by Cathy Kelly
Both Leonie and Emma had been gratifyingly eager to castrate Harry if they ever slapped eyes on him, and Hannah found herself thinking how nice it was to have female friends to confide in again. She’d been too hurt by Harry to seek out all the female friends she’d let go by the wayside when she fell for him first. It was comforting now to have a bit of sisterly outrage and support.
‘I doubt I’ll ever trust a man ever again,’ she admitted slowly. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted Harry in the first place. I should have known.’
‘How could you?’ Emma asked. ‘You’re not a mind-reader.’
‘It’s nothing to do with mind-reading. It’s to do with men. They can’t be trusted, full stop,’ Hannah insisted. ‘Well, I can’t trust the men I meet, anyway. Your Pete sounds lovely, but I think some of us just aren’t cut out for relationships. They mess you up. Some women are better off on their own and that’s the sort of woman I am. I can take care of myself and I don’t need anyone else. That’s my plan.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ Leonie argued. ‘You’re beautiful, Hannah, you could have any man you want. You simply ended up with a guy who was weak and left you. That’s no reason to give up on men in general. You have to dust yourself off when it all goes wrong and start again.’
By dessert – fruit for all of them – they’d moved on to their personal theories on how to get over a man. Emma hadn’t had many boyfriends before Pete, so she pointed out that she wasn’t much of an expert. ‘I met Pete when I was twenty-five and I’d only been out with three men before that. Dad ran the last one off the premises when he arrived smoking a roll-up cigarette. Said he didn’t want me corrupted with drugs.’
They all laughed at that.
Leonie admitted that Ray had been her first real boy friend and that their split had been mutual, more or less, so she hadn’t needed to dust herself off. What Leonie couldn’t understand was how Hannah had decided to simply give up falling in love until she felt strong enough to cope with men on her own terms. They’d heard about the fabulous Jeff and how Hannah had decided that a post-Harry bonk would be good therapy.
‘How can you do that?’ asked Leonie, fascinated.
‘Do what?’ Hannah bit into a piece of watermelon, little squelches of juice slithering down her chin.
‘Decide that you won’t get involved with any guy but just treat him like a friend who happens to be a lover. I mean, what if you met someone gorgeous and you couldn’t help yourself and fell hopelessly in love?’
Leonie wanted to believe that someone gorgeous was always waiting around the corner, that it was a matter of kismet, destiny and the right Daily Mail horoscope when it happened. You’d fall in love, it was inevitable. Hannah wasn’t convinced.
‘Feeling terrible for months after Harry left, that’s how I can do it,’ she said. ‘After the pain I went through, I’m not about to go through it again. If I turn into a heartless cow who uses men, I don’t care. That happy, coupley love thing is not for me. I spent years doing that and where did it get me?’ she demanded. ‘Bloody nowhere. Harry upped and left when it suited him and all I had for ten years of love and affection was a huge spare tyre and a dead-end career. Men are a waste of space, apart from for rumpy-pumpy in the bedroom department.’
Emma broke out laughing at the pair of them. They were a howl. She loved sitting with her feet curled up on the cushioned bench, giggling and talking about men and sex.
She shifted to get more comfortable and felt a familiar ache ripple through her. An ache that turned swiftly from a distant pain into a hard one, gnawing at her insides. Her period. God, no, she shrieked silently. It couldn’t be. She was pregnant, she was sure of it.
Emma stared at the others in dread, hoping they’d developed a similar pain, something to do with the lamb or a dodgy shrimp or anything…It rippled through her again. An unmistakable pain, the sort teenage girls who’d just had their first period could never adequately explain to their non-menstruating friends. Once felt, it was never forgotten.
Her period. There was no baby, Emma realized. There never had been. Probably never would be. Grief hit her in a wave.
She pushed herself away from the table clumsily, dropping her napkin and spilling what was left of her single glass of wine. ‘Must go to the loo,’ she said shakily.
In the dusty toilet with no lock on the door, Emma’s fears were confirmed. She was numb as she looked at the tell-tale droplets of red in the toilet bowl. Using a wad of loo roll as a make-shift sanitary towel, she walked slowly back to the table, feeling lifeless and drained.
