Chapter 4 #2
I also break the news to Francesca, who is still liberated from the usual run of things on her maternity leave, knowing that she will somehow be relieved to finally have me figured out. The ongoing mystery of Married-and-yet-Child-Free Me has miraculously worked itself to a solution.
‘Welcome to the madhouse, babes!’ she says, sounding very much like she is speaking from a madhouse.
Carrie is told the news over a Sunday-morning breakfast in Bluebird on the King’s Road, where she insists on us going every time.
‘Huh, I knew you were going to say something like that,’ she says coolly, before correcting herself. But it’s too late. We’ve both heard it.
‘But that’s amazing news! You must be so excited.’ She summons a waiter, her smile papering over the mood. Her face is still somehow like a kicked-in bollock. ‘I’ll have a glass of rosé, which’ – she tries to laugh lightly and not too cruelly – ‘I guess you won’t be able to have for a while.’
Boyfriend or not, the reality that Carrie hasn’t had a child yet at thirty-seven is a wound that hasn’t ever quite scabbed over.
Years ago, we had the Child Chat, and she was sure with every single cell in her being that she would have two boys.
She was unabashed in her hope, and utterly convinced that it wasn’t so much a matter of if, but when.
‘Jeremy and Jack,’ she would say, as though she could will them into being by saying their names enough.
The way she said it made it sound as if they were already here, and she was already proud of them.
‘I dunno about the kid thing,’ I’d admitted to her as we swung our legs over the balcony of the Camden Palace, huffing Smirnoff Ices as though we were entering the Prohibition era at dawn.
I was pretty good at being single back then, and babies did not feature in this particular frame.
‘I think I’d prefer to be a dad. That’s a nice low bar I can get on board with. ’
But here and now, over breakfast burritos that remain largely untouched, Carrie makes to leave. It feels like our friendship has suffered a hairline fracture, and neither of us really knows who issued the blow.
‘I really need to get on. I’m off to Seville for two weeks on Sunday! It’s going to be a blast.’ She’s left the last bit unspoken: My life without the kids I always thought I was going to have will always be a little bit better than yours.
My mind soon becomes a carnival of ideas and hopes, a joy to visit as my future unfurls and takes shape.
If it’s a boy, he will have his dad’s shoulders and my dark grey eyes.
Johnny’s sense of fairness, and my vulgar wit.
If it’s a girl? She will be amazing at everything she ever wants to do, and effortless in the doing.
If I think long enough, I can already feel tiny toes graze my lips, soft as kitten paws.
I see myself running my finger along the dimples of a baby’s knuckles, and burying my face in fleshy arm rolls that smell of contentment.
When I am fifteen weeks pregnant, there’s finally a bump, thrillingly visible through my clothes.
Less thrilling is how challenging it is to get a seat on the tube.
I shift my weight from foot to foot, placing my hand at the top of my stomach, in case anyone thinks I’ve just had a really decent lunch.
Young finance types, the sort of young pricks who fax and email me codes and/or lunch orders every day, sit there with their headphones on, eyes joined in holy matrimony to their phone screens.
One morning, I get so hacked off about it that I decide to partially abuse my privilege as a person bringing life into the world and start making theatrical retching noises, hoping this will clear a space.
The young lad in the priority seat keeps his eyes fixed on the floor, and I inwardly remind myself to order a Baby on Board badge.
I am standing so close to him that my small bump is practically resting on his shoulder.
Every time I go to the toilet, I check my underwear and every time I am relieved to see they are unblemished. I can actually feel myself unclench.
Until the moment does eventually come, despite all my hoping and wishing.
It’s a sun-drenched June morning, the sort of morning that makes even the grotty flat seem ripe with promise.
When I go to the toilet first thing, I only catch the streak of rust on my knickers out of my eye’s corner.
I can feel adrenaline flood every part of me, and a wholly new sort of pain starts as a speck, then becomes a dot, then refuses to stop growing and getting more acute.
The streak of rust in my knickers can only mean one thing: paradise is being revoked.
I stand stock-still next to the bathroom sink, afraid to catch my own eye in the mirror, willing things to stay the same.
‘Please stay,’ I whisper, over and over again, attempting to order my body to do what I want it to.
I will stay still in this exact position for five more months if I have to.
I conjure up the picture of a baby, then a child, then a teenager, hoping that willing them into existence in my mind’s eye will give us a shot at making it.
With trembling fingers, I grab my phone off the lip of the bath and turn to Google for answers.
‘Very light bleeding is common and can happen in early pregnancy. It could be due to harmless inflammation, or changes in your cervix.’ I still see the baby, then the child.
