by Ajay Close
‘Then again, do I really want to sign up for eighteen years with Frankie’s inner child?’
‘He’ll make a great dad—’
I caught her eye.
‘Once he realises it can’t be fun all the time.’
‘And if he never does?’
‘You’ll have to kill him.’
She bit her lip, looking over her shoulder to check we’d not been overheard. ‘At least he’s got some energy, he’s not knackered seven days a week. And he talks to you. I haven’t had a conversation with Kenny since 2008.’
‘But you’ve got children. Anyway, I always know what he’s going to say.’
Now I was the one casting a guilty backward glance. Yes, we still talked across the candlelit table when we ate out, or in the arts centre bar around the corner, and yes, we were each comprehensively familiar with the other’s preoccupations. But every once in a while he’d introduce a thought I didn’t know inside out, a concept I needed to concentrate to engage with, and my heart would pound as if he were trying to murder me.
Ruth took a salad bag out of the fridge, dumped its contents in a bowl, opened a bottle of Sainsbury’s dressing and drenched the leaves. Before she had children it was always home-made balsamic vinaigrette.
‘The clinic rang with a date for my laparoscopy,’ I said.
‘That’s great!’
‘It was next Tuesday. I’m giving evidence to the Standards committee.’
‘So you rescheduled?’
I grimaced.
‘You didn’t reschedule?’
‘I don’t want to get started and then have to stall it again because I’ve got too much on. If I need IVF, I’ll have to clear my diary for six weeks.’
‘How is Scotland going to manage?’
‘I’d like to see Frankie take six weeks off work with next to no notice.’
‘Frankie doesn’t have a womb.’
We both smiled at this thought. There was a pause.
‘You don’t want to do it,’ she said.
I was used to Ruth’s insights and the temptation to hear them as oracular.
‘Of course I do.’ I began to sculpt a radish. ‘There’s a risk of ovarian cancer.’
‘You could always have a hysterectomy when you’re done.’
‘Great idea!’
‘And the real worry?’
The years fell away and for an instant I glimpsed the psychology student with her bleached buzz-cut and cherry-red Doc Martens.
‘Shall I lie on the couch?’
She folded her arms to show she was prepared to wait.
‘I have these awful dreams, doctor.’ I said it as a joke, although it happened to be true.
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know. I can never remember when I wake up.’
‘You don’t believe in stuff like that.’
‘No.’
‘So?’
I regretted starting this conversation. ‘How about, if it doesn’t work, we’ll know it’s never going to happen, it’s the last card in the deck?’
‘Use it or lose it.’
We burst out laughing.
‘Maybe not the most tactful remark in the circumstances,’ she admitted.
A high-pitched yelp announced that Meaghan had joined the tussle on the settee. This time neither of us bothered to look.
‘Just think, you might be standing here in ten months’ time showing off your new baby.’
‘And then I find out I’m no good at it.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her glance fell on the radish I was carving. It was going to be a lotus flower. ‘You still have to do it. And do it again. And again. And again. And after a while you can’t remember a time when you did anything else. It’s boring, God knows, but it has its own…’
‘Zen-like satisfaction?’
‘They need a routine. You supply one. You had a mother.’
I looked at her.
‘OK, forget I said that.’ She snatched the knife out of my hands and chopped the lotus flower in half, dropping the pieces in the salad bowl. ‘We’re going to eat it, not enter it for the Venice Biennale.’
I took the knife back and selected another radish.
‘Oh,’ she said, understanding.
I met her look.
In the dogmatic voice she used with the children sometimes, she said, ‘Lilias is a one-off. When they made her they broke the mould.’
‘Get his shoes, Meg!’
The game on the settee had switched to tickling. Torcuil’s fingers strummed at my husband’s armpit while he wriggled in a helplessness that was obviously feigned.
‘Torcuil, Meaghan, get off him!’
The radish flew out of my hands, the knife clattering on the counter. Kenny was back from the off-licence. He wasn’t a big man in the Scottish sense, his height was more of a lovable eccentricity, but just then his bulk filled the doorway. His eyes, generally slitted with amusement, were blazing. Torcuil and Meaghan disentangled themselves from Frankie and perched on the edge of the settee, knees together, beady-eyed with shock. For a moment Frankie’s face showed the same stricken expression, then he recovered his poise.
‘They’re no bother, Kenny.’
‘They’re acting like little savages.’
Of all our friends, Kenny and Ruth were by far the most relaxed with their children, allowing them to relate to the outside world without the relentless policing of behaviour, the prompts of please and thank you and pardon contemporary parenting seemed to require. I decided something had happened while he was out, and he’d brought the frustration home with him. But if that was the case, why was Ruth watching my husband, not hers?
There was an amused, unruffled look Frankie wore sometimes when I was annoyed with him. I found it completely exasperating. He shared it with the children now. ‘Your daddy’s right, two against one’s not fair.’
Torcuil’s eyes slid towards him, sensing this was a joke but needing confirmation. Frankie winked. Torcuil smirked.
Kenny’s arm shot out, yanking his son off the settee.
‘Upstairs, both of you.’
