Chapter 4
I can’t stop thinking about the stories the stuff from our bodies can tell.
And piss can utterly change your life.
But the second line is even stronger and redder than the control one. Almost defiant in its redness. I feel the floor wobble beneath me. This is pure Alice in Wonderland stuff: walking through one door, mainly to see if you can, then turning around to find the door, the way back out, has vanished.
I know I’m meant to feel some sort of euphoria.
Yes, we were trying and trying, almost to a point where it was not much more between Johnny and I than chat about mucus and cycles and implantation.
And now we have moved from using all the language into a new reality.
A whole new place. All that hope has gone and created something.
For a brief, fluttering cicada of a moment, I feel a little bit proud of Johnny and me.
But a chaser of something else, a surety that things will never be the same again and maybe that’s not such a good thing, creates a strange aftertaste.
What about all the stuff I wanted to do?
Would I have ever done it, pregnancy or not?
Something else bears down on me. I have eighteen years, possibly more, of hard, unpaid labour ahead of me. I will probably never have a day without worry ever again. I feel immediately wrecked; so much so that what I once thought would be a euphoric moment becomes a ‘take to the bed’ moment.
It’s a weird brew of feelings, this guilt that I wasn’t more immediately happy at the two lines, and the terror that I’m nowhere near ready for what comes next.
What business have I, a person who thinks ungenerous things about almost everyone around her, being in this position?
I send annoying baby toys to new parents for kicks.
I glare at screechy babies in cafes. What sane world would entrust me with my own one?
The more I think of it, this could well be a very human and understandable reaction to the idea of a screaming, shitting thing entering your life.
In quick succession, I think of the mums on the Goat’s Milk Mile and their glossy, satiating happiness.
I think of the other women whose cohort I was in amongst only a few minutes ago.
The ones that maybe want this even more than me, and are denied it month after month, their hopes dashed with a horrid little single line.
I’m still heady with wonderment about how this one moment that happened right after Deal Or No Deal has changed everything in my life, when I hear the scrape of Johnny’s key in the front door downstairs.
We may be already married, but this will mean we are truly, definitely, in it for the long haul.
Johnny walks into the bedroom, loosening the tie he absolutely doesn’t have to wear to his trendy tech job. (Again, I don’t know exactly what type of tech job Johnny has. He has explained it time and time again with Job-like patience, but like the offside rule, it refuses to absorb into my brain.)
Despite a tiny part of me telling myself to stay quiet, to find some more time to let this just be something between the baby and me, I find it impossible to hold on to it. Before my head even knows what’s going on, I hand him the pregnancy test, wordlessly.
‘What does that …’ he says, confused.
‘Well, I’m hardly handing you a negative pregnancy test now, am I?’
He peers at it again. His brow unknots and he breaks out into a smile.
‘The boys can swim! Yesss!’
This is yet more evidence of Johnny’s niceness.
Initial tests showed that, in fact, he had an embarrassment of riches in the swimmers’ department.
They were all Olympian-grade, bound for the podium, able to swim sensibly in the right direction, plus there was a shitload of the buggers.
The unspecified problem appeared to lie with me, but even so, Johnny has been happy to assume responsibility.
He is such an unbearable dude cliché, being proud of his working nutsack, holding the test as proof of his man-virility, yet in that moment a part of me loves him for it.
And I tell him so. ‘I love you for knocking me up, so I do.’
He laughs softly to himself. ‘Oh man, this is going to be so great.’
And then, as though he’s reading my mind, he adds, ‘You down at the Spence, with the Baby Bjorn, the Bugaboo, all of it …’
‘Ugh, as if.’ The unbidden smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. ‘They probably don’t want to be friends with anyone new anyway, that shower.’
I hate that despite my many protestations to the contrary, he knows that deep down I want that, to join their gang.
‘How do you even know what a Bugaboo is? That weirds me out a bit, if I’m honest,’ I tell him.
‘I’ve been doing my homework,’ he says, almost to himself. He stares down at the test’s two lines. I can tell he’s half afraid they might go away under his eyes.
‘You’ll never guess what. They have this machine for getting rid of the dirty nappies. A genie,’ he tells me.
‘Why didn’t you say so? I’d have done this baby thing years ago if I’d known that.’ We can make this joke now.
