by Anna Legat
It wasn’t the same for Emma. For Emma, it was harrowing and humiliating. Not to mention the terrible waste of time. Still, this was the last time. No matter what. Ben had promised.
*
The implantation had been unsuccessful. Realistically, the odds were against them. Pure statistics. Two previous attempts had failed. What were the chances of the latest one succeeding? Ben and Emma had tried. And failed. It happened sometimes that people failed. The failure didn’t taste good, but one had to live with it. The fact was that they had been teetering on the edge of chaos for the past two years. Two years of medical appointments, tests, diet changes and regimented sexual antics.
At first, Emma thought their failure to have babies had something to do with her sexual ambivalence. She didn’t like sex. She didn’t get orgasms to the extent that she wouldn’t be able to tell she was having one, if she were. Principally, she wasn’t remotely interested. Never had been.
It had nothing to do with Ben. He was gorgeous. He could be a kept man, and on some level, he was. He could be an ornament on her mantelpiece, and in her mind that was where she kept him. He was a man to bring home, which she had done, and her parents loved him to bits. Everyone loved Ben. Every woman lusted after him. He turned women’s heads without realising it. He had a body to die for, as Emma’s girlfriends reliably informed her.
Emma had tried to get into the spirit of sex. She had read all the shades of grey she could get her hands on – at least the extracts that were instructional on sex, leaving the overall plot intricacies to the experts. Still, she wasn’t aroused in any shape, shade or form. She participated in intercourse dutifully and at regular intervals. Her lovemaking was like drawing by numbers. And she was great with numbers – she could do that with her eyes closed! Once a month, when the possibility of conception was at its highest, she would perform headstands following sex. For the sperm to sink in. She had read somewhere that it would help. But it had not.
When she hit thirty-five, Ben had suggested IVF. It was now or never, he had said. Think what a beautiful baby we could make. OUR baby! And again, just as with the sex, Emma devoted herself unconditionally to the project. She loved Ben – she couldn’t emphasise that enough. She would do anything for him. If a baby was what he wanted, then a baby he would get. On it went: hormone injections, diet change, IVF number one, more hormones and IVF number two, yet more hormones, mood swings, hot flushes, tiredness, anxiety and IVF number three. And nothing. End of the tether.
In a way, Emma was relieved. She had done her bit. It wasn’t her fault it hadn’t worked. Plus she was so busy! Hectic. Otherwise occupied...
Ben called her at work three hours ago. He never called unless there was an emergency. For Ben, anything to do with the baby was an emergency. That was the only reason he would have called her in business hours.
She had been in the middle of an appointment so she let the phone ring. It could be either a yes or a no – nothing too complicated – so it could wait, she concluded. After all, nothing could be changed by answering the phone to hear the verdict. Especially in the middle of an appointment. Later on, she listened to Ben’s message, in the privacy of her small office. It was a no.
Of course, she could have driven home straight away. To be there for Ben. But that wouldn’t have reversed the result. The result would still be a no. So she stayed at work, in her comfort zone. She had too much to do. Blackburn – Gary – wasn’t settling in as expected. He had some outrageous ideas about tea and loo breaks while the branch was run on a skeleton staff. She had been planning to have a word with Blackburn about the banking sector’s work ethics. The sooner she did that, the sooner he could change his ways and become productive. She had to do it today. It was in her diary for 16:30, after the branch closed for business.
Now, she was late. Later than usual, and considering the emergency of the situation (as perceived by Ben), she had to hurry. After the town centre, the traffic had begun to thin a bit and Emma was able to ram the gas pedal into the floor. She zoomed by slow buses and the general road litter of the small-Fiat-and-Skoda variety, overtaking them on blind corners and double lines. She had to be by her husband’s side as soon as humanly possible. She loved him.
*
The letter was on the kitchen table. Dr Bleibner was an old-fashioned man, given to writing conventional letters and sending them first class by Royal Mail. He could have phoned. A phone call would have sounded less ominous, less final. Alas, it was a letter, stating the blinkingly obvious in three unnecessarily long paragraphs. In one word it was a no.
