I feel disproportionately crushed. I found a small, possible use and it turned out to be non-existent. I had held on to today as evidence that I was needed, that I still had a role to play.
How did the meeting go? messages Anais. I’d built it up to her too, of course. What sort of idiot buys a new outfit for a barely anything meeting that was too unimportant for the other person even to bother to show up to?
I ignore her message.
24
Harriet
January
I watch her from across the room. I have been here for half an hour, to get settled. I enjoyed some granola and yoghurt, then treated myself to a pastry, crammed with juicy raisins, which I stuffed into my mouth hungrily. I am halfway through a juice, made from beetroot and ginger, and I am reading a broadsheet for the first time in a while. In truth, I’ve had a lovely morning.
Lexie arrives and she’s wearing a navy jumpsuit that I am envious of and I think: Oh Lexie, what a shame that there is no meeting. What a shame that your outfit is more coveted than you are.
And then I see her stand up and head over to a man who shakes his head at her before she heads back to her table. Nice shoes too, Lexie. But oh, the embarrassment. I lick a tiny bit of pastry crumb from my top lip and keep watching as Lexie types on her phone. I see her wait, and wait, and I order coffee. I see her wait longer and I start on the newspaper supplements. As Lexie leaves, looking close to tears – oh honey, no need to overreact – I treat myself to a bellini.
25
Lexie
February
I’m sitting in an airport lounge drinking a (slimline) tonic with lime. Tom and I are going to Sweden and we are having a celebratory start-of-the-holiday G & T, except that I want a baby, and booze and fat are the enemy of embryos, so I am having a G-less & (slimline) T. One shot of a clear liquid, it’s all it is, but somehow it kills the whole point.
‘To the holiday!’ says Tom brightly, but I’ve already checked out. I’m thinking about coming home and getting on with hospital appointments, and this drink, the flight, Sweden, all they are now are obstacles, things to get out of the way before I can get where I want to go.
It is February now and this is our year. This is it. I have been stagnant and now I want to go, go, go like the easyJet plane that just left the runway.
‘Lexie?’
I’m staring. That’s me, that giant orange flying vehicle, taking off after a massive delay but determined to still get to Malaga.
‘Mmm?’
I am snapped out of my shit analogy.
I am irrational now too, so I have fears of air strikes, ash clouds, anything that can keep me away from the hospital. I dream nightmares of battling my way to somewhere and I know that while in the dream it might be the jungle or the supermarket, really it’s the reproductive medicine unit. I need this to move on. We both do. Off his own back, Tom got himself tested before we went away – ‘I thought it might be one thing we could easily tick off,’ he said, shy – and came back with the all clear; good sperm.
The plane soars and I look at Tom.
He looks like he’s about to say something but stops himself.
‘What?’ I say.
I’m on high alert; convinced always that something terrible is about to happen. This charge of anxiety has started to sit in my chest lately, thrusting itself upwards to my throat with the slightest nudge.
He looks shifty.
‘What?’ I demand. I’m horrified and suddenly sure he’s going to confess that he doesn’t love me any more in front of a stag party chanting about a man named Gavin in Wetherspoons in Gatwick Airport.
‘Nothing. I was about to ask if you wanted some crisps,’ he says, looking flustered and like he needs to reassure me quickly. ‘But—’
‘But you suddenly realised I was supposed to be healthy. I’m not allowed crisps on the holiday I didn’t even want to go on,’ I mutter, necking my (slimline) tonic and remembering once again that it’s in a state of ginlessness.
Tom rolls his eyes but stays silent.
But after a few minutes he cracks.
‘I’m going to go and buy a book,’ he says. ‘But when I come back, can we start again and try to make this a nice break? You never know, it might be the last one we have before we’re parents.’
The thought – even in my negative, defeatist brain – makes me smile.
‘In that case …’ I look up at him but he’s nodding already.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’ll get you a gin.’