A few days later, Johnny reveals that he has already come up with a list of names for the child we’ve already referred to as ‘Ricey’ (owing to its long-grain size) and ‘November 2010’ (due date).
‘I’m doing the baking around here,’ I remind him. ‘I will therefore also be doing any naming.’
He still wants to show me the list. Amazingly, it hasn’t been laminated, although near enough.
‘What about Ciel?’ he offers.
‘Ciel,’ I reply distastefully.
‘Yeah. French for heaven.’
‘What about … Blythe,’ I attempt.
‘As in Blithe Spirit?’
‘Just, I know someone cool with that name.’
‘Hard, hard pass. What even is that?’
‘Maximilian?’
‘“Maximilian, come in for your dinner,”’ I yell in my broadest Northside Dublin accent. ‘Be serious for a second.’
Then: ‘Djuna?’ I offer. ‘After Djuna Barnes?’ Our names are becoming more bougie-slash-wanky by the second. He looks horrified, although I know he loves this game. He’s wanted to play it for a very long time.
‘Djuna.’ He tastes it in his mouth. ‘We’ve gone way too Hackney on this one.’
In the end, we decide on Jonah for a boy, Luna for a girl. The names make it all too real. Something that is at once thrilling and terrifying.
‘Why are you moving so slowly around the house?’ Johnny asks a few days later while we are making dinner.
I can’t bear to tell him that I’m afraid to move; how much I fret that the one bit of kinetic energy I am forced to use to get from A to B could be enough to unseat this baby from my womb and unspool this whole dream of ours.
‘What pregnancy symptoms do you have?’ he asks. I tell him there are none. Apart from the occasional slosh of low-level anxiety, my body pretty much feels like business as usual.
At eight weeks and five days, we pay for a private ultrasound. Johnny and I hold hands in the waiting room of the clinic, giddy with gladness.
When we finally get to meet our child, sort of, we don’t see much on the screen, and certainly the little grain of rice isn’t giving us many clues.
‘They’re in there on their own, I can tell you that much,’ says the technician, passing a wand over my still-flat stomach. I push my tummy muscles out, hoping to create some semblance of a bump.
And then we hear the rapid-fire thtum-thtum-thtum of a heartbeat and really, is there a more glorious sound?
Luna or Jonah sound as though they are already running full-pelt at life.
We listen to this beautiful sound. I want it as my ringtone.
I want it sampled in the biggest pop hit of the summer.
I want to hear it every single day. Our little grain of rice may only be a few inches from the fingertips resting on my stomach as the crow flies, but he or she already feels half a universe away.
‘Oh my God.’ Johnny exhales quietly, not wanting to talk over the sound. I can feel him tingling with excitement. We leave the clinic, feeling garlanded, and like more of a unit than we have in a long time.
That evening, as we sit watching TV, there’s a softness to us. Because I don’t want to watch documentaries on Tin Pan Alley and he’d rather eat a nipple than watch anything with even a passing mention of a designer handbag in it, we decide on neutral territory. A Canadian crime series.
Johnny places his hand on my stomach, giggling as he does so.
In this moment, we are warm and calm and glad of our lot in life.
I notice an actor, a minor character, whose eyes are an arresting, ambrosial brown with long eyelashes that seem to have a life of their own.
He’s more Mr Snuffleupagus than man. As I clock the name of Detective #3 in the credits, Ted Levy, I think to myself, I could stand to have a son like you.
When I mark twelve weeks pregnant in the calendar, and only then, I decide to call Mum and tell her.
I have thought of this exact moment many times in my life.
She probably has too. I can already hear her intone into the hallway, sitting at the mahogany telephone desk under the stairs, ‘Oh, thanks be to Jesus FINALLY.’
Instead, something else happens. ‘Oh, sure I know that,’ she breezes back. ‘Johnny already told me, last week.’
‘When do you and Johnny … and why didn’t you say anything before now?’
‘I was waiting to see how long you’d take to say anything,’ she replies. This is very on-brand. I’m incensed, making a mental note to bollock the living daylights out of Johnny for this later on.
‘Don’t be too hard on him now,’ Mum says. ‘He’s just too excited to keep it all in. Like a little kid on Christmas Eve.’
And he really is. ‘What did we ever talk about before this happened?’ I ask him later as he googles ‘travel systems’, and I’m only half joking.
‘We’ve talked,’ he says, a little uncertainly.