Emma read the letter word by word, as one should, even though she already knew what it said. So that was it. The letter had put the final full stop after their two years of trying. Emma placed the letter in the plastic wallet where they kept all the other letters related to the baby. The matter was closed; the file retired.
Ben was sitting in the conservatory, looking out into the garden. His elbows were on his knees and he was leaning forward, cupping his hands over his face. ‘You can tell spring’s in the air,’ he said when Emma kissed him on the cheek. ‘The buds are beginning to open. D’you know, I hate daffodils? They’re so boastful. So full of themselves. "Look at us," they’re saying, "we’re thriving!"’
Emma didn’t know how to tackle the subject of daffodils. She had prepared a few lines about the result, and the end of trying and things happening for a reason. Daffodils didn’t come into it. She wasn’t on safe ground. So she said, ‘Sorry, I’m a bit late today. Was held up at work with Gary. Remember Gary? Our new cashier?’
Ben either didn’t remember or didn’t want to talk about Gary. Emma adopted a different approach. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? I could do with one. I’ll make us a pot.’
She wasn’t a great tea drinker, but Ben was. Emma drank espresso coffee, which she purchased daily from Costa, next door to the bank. Ben wouldn’t touch it. He was a confirmed tea man. It was astounding how different they were: Emma and Ben. They couldn’t even agree on the same beverage. Imagine bringing up a child together! Everything happened for a reason, her gran used to say. A way of reconciling with facts.
She put three teabags in the pot and poured in hot water to the top. The pot was from Emma’s gran, too. Emma inherited it alongside a set of dainty cups and saucers, and beautifully crafted silver teaspoons. Neither of them took sugar. They were in agreement on something after all!
She carried the tray with the pot and two cups, clinking teaspoons and a jug of milk to the conservatory. She couldn’t bring herself to offer the tea to Ben. He was crying. He was crying like a little schoolboy – big sobs, red eyes, runny nose. As if it was the end of the world for him. He lifted his swollen face. ‘I’m so sorry, Emma. All I wanted was to give you a baby – our baby... All I could think of doing to make up to you for –’ Another sob broke into his sentence.
Emma cuddled him. ‘It’s OK. We’ve tried and it isn’t meant to be. As much as I’d love a baby...’ It was a well-rehearsed line which she could deliver with calm and panache. She could’ve said It’s okay because I don’t need a baby; wouldn’t know what to do with it, which would be closer to the truth. But she didn’t want to hurt Ben’s feelings.
*
It was a lovely dog, a tawny Airedale puppy Emma had found on the internet. It was registered, fully vaccinated, microchipped and dewormed. It had cost a handsome £900, plus the petrol, for Emma had to drive all the way to Ipswich to get it. It was going to be a birthday surprise for Ben, and to kill two birds with one stone, it was a consolation prize. To help him forget about the baby and about their failure to make one. That was the best Emma could do under the circumstances. Ben needed it, she reasoned with herself, because in reality she didn’t. Not that she didn’t like dogs. Not that she minded them. But she simply didn’t have the time to battle with a living-breathing creature demanding attention on a daily basis. In her line of work even goldfish would be a challenge.
Ben, however, would love it. He would bo
nd with the dog, take it for walks, pick up its poo from the pavement and throw a ball for it to fetch, just like all the other dog lovers out there. And hopefully, with his hands full of doggie matters, he would forget about the baby.
How wrong had she been!
‘What on earth made you do that?!’ He was pointing to the dog who had climbed out of the cage and was staggering around the sitting room, sniffing the furniture and whimpering under its breath.
It was a shock. At the very least, Emma had expected a smile – a smile she had not seen on his face for three weeks, since that day. She had hoped for more: a hug she had longed for, a 'thank you' that would only be basic courtesy, an 'I love you' that was long overdue. She received none of that. And so the nasty irritability had set in again. That niggle at the back of her mind – the doubt.