Meaghan jumped as if slapped.
‘Upto your rooms, now.’
The children fled, their trainers thundering on the stairs.
I remembered the last time we had been to Kenny and Ruth’s, when Frankie bought a couple of ninety-nines from the van across the road and, before Kenny had a chance to say no, carried them up to the kids in bed. The time before that, he’d flicked a pea off his plate at Meaghan. They loved it when he crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, or made fart sounds and pointed at them accusingly. He could hardly get in the door before they were searching his pockets for their treat. All this currying of favour drove me crazy. I was so busy dealing with the way they preferred him to me, it never crossed my mind that I might not be the one he was competing with.
It was a storm in a teacup, uncomfortable in the moment but soon forgotten.
Ruth turned away to finish preparing the meal we would all sit down to quite happily in thirty minutes’ time. ‘Fancy a wee aperitif?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
She resumed the conversation where we’d left off. ‘Kids are tougher than you think. You had Lilias, and look at you now.’
‘Is that meant to be a compliment?’
She raised her glass in a salute. ‘Size twelve. All your own teeth. Good job. Fantastic friends.’
‘So I should pull myself together?’
She grinned in the unrepentant way of people who spent their twenties mining the unconscious and by forty are back with common sense. ‘If you really think you’re going to fuck them up, bail out now. Otherwise, yeah, get on with it. For all our sakes.’
Doctor
How do you describe something you did a couple of thousand times? I say two thousand, it may have been more – but not so many more. All those nights we were too exhausted to touch, all those groggy mornings and listless afternoons I
won’t see again. We both preferred the daytime: a Sunday with the background hiss of childhood boredom, a chalky sky outside the window, the smell of lunch downstairs. Frankie was warm-blooded. I’d strip off fast and dive between the covers into his humid cave, a hot bath of flesh, his hands pulling me in to the furred breadth of his chest. ‘Jeez, your feet are baltic,’ he’d protest for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time I’d turn in his arms, saying, ‘Not as baltic as this.’ So then he’d set about warming me and, when I was tingling and touch-drugged and drowsy, we’d kiss.
Ruth once told me she and Kenny could get from toothpaste to climax in fifteen minutes. We liked to take our time. It was the one advantage of not having children. In the beginning we were pretty evenly matched, I didn’t think of him as especially good-looking. Then the years pass, and looking good is less about the extra you have than the basics you retain. Just as I was discovered by gravity, he found the Botox of fame. Like most women my age, I was intermittently gorgeous. The rest of the time I looked tired. Frankie was in a different league. No matter how tired, he still had those shoulders, a genetic fluke maintained with thirty laps of crawl a day. Those shoulders, the sandy brush-cut, that virile flush. It was a pre-feminist look. You’d never have guessed he owned a jar of moisturiser and cooked a mean risotto, which made him that most desirable of combinations, a sensitive type who looked like a brute. I saw the glances in the swimming pool: plenty of women would have given their eye-teeth to be warmed by Frankie’s hands. I never worried. It wasn’t just that he loved me. There was a streak of the altar boy in him in love with the idea of fidelity. Though he liked to ring the changes, in a monogamous context.
‘Take your clothes off, Mr MacKewon. All your clothes. Now, let’s have a look. Stand still, please, eyes straight ahead. Broad shoulders, strong back, firm buttocks. Good. I’m just going to… Sehr gut. Stand still, I said. Muscular thighs. Turn around please. Strong definition on the pectorals, taut abdominals. Oh. What have we here? No need to answer, I can see what it is. Lie down on the couch.’
‘But, doctor…’
‘On the couch, please. I need to give you a thorough physical examination.’
‘But, doctor, you’ve nothing on under that white coat.’
‘Try to relax, I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘What are you doing, doctor?’
‘I find it more convenient to work on top of the patient…’
‘That was nice,’ he said.
‘Mmm.’
‘That was very nice.’
Afterwards we’d fallen asleep. I had dreamed of porpoises and whitecaps and jellyfish that flashed like neon. I was warm all the way through, still drifting on the incoming tide.
His hand settled on my belly. ‘Like the old days.’
I bumped against the shore.
‘“Come round for breakfast,” you said. I thought, coffee and a croissant. Bacon, if I’m lucky. Fuck. Then you went in and did a day’s work. I had to pull a sickie, go back to the flat and crash out.’
Above me the ceiling came into focus. There was a crack in the plaster I hadn’t seen before.
‘Eight in the morning. I couldn’t believe it. A quickie maybe, but not the full a la carte. I thought, I’ll be dead of a heart attack by the time I’m forty, but I’ll die happy.’ He gave a pleasurable shudder. ‘What were you doing down there?’
‘Just the usual.’
‘No, it’s different when the doctor does it.’ His fingers combed the hair between my legs. ‘Good job my ma’s not alive to see me now. I was a good boy, till I was corrupted.’
‘Not by me.’
‘Must have been your twin sister, then.’
I said nothing.
He nudged my shoulder. ‘It was your idea.’
‘What was?’
‘The doctor.’
‘No it wasn’t.’
‘Aye it was.’
