by Ajay Close
We went to different universities but bumped into each other between terms. In the Ashoka one Sunday, at a Waterboys gig everyone had tickets to, outside Boots on Byres Road. He seemed taller to me. He admitted years later I’d had noticeably bigger breasts. We’d have ended up the sort of acquaintances who smile and wave and pretend they’re in a hurry when they pass on the street if we hadn’t both found jobs in Edinburgh. I was a trainee civil servant, he was a cub reporter on the Evening News, both of us homesick for Glasgow. One day I stood behind him in a supermarket queue and we went for a drink. It wasn’t like a date, more an extension of those chats amid the shredded foam rubber. We fell into the habit of meeting mid-week and sometimes catching a movie on Sundays. Then my landlord started knocking on my bedroom door at one in the morning and Frankie offered me his spare room.
Every Saturday he’d stand in a sparse crowd of fathers and wives watching a different team of butchers and fitters and photocopier salesmen with dreams of promotion to the second division. If I had nothing better to do, I’d keep him company. We operated a points system. Two for a striker with lovebites, three for lovebites and a black eye, four for a manager in a sheepskin coat, five with a gold signet ring, six if he smoked a cigar. It was part of the joke that we were no less faithful to the clichés of our respective trades. Why else did I wear all those prissy little suits? As for Frankie, he passed his days in a pink-eyed jitter of nicotine and adrenaline, chasing sirens, having doors slammed in his face, poking his nose into everybody’s business in case it turned out to be news. Night after night of council committees and residents’ action groups. Even the hanging around had a sour-tasting glamour for him. If we’d been boyfriend and girlfriend I’d never have tagged along, but I was home from work by ten past five with seven empty hours to fill, and who remembered that Christmas kiss? Not me.
I learned to drink pints of heavy, and flirt with men in uniform, and make the tyres squeal as I accelerated away from the kerb. One Saturday morning I hung out of the passenger window of Frankie’s Ford Escort spraying antifreeze on the iced-up windscreen while he sped blind along Lothian Road. When his cousin from Galway came to stay, I slept on the floor in his room. I can’t remember how we undressed, but I know it caused us no more awkwardness than getting changed into our shorts and plimsolls at St Ursula’s. I’d met a man by then, an academic with a pile of post-structuralist journals by the lavatory and a way of cocking his head to dissect the subtext of my least-considered remarks. That summer I moved to London without a backward glance.
Ten years passed before we met again. Simon and I had discovered there are only so many times a couple can get back together, and devolution had created opportunities for clever women at St Andrew’s House. I got myself posted up from Whitehall, only to be shocked by how little Scotland felt like home. One night I turned on the television and caught the end of the local news. A gum-chewing boy in a Rangers strip was expressing smirking repentance for a spectacular foul. There was a cutaway shot to the interviewer. His face gave me the first thrill of recognition I had had since coming north. At the end of his report he delivered a tricksy little summary while walking towards the camera. I say I recognised his face, but it was the way he moved my body remembered. A whole physical life was encrypted in that walk: the heel of his hand on the steering wheel as he reversed the Escort; the receiver clamped between chin and shoulder, dictating copy down the phone; that chimpanzee grin he used for satire. The next morning I tracked down his number and we talked until his boss grabbed the phone out of his hand and told whoever you are, ‘He’s supposed to be working.’ We arranged to meet that night in a bar that hadn’t existed a decade before. He was waiting for me in a suit that looked too expensive for work, even work in television. I glanced around at the Corinthian columns made of glass, the flame velvet sofa.
‘Where’s the spittoon?’
‘No spittoon.’
‘Beer mats? Overflowing ashtrays?’
‘I packed in the cancer sticks four years ago. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink in shebeens, and I don’t run after flashing blue lights.’
‘Are you sure you still want to be seen with me?’
At least his smile hadn’t changed. ‘You don’t have a scoobie, do you?’
‘About what?’
His eyes caught mine with a different sort of smile, until I dropped my gaze.
The restaurant had been fully booked; he’d got a table because he knew the owner. He was on first-name terms with the First Minister, coached a team of East End neds as a favour to someone I should have heard of who’d just had a Hollywood smash. I mentioned my secondment to the Cabinet Office and the lecture I’d given to MBA students at Fontainebleau. It was at least thirty minutes before this territory-marking was abandoned for common ground, and another half hour before I could relax in the certainty that, underneath, we were still the same. Though he had never offered me his jacket before when I said I was cold, or touched my waist to steer me across the road. At the end of the evening I found myself standing at the taxi rank with my arms around his neck and his lower lip (drier than I remembered) on mine.