‘If you don’t want it, I’ll take it back,’ she said dryly.
‘What made you think I wanted a dog?’
‘Like I said, I’ll take it back.’
‘Did you really think a dog is what we need?! I want a child – with you – not a bloody dog!’
‘We can’t always get what we want!’
‘So you get me a dog.’ He stood there, defeated.
Emma sat down, watching Ben’s consolation prize as it piddled on the TV cables in the corner of the room. She had no words for the dog, no words for her husband.
He, on the other hand, had plenty, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, Emma. And I wonder, just wonder... Could you answer me straight?’
‘Answer you about what?’
‘Did you ever want a baby with me? For one second, did you ever want to have my child?’
‘I did everything in my power.’
‘That wasn’t the question.’
She got up to rescue the dog, which was now entangled in the cables, looking dangerously close to strangulating itself. ‘I’ll take it back.’
‘Leave it! For God’s sake, bloody well leave it!’ Ben shouted, loud and furious. Then he muted his tone, ‘Leave the dog be. It may be the only thing to save our marriage.’
She left the room. She didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t know what he wanted. All she knew was that they couldn’t have possibly wanted the same thing.
TREVOR
‘Do you think Kurtz is referring to his internal demons when he says his dying words – The horror! The horror!’ Trevor posed the question to the class, hoping against hope that at least one of them would put their hand up and say something – anything. No one did. They sat there looking exquisitely bored, some of them gawking at him without comprehension, others gazing leisurely out of the window; someone at the back of the classroom – Dylan, by the looks of it – was nodding off, his head limp on the cushion of his folded arms. This was slowly becoming Trevor’s own unspeakable horror. He had to give them a hidden clue, something to spur them into action. Electric shock would have come in very handy at this point, but he doubted even that could bring this class back from the dead. They were slow. They were the slowest form in school – notably, in a school not particularly renowned for its academic prowess. Trevor had to go on talking if only to fill the silence.
‘Would you say Kurtz knew he was dying and at that point saw the horror of his imminent end? Would you say that? Would you? Who would agree with that statement? Just put your hand up if you do,’ he was almost shouting.
Wake up, you lazy bastards! Wake the fuck up!
The silence of their response was deafening. Trevor was seeing the horror of his own impending end – professional end. He was trying not to look in the direction of the inspector, but couldn’t help furtive glances, his eyeballs bouncing in his head like a pair of conkers. The man was sitting at the back of the classroom, his presence a heavy weight chained to Trevor’s ankles. Trevor was drowning. His breathing was becoming rapid and shallow. He could feel sweat blistering on his forehead. His heart was drumming. If he had never quite got to the bottom of Heart of Darkness, now he was, well... in the heart of it. Living it. His own worst nightmare.
OFSTED had swooped on Parkhurst Comprehensive like the biblical plague of locusts. Out of nowhere. A dread-infused debate in the staff room this morning had conclusively attributed this unannounced inspection to Bloody Mrs Steadman. She had apparently complained about what was commonly known as kerb dealing, the class C drug trade that went on unhindered by the school’s front gate. Strictly speaking, outside the school grounds. The suppliers were the disgruntled, underpaid employees of the nearby Western National Hospital. That was where the problem lay. But no – Bloody Mrs Steadman had an axe to grind with the school.
Trevor had been given no time to think. His first lesson was with Form U – the Undead as he called them – and that was when the inspector strolled into his classroom, signalling the beginning of Trevor’s end.
In a last-ditch attempt, Trevor decided to create the smokescreen of group work – the illusion of activity. ‘Right!’ he rolled up his mental sleeves, pumped up his chest (he had seen it done before somewhere on the telly, and it had worked). He would ignore the cramps in his stomach. He would not shit himself. He would come out of this hellhole a winner. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve – tricks he vaguely remembered from his early days, tricks he never used anymore, tricks he had never tried on this lot. ‘Right, class! I want you to discuss it with your partner... the person next to you,’ his voice wavered slightly as he realised the challenges the word partner would present to this class. ‘Discuss...’ Right, he mustn’t be raising the bar. ‘Talk to the person next to you about the horrors. What horrors did Kurtz see? What horrors do you think he might’ve seen?’