We order a gin each on the plane too, as it’s a tradition on all flights we go on, and now that we’ve officially imposed the maximum fun, minimum limitation of things related to fertility rule, we’re sticking with it.
We make a toast.
‘To hopefully the last holiday where a flight isn’t a total nightmare,’ Tom says.
‘To hopefully the last holiday where we don’t have to stay sober to be responsible parents,’ I reply, faux-seriously. I squeeze Tom’s hand tight. I have had alcohol in the daytime and I can feel its joy and its novelty in my bloodstream.
‘To hopefully the last holiday where we have time to have ridiculous conversations like this,’ Tom adds, and this time we clink our plastic glasses then drink.
I put my glass down and my head on Tom’s shoulder and I am sleepy, but a seven-hundred-page novel is more relaxing to me than sleep, so I reach down by my side for the Margaret Atwood I’ve slotted between me and the edge of the seat.
‘To definitely the last holiday when you get to read a tome like that on the plane,’ he says.
‘Never, never, never,’ I whisper, smiling sleepily and opening up to my bookmark.
A few hours later, we are in a four-star hotel getting ready to sample Sweden’s nightlife.
Tom is on his laptop finishing something for work and I am lying in a deep bath with bubbles under my chin. Music is playing from my phone on the floor and I’m singing quietly to myself, smiling.
This is what it’s like to be young and carefree. My new jumpsuit is getting another outing. I want a long, expensive cocktail. I want to laugh. I want to be with people who don’t know me.
My phone beeps next to me and I strain over the side of the tub to pick it up, grabbing a discarded sock to dry my hand with first.
It begins innocently and I am doing my ‘Will this hurt me?’ calculation, as I do now at the start of all contact. Even an engagement announcement can do it; I know that you’re just focused on your ring now, but you’ll be on to babies next and that will still probably all happen before I get pregnant.
I think this message can’t punch me but then terribly, it does.
I tried to call you but couldn’t get through … erm, I’m pregnant. I know – weird, right? Still getting my head around it (and it’s very early days and obvs total accident – whoops!) but am happy xxx
I throw my phone on the bathmat and hope that it breaks. I put my head under the water, stay under a second too long and come up gasping.
I feel my heart hammering and I hope that Tom doesn’t come in because I need to get myself together before I speak to him. Because while those texts bruise every time, this one is worse.
Anais, my friend who pretends to vomit when people mention children, has at some point while I have been weeing on ovulation sticks, googling fertility diets and giving up on books because they have mention of pregnancy, had spontaneous sex with her fiancé and got pregnant.
I’m angry with her even though I know it’s illogical, because – the word is stuck in my head, ‘whoops’ – she is complacent about it, breezy, and I am so, so bitter.
My ears echo under the water.
I no longer like myself, I realise, sharply. I used to think I was kind. Caring. I felt joy when I heard other people’s good news.
But now … who would like someone so resentful? Who would like someone who reacts to their friend’s pregnancy in this way? I cannot garner one tiny flicker of joy for her. Nothing. It is all
about me. It is all anger and sadness.
If other people I knew struggled to get pregnant it would probably make them start a support network for childless people. They would become wellness gurus; yoga teachers. They would make the most of their lives without the limitations of children, opening a school for the underprivileged in Sudan or writing a screenplay.
They would be able to sip champagne at baby showers without it feeling as though their insides were being put through a spiraliser.
So what’s wrong, then, with me?
Why am I the one who can’t cope?
It turns out that I am not a good loser and that is a terrible thing to realise about yourself.
For once, I manage to hold it in for a short time, at least. I get out of the bath, pad out to the bedroom with a giant dressing gown trailing around my ankles, dry my hair, and though Tom comments on me being quiet, that is all. He’s still at his laptop and his eyes haven’t rested on my face yet. He directs his comments at his screen.
An hour later we sit opposite each other in the nicest restaurant we have ever been to, to eat a taster menu that is the best we have ever eaten and will be paid for by his company.
