by Ajay Close
It was the sort of joke a television sports personality could get away with. She flashed him a roguish glance. ‘Misunderstandings are more common than you’d think, though generally it’s a question of timing. I remember one highly-motivated couple…’
I caught her eye.
She cleared her throat. ‘The approach we take is rather different from anything you’ll find elsewhere. Our fee scale is a little higher than some clinics per cycle of IVF, but we offer a much better chance of conceiving in the first or second cycle, as opposed to the third or fourth. It may not come to that, there may be a way we can help you conceive naturally.’ Her left hand spanned my notes and I had a vision of those slightly rubbery fingers probing my body’s secret crevices. ‘But if IVF is the appropriate option, we strongly recommend you live locally for the duration of the treatment.’
I didn’t need to look at Frankie to know this had thrown him.
‘Both of us?’ he queried.
‘We need you to do your bit, but the deep freeze is a wonderful invention. It’s up to you: whatever Freya would find most restful.’
‘Now you’re asking,’ he said.
‘Can’t I just commute?’
I guessed she used this rueful pucker with all her awkward customers. ‘As I said, conception is a tricky business, none of us fully understands why it works in some cases and not in others, but one of the reasons we tend to do better than most clinics is because we encourage our mothers to give themselves over to the process. We need to see you every day. Most days, you’ll be here for under an hour. That might seem like something you can squeeze into your normal routine, but trust me: I’ve seen what happens when clients go down that road. It’s enormously stressful for them, and rarely ends in a happy outcome. This is not a trivial procedure.’
I knew what was involved, but she went through it anyway. A week of injections to shut down my cycle, three weeks of hormone jags, blood tests to make sure I didn’t get ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, vaginal scans, more jags, sedation while they collected the eggs, implantation of the embryo three days later, and another fortnight of progesterone injections before the pregnancy test.
‘It’s perfectly safe, we monitor you very closely, but these are powerful hormones we’ll be putting into your body.’ She paused, the saleswoman in her taking over from the doctor. ‘And after all, we’re talking about a very short space of time. A matter of weeks if everything goes to plan. Book yourself into somewhere comfortable where the food’s good, pack a few beach books, some music you find relaxing and, ah, leave us to worry about the technical details.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Frankie said.
She glanced at a photograph on her desk, twin girls a couple of years older than the heartbreakingly-cute babies decorating the corridor walls. They had that rosy-cheeked, tousle-haired, just-bathed look: the excitement of small children in their pyjamas before the great adventure of bed. ‘It’ll be your last chance to lie around doing nothing for a long time, take it from me.’
I thought about a matter of weeks kicking my heels in the middle of nowhere. My career on tick-over while Frankie worked his usual fifty hours. Country hotels. The traditional Scottish breakfast cooked at six and microwaved back to searing heat at nine. The shoebox en suite with its extractor fan droning half the night. The framed prints of local beauty spots and the window overlooking the bins. How could any of that facilitate the process? And I had never read a beach book in my life.
‘There’s one other thing I’d like you both to think about.’ Her right hand came to rest on top of her left, an obscurely ominous gesture. ‘Our clients tend to find it useful to have a fallback plan.’
‘We’re not interested in adoption,’ Frankie said.
‘I’m talking about other reproductive technologies. For example, would you consider using a donor egg?’
This was something I hadn’t researched.
‘It’s only fair to warn you there are currently more women wanting eggs than there are donors but, assuming it’s a possibility, how would you feel?’
‘I’d have to know a lot more about it,’ I said.
‘We can steer you towards the relevant information. What I’d like to know now is whether you’re open to the idea in principle?’
‘It’s not just my decision.’
‘Of course.’
I turned to Frankie.
He shrugged. ‘If you don’t mind, I don’t mind.’
‘And that’s your considered opinion, is it—?’
The consultant moved her right hand in a tactful gesture of curtailment.
‘How do you know my body would accept another woman’s egg?’
Frankie dropped into the droll growl he used sometimes on camera. ‘It’s your head she’s asking about.’