One look at Emma’s white face and Leonie and Hannah knew something was wrong.
‘Are you sick?’ Hannah asked in concern.
‘Was it something you’ve eaten?’ said Leonie.
Emma shook her head dazedly.
‘It’s my period,’ she said simply. ‘I thought I was pregnant, I was sure I was and now…’ her voice broke as she started to cry, ‘I’m not.’
She sank into her seat beside Leonie, who immediately flung an arm round her. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ Leonie crooned in the same soft voice she used when the children were sick or upset.
As Emma cried, great heaving sobs that shook her entire fragile body, Leonie was shocked at how thin she was under her T-shirt: not elegantly slim, the way Leonie longed to be. But bony, almost skeletally thin, her ribs sticking out like rack of lamb.
‘You poor darling. I know it’s awful, but you’re so young, you’ve years ahead of you, Emma,’ Leonie soothed, hoping it was the right thing to say. ‘Lots of couples take months to conceive.’
‘But we’ve been trying for three years,’ Emma said between giant hiccuping sobs. ‘Three years and nothing. I know it’s me and I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t have a baby. What’s wrong with me? Why am I different? You have children, why can’t I?’
Leonie and Hannah’s eyes met over the table. There was nothing they could say. They’d both read of women tortured by their inability to have a child: neither of them had ever met anyone in that appalling position. Or, if they had, the women in question had obviously kept it a secret. Leonie dredged her memory for information on infertility. Hadn’t she read something about couples who finally had babies when they stopped trying so frantically and relaxed? And Emma being so thin couldn’t help. The poor girl was literally wasting away with nerves and strain: she didn’t have a hope of getting pregnant while she was like that.
‘The stress of wanting a baby so badly may be affecting you,’ Leonie said finally. ‘You know, some people make themselves ill because they want it so much and then, once they take a step backwards, they get pregnant.’ It sounded so lame the way she’d said it, like telling a fairy story about Santa Claus to a knowing and deeply suspicious ten-year-old.
‘Why didn’t I get pregnant when we were first married?’ sobbed Emma. ‘We weren’t really trying then. Or before we got married. Pete was always terrified the condom would burst and I’d get pregnant. He said my father would kill him. Maybe we’re being punished for something, sex before marriage or…I don’t know.’ She looked at them both wildly, her face pink and streaked with tears. ‘What is it? I’m not really religious, but I’d pray for hours every day if I thought it’d work.’
‘Look at me,’ Hannah urged. ‘You’re not being punished for anything, Emma. Don’t be so daft. I’m five years older than you and I haven’t even met the man I want to have kids with, so you’re doing miles better than I am. If you work on the everything-that-goes-wrong-in-your-life-is-a-punishment theory, I must have done something terribly wrong to get landed with Harry and then get dumped. Now I don’t have even one prospective father of my unborn children on the horizon.’ She didn’t add that children were the last thing on her mind, prospective father or no prospective father.
Emma’s sobs subsided a little.
‘Maybe you could investigate what’s wrong,’ Leonie suggested. ‘Even if there’s a problem, doctors can do incredible things nowadays if y
ou’re infertile. Look at all the babies born thanks to in vitro fertilization.’
Emma shook her head miserably. ‘I couldn’t put Pete through all that. It’s a nightmare, I saw a programme about it on the telly. And…’ she wiped her eyes in despair, ‘he doesn’t know how I feel, not really. He loves kids, he doesn’t understand that if you can’t have one after three years, you’ve no hope. I can’t tell him that.’
The others looked at her in alarm.
‘You haven’t told Pete any of this?’ Hannah asked gently.
‘He knows I want a baby, but I couldn’t really tell him how desperately I want one.’
‘Why not?’ Leonie asked in disbelief. ‘Surely you have to share this with him – he loves you, after all.’
Emma shrugged her thin shoulders helplessly: ‘I keep thinking that if I don’t say anything, the problem will be in my imagination and I might still get pregnant. If we do something about it, I know it’ll be my fault and they’ll tell me I can never have a baby…I just know it.’ Her eyes glazed over, her mind off in some faraway place.
