Feels Like Maybe

by Claire Allan

  No doubt Jake would have wanted something a bit more “out there”. He would laugh and tell me that Maggie was “so suburban”, “so bland”, so “predictable”. He could go and scratch himself. I was going to have a big enough problem selling this one to the folks back home without announcing the arrival of baby “Aisha” or “Bluebell”. Nope, Maggie was just fine. Absolutely perfect.

  

  Chapter 2

  Beth

  My father once told me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to believe him. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  I don’t know why I couldn’t sleep. In theory I should have been exhausted. The Brighton sea air should have been enough to knock me out, especially when combined with the huge dinner Dan and I had shared and the several glasses of wine that had washed it down.

  He was snoring beside me. Gorgeous, naked, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world, and yet here I was sitting up in bed, staring at the illuminated digits on the hotel clock and counting the hours till morning.

  This bed was huge. Dan had joked that we would have had room to invite a couple of friends in for an orgy and still had room to sleep well all night if we had been so inclined. I had laughed, pulling him close to me, and had told him I wanted him all to myself. He had kissed me then, and for the first time in months I felt like he really and truly meant it.

  I knew he loved me. I didn’t doubt that for one second. It was just that lately acts of physical intimacy had become about much more than just being in the mood for a snog or a romp between the sheets.

  I shook the thoughts from my head and got out of bed, padding to the bathroom. I could not allow those thoughts in my head now. This was not going to help. I had to stay positive, remain calm and relaxed and not, under any circumstances, get myself into a whole state about how my world was about to change and how everyone was about to learn just what a complete bitch I really was.

  Aoife hadn’t planned to get pregnant. I knew that. The rational side of my brain – which I do have despite being an airy-fairy-head-in-the-clouds type most of the time – knew that this was not in her plan. Her relationship with Jake had never been secure. I’d given up trying to warn her off, learning that sometimes it is better to stay quiet about a relationship than risk destroying a good friendship over it. I had been supportive. I’d even held her hair back when she threw up in the shop toilet as waves of morning- sickness swept over her. I had chosen the most gorgeous pram I could find for the baby and had helped design and decorate a nursery for it. I had even offered to hold her hand when she gave birth, something I knew could happen at any time.

  Dan thinks I went a little overboard, but perhaps he doesn’t realise just how much I was trying to convince him, and myself, that I was absolutely 100% okay with the fact that Aoife got pregnant with the drop of her knickers while I . . . well, I didn’t.

  ***

  Apparently twenty-three months is not that long, really, to be trying for a baby without success. I’m pretty sure a man came up with those statistics. After a year we had gone to the finest consultant money could buy and had a series of invasive and painful tests. (Well, mine were invasive and painful, Dan’s simply involved a porn magazine, a plastic cup and his hand – he had been mortified but at least he didn’t have to expose his undercarriage to complete strangers.)

  They couldn’t find a reason. Our infertility (how that word hung over my head like a badge of shame) was unexplained. I got really, stupidly excited that month. If there wasn’t a reason then surely it was going to happen for us any time now. I imagined Aoife and me shopping for prams together, rubbing our expanding bellies and secretly I planned hiring a nanny to work for us both to share the childcare costs. And of course the nanny would bring our babies to Instant Karma every day so we could coo over them. Two proud mums together.

  I cried for two days when my period arrived that month. Aoife never knew. I phoned in sick with a stomach bug and spent two days in bed, berating the unfairness of it all.

  I’d come over all melodramatic and told Dan to leave me for a woman less barren and he had smiled and pulled me close.

  “There is no reason why we can’t have a baby,” he soothed, “so you are stuck with me, Betsy.”

  He then fed me chocolate and Nurofen until the worst of my hormonal surges had passed and promised to shag me senseless for the coming month. This was not going to defeat us.

  ***

  I sat in the bathroom of our hotel in Brighton and took deep breaths. Maybe this month it would happen. After all there was nothing wrong with us. Nothing at all.

  

  Chapter 3

  Aoife

  My waters had broken in the early hours of the morning. I had woken at three to some niggling pains in my back. Crawling out of bed I’d paced between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, trying my hardest to convince myself this was yet another false alarm. When a particularly harsh pain winded me I walked downstairs to the shop I shared with Beth to retrieve my antenatal notes from behind the counter and, if I’m honest, to escape the feeling that the four walls were closing in on me.

  I needed the space of our shop, the comfort of its Aladdin’s cave of pretty things. Instead of climbing back up the stairs I sat on the wrought-iron daybed which had been the focal point of Instant Karma since it opened four years ago. The rest of the shop had changed but this daybed would be there forever, Beth and I had vowed. We had spent many an hour sitting on its silken throws and cushions eating Jaffa Cakes, planning the transformation of clients’ homes and putting the world to rights.

  I pulled a throw – a dazzling and comforting silken creation in the brightest greens, pinks and golds I had ever seen – round me and leafed through my notes. They made little sense. I had never looked at them before. Looking at them would have made this all too real.