Dr Ross pressed her lips together but it was too late, I’d seen the smirk.
‘Well,’ she said lightly, drawing the consultation to a close, ‘it’s one option. There are various paths you might take.’
Brogues
My title was Head of Transparency, in charge of a tiny autonomous unit squeezed on all sides by departmental big spenders. Anyone with an interest in, well, anything at all, could log on to our website and track the history of their chosen issue, the part played by Brussels, Westminster, Holyrood and their local council, decision by decision. If you wanted to know why your granny died after her hernia operation, why prisoner number 666 couldn’t follow the 5:2 diet, why hedgehogs were being culled on Uist, it was possible to find out from the comfort of your own home. As an idea this was hardly radical, merely the logical next step from Freedom of Information, but the IT boys had always blenched at the sheer volume of data, the mind-boggling complexity of the pathways involved. For years it was regarded as an insane piety. Then I volunteered to take it on.
I never doubted it was possible. All it required was clarity of thought, a clarity that would spread through the government, reforming administrative practice. After all, taking the right decision for the right reasons, and logging them as you went along, was a hundred times quicker than trying to post-rationalise a moment’s sloppy thinking. Inevitably we weren’t popular with everyone. Those who refused the carrot of transparency had to be shown the stick. In some offices we were known as the ‘rubber heels squad’. The job had its pressures. My staff turnover was higher than average, which is how I happened to be interviewing for two vacant posts that Wednesday morning.
I was just in the door when Kelly called me over and nodded towards a figure sitting under the atrium. ‘Mr Smith.’
I squinted in disbelief.
Kelly laughed. ‘I did wonder.’
‘And he’s not due for another forty minutes.’
‘The keen type.’ She was enjoying herself. ‘That’s good, no?’
‘The keen types get here bang on time. It’s the game-players who arrive early.’
He half-turned in his seat, looking towards us, and I had the strangest feeling.
‘You know him?’
Kelly was wasted on reception, but she wouldn’t consider another job.
‘He reminds me of someone.’
‘Who?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
He was wearing a cheap, black, narrow-lapel suit with a black shirt and black tie. A thirtysomething might just have got away with it. On a man twice that age, however tall and spare, it was embarrassing. Like an ageing theatrical knight convinced he had one last Hamlet in him.
I walked across, expecting him to stand, if not out of ordinary politeness, then from interview nerves.
‘Mr Smith?’
He remained seated. ‘Are you Miss Cavalle?’
There was something about the way he said it. Now I was close enough to study him, his long face troubled me. The directness of his gaze behind those wire-rimmed glasses, the starburst of white at the outer corner of each eye. Elsewhere his skin was a toughened liverwurst brown. A weekend Munro-bagger, I guessed. Almost an old man, with fleshles
s shanks and clumps of wiry hair in ear and nostril, but I could tell from the way he was sitting that his body was not yet a burden.
His stare let me know that I too was being judged.
Generally I didn’t talk to applicants outside the interview room, but Mr Smith had already ruled himself out as a candidate, and I was curious.
I took the chair diagonally across from him. ‘Have you come far?’
‘Perthshire.’
‘You must have had an early start.’
‘It’s a fair walk.’
I saw this was intended to elicit just the swift look I gave him.
‘And you?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
‘Where do you bide?’
‘Glasgow.’
‘You won’t see much of your bairns.’
I composed my features into a pleasant expression. ‘Do you have family yourself, Mr Smith?’
‘None I know of.’
I had to look him in the eye to check if this was another joke.
‘Never say never, eh?’ His upper lip had that overdefinition I had noticed before in older men, almost as if he were wearing lipstick. It brought out the yellowness of his teeth. ‘We’ve one over you there.’
‘We?’
‘Men.’
We sat for a few moments holding each other’s gaze. When I told Frankie, over dinner that night, he said, ‘The guy was flirting with you,’ but it didn’t feel like that.
When we had watched each other for long enough to establish that neither of us was going to look away, I said, ‘What age was it you put down on the form?’
‘I cannae mind.’
‘Thirty-two.’
He looked very pleased with himself.
