by Ajay Close
I started the conversation, drawing attention to the way Frankie kept looking at the sleeping baby on the settee.
‘He can’t help it,’ Ruth said, ‘it’s his paternal instinct.’
‘It’s his instinct to be the centre of attention,’ I said. ‘Asleep! In the same room as big Frankie MacKewon! God forbid, she might grow up watching the competition.’
Frankie studied his plate. I had lost the knack of wifely teasing. I sounded like the sort of second division club manager who punched his arm and laughed hysterically when their paths crossed in John Lewis.
I wondered aloud why no one ever talked about paternal instinct.
‘Because it’s called wanting a shag?’ Kenny suggested.
Ruth rolled her eyes. ‘Because they won’t admit to it in front of other men.’
Kenny winked at Frankie. ‘This touchy-feely business has gone too far. They’ll have us in frocks and Manolo yokemabobs if we don’t watch it.’
‘Even Torcuil,’ Ruth said, ‘he’s dying for a shot with Meaghan’s dolls, but he won’t let himself.’
‘She ties them up and plays hostages with them,’ Kenny told us. ‘She’ll make someone a great mammy one day.’
I topped up my glass of water. ‘It’s not a million miles from Lilias’s idea of mothering.’
‘She never beheaded you on the Internet,’ Frankie said.
‘That is a difference,’ I conceded.
But Ruth hadn’t finished with paternal instinct. ‘I suppose boys are slower to develop the nurturing urge.’ She looked at Frankie. ‘What age were you?’
‘Thirty-nine.’
She gave him the look I’d seen her use with Torquil when he was showing off. ‘They have to get mating out of their systems first, all that displaying and competition.’
‘You’ve turned into a right wee biological determinist,’ he said.
‘It’s having kids. All that guff about nurture goes out the window. Animals have two basic drives: reproduction and survival.’
‘What about football,’ Kenny said, with another wink at Frankie, ‘is that not a basic drive?’
‘More basic than reproduction these days,’ I said, in another attempt at conjugal teasing.
There was a silence.
‘I’ll get the pudding,’ Ruth said.
‘How are you?’
We were by the sink, site of a hundred feminine confidences, only that night it was Kenny washing, and me drying, while Ruth sought Frankie’s opinion on the fungus that had appeared in the garage.
‘Blooming,’ I said, ‘does it not show? Still, I’ll pay for it in the end.’
This was Ruth’s joke. You got a good pregnancy or a speedy labour, not both. She had suffered from indigestion every day of her nine months to deliver Mhairi in just fifty-three minutes. Kenny called her the human cannon.
He was running hot water into a pan. ‘I meant the both of you.’
I could have told him Frankie was baking brownies to appease my breeder’s sweet tooth and swimming shotgun at the public pool lest a passing breaststroker kick my bump, but if I walked into a room he happened to be in, within ten seconds he’d walk out.
‘We get by,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘How long is it you were away, four months?’
‘About that.’
‘Long enough to get used to it.’
I liked the combination of ungainliness and grace in Kenny’s six-foot-seven-inch frame. I liked the bulk of him looming over me as we worked at the sink. Despite his smoker’s skin and stringy hair and yellow nails, around him the world was a more wholesome place. But we didn’t do personal conversation.
He handed me the saucepan. ‘Ruth says you haven’t been back to the clinic.’
‘I’ve never felt so well in my life.’
‘Good for you,’ he said in a tone that told me exactly what it was like to be a patient of his, ‘but we don’t know about the little fella.’
‘The baby’s fine.’
‘Ah, he’ll be grand, but you’d want to be sure of that. Have you even had a blood test?’
I glanced down, past my newly magnificent breasts.
‘It’d be a fecking big tumour, so,’ he admitted.
We laughed.
‘I’m a bloke,’ he said, ‘pity on us: watching it all happen. Remember Wonderwoman out there, eight months gone with Torcuil, dragging thirteen-and-a-half stone up and down stairs with trays of Bovril and dry toast? I had myself tested for glandular fever, hepatitis.’ He laughed shamefacedly. ‘Couvade syndrome. She knew what it was all along, but she didn’t go on and on about it.’