Cue the happy ever after. He was a full-time sports reporter by then, covering the sort of fixtures to which I couldn’t tag along. In due course he became a presenter, one of those gruff, poetic men’s men whose aftershave seems to leach through the television screen. Of all the fans with typewriters, he was the most intellectually nimble, a turnstile philosopher famed for the extended conceits in his match reports. No European Cup was complete without Big Frankie waxing lyrical on national pride, his perma-flush set off by an ice-blue open-necked shirt. Alone together we were the same old Frankie and Freya, but the world around us had changed. Every man in Scotland watched Extra Time. When Frankie cracked a joke in the studio half a nation laughed with him. Strangers clapped his back in the street or jabbed a finger in his face, insisting the ref had been wrong. One day he phoned me at work to say, ‘Guess what?’ He’d signed an £80,000 contract, with half as much again to be earned on the after-dinner circuit. I thought he was joking. I couldn’t see Frankie as a totem of Scottish manhood. To me he was still Kewie, the ginger kid with chubby knees.
There were five other couples in the waiting room. Two corporate-looking women ignoring their pinstriped husbands, an orange-skinned blonde squired by a Glaswegian with a silver ponytail, a mousy woman kneading the hand of her edgy other half (like us, I guessed, waiting to be given the hard sell), and a fat girl barely out of her teens whispering with her beanpole boyfriend. The clinic boasted an eleven per cent success rate per cycle for women of my age: if we oldies had two shots each, one of us was in with a chance. Discreetly I eyed the competition, grading the elasticity in their skin, the gloss of their hair, and anything else that might indicate fertility. For all the girly inclusivity of those fashion magazines, the framed notice offering spa treatments, the upmarket snacks in the vending machine and the endlessly-smiling staff, we all knew there were two classes of women: those who could make babies, and the rest.
‘Is it midgie repellent?’
‘Ssshhh.’
The fat girl and her boyfriend were giggling in the corner.
‘Fly spray?’
‘No,’ she hissed.
‘Toilet Duck?’
She sniggered. ‘No.’
‘It can’t smell like that and not kill something.’
They were talking about somebody’s perfume. Mine, perhaps.
‘I think it’s nice,’ the girl said.
‘If you like Vapona.’ His accent was posher than hers, even with a mouthful of chewing gum, but their bodies did that unselfconscious mirroring you only get with a good match. ‘What’s wrong with the smell of—’
She clapped her hand over his mouth so we all knew what he’d been about to say.
‘You know what they make it out of?’ he asked, when she lifted her hand.
She gave him a sidelong look.
‘I’ll give you a clue. It comes ou
t of a cat’s arse.’
‘Shut up.’ She flounced across the room to choose a magazine. He sprawled in his armchair, watching her.
‘You reading that?’ She pointed at my lap. ‘That Vogue.’
‘No.’
She took it with her left hand. The diamond was small, the rose gold keeper looked antique. They seemed too young to be married, and much too young to renounce nightclubs and hangovers and recreational drugs for the sake of the next generation. Though biology would disagree. According to biology, they were the perfect age.
She planted herself in the armchair beside me. ‘This your first time?’
‘Yes.’
I felt Frankie tensing on my other side.
She brought her thumb to her mouth and gnawed at a hangnail. ‘Boring, eh?’
‘They could manage their appointments system better.’
She stared at me as if I’d arrived from outer space.
‘There’s no need for us all to be here at the same time.’
She thought about this for a moment. ‘Aye. Most days you’re in and out, half an hour. I’ve left the dinner in the oven.’ A bright spot of blood had appeared on her thumb. She sucked it. ‘I’m Nikki by the way.’
‘Freya,’ I said.
‘Is that foreign?’
There was a muffled snort on the other side of the room. I gave her husband a cool stare. He looked up, still chewing, and winked at me.
It may be Nikki mistook my silence for nerves. ‘She’s all right, Doctor Ross, when you get used to her. Better than that woman they had before. I could see her far enough. It’ll be worth it in the end, eh?’ She gave a heartfelt sigh. ‘It better be.’ Across the room, the gum-chewer had taken out his phone. She leaned towards me, dropping her voice. ‘If it was my choice, we’d leave it for a couple of years, but somebody doesn’t want to wait.’
She wasn’t truly fat, I saw then, just scaled-up. There was a waist between her Amazonian hips and that eye-catching bust. Her brown hair was pulled back and twisted into a plume secured with a plastic clip, and the smooth acreage of brow and cheek so candidly exposed was beautiful. I felt a sneaking admiration for her spray-on jeans in that Homes and Gardens setting.
She glanced at her husband. ‘It’s worse for them, this place.’
‘Is it?’
She moved her hand in close to her belly and waggled her pinkie.
Sneaking admiration gave way to the hope that no one else had seen, but she had a point: these men could have been awaiting summons to some evolutionary court. They were almost comically anxious to avoid each other’s eyes: the silver ponytail thumbing out a text message, the nervy type staring at his wife’s hands, one of the suits studying the Telegraph crossword with ferocious concentration, the other checking his watch. Even her husband’s cockiness could be read as a smokescreen for embarrassment. Blond hair curled into tendrils below his black beanie. An ironic tuft of beard under that mouth-breather’s pout. A naughty-boy glint in his eye that brought back double maths and Mr Wilson in a lather with Craig McBurnie. Craig McBurnie, Stephen Lynch, Matthew Doherty. Funny that I still remembered their names. For a good twenty years I hadn’t given a thought to naughty boys, and now I saw them everywhere. My godson. Ruth’s eldest. Miranda’s four-year-old twins. Who knew, I might yet give birth to one myself. The child in me could still recall that anxious twist in my guts, but the mother-in-waiting was a pushover for their bold-eyed mischief.