  The pain was still coming in waves, some bad, some bearable. I still had two weeks to go, surely it couldn’t be time? Matilda, our guardian angel – a crystal statuette which stood on a shelf behind the counter – looked at me with a sense of pity as I winced with pain.

  “Don’t give me your pitying looks,” I chided her. “It’s probably just those damned Branston Pickles things or whatever the feck you call them.”

  She didn’t answer, of course – just carried on looking at me until I could take no more of her stares and decided to make my way back upstairs for a bath. As I walked past her towards the mahogany door that separated my working life from my home life, I felt a pop, followed by a trickle and then a gush.

  “Ah fuck it!” I gasped to Matilda. “Either this is it, or I’ve just peed myself.”

  Beth was supposed to be my birthing partner but there was no way I could phone her now. Not only was it stupid o’clock in the morning but she’d had the audacity to bugger off to Brighton with her husband Dan for a weekend of mad sex and debauchery. Beth had been reluctant, worried she might miss getting a quick look at my fandango in the delivery ward, but I had encouraged her to go. I had noticed she looked tired lately, and stressed. She was even arguing with Dan, which never happened. As with so much over the last year, this was another decision which had seemed good at the time but that was coming back to bite me in the arse right now.

  I was going to have to do this alone I realised as I looked at the ever-increasing puddle at my feet. It was clear from looking at Matilda that she was going to be no fecking help at all.

  ****

  Staring at my watch now, I realised that Beth should be home. It had gone eleven. I lifted Maggie to me, latching her eager mouth onto my breast and marvelling at just how exceptionally clever she was. Here she was, just a matter of hours old and she already had this feeding malarky down pat. I’ll admit I was a bit proud of myself too. I hadn’t planned on breast-feeding. I hadn’t really thought about feeding at all – it was part of my “total denial of pregnancy” strategy. Her burps came easily and I swear she knew my voice over the clatter of nurses and mi
dwives who walked in to check on her and on my poor tattered perineum.

  That day, Maggie’s birthday, had been a day of extreme highs and lows. I still could not believe Maggie was mine. Beth would be most put out that this tiny creature had managed to do in five minutes what she had been trying and failing to do for nine months. Beth couldn’t understand why I wasn’t doing cartwheels over my pregnancy.

  She was puzzled that I had resisted maternity clothes for as long as possible and had taken to leaving Formes catalogues on the counter for me from a week after I peed on that blasted stick. She didn’t understand – couldn’t understand – because her life was so different to mine. She had the loving husband, I had the love child – so many times over the last nine months I had wanted so desperately to swap. Now I knew that I would never trade my child – not for every designer daybed in the greater London area.

  When the lows came they floored me. I had woken at 6 a.m., my bladder stretched to capacity. Buzzing a nurse I muttered that I needed to go to the toilet and she had helped me to the door. Sitting there I waited for the relief of a good pee. It was only when the stinging started that I remembered I had been stitched from hither to thither. This wasn’t going to be easy, was it? And peeing was the least of my worries. Vowing that I was never, ever going to poo again I stumbled back to my bed and wondered just what the hell I had let myself in for.

  I lifted Maggie to my shoulder. She had that delicious newborn smell, a mixture of Johnson’s baby bath and milk. I stroked her white babygro, feeling her skinny legs curled up to her tummy and feeling the silken touch of her tiny hands. Leaning back on my pillow I closed my eyes and breathed every inch of her in – my contemplation only interrupted by a gasp of disbelief in the doorway.

  I looked up and saw Beth, her mouth a perfect “O”. Tears glistened in her eyes and it was all I could do not to giggle. Beth, gorgeous, lovely Beth – she was such an emotional person. I should have known the sight of me, in all my post-birth glory with this bundle of perfection on my shoulder, would have reduced her to tears.

  “You’ve had the baby then?” she eventually stuttered.

  “Nope, they just asked me to mind this one between contractions,” I joked, but then again, looking at my stomach still swollen and round, I realised that was not beyond the realm of possibilities.

  “What did you have?” Beth asked, walking towards my bed, her hands outstretched to my daughter.

  “A Maggie,” I answered, a smile of pride dancing across my face. “I did it, Beth, all on my own. I didn’t even have one of those epidoodahs or anything.” I decided it would be best not to tell her I wanted one, begged for one and even offered to pay for one.

  “You should have called,” she said, touching her fingers against the smoothness of Maggie’s pristine babygro. “I would have come back.”

  “I didn’t want to ruin the shagfest,” I said. “Dan would never have spoken to me again.”

  “He would have been fine. You know he would have been.”

  I lifted Maggie down from my shoulder so that Beth could marvel at her button nose and unimaginably long eyelashes.

  “Sorry about the mess at the shop,” I muttered. I hadn’t found the time or energy to clear up the puddle as I waited for a taxi to ferry me to the hospital.

  “Don’t worry about it. Dan was able to grab the counter before his arse hit the floor. He promises he won’t sue.” She reached her arms out again, taking Maggie from me and cuddling her tightly to her chest. She started to cry. “Oh Aoife,” she said, “Maggie is just perfect. You are so lucky.”