‘She did to me,’ I said.
‘Ah, shur, that’s what friends are for.’
A wail rose from the settee at the far end of the long room.
The baby quietened as soon as he picked her up. He brought her back to the kitchen, and I thought: why not be honest?
‘I don’t know him any more.’
Preoccupied with the baby, Kenny frowned.
‘I see more of him on screen than I do at home. If he’s not flashing his pecs in Sicily, he’s prancing around in satin shorts sparring with Amir Khan. Do you watch Midweek Round-Up?’
‘Most weeks.’
‘So you caught his little chat to camera after the credits?’
‘Oh,’ he shifted the baby to his other shoulder, ‘Ruth said you wouldn’t like it.’
‘Maybe she should have a word.’ Something occurred to me. I had noticed it countless times and yet it had never really registered until then. ‘He’s always looking for her approval lately. Everything he says, he checks her reaction.’
Kenny ducked his head into his shoulders. ‘She’s been counselling him.’
I nodded as if this were a minor piece of news. ‘About what?’
‘I can’t say.’
But I could see he knew.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said, ‘it’s like I’m sharing the house with a stranger.’
‘Jaysus, Freya, have you looked at yourself? I mean, it’s great and all, but you aren’t the woman you were.’
‘So what am I?’
His mouth slackened into an expression that, on any other man but Kenny, I would have described as a leer. The hand not holding his daughter shaped the air. ‘You’re softer.’
I felt a stab of disappointment, he was talking about my figure.
‘You’ve slowed down – no, it’s good, it’s good. You’re more instinctive, not so,’ he tapped his forehead, ‘all up here.’
‘If you’re trying to say my brain’s shrunk, it happens to all pregnant women.’
‘No, no, no, no, no. I’m not talking about intelligence.’ He squinted. ‘Or am I, now? A different kind of intelligence, maybe. Like a cat. Or a…. a lioness. The way you walk – you’ve a lovely sway on you now.’ He put his hand over the baby’s head as if to shield her from what he was about to say. ‘He’s good for you, anyone can see that, but it’s hard on the big man.’
‘It’s finished,’ I said. ‘It hardly started.’
‘Ah, well, I won’t pretend I’m sorry about that.’
Having been shared with a million viewers of Midweek Round-Up, my infidelity was hardly a secret, but the shame I felt then was scalding, corrosive.
‘I didn’t want to be stuck out in the boondocks. I didn’t see him for weeks on end. I was lonely. All right: I was his first love, he’s never looked at another woman – when did he last take a proper look at me?’ The baby was watching me, fascinated. ‘Of course it’s a demanding job, and they pay him very well, and I worked long hours too, but… I just wish he’d told the studios to fuck off once in a while. I know what you’re thinking, and Ruth: he adored me. Yes, he did. But he was quite happy not seeing me for weeks on end. Well, it turned out there was somebody up there who actually enjoyed my company, who was prepared to make time to be with me—’
I could hear how I sounded. Better the unvarnished truth than this whining self-justifica
tion.
‘Look, when you both want something that much and it doesn’t happen, month after month after month, it drives a wedge between you. I’d look at his face and all I saw was unhappiness. You love each other, but it’s so painful. We had all the tests: nothing wrong with him, nothing wrong with me. It still wasn’t happening. Was the clinic going to make any difference? I couldn’t see it. We couldn’t go on like that. Another six months, a year, and we’d have forgotten why we got together in the first place. We needed to get past this. I needed to get pregnant—’
I’d said so much, was there any point in not admitting it?
‘And I thought it might happen with a younger man.’
In his tactful, doctor’s voice, Kenny said, ‘Does Frankie know it’s over with this bloke?’
‘Yesterday we had a discussion about the funny noise the Dyson’s been making. That’s about as meaningful as it gets.’
‘He’s having a tough time of it, Freya. Cut him some slack.’