Surely I wouldn’t be seeing them so vividly if they weren’t really coming?
But the streak of rust soon gives way to something redder, angrier.
‘If you’d like to hold a funeral for your baby, that is something that can be arranged, and we can recommend people to help with that, but when a baby is born under twenty-four weeks’ gestation, there is no legal requirement to have a funeral,’ a kindly nurse explains.
‘Oh yeah, that is probably something we—’
The fucking thought of it. I cut him off at the pass.
‘We won’t be doing that. No funerals. I just …
no.’ I feel him freeze in protest beside me, but even so, we both know that I will get my way this time.
He is hurting, but I’m willing to argue that what I’m going through is of a different stripe entirely.
‘Johnny, I just can’t.’
‘If you would like to see your baby, we can make arrangements for that,’ the nurse offers gently.
‘Well, I would,’ Johnny says pointedly.
‘I don’t think I want to,’ my mouth says, even though every other fibre in my body is virtually screaming at my mouth as though it’s just scored an own goal in the World Cup final.
I can just about hear the tiniest voice from somewhere inside me, though it is screaming at the top of its lungs, ‘What are you doing?’ I want to tell them about the guilt: how it swaps places with numbness every two minutes.
That I somehow feel as though I deserve to be sad.
Without looking at me, Johnny follows the nurse out of the room.
She turns back to put a hand on his shoulder and I couldn’t be more envious of them.
While he’s gone, I think of Johnny holding our child, talking to it, telling it all the plans he had for the three of us. The child that was inches from my fingertips only a few days ago.
He returns a half-hour later, pink-eyed and mad.
‘I took a photo,’ he tells me. ‘I know you don’t want to see it now but you might, one day.’ I can’t tell whether I’m meant to be furious or relieved.
The next day, Johnny and I walk down the road, his proprietary hand on my shoulder feeling like a bag of wet seaweed. His breathing comes in small shudders.
‘It was the size of an avocado,’ I tell him, although he knows this for certain, having seen the baby.
I take one last look at the update on the pregnancy tracker app before deleting it forever: ‘Your baby is the size of an avocado!’ it told me in a very excited and swirly font.
It would have become a mango next, then a sweet potato.
‘Thinking of a good friend going through a tough time right now and sending her so much love and good vibes #tragedy #loss #friendsforever #wellness’, Brigitte has written up on her Facebook wall. Huh, now she’s interested.
Carrie texts me later that day. ‘Off to Argentina for a few weeks, just a quick break, but would be great to catch up when I get home xx.’ I notice that I only ever hear from her now when she is going somewhere impressive.
Has she not seen Brigitte’s post yet? Have they not spoken about this? ‘I’ve lost the baby,’ I text back, my fingers close to sparking. ‘So there’s no need to keep reminding me that you’ve got it better than me any more.’ She tries to ring four times: I cancel each call on the first ring.
‘I know you don’t want to but I’m just saying you can talk to me,’ Carrie texts. ‘Use me. Whenever you are ready.’
I’m already thinking of how I will tell Carrie about this.
From the kindness of the nurse that felt like an exquisite pain to the look in Johnny’s eyes when he came back into the room and it was just the two of us.
And then, the meeting in the hospital that happened after that, the one that changed everything for us and between us.
I cannot even begin to imagine my mouth forming the words in front of Carrie, or anyone else.
Francesca has yet to return my text about losing the baby. There I am, all un-figured-out again, I guess.
Just as I thought would happen, Mum makes it all a little bit harder than it needs to be.
‘Are you going back to work at all in the next while? Some people say it’s a good thing. A distraction.’
‘I’m not really in the headspace for anything like that.’
She clucks her disapproval. ‘Just mind yourself in there with that lot, taking liberties like this.’
Well, I tell myself, she was never going to be one to leap on the next Ryanair flight over, comfort foods and blanket in hand.
‘No, Mum, I will not be going back to work yet, if that’s OK with you,’ I tell her. ‘I’m taking as much time off as I can humanly get away with.’ But this taking of the time off is not the Mum Way, or at least the way of my mum.
‘You won’t lose that job now, will you?’ she says. ‘Jobs in financial services aren’t that easy to come by for people like you.’
It does not surprise me in the slightest that, even in a moment such as this one, she will somehow get the dig in. Is she even aware of it? Is the casual yet quietly devastating insult just something she does, like breathing or blinking?
‘People like me. Meaning?’
She exhales. ‘Get some rest, by all means, but there’s the rest of your life to get back to. You’ll only be able to take time out for something like this for so long.’ On this, I stay silent because I guess she knows.