His fingers burrowed deeper, the other hand lifting to give me an unobstructed view of his reviving interest.
‘Before I went in to the Western for my foot. I was joking about the nurses and you said, “It’s the doctors you’ll need to watch.”’ He nudged me again. ‘Remember?’
‘No.’
‘Aye you do.’ It was one of his standing jokes that I would never concede a point. ‘Doctor Hess. “Herman,” I said, but you said, “No: Hildegard. Works twenty-four seven, can’t get a lumber, so she gets her rocks off with the patients.”’
I did have a vague recollection of this conversation.
‘You had your glasses on and that white pyjama jacket. I’ve not seen that for ages – you’ve not given it away to Oxfam? You started talking German. Aah, that rings a bell, eh? Go on, admit it.’ He tugged provokingly at my pubic hair.
‘No.’
He looked at me for a moment then took his hand away. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re not still huffing about me working Friday night?’
‘’Course not.’
‘What then?’
‘It’s not my style.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I waited until he worked it out.
‘Fuck’s sake, it’s a ponytail and a German accent. It’s not going to get you an Equity card.’
We were lying ramrod straight now, no part of our bodies touching. I could see him thinking it over.
‘Why’d you do it, then?’
‘I…’ But the evasions that occurred to me seemed as damaging as the truth. ‘You like it.’
‘And you’re just humouring me?’
I sighed.
‘You hate it.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘It reminds you of your fucking mother.’
I closed my eyes.
‘Were you faking it?’ he asked.
‘You know I wasn’t.’
‘How? Tell me how I’m meant to know? For ten years I’ve been thinking you do it for pleasure.’
‘Frankie…’
‘You know: an equal party.’
I felt a flaring of resentment. If the charge was sexual bad faith, I wasn’t the one who’d said ‘like the old days’, as if I rationed it, or the missionary position had become our staple. As if we had both agreed the poverty of our intimacy.
‘Yes, equal,’ I said, ‘not cloned. We are allowed different tastes. I never spent my weekends standing outside the changing rooms at Ralph Slater before I met you. I didn’t listen to radio phone-ins about Luigi Moroni’s groin injury. Now I do, and I quite enjoy it.’
‘Quite enjoy…’
‘I’m not talking about the sex.’
‘I am.’ He was shouting now.
‘All right, I don’t find the doctor–patient thing sexy per se. What I do find sexy is that you find it sexy.’
‘Well molte fucking grazie.’
I was tempted to get up and walk out, but I knew from experience the sweetness of upping the ante was short-lived and the wait for retaliation unbearably suspenseful, so I lay there, nursing my sense of grievance. What was wrong with the reliable mechanics of marital sex? We still did it, for God’s sake, and I knew plenty of couples our age who didn’t. If it was a long time since either of us had felt an uncontrollable urge to rip the other’s knickers off, surely that was inevitable, not an indictment of our relationship, a blight to be cured by pretending I was someone else.
In a calmer voice, he said, ‘You think I don’t know what this is really about?’
Here we go, I thought, the joker card. I played it too, now and again, but not half as often as Frankie. ‘You know what I miss about the good old days? At least I used to feel you were arguing with me, not some sock puppet in your own head.’
He lifted his hands with a flick that said he’d tried to discuss this in an adult fashion, he wasn’t going to try again.
Of course it bothered me, not knowing what he thought was bothering me. I reviewed the weekend. I’d griped about the empty
honey jar replaced in the cupboard, the cardboard core of the loo roll left on its holder, but such things were so trivial to him they were wiped from his memory before I’d finished complaining. His working hours were a longstanding beef, but I’d lost that battle years ago.
I looked at him. He raised his eyebrows.
‘Frankie, if you’ve something to say…’
I waited thirty seconds and got up from the bed. ‘Right, OK.’
It worked.
‘All that money we’re paying, and you won’t even give it a chance. But Freya Cavalle’s never in the wrong. It’s always got to be somebody else—’
So that was it. We had been discussing the clinic over lunch. I was prepared to book the time off work, if it came to that, but I refused to be exiled to some grotty country hotel. He thought I should be feeling guilty about this. Guilty enough to engineer a quarrel about sex to retake the moral high ground.
‘Three years we’ve been trying. We know the clock’s ticking. You won’t even have the fucking laparoscopy.’
‘I’m booked in next week.’
‘What day?’
My face gave me away.
‘What day, Freya?’
‘I’ll ring them tomorrow.’
He made a sound like a punctured tyre.
‘They’ll do it with no notice,’ I said. ‘We are paying all that money.’
‘We can afford it.’
‘And don’t they know it.’
‘They get results.’
‘Apparently.’
‘But you think they’re ripping us off?’
‘I think we don’t know. If they’re so fantastically successful, why isn’t every other clinic in the country doing it the same way? You saw the IVF lab: they’re not spending the money in there. If they see me every day, they can justify charging us over the odds.’
On the chest of drawers, his mobile started to ring.
‘It’s not just you,’ I said, ‘I want a baby too.’
‘Do you?’
The ringing stopped. I knew it would be the studios.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You say you do, and I used to believe you, but not now.’