Another wave of resistance rose in my chest. ‘And what slack’s he cutting me?’
‘Don’t you know?’
Just then the CD, having fallen silent twenty minutes before, reached its hidden bonus track, a cacophonous Rolling Stones cover. Mhairi began to cry. Kenny paced between cooker and fridge, murmuring into her scalp. This time it didn’t work. Her face grew red, her brow compacting to make room for the furious oval of her mouth. Touching my belly to reassure the child inside me, I turned the music off.
‘What slack is Frankie cutting me?’
At the peremptory note in my voice Mhairi stopped crying. Kenny tipped his head back in relief, or perhaps it was resignation.
‘He knows the little fella isn’t his.’
The back door opened. Frankie walked across to the radiator. Ruth followed him in.
‘Is there any more coffee?’ She answered herself, ‘No, but I know where the kettle is.’ She flicked the switch and relieved Kenny of their daughter.
There was a pause filled only by her sing-song to the baby and the asthmatic grumble of the warming kettle. Kenny’s eyes strayed to the ventilation grille above the cooker.
I didn’t really need to ask. ‘You heard us, didn’t you?’
Ruth’s glance intersected with mine but she carried on fussing the baby.
‘Aye,’ Frankie said.
I saw he was angry with Kenny, and humiliated in front of Ruth. I didn’t want to think about how he was feeling towards me. I went over to the sink and washed the cafetière. He took it from me. I watched him set out the cups and fetch the milk from the fridge. He seemed familiar to me in a way he hadn’t for a long time. Not like the menopausal last-chancer who stripped off on camera, or the poker-faced stranger who shared my home and bed, but like the old Frankie. My husband. And so I placed my hands on my belly and told him. ‘There’s no question, she’s yours.’
The kettle came to the boil and switched itself off. The baby mewed against Ruth’s breast.
For the first time since coming in from the garage, Frankie looked at me. ‘That’s not what the second sperm count said. There was a cock-up at the lab, it was some other guy’s sample first time round. Mine are fucking useless.’
We got into the car. I didn’t start the engine. We sat there, staring through the windscreen at the Mini parked ahead of us.
I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me—?’
He laughed under his breath. I supposed I deserved it.
‘It’s not his child either—’
He held up his hands as if he couldn’t bear to hear any more.
‘That fucking clinic.’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters. If it’s not yours, and it’s not his, whose is it?’
‘I don’t care, Freya.’
I sighed. ‘Thank you.’
He turned to look at me. ‘No,’ he said, more distinctly. ‘I. Don’t. Care.’
The pain was so sudden, I thought I was having a heart attack.
He turned back to the windscreen.
‘Frankie, listen, I know I haven’t behaved well—’
‘Shut it!’
I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d hit me. We called the sort of men who told their wives to shut it ‘sexist shitheads’. But then, what would we call the sort of wife who slept with another man because he had younger sperm?
‘This isn’t us,’ I said. ‘You and me, we’ve always – we talk—’
He laughed under his breath again, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘It happened once. I know that’s one time too many, but it was only once, and I felt – I feel bad about it…’
He talked over me. ‘I’ve had it up to here, Freya. I can’t take any more. I thought I could, but I can’t.’
‘No,’ I said, pleading now.
He looked at me.
‘Frankie…’
‘You can keep the house.’
‘You love me!’
‘I did, aye. It’s a pity you never noticed until now.’
‘We’ll start again – you, me and the baby.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
I had to admit it. ‘Not really.’
He closed his eyes as if to summon new reserves of strength. ‘I don’t care who the father is. Your farmer, Barack Obama, Mickey fucking Mouse: it’s not mine. I thought if I kept my mouth shut, if I didn’t say anything I’d regret later, I’d get used to the idea, but I’m not a saint. I’m sorry, but I can’t watch you giving birth to another man’s child.’
Even now a part of me refused to accept it. This was Frankie, who had loved me, man and boy. There had to be something I could say to change his mind. And perhaps there was. I’ll give her up for adoption. But I was never going to say that.