‘Ladies, we’re going. The bus is here.’ Flora’s crisp, clear voice startled them and they realized that the other people from the tour were collecting their belongings and wandering out of the restaurant, clutching the inevitable plastic bottles of mineral water.
Hannah waved the waiter over and quickly paid for the wine, shaking off Leonie’s suggestion of going halves. Emma didn’t say a word.
A subdued trio climbed back on the bus, Emma red-eyed and Hannah staring blankly out into the night. What was wrong with her, she wondered. Why didn’t she want children with the same blinding intensity as Emma? Was she abnormal? They’d simply never been a part of her life-plan, a plan that revolved around one facet: security. Making her way in life and being secure so that she’d never have to rely on a man again, the way her mother had had to rely on that feckless lump of a father of hers. Those years with Harry had been a fatal blip in her mission, years when she’d gone all cosy, practically married and ambitionless, and had forgotten that when you most needed them, men had a habit of failing you. Well, never again. She’d build her career up and make sure she never needed a man ever again.
Flings with men like Jeff Williams were allowed: simple physical relationships with people who wouldn’t dare to mess with her life. And as for children, they didn’t feature in her plans either. Maybe she was heartless, but she didn’t think she’d make a very good mother. She still pitied Emma though. She knew how destructive it was to long for something you simply couldn’t have. She knew too damn well. Harry’s fault, again. Bugger Harry.
Leonie, Emma and Hannah sat on the upper deck in the late afternoon as the boat sailed up the river towards Luxor. With three weak cocktails in front of them, they watched the golden, glowing disc of the sun set on the left-hand side. The rays turned the mountains to the right a deep, mysterious rose gold. Palm trees clustered around the banks, as if planted by a clever gardener who knew how to achieve that artistically pleasing random effect.
‘I half expect to see elephants charging from out of the trees, like in Africa,’ said Emma dreamily.
‘You are in Africa,’ said Leonie with a grin.
‘Oh no, the sun’s finally affected my brain,’ Emma groaned.
‘Sun my ass, it’s all those Fuzzy Navels you’ve been guzzling,’ Hannah pointed out. ‘I know they’re weak ones, but you’ve had two.’
It was a perfect time of day to sit quietly and watch the valley pass by. The air was cooler than in the early afternoon and as the boat sailed north along the Nile, a refreshing breeze blew against them, rippling Emma’s loose hair like a hairdryer.
It was the second last day of their holiday and they were all eager to take in every single detail of the country, determined not to forget a thing. The next day they were going to be busy the whole time, visiting the Valley of the Kings and Queens in the morning, and Karnak in the afternoon. There wouldn’t be a spare moment in their exhausting itinerary, Flora had warned, advising everyone to take advantage of their afternoon off.
The girls had been only too pleased to comply. Emma’s parents had decided to join in the card game in the inner bar after lunch and Jimmy O’Brien had done his best to get Emma on their team. But she’d refused.
‘I’m going to sunbathe, Dad,’ she’d said firmly.
He looked genuinely surprised. ‘But wouldn’t you rather be with me and your mother?’
Hannah and Leonie finished their coffee and began to leave the lunch table discreetly, not wanting to embarrass Emma by being present for what seemed like an inevitable spat with her father. But Emma took strength in their presence. She couldn’t imagine either Hannah or Leonie being browbeaten by their father.
‘Dad,’ Emma said pleasantly, with an unaccustomed hint of steel in her voice, ‘of course I like being with you and Mum, but we’re not joined at the hip. I want to sunbathe and I don’t want to play cards. Enjoy yourself.’ She got up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, hoping to defuse her words with the gesture. It worked. Her father remained uncharacteristically silent.
Or plain old shocked because Emma had stood up to him, Hannah guessed shrewdly. If she’d been a psychiatrist, she could have written an entire thesis on Jimmy O’Brien. After five days of watching him, she’d decided he was a horrible man with an inflated opinion of himself.