As if sensing my interest, Nikki’s husband looked up. Our glances connected, he looked away, and I felt a pang of slighted vanity that was almost like loss.
Nikki dropped the copy of Vogue back on the magazine table. ‘Do you stay round here?’
Her husband shot her a look. I wondered if she was deliberately winding him up.
‘Glasgow,’ I said.
‘There’s nowhere nearer?’
‘Not with a reputation like this place.’
‘Cool.’
I felt something new in the air between us.
‘We’re NHS.’
‘Lucky you,’ I said.
Her glance strayed towards Frankie, then veered away, her mouth crimping in a smirk. ‘What does your husband do?’
Ah.
I looked her in the eye, not bothering to answer, since she knew.
It didn’t happen so very often when I was with him. I suppose my presence put them off. Mostly it was men who made the approach. A look on their faces as if they were the ones about to be recognised. As, in a sense, they were. He’d give them their two minutes of manly banter before explaining he was out with the wife, you know how it is.
‘Frankie MacKewon?’ Nikki’s husband crossed the carpet towards us.
A fraction of a second later than he might have, Frankie looked up.
The boy extended his hand. ‘Kit Oliphant.’
If he was going to shake hands, Frankie had to put down his phone. I watched the possibility of a snub register in the boy’s eyes. He seemed to remember where he was, the implications of meeting in that place, what it might say about him, or about Frankie, how this could mar the innocent pleasure of two Scotsmen talking football. Each knew more about the other than the other wished to be known. Even if they exchanged the benefit of the doubt, taking it for granted neither was any less of a man, each knew the secrets of the other’s bedroom, the joyless fucking dictated by the ovulation kit, and neither wanted to shake hands with the sort of man who’d put up with that. But it was too late now. There was an audience to consider, the women mildly diverted, the men transfixed and waiting for a sign.
Frankie slipped the phone into his pocket. ‘How’re you doing, Kit?’
Sperm
The consultant was a short, fleshy woman dressed in expensive shades of sackcloth and ashes, with blonde highlights in her hair and a faint mousy down where the light from the window caught her cheek. It was hard to put an age to her. She looked as I imagined a Roman fertility goddess would look, if fertility goddesses banked a hundred and fifty thousand a year.
‘Mr and Mrs MacKewon, I’m Doctor Ross.’
She sat straight-backed behind her antique desk, while Frankie and I fought to remain upright in the maw of a loose-covered sofa.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I use my own name, Cavalle.’
Frankie leaned forward. ‘Call us Frankie and Freya.’
She opened a folder. ‘The first thing I have to tell you is your count was extremely healthy. Usually in a first consultation I’m saying cut down on alcohol, start wearing boxers and take a course of selenium, but the best advice I can give you is just carry on as you are.’
She broke off. I was staring at Frankie.
‘I had the test last week. What’s the point of sitting here not knowing…’
‘…whose fault it is,’ I finished for him.
‘It’s not about blame,’ he said.
But it was. It had to be someone’s fault, and I so badly wanted it not to be mine. I knew he felt the same. Despite the solicitous body language on show in the waiting room, in their uncoupled hearts every one of them was praying please let it not be me. The past year, the rockiest in our marriage so far, now seemed like paradise. While I wasn’t in the first flush of youth, male infertility was on the rise: it could have been either of us. But now we knew, and everything had changed. The best part of me was pleased for him. I just wished there was some way he could have been normal without confirming my lifelong suspicion that there was something wrong with me.
Dr Ross placed her hands on top of the desk. ‘At this point we can’t say why it hasn’t happened.’ She glanced down at her notes. ‘Your GP says you’re ovulating, but we don’t know if the egg is getting to where it needs to be to meet the sperm, so I’d like to book you in for a laparoscopy. We have an arrangement with a private hospital down the road. The surgeon’s very neat. He goes in through the tummy button and has a look round for—’
‘Damage to the fallopian tubes,’ I said. ‘Endometriosis, fibroids,
adhesions or malformations.’
Frankie grinned. ‘I should have warned you, my wife’s a technocrat.’
Dr Ross returned a sporting smile. ‘There’s no guarantee he’ll find anything. Conception is a delicate business. There are plenty of couples with everything in full working order, but something between them just doesn’t click. And that’s where we come in.’
Hidden from her by the depths of the sofa, Frankie squeezed my fingers.
‘On the other hand, there may be a very simple reason why you’re not conceiving.’
‘Is this you checking I’m putting it in the right hole?’