  “I wonder if I’ll feel the same at the two in the morning when she’s screaming for a feed?” I said, knowing full well that I would. I already knew I would forgive anything of this child. Beth held her for a while, rocking her back and forth, whispering inaudible and soothing sounds into her ear. I looked on, contentedly – until, that is, Beth asked the question I had been dreading all day.

  “Don’t you think it’s about time you told your mother you’re pregnant?” Beth’s eyes didn’t meet mine.

  “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “But you can’t hide her, Aoife. She is here now, a real, live baby.”

  “Not today,” I muttered. “I can’t be dealing with Sheila and her crises today.”

  “But –” Beth started.

  “But nothing, not today,” I replied firmly and reached to take my baby back into my arms, suddenly feeling very protective of her.

  Beth sighed. She looked hurt, but I had no time to think about her sensibilities at the moment. I was the one with aching breasts and stitches in my nethers. If anyone was getting sympathy right now it was me.

  *****

  Beth had left after an hour. She had wanted to stay, she told me, as she stared longingly at Maggie, but there was business to be sorted out and I was hardly in a fit state to attend to it. With timing not being one of my strong points I had given birth three days before I was due to finish Elena Kennedy’s yoga room. Elena is one of our most valued clients and while she obviously was aware that I was pregnant and that babies appear when they are good and ready, both Beth and I knew she would take a degree of soothing when she found out Beth would be doing the rest of this project alone.

  It shocked me to find that after Beth left I felt slightly bereft. I had no one now. I should have told my family back home of course, swallowed down my pride and phoned them, but I could not bear the inevitable recriminations and disappointment. Maggie was not a disappointment. It wasn’t that I had purposely kept this from them – there just never was a right time to tell them that I was knocked up by a feckwit of a man who didn’t want to know. Fighting tears, I walked to the window and stared out at the grey evening. The wind was blustering through the trees and the light was already fading. I wanted to open the window as far as I could, and shout to the world that I was a mother. I had a beautiful daughter. I hadn’t meant to make a mess of things, honest I hadn’t, and what I needed now was a hug, someone to show me they really cared.

  Tears tripping me, I wandered into the corridor, my heart thumping. I just needed someone, anyone, to listen. As it happens I found Peggy – feet up on the nurses’ station, head buried in the latest edition of Take a Break.

  “I’ve made a mess,” I muttered and Peggy simply smiled.

  “Never mind, sweetie pie. You wouldn’t believe the kind of things we see here in the wards. Nothing about a woman’s body after childbirth scares us any more.”

  “Not that kind of mess,” I muttered before erupting into hysterical sobs. “I’ve messed up my life, every last part of it! My parents don’t know about Maggie. Her father doesn’t want to know her. No one cares. We’re all alone!” My voice had risen to a roar, all the hurt and fear pouring out.

  “You’re tired, lovely,” Peggy soothed. “How about I take Maggie for an hour or so to let you sleep?”

  “That won’t help,” I said petulantly and I meant it. I mean, Peggy was hardly going to take Maggie for an hour or two every day of her life to help me, was she?

  “Do you want me to call your parents?”

  “My mother would have a stroke.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He would have stroke worrying about telling my mother.”

  “And the baby’s father?”

  “Even if I knew where he was he wouldn’t want to know. He made that clear.”

  I could see Peggy start to run out of ideas, losing steam and patience.

  “I’m sure it’s not that bleak. A baby can be a great healer. Please don’t underestimate the power of that little girl in there to make things better. I’m sure they will all fall in love with her as soon as they see her.”

  I wanted to believe Peggy. Maybe they would love her – Mum, Daddy, Joe, all of them – so I asked her to bring me the phone. I felt terrified but, if I’m honest, I was excited too. It was as if I had been given permission to phone Jake again after all this time. Peggy could be r
ight, a baby could heal things.

  I looked at Maggie again. She had her daddy’s nose, his soft dark hair. I bet myself that if he could meet her, even if for five minutes, he would love her.

  I wasn’t naïve. I knew he wouldn’t fall at my feet. My days of fantasising about him banging at the door of the shop at three in the morning begging forgiveness had long gone. I had binned them right about the same time that I had stopped allowing myself the fantasy of imagining myself giving birth back home, my family surrounding me and celebrating this joyous new arrival. Jake would have been there, flirting with my mother and keeping her onside. When our child arrived they would have congratulated me on my reproductive skills before Jake would have proposed, in front of them all, telling them I had made him the happiest man in the world. No, that fantasy had gone a long time ago.

  But then again, I allowed myself a little hope. I thought that if he grew to love Maggie, he could grow to love me again too. The only problem was, I didn’t know where he was. This was going to be far from easy.

  ****

  “No way, Aoifs ,” he’d said, jumping out of the bed as if it were on fire.

  I used to love that, the way he called me Aoifs. It felt special at the time. Now I realised it was simply because he was too damned lazy to learn how to pronounce my name properly. It would have required effort and Jake was never about effort. He liked the world handed to him on a plate.

  “I didn’t plan this,” I said. “I’m as surprised as you. I thought you might be happy.”