Lolly came with me to the antenatal classes. I nominated her my birth partner. She turned squeamish at the explanation of childbirth, which I thought a bit thick, considering all the traffic she’d seen in the other direction. The men who turned up with their partners were a mixed bunch. There was a vegan couple who looked as healthy as Dad except they looked as if they’d knitted their own clothes with egg noodles. There was a rich-looking couple in their mid-twenties who both looked very, very clean. He looked like an oversize preppy American schoolboy and I’d have given hard cash to see his face when the fun really started. There were two normal guys, Tom and Duncan, who turned up with their partners and obviously found the whole thing embarrassing, especially being lumped with the vegans. They linked up and stood outside, smoking and farting and talking about football as a relief from the Zen music and aromatherapy birth plans. I know this because Lolly went outside to join them and tell them we weren’t lesbians. I looked up from the half-hearted pummelling she was giving in back rub classes, to catch her trying to give Duncan the glad eye in the mirror. Her reasoning was straightforward – the nearer the time the more grateful he’d be for a bit on the side. ‘Have some morals,’ I said. ‘Put yourself in her position. She’s got enough to contend with without finding her man’s playing away from home.’
But she wasn’t capable of thinking herself into someone else’s position, and it didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t respond. Either he was frightened or had more morals than she gave him credit for. Personally I think he was one of those men who refused to see the attraction in a fat orange Amazon. Someone with taste. For whatever reason he made it clear that she left him cold, and the more he ignored her the more she wanted him.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone faithful like that? Not like Nick and all those other bastards. Someone you could settle down with.’
‘So why are you trying to sabotage his marriage when it looks as if that’s what he’s already got? Are you jealous?’
‘Of that boiler? Have you seen her?’
‘And if you had him at her expense then he wouldn’t be the kind of person you’re pretending to look for. You’d lose interest in him quicker than Nick did me.’
‘I suppose.’
My time came closer. My belly was like a drum. When I got tired it was like turning the light out. I peed in spoonfuls. Lolly said that if your waters break in Marks and Spencers you get a fifty pound voucher, or a hamper, or something. I told her it wasn’t enough of an incentive to hang around and get fallen arches. We were watching Emmerdale when my waters did break. I already had the bag packed and told Lolly to call a taxi. She turned all fingers and thumbs and I had to take the phone from her.
‘This is the easy bit. I’m going to need you to hold it together a bit better than this. Check the lift’s not broken and hold it on the landing.’
They wouldn’t let her stay overnight with me but promised to call the instant things started happening. For some mysterious reason, having closed off her mind to all the details, she now thought the whole thing couldn’t happen without her. I didn’t make any bones about it and told them I wanted every drug going. Rumour had it Mrs Vegan had opted for a home birth. I could imagine her, with the first mediaeval pain, realising that aromatherapy and her hand-knitted husband weren’t going to be of much use when her vagina looks like a python eating a sheep – in reverse.
They called Lolly in the wee small hours. I knew from her instant arrival that she’d been smoking in the car park, chatting up the A & E porters. I’d been so uncomfortable I’d been persuaded to have a bath. I was sitting in the water like a convulsing egg, contractions coming thick and fast, when Lolly burst in brandishing her phone like a police badge.
‘They said it’s happening.’ She looked disappointed at the lack of drama.
‘No they didn’t. They told you to come in. I was there when they called. Turn off your phone.’
I lumbered back in my paper dressing gown. There was some complication that delayed the pain intervention and I heard myself making inhuman noises, until I was swept up by a blissful wave. I looked down, between my thighs, and saw Lolly staring, wearing a look of paralysed horror. The doctor arrived, all business, brushes her aside and draws an imaginary equator across my stomach. ‘I work from here down,’ he said to her, ‘you stay up north.’ He’s young, assertive, reasonable looking and he must earn a mint.
‘We’re not lesbians you know. I’m just her birthing partner.’
He completely ignores her. I have no idea how much time passes. I’m soaked in sweat and the paper gown is stuck in patches. The doctor says something I don’t hear and leaves.
‘We’re going for a ventuse delivery,’ the midwife explains.
‘Where’s he gone?’ Lolly shouts, beating me to it. There’s an edge of panic in her voice that starts my heart hammering.
‘To get his boots on – for traction.’
He reappeared between my legs like he’d sprung up out a trapdoor. A whole new cast has appeared with him. Suddenly, from it being just me, Lolly, the doctor and the midwife, there are now two female paediatricians wheeling a machine and someone else too – I’ve no idea who. Aside from the paediatricians they’re all wearing different coloured uniforms. It’s like panto. Lolly’s peeking south and what comes after I get from hysterical description that grew with each telling.