In front of me is a duck consommé that everyone around me is telling me is delicious and that I feel too sick to taste.
The other downside is that we have to share the meal with strangers to me, Tom’s colleagues. There is Executive Producer Sue, his fifty-something boss, and cameraman – sorry, Director of Photography – Dan, who has brought his wife, Marissa. I’m usually on high alert when we meet newly married people or, indeed, any couples in their thirties, but tonight I’m distracted, still thinking about Anais.
And then in the buzz of the table, something rises above as Tom goes to pour the wine.
‘Not for me,’ says Marissa, opposite me. ‘I’m pregnant.’
She gives her stomach the subtlest, lightest touch and from then on, I’m not there. I can’t engage, I can’t joke. I’m under the water again.
I want my glass of wine and yet I resent that, too. I don’t want to be able to drink this. I want to be banned. I want to have a higher purpose that means the Pinot Noir is off limits to me. To be asking questions about the menu like Marissa is, to make sure no unpasteurised cheese passes my lips. I think about my short-lived Brie ban last year and my stomach tips further.
Tom and I told no one but my brother and his wife about the miscarriage. They’re common, this early, I told myself. It happens to so many people. Another baby will come along and I’ll move on. But no one told me that it doesn’t always happen. No one told me that a miscarriage isn’t a blink-and-you-miss-it thing, even in the early stages. No one told me that it is physically gruelling. No one told me that afterwards comes grief, in its own right.
I glug the end of my wine, as everyone around me finishes their consommé, and top it up again.
‘What about you two?’ asks Marissa absent-mindedly as she dives into her soup. ‘Do you have children?’
I know I can’t win a war against the tears springing up in my eyes. They’re powerful; I am weakened, again. I should have spoken to someone about my miscarriage, I think. Now, it just feels like it’s too late, but it stays there, undiscussed, unpurged, and then at moments like this it sweeps over me.
I shake my head, which is all I can manage, and shove some homemade rye bread into my mouth, miming towards it to show that I can’t elaborate right now, much as I’d love to.
Even the bread is making me gag, but better that than the pâté that is just arriving. Or the lobster that I know is en route.
I curse Tom for being in an easy, mundane chat with Sue about work, helping himself to the pâté and missing the eye contact that I keep trying to send in his direction. I gag, again.
‘Can you Google pâté?’ says Marissa to her husband, topping up her fizzy water. ‘I’m pretty sure I can’t have that.’
Tom is still oblivious, leaving all this coping to me. The wine is the only crutch available to me and so I drink, drink, drink more, ignoring Marissa’s question.
Later, as the long meal draws to an end with a plate left barely tainted by food in front of me, someone suggests we all have a digestif.
‘Except you, Marissa!’ I slur loudly. ‘You can’t have one because since you mentioned a few times, you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
She is silent, staring at her (decaf) coffee. She smiles awkwardly.
Suddenly, Tom is round at my side of the table and whispering in my ear.
‘Oh, so now you notice me,’ I say. ‘It only took about twelve hours.’
‘You’re really drunk and not making much sense and you’re being a bit offensive to Marissa,’ he whispers. ‘We should probably leave.’
He starts to pull my chair out.
‘But shouldn’t we be “making the most of it”, Tom?’ I shout loudly, and I catch a glimpse of Marissa looking away from us, uncomfortable. ‘We have to “appreciate this time”, see, that’s what everybody says.’ I look at Marissa again. ‘Look!’ I announce. ‘Poor Marissa has to have decaf coffee now. We should make the most of it. Let’s get espressos!’
I boom the last word into his ear and feel him go slack. I see his boss, on his other side of the table, subtly take out her phone and pretend to scroll.
And suddenly I’m furious, once again.
‘You don’t want to do this tonight, right?’ I hiss at him. ‘No problem! Just let me know the timescale and I’ll schedule in when I get sad because my friend, who doesn’t even want a baby, is having one and the whole world’s pregnant. I’ll put it in my diary for six years’ time, when I’ll probably be too old to have a baby but who cares? Because it works well for you with your bloody job.’