‘Do you have a degree, or was that a fiction too?’
‘University of life,’ he said.
‘And the rest of your CV?’
He didn’t bother to reply. I checked his body language. Legs modestly apart, hands spanning his thighs, no armpit-flaunting or groin-airing, but a definite challenge.
‘Your application form was very well done.’
‘Ticked all the right boxes?’
His stare made me itch for a mirror. Lipstick on my teeth? Pigeon shit in my hair? I waited.
‘It’s amazing what you can find on the worldwide web,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Why?’
For the first time he smiled. ‘Is it not your job to work that out?’
‘Actually no. As long as I weed out the time-wasters, the government doesn’t care. But since you’re here, why would you go to all that trouble when you knew you’d never get the job?’
His smile acquired a cunning edge. ‘Because I’m too old?’
‘Because you’re a liar.’
‘I’ve owned up.’ As if that made it all right.
‘You violated the ethos of the unit you say you want to work for.’
His eyes were suddenly huge. I saw their Spam-pink rims, each blue iris swimming in its greying sclera, and I wondered if he was having some sort of attack. Then I realised he was wearing bifocals.
‘You don’t like folk showing initiative?’ he said.
‘You lied. When applying to work for the Transparency Unit. That could be construed as a failure of intelligence.’
I sat back in my chair to break the charged space between us. Professional detachment came naturally to me, I wasn’t sure how he’d got in under the wire.
After a moment, I asked, ‘How did you think I’d react?’
‘Is this part of the interview?’
‘You’re not going to be interviewed.’
‘Ach well,’ he pushed the glasses higher up his nose, ‘maybe that’s a failure of intelligence in you.’
I had never been mocked by an interview candidate before. At least, not to my face.
‘You’ll lose some good folk, being so pernickerty.’
I could have explained that being pernickerty was what the Transparency Unit was all about, but why waste my breath?
‘Like now. You’re thinking, he’s interesting, but I don’t like him making a monkey of me.’
‘I’m not employed to hire people I find interesting, Mr Smith.’
‘Be better if you were, Miss…’
‘Cavalle.’ We said it together.
His eyes loomed large behind those distorting lenses. ‘You’re not related to Lili Cavalle, the actress?’
‘She’s my mother.’
‘I saw her the other night.’
My pulse picked up speed.
‘On television.’ He smiled again, showing his yellow teeth. ‘A repeat of The Protectors. She was a perfume-maker. Blew herself up with a bottle of scent.’
‘I’ve not seen that one.’
‘You should look out for it, she was very good.’
‘I’ll tell her you said so.’
‘Aye, you do that.’
Who the hell remembered Lili Cavalle these days? She didn’t even call herself that any more. I had a sixth sense for actors, the high hum of their presence, the salivary repartee: Mr Smith wasn’t a pro.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Paul standing beside Kelly at reception.
‘I have to get back to work.’
He, too, stood up. ‘Do I get my expenses?’
‘What do you think?’
He gave a wry cough. ‘It was worth a shot.’ The eyes swimming behind his glasses softened. ‘I’ve met you, anyroad.’
Before, he had shaken my hand, now he held it. His liverwurst-coloured fingers were rough but warm around mine. His nails, I noticed for the first time, were rimmed with black.
And then it dawned on me who he reminded me of. Myself. For years I’d stared at strangers just as Mr Smith was staring at me. I travelled all over the south of England, Guildford, Exeter, Bristol, the London West End, monitoring my body for the tell-tale frisson, running through the checklist in my head. I spent a fortune on theatre tickets, waited hour upon hour across the road from the stage door before trailing them to the pub. A new suspect every week, each as plausible as the last, but never quite conclusive. As with any addictive behaviour, it was the impossibility of satisfaction that had me hooked. I had to move back to Glasgow to break the habit. One of the few facts she’d let slip was that he wasn’t a Scot.
‘I’ll be off then,’ he said.
Since my mother had entered the conversation he seemed a different person, his unfortunate manner replaced by something almost like tenderness.
‘I’d never have guessed, if it wasn’t for the name.’