Evidently I’ve some kind of tarpaulin stretching from my arse to the floor. The doctor returns with what looked like a sink-plunger, which he pushes into me followed by, according to Lolly’s account, two feet of handle. I understand the need for the boots when he begins a tug of war with my organs. A small head appears between my legs. The doctor detaches the sucker. Lolly told me the next bit. I made her take out the embroidery. The little face is looking down the slipway of the tarpaulin. The eyes open and eerily look at the new world. One of the paediatricians intervenes and sticks a tiny tube up the new nostrils and mouth to suck out all the stuff. I’m panting and pushing. The doctor gets some kind of grip and, also according to Lolly, the baby comes out like an artillery shell, smeared in blue grease and without making a sound. The doctor gives the baby to the two paediatricians who take it over to the machine, shielding the action with their backs. I don’t remember crying for my baby but Lolly said I was howling, shouting and sobbing like an accordion that’s fallen down a flight of stairs.
They turn back and hand the blue bundle to me, tell me I have a beautiful baby girl. The exhaustion vanishes. The universe contracts to this little face no bigger than the ‘O’ I can form joining my forefinger and thumb. They’ve been cosmetic in their use of the blanket. When it slides back I can see the sucker ring on the top of her head, like a monk’s bald spot. Lolly said the doctor was still at it, elbow deep, like a vet in a safari park. He hands a large bloody pancake to the midwife. He apologises to me for having had to do an episiotomy. I’m so happy and pain-free I wave this away. Having no idea what her perineum is called, Lolly takes a look. I’m not convinced that what followed was spontaneous because she manages to miss the tarpaulin and any sharp edges and fall on top of him.
* * *
It’s strange, all kinds of skills are monitored and tested. You need a licence to drive a car. I’m sure you have to have some kind of certificate to teach swimming. You’re not a real plumber unless you’re registered with some body or other that can vouch for you. But you don’t need to pass any kind of test to be a parent. Look at mine.
No one really teaches you anything about having a child. It’s not negligence, it’s just that nothing really prepares you. You can read about the tiredness and the stretch marks and the soreness, but they’re all surface things. One night, when Millie wouldn’t sleep or feed and cried right through for seven non-stop hours, Lolly said you could understand how parents could become child-beaters, couldn’t you? And I said no – you couldn’t. Don’t get me wrong – much of looking after a baby is sheer boredom. There were times I craved adult conversation so
much I tried to drag out the midnight exchange at the corner shop, making idle chit-chat through the bars as he checked the camera to make sure I wasn’t casing the place, before sliding across the Sudocrem. And it’s not as if you get a lot back at first – all you are is a mobile feeding station. And no one can seriously say they like changing nappies. If you’re half-way normal you can admit that you find your own kid’s shit less objectionable than you thought you were going to, but any other kid’s as revolting as you imagined. And I can’t stand those professional mothers, not mothers with professions but those ones who can’t wait till they’re outside to breast feed, brandishing nipples like periscopes, changing their kids’ nappies on park benches, who make a virtue of letting themselves go because it’s wholesome to look like a sow with ten kids, breasts like tubers, sitting smiling in a hurricane of noise and snotters.
What none of those books or classes tells you, because they can’t tell you, is that if you’re any kind of a parent at all you not only love your child, you fall in love with her. Big things fit into small things. I gushed with more love than I thought the universe could hold and she just drank it all up. I’ve never forgiven Mum because I never really tried to understand her. What kid does? But all I have to do is to stare at Millie for five seconds and her leaving us is even less understandable. When I told Lolly I couldn’t understand child-beating I was deadly serious. Dad’s as good a grandfather as someone of his habits can be, better than he was a father. But he didn’t hesitate to raise his hand to me when I was a kid. I don’t know anyone treated differently. Maybe it was a generational thing. But there’s being hit, and there’s being hit. Not all beaten kids grow up to be child-beaters. No one’s ever hitting Millie.
I wouldn’t say life was easy, but I didn’t have it as hard as most of the single mothers round here. I was a veteran for a start. Seventeen is the average. There are thirty-year-old grandmothers in this block, who dress the same way as their daughters. And I didn’t try and do the same thing as some of the seventeen-year-olds, trying to lead exactly the same life as a year ago except with a kid in tow. I’d been on the receiving end of that arrangement. Dad asked me what I needed his cronies to steal. At first he turned up every second night with the shakes, because he’d spent the day drying out expecting to see her. I let him hold her for about a minute at a time, Lolly and me either side, propping him up like human scaffolding, my hands inches from Millie. The strain of staying off the sauce every other day was telling on both of us. I told him to drink more and come round less. The next week he looked radiant, swaying over her cot with this smile on his face I don’t ever remember being directed at me. The only thing I really minded was his new habit of bursting into tears at the sight of her, setting Millie off.