‘I’ll move out tomorrow,’ he said.
‘No,’ I turned the key in the ignition. ‘I’ll go.’
Blood
I moved into a Travelodge. It was just what I needed: an empty room where I could tidy away every trace of myself. To minimise the risk of miscarriage, I decided not to go back to work. After so many weeks I was inured to what others called my life of leisure. Early to bed. A long lie in the morning. Hours whiled away in bookshops and cafés and galleries. The odd lazy afternoon at Ruth’s, holding the new baby. She knew I’d moved out, but after a couple of rebuffs she stopped trying to discuss it. I told myself it was better not to think about it, to blank my desperate feelings so they didn’t poison the baby.
I kept the news from Lilias, as did Frankie. Or at least, she never referred to it. She was making a point of ignoring the pregnancy. I wasn’t sure why, but because I would never ask for anything withheld, I followed her lead. It became a sort of game between us: who was going to crack and mention it first. I suppose I won. We were queueing at the box office to collect tickets for Andromache when, apropos of nothing, she cast a jaundiced eye over my dress, and said, ‘I’m not sure about the wisdom of horizontal stripes, darling.’ After that, it was open season. She was not sure about me wearing low-waisted jeans, and snacking between meals, and resting my hands on my bump (‘It’s not going to go away if you stop touching it, you know’). Was I absolutely certain of my dates? I really shouldn’t be that big. She hadn’t shown until her fifth month, and never had to buy a maternity dress. She hoped I was using oil of evening primrose, although at my age I’d be left with a kangaroo’s pouch whatever I did. I’d be lucky not to get piles, the size it’d be by the time it was ready to come out. Frankie would feel the difference too, unless I begged them for the husband’s stitch, and she didn’t think they did it these days – the feminists had spoiled things for everyone else. I could look forward to constipation, indigestion, loosening teeth, postnatal hair loss. My breasts would go south, if they hadn’t already. And I wasn’t to believe the propaganda about pelvic floor exercises: I’d never cough off the lavatory again.
Then one day she phoned asking me to meet her at t
he hospital.
The nurse was young and overweight, with a swag of flesh joining her chin to the place where her collarbone should have been. Lovely skin, like Galloway milk, except where she’d smeared herself in sand-coloured foundation. I got this eye for detail from Lilias, it was part of who I was, but recently I had been making an effort to switch it off. It wasn’t a trait I wanted to pass on to my daughter. The knack of walking into a diamond shop and instantly seeing the flaws makes no one any happier.
‘You should have come through,’ the nurse said, ushering me down the corridor.
‘The sign said to wait.’
She wrinkled her nose indulgently. Evidently the rules were not made for relatives of Lilias. ‘You can keep an eye on her for me, see she doesn’t overdo it.’
‘Which of her many overdoings do you have in mind?’
She flashed me a disconcerted glance. ‘My gran was the same. Never had a day in bed. If you needed a hand, she was there for you, but when she needed help, would she ask?’ We walked a few steps in silence. ‘It’s Freya, isn’t it?’ she said. I glanced at the laminated badge pinned to her uniform. Someone had christened her Grace.
‘The thing is, Freya, she needs everything she’s got to fight the cancer. She can’t be running your life and hers.’
Nurse Grace wanted my mother to move in with me. It would be useful with the baby coming, having someone there if I wanted to get out to the shops. And it would make all the difference to her. But she wouldn’t be running after me. Those days were gone. It was my turn to hold everything together.
After a lifetime of being ambushed by Lilias’s scripts, I didn’t even blink.
‘I know it’s scary, she’s your mum, she’s always been there for you, but she’s got enough to worry about without you in bits.’
We pushed through a set of double doors into a large room lined with examination cubicles. The nurse pulled back a curtain. ‘Here we are.’
I was reminded of uncooked chicken wings on cold-cabinet shelves. Meatless sinew, those scaly wrists. Stick legs stuck out below the paper gown. I felt a sudden fury at the blinking striplight, the scuffed plastic chair, the handwashing instructions on the wall.