The entire table is looking at us. Tom tries to give his boss some cash but she waves him away.
‘We’ll sort it out tomorrow,’ Sue says quietly. ‘Just get her back to the hotel – honestly, it’s fine.’
I crumble then into sobs, and Tom scoops me up and shuffles me out.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say repeatedly because I know already that tomorrow I will be mortified but I can’t yet grasp hold of the feeling. I am too precarious myself to grip onto other things tightly.
We walk out into the freezing air but I can’t hold onto that, either. I shrug off Tom’s attempts to put on my coat.
‘I don’t need a coat,’ I mutter, twirling around. ‘Look at my lovely jumpsuit. Leo never saw the jumpsuit. What happened to Leo? I wonder.’
‘Anais?’ he asks quietly. ‘Anais is pregnant?’
I sit down on the kerb and cry like this is grief. Which it is, in many, many different ways.
‘I miss the baby, Tom,’ I cry and it all comes out then, what should have emerged to a counsellor, or a friend, or a mother, and to Tom, of course, but long, long before now. It comes out in sobs, at the side of a road in Sweden. In tears rolling down all the way onto a new jumpsuit. In fatigue, a deep, deep fatigue that I can’t ever imagine lifting.
‘It’s okay,’ he whispers, parental. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.’
His arms are my coat and he clutches me tight until I feel my sobs start to dissipate.
‘I don’t want this to be me, Tom,’ I whisper as he holds me. ‘I don’t want to be this person. This angry, defensive, bitter person. I want to be myself again. How can I be myself again?’
He loads me into a taxi, where I sit silently, spent, thinking.
He tucks me into bed as I’m muttering about how I feel left out because ‘everybody in my life is a mum with their mum blogs and their mum friends.’
And Tom, who has stroked and coaxed and tended until then, snaps.
‘No, you’re not,’ he says. ‘But you know what? I’m not a dad either and I’m still trying to enjoy my life with you until I am. It would be nice if you could do the same.
‘And it would be nice if you hadn’t done that in front of my work colleagues. I have to walk into work with those people
now and they know my entire fucking business.’
And that is the last of my memory.
Next, I wake up fully clothed and full of self-loathing. Then I remember why and it’s terrible, not just because of Tom and his work colleagues, but also because that is what I really think of myself.
Once more, I wish I had the strength of character to stand up for what I believe in. To practise what I say I believe: that I see motherhood as only one version of womanhood. That womanhood is a varied and eclectic construct. Something that doesn’t have to involve being a parent and that still has value, even if you don’t have fifty-five episodes of Peppa Pig downloaded onto your Sky planner. Instead of drinking too much wine then shouting about being left out by the mummies.
Tom has gone to work and I am left with the awfulness of a day alone, hung-over and paranoid.
26
Harriet
February
I am sitting up in bed in the early hours of the morning scrolling through Tom’s social media, when a new email pings in. I click on it, because who emails at 1 a.m.? Answer: Tom. Today, Tom emails at 1 a.m.
How did you get on with Sam? Hope it went well x
Just that.
But is ‘just’ the right word? Do you ‘just’ email a girl you don’t know, in the early hours of the morning when – according to the internet – you are in Sweden?
I think Lexie is with him too, because I heard them heading out of the flat together a few days ago and it’s been silent through the wall since.
So he’s abroad, working hard, with his girlfriend, and at … I work out the time difference … 2 a.m., he emails an unknown woman with a message he has no obligation to send? He had done his bit, shared his contact, there was no need for the follow-up.
If Tom is testing the water, I need to make it clear that I am not closing him off. I rewrite my reply five times before I decide that it will only sound off the cuff if it is off the cuff.
So I down a rum and Coke in the kitchen then climb back into bed and type quickly.
Through the Wall Page 10