On Wednesday, he’d insulted the pretty young belly dancer who’d arrived on the boat with a band of musicians by telling her loudly that she ‘should put some clothes on and not strut around with everything hanging out like some common floozie’. Only Flora’s immediate interference had prevented an international incident, because the lead musician looked as if he was ready to smash his electric keyboard down on Jimmy’s head.
‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Flora had said soothingly, placating all around her and gently leading Jimmy and Anne-Marie off to another part of the bar where she had to listen to ten minutes of a lecture on ‘Why It Was A Shame These People Weren’t Respectable Catholics’. Emma had been crimson with shame and had barely been able to look the belly dancer in the eye.
Somebody as self-effacing as Emma didn’t stand a chance of standing up to her father, Hannah realized, taking another sip of her cocktail. Her mother was plain odd. Chatty one minute, she’d lapse into silence the next, staring off into the middle distance with a vacant expression on her face.
‘She’s not normally like that,’ Emma had said worriedly one day when Anne-Marie had broken off what she was saying mid-sentence and begun humming. ‘Dad insists the heat is affecting her badly, but she’s normally so alert. I can’t imagine what’s wrong.’
The three women had spent a blissful afternoon sunning themselves on the top deck, reading, chatting, sipping mineral water and listening to the endlessly replayed disco classics record that emanated from the boat’s speakers. Whoever was in charge of the music on the boat had a limited selection and veered between seventies disco hits and songs from old musicals.
‘If I hear “Disco Inferno” one more time, I’ll kill someone,’ Leonie said, finishing her Fuzzy Navel and wondering if she’d have another before dinner.
‘At least they’ve lowered the volume,’ Emma interjected.
‘Only because it was frightening the cows,’ Leonie pointed out.
In places where the river widened, there were isolated grass banks surrounded by water, where cows grazed serenely, none of them appearing concerned that there was no obvious way back to the land.
‘There must be strips of land back to the bank, a pathway we can’t see,’ Hannah said, peering at the latest batch of cows on a marshy island, her eyes peeled for a walkway. ‘They couldn’t swim, surely? The crocodiles would get them.’
‘Sobeks would get them – descendants of the crocodile god, Sobek,’ said Leonie, who loved hearing about the Egyptian gods and studied her guide book every night to learn more about the sights they were going to see the next day.
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��Teacher’s pet,’ teased Hannah, lobbing her drink’s cocktail umbrella over at her.
‘You’re just jealous,’ retorted Leonie good-humouredly, throwing the little umbrella back. It bounced on the table and flew off over the side of the boat. ‘I’m going to get a gold star on my copybook for figuring out the great mystery of the fish sacrifice.’
‘That was a marvellous piece of deduction,’ Hannah admitted.
They’d all laughed heartily the night before when Leonie had come up with a reason why fish were never shown as offerings to the gods on the various temple carvings. Flora, the guide, usually left them with an unanswered question at the end of a tour and told them that she’d explain it the next day.
Yesterday, Flora had answered the question about why Hatshepsut was the only queen buried in the Valley of the Kings and had posed another conundrum – about the fish sacrifices.
Leonie, who was fascinated with Egyptian myths, decided that the answer to the question lay in the story of the god Osiris. Hannah and Emma, sitting in the comfort of Hannah’s cabin sharing a bottle of peach schnapps as a nightcap, laughed so much at her solemn explanation that they nearly fell off the bed.
‘When Osiris’s evil brother, Seth, killed Osiris and dismembered his body, scattering it around Egypt, Osiris’s distraught wife, the goddess Isis, found all the pieces and put them back together,’ Leonie explained enthusiastically. ‘The only part she couldn’t find was his penis, which had been eaten by a fish. So that’s it.’
Hannah crowed with laughter. ‘You’re telling us that fish can’t be used as a sacrifice because a fish ate Osiris’s willy?’
‘Yes, it’s perfectly sensible to me.’
Emma, who had discovered that she really liked peach schnapps, got a fit of the giggles. ‘But we had fish for dinner tonight,’ she managed to say, between laughs. ‘I think I’m going to puke!’