‘No, we’re very different. I, ah…’ My glance dropped to the floor, to the brown brogues under his black trousers. I was distractingly aware of Paul watching us from the other side of the atrium. I gave Mr Smith an awkward smile as I tugged my hand from his grasp. ‘I suppose I must take after my father.’
Cat
My mother told me she went into labour in act four of Macbeth during a Saturday matinee at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. I was lucky in my Scottish birth. A week later and I’d have been a Geordie. A fortnight after that, Liverpudlian. Lilias, always a slender woman, was living on black coffee and untipped cigarettes. The director had no idea she was starving for two. I like to picture her with clunky wrists and hollowed throat, her discreet bump upstaged by a spectacularly pneumatic bosom. In a linen smock and blood-red surcoat cut to flare from those milky breasts, she was the perfect Lady Macbeth, even in her seventh month. If only I’d hung on for another half-hour I’d have saved the house from her understudy, a dumpy girl with ginger hair who had to wear Lady Macduff’s dress (Lilias’s waters having broken over the surcoat). There was talk of naming me Hecate, to be shortened to Cate, but Banquo persuaded her it might not be the luckiest start and instead I got Freya, the Norse goddess of love. I heard this story told dozens of times as a child, drinking orangeade in pubs where the barman turned a blind eye because we were his only afternoon custom. There was always a moment when Lilias l
ooked to me for confirmation and, because I loved to be included and had heard the details so often I almost believed I did remember, I would nod at her, mugging a little, renewing the gales of laughter.
In term time I was packed off to Uncle Nellaney in the house of ticking clocks, but the rest of my childhood was spent ‘helping’ boarding-house landladies with the housework and walking the arthritic hind legs off their bug-eyed King Charles spaniels. Where the accommodation did not include free child-minding, there were railway waiting rooms, bus station cafes, public libraries and municipal art galleries where the staff, recognising a fellow time-passer, let me alone. Only if we found ourselves in a burgh too mean for roofed and heated public space would I end up backstage. Every school holiday brought a different town, sometimes two or three: throwing the Gordon rug over the latest greasy sofa, buying a bunch of fresias for the ring-marked table, propping the photograph of my father as Othello on the mantelpiece, and telling myself this was home.
It wasn’t a slapdash upbringing. I never sang at the table or ate in the street. To this day I am innocent of the taste of bubble gum. We said ‘lavatory’, not ‘toilet’ – and certainly not ‘cludgie’; ‘street sweeper’ not ‘scaffie’; ‘going to’ not ‘gonnae’. Farting was euphemised as ‘having an affliction’ and well into my teens I believed this to be the correct, if recherché, phrase. ‘Common’ was another proscribed word, with its whiff of shopkeeper-class petty-mindedness. In hindsight, I can see that Lilias was just another parvenu: an ambitious, pretty woman with a Frenchy made-up name. But as a child I was convinced there was no one else like her. And I never met anyone else’s mother who dished up Shredded Wheat for dinner or pegged used towels on the line for a ‘fresh-air wash’. My mother was that trickiest of combinations, a bohemian snob. I once asked her why she didn’t wear a boob tube like our landlady that month, a divorcée whose gold slingbacks and cerise toenails struck me as the ultimate in glamour. I don’t remember committing this crime, but I do remember hearing it recounted in a series of green rooms, and being scorched at each telling by my mother’s tinkling laugh.
There was a fixed way to dress, to smile, to enunciate, to deal with bus drivers and box office managers, to converse with our fellow boarders and, if need be, to ignore them. And although the memory of all this was a source of corrosive resentment throughout my twenties, it was a kind of structure when everything else was in flux. I never knew when I went to sleep if I would wake up in a bed, or on somebody’s sofa, or in the back of a van speeding down the M1. Whether there would be scrambled eggs for breakfast, or (since Lilias remained an erratic dieter) nothing but frozen peas. Whether I would be spending the day with Cordelia or Goneril, Mrs Warren or Eliza Doolittle, Dorothy or the Wicked Witch of the West.