Dylan at the back of the classroom perked up. He shouted out, ‘How about The Shining! Did you see The Shining?’
‘Or Poltergeist!’ another offering from the class. Trevor froze.
‘Nah! That’s old shit!’
‘The Shinin’s even older, jerk!’
Emily, a fat girl raised on a diet of pizza and horror DVDs, spoke for the first time in Trevor’s class, ‘I liked The House of the Devil best.’
‘You can’t be serious. It was crap!’
‘How about You’re Next?’
‘Children, can we focus on Heart of Darkness?’ Trevor’s voice was breaking all over again.
‘Yeah!’ Dylan bellowed, ‘You’re Next! Choice!’
*
His car was his castle. It was a moody Skoda, made to create the illusion of space and comfort, an illusion because everything inside-out was an imitation of the real thing: fake leather seats, cheap plastic wheel hubs made to look like metal alloys, air con that blew lukewarm fumes smelling of Dettol. The thing was driveable, just about, and Trevor was grateful for that small grace. He could sail across the Wensbury Plains at his leisure, savouring the time and space that was exclusively his. In his car, Trevor could be his own man. He would never relinquish his daily commute between Sexton’s Canning and Greyston, long and pointless as it might seem to others. It was his forty minutes of respite, each way. He could have changed schools long ago, taken up a post in Sexton’s secondary, but that would cost him his freedom – well, the temporary, on-loan freedom of his eighty minutes' daily commute.
The day had been catastrophic, but he could do nothing now to reverse the course of events. Forward and aft, he had told himself as he squeezed his bulk behind the wheel of his comforting Skoda. He pulled his striped tie off his neck and loosened the top button of his dastardly new shirt. An angry red scratch ran across his throat like the imprint of a noose. Why did Sandra insist on buying him size 42 shirts? Could it be, perhaps, that he dared not tell her he’d be much more comfortable in a 44-size chest? Would she change the habit of a lifetime or would she just tell him to lose some weight? Probably the latter. So he didn’t bother telling her anything. He rubbed his neck to get the blood circulating again to his face and brain. In the rear view mirror his eyes looked back at him, tired and hollow. The eyelids weighed heavily on them, swollen.
The heavy-hooded eyes of a defeated man. He re-adjusted the rear-view mirror and started the car.
The Archers was on. Comforting. Another tiny bit of his secret personal indulgence. He listened to The Archers religiously. He lived amongst them. They were all good people, his kind of people, and often, as he listened to their trials and tribulations, his own would mercifully pale into insignificance. Like now.
There were more important things in life than failed OFSTED inspections, and what if the inspector hadn’t failed him? Maybe the inspector was his kind of a man, too. Maybe he understood the insurmountable challenges of a class full of estate kids, who in all honesty were doing the world a favour by simply turning up at school every day. Instead of... instead of whatever else they might otherwise be getting up to. They could’ve easily chosen not to be in Trevor’s class so the fact that they had been there this morning, in full force, would be recorded in Trevor’s favour.
He was beginning to relax. Smiled at himself in the rear-view mirror. In there, apart from his smiling eyes, he saw the red car. He had seen that car before, he was almost sure of that. It had to be that nutter again. He would always drive up right into the arse of Trevor’s Skoda, and hang in there, glued to it, readying himself to zoom out and overtake. And he would overtake, no matter what. Even if, like now, there was another car in front, the nutter would have to overtake it as well. A nutter who could not stay in line.
Trevor was annoyed. The hell with road courtesy. The nutter was pushing into him, so Trevor pushed into the car in front. This manoeuvre had a domino-like effect. Trevor smirked. Normally he wasn’t one for road rage, but today was different. He wouldn’t let the nutter in. He would push forward. He was bloody well annoyed. See how the nutter liked that!