I breast-fed for nine months and stayed with her practically every minute of that time. Lolly was a star. She kept offering me nights out. I told her our ideas of a good night out were different. I said my idea of a night out had nothing to do with men. She lost interest in the detail at that point and offered her services as a baby sitter. I accepted. I was expressing milk when she arrived. I was excited about the prospect of getting dressed up, even though it was only a girls’ night. Lolly squirted some of the milk in her mouth.
‘Have you tasted this stuff? It’s disgusting.’
Then we had the five minute talk, starting with my mobile number, written headline-size beside the phone, moving on to Millie’s sleeping routine, and household hazards and how to avoid them. She was wearing a scarf she pretended to hang herself with, sticking out her tongue and rolling her eyes. Millie was asleep by the time I left. Standing waiting for the lift I heard the creak as Lolly prised the letter box open.
‘Put the bleach down!’
I refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing me smile. I was meeting Moira and Ruth. They’d been at school with Lolly and me, and sometimes we’d make up a foursome till other things got in the way. Of the two, Moira is the one everyone remembers, which is funny because she’s half the size. She never exercises and keeps her shape by starving herself. She tans herself to light coffee-coloured, to stand out against all the pale people – like Ruth. Most people describe Ruth by all the things that she isn’t.
Moira can’t imagine life without a man, but not the way Lolly does. They both use men for different reasons. They’re polar opposites. Moira’s spent her life plotting how to get out of Bridgeton, but none of it involves self-improvement, or sacrifice on her part. She’s always had boyfriends, as far as I know she’s been faithful as long as it’s lasted, she’s always chucked them and moved on, without ever breaking her stride or looking back, and she’s always had the next one lined up. I don’t know if there was ever an overlap but you wouldn’t get a chink of light between. She’s demanded a higher spec at each move, like some social-climbing sales rep choosing a car. I think of her various boyfriends as relay horses. She’s ridden a dozen nags with her eyes on a thoroughbred – a mason with a good trade, who can install her in a house with a patio. She gets her status, even in her own eyes, from the boyfriend she’s with at the time. And she obviously thinks a woman without a man, like me or Lolly, since Lolly’s men are accessories, has no status at all.
Ruth’s quiet. I’d call her homely. Lolly says that in Ruth’s case ‘homely’ means she’s the type of girl most boys only want to fuck at home so they don’t have to meet their friends with her. Lolly says that’s the way men think. Lolly says that if a man ever asks you to describe a friend, and you say she’s got a lovely personality, then you might as well say she’s a farmyard animal for all the chance the poor girl’s got. Lolly says men are merciless.
Ruth was always on the edge of things, even in the playground. When there were sixteen simultaneous games played in the same space and it meant there wasn’t a spare square inch, she always seemed to find herself a quiet bit, watching hopscotch. She’s chronically shy. She never skipped ropes because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, while Lolly, although she hated it, skipped just to make her skirt fly up and give the boys a chance to see her knickers. Ruth was always going to be one of those picked last choosing netball sides. Choosing any sides. Everyone recognizes the type, especially themselves. She’s a bit overweight. We’re back to Lolly categories here, not erotic fat but sad fat. Lolly says Ruth has fat in the wrong bits. Lolly says flat chest and a big bum is the double dunt – you’re fucked both ways. When I think back it was never really a foursome, it was me and Lolly and Moira with Ruth two paces behind. You often find good-looking girls have plain girls in tow. Moria has Ruth. Moira uses Ruth. Ruth was the messenger. ‘My pal fancies your pal...’ stammered out in the playground, while she’s looking at the pavement chalk and dying a death, because she likes the boyfriend’s friend she’s been asked to talk to, and as far as he’s concerned Ruth’s just a piece of talking furniture as he scans the bodies looking for Moira, wishing he was the one that Moira fancies. Women are merciless.
‘Where’s Lolly?’ Moira asks. She never drinks locally and insists on meeting in a wine bar in town. They have wine bars near where we both live. They’re bars that also sell wine, one kind that comes out a barrel and arrives in half-pint tumblers, and leaves people like Dad, with cast-iron livers, slumped across the table by noon. But that’s not what Moira has in mind. She has the kind of place we’re now sitting where people in those half-circle kid-on leather sofas actually pay money to drink foreign water. It’s just after seven. The guys in suits have that Friday attitude. They’re on to their second or third and are loosening ties. The music is cranking up and it’s getting to the stage where you have trouble hearing the other person, unless you look at their lips at the same time.
‘Looking after Millie.’
But she doesn’t hear because she isn’t interested. She’s looking round and I can practically hear the calculation, like a Geiger counter as she catches the flash of an expensive watch, and it occurs to her that a mason and a porch might be selling herself short.
Four New Words for Love Page 4