I knew you’d understand
I almost reported a man for having a wank in the park and then I got closer and realized he was sanding a chair leg
Clapton, man
Clapton. What’s up?
My soul has been pureed in an unspeakable act of betrayal
Did someone regram you without a credit?
No, Art’s new girlfriend has a secret child
Like Mick Jagger???
Sort of
Dude. That burns
I am in bed and I am staying here until further notice. It is the only respectable thing to do
I am coming round
You don’t have to
I have ordered a cab
Will you bring alcohol and Camel Lights
Yes. Will bring a nice bottle of white I’ve got in
What country is it from?
Dunno. France mebs
I can’t drink it
Why?
Nothing French
Is this a Brexit thing?
No
You drank French wine the other night
I AM NOT DRINKING FRENCH SHIT GODDAMNIT
Okay I’ll get some fucking Chilean then!
I am going to smoke in bed I am that unmaternal
I am going to swing by the Scottish restaurant, would you like any supplies?
Filet-O-Fish
Do they still do those
Yes
How many?
Three. One for each eye
My mother comes in. “The Kraken wakes!” She sits down on the bed. “Are you getting up today?”
“Negative. I am exploring my fertile void.”
“Sounds messy. Will I need to change the sheets?”
“A therapist once told me about it. It’s about the useful nothingness you have to go through occasionally in order to prepare for the next thing. It’s about stopping to reassess.”
“It might be more useful if you took a break from your phone.”
“Don’t turn off my life support! I know you would, given half the chance!”
“Ach. Do you want a cup of hot chocolate?”
“Maybe later. Nicolette is coming over. She’s swinging by the Scottish restaurant, if you want anything.”
“What is the Scottish restaurant?”
I look at her.
“Do you mean McDonald’s?”
“DO NOT SAY ITS NAME!”
“I’ve had my smoothie and some melba toast. It’s eleven a.m.”
“If you wanted something to do,” I say, “you could have a whip-round on the cleaning front downstairs. That would be so helpful.”
She goes downstairs. I hear her sing a line of Madonna, and I think maybe this time it isn’t to dispel the spirits but more to dispel her own anxiety. Imagine that. I hear the hoover start up. Then the hoover stops and I hear her walking to the front door and opening it.
“Hello!” says Nicolette’s voice. “I’m Jenny’s friend Nicolette. It’s Carmen, isn’t it? We’ve never met but I’ve heard a world about you. I’ve come to get in bed.”
“Let me guess,” says my mother. “Leo.”
“Yes! Oh my God!”
“Are you spiritual?”
“I am VERY spiritual. I love a ghost. I am always ghost-hunting.”
“GET UP HERE, NICOLETTE.”
KELLY SAID
“So he’s been lying all this time? You’ve been trying, like actually trying. You could have got actually pregnant!”
“Yeah …”
I couldn’t say it. I just … couldn’t tell her.
I said: “He says he’s talked it all through with his therapist and he’s sure.”
“No way is he. For starters, having kids is the ultimate vanity project. And Art is very vain. He will have kids, for sure.”
“Well, he says he won’t have them with me. He has decided not to sire my young.”
“Then you’ve got to leave him,” Kelly said, deadly serious. “He’ll string you along until you’re fifty and then he’ll leave you for a thirty-year-old and have twins. You have to trust me on this.”
She poured two glasses of wine and I topped them up to the brim.
“Whoa,” she said. “Someone’s on a mission.”
I think probably part of me wanted to beat my body up—because that’s how it has to be sometimes, for us to truly own ourselves, doesn’t it? I didn’t have time to go through the maybe-if-you-loved-yourself-more-you-could-forgive-your-body rationale. I was on the fucking minutes. By 9 p.m. we’d got to the second bottle of wine, the second pack of fags, and the eighth circle of Truthtalk.
“Do you think I’m maternal?” I said to Kelly.
Her brow buckled. “Huh?”<
br />
“Don’t feel pressured to answer.”
“Not really,” she added, “when I think about it.”
“Why not?”
“You like to do your own thing.”
Now I frowned. “It’s strange, isn’t it. The either/or.”
“I thought you judged me when you found out I became a mum so young.”
“What? How?”
“If you knew me without Sonny—not that that would be possible, but try to imagine it. If we’d just met in a bar, say, would you think I was maternal?”
“Yes. I think so. You’re very authoritative.”
She laughed. “What?”
“And organized.”
“Oh, stop. I feel too sexy.”
“And you are very caring. You care about me. I feel that.”
We were silent for a moment. I thought about the first time she’d left me alone with Sonny and I worried about child abuse, the way I always do when I’m left alone with strange children. Not because I have any desire to do it, but because people might think I do, or I might do something inadvertently.
Kelly said: “I thought you thought I was a dumbo.”
“I didn’t think that, Kelly. At all.”
We sank another glass.
“Well,” she said. “I thought so.”
“What made you think that?”
“You referred to me as your ‘mum-friend’ in a column one time, maybe even a few times.”
I opened my mouth to speak. From the corner of the room, Siri said:
“Sorry, I couldn’t find any matching restaurants.”
I cracked up. So did Kelly. We both looked at her phone. “I think what this tells us,” she said, “is that there’s just no way to win.”
FAKE NEWS
I’d done it once with Art. Toward the end-end. Sent him a shopping list and put “chicken breaths” instead of “breasts” and considered changing it but then left it there because I thought we could both use the laugh.
GOOGLE ME
Nicolette stamps up the stairs and into my room. She’s wearing a sweatshirt that says KILL ALL PODCASTS on it in arching capitals, like the logo of a university.
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