May #5
Still so quiet. ‘Hang on, I’m having trouble hearing you.
’ I felt for my volume control and turned it up as far as it would go.
‘Is that better?’ I asked, ducking down a narrow side street, the ground a dirty grey and pocked with dried chewing gum and cigarette butts.
I realised I was standing outside a shuttered entrance to a club ; there were flyers outside, tacked to the brick wall. ‘Are you free for a drink?’
She started sobbing.
‘Oh, Anna. What’s wrong?’ My eyes skipped left and right, trying to work out what it could be.
She’d only cried a handful of times since we’d met as eleven-year-olds, and I could probably pinpoint each occasion.
When she didn’t reply, only sobbed more, I asked again : ‘Are you OK? Please talk to me.’
She was quiet for a few seconds, then she said it : ‘I’ve lost the baby.’
Darkness. My eyes had closed. I felt suddenly empty.
I remembered I hadn’t eaten lunch, but it was more than that – the kind of empty that comes from scrolling mindlessly through the daily disasters in the news.
Oh, but Anna, she should be feeling full, she should be …
how many months now – three, four? ‘I’m on my way. ’
When I hung up, the stab of guilt had returned, but for a very different reason. It was my insides I’d been willing to be barren, not hers.
I rang the bell and Caleb answered. Before he did, I heard him coming – or rather, I heard Theo, who was in his arms, wriggling and wailing. Though it was still the shade of runny honey, the hallway seemed darker than usual. Duller.
‘I’m so sorry, Caleb.’
Unlike Theo’s face, his was eerily still. The whites of his eyes, normally bright against brown, were streaked with crimson, and his mouth was a fixed straight line.
I leant in to give him a hug and Theo wailed even louder.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ said Caleb, pressing his palm briefly to his forehead before blinking, once, hard, and rubbing his little boy’s back. ‘He knows something’s up.’
‘Of course, don’t worry about me. What can I do?’
He half smiled as he tipped his stubbled chin towards the stairs. ‘You’re already doing it.’
She was lying in bed, under the covers, one set of curtains open, the other closed.
A pool of early evening light had let itself into the room and was twinkling with dust motes.
I expected she might be sleeping but her eyes were open and staring up at the ceiling.
Like her voice on the phone, her features were quiet, expressionless.
When I tapped my knuckles against the doorframe, she craned her neck to look at me and in her small voice thanked me for coming.
‘Anna, I’m so sorry.’ I walked towards her, and she lifted the nearest side of the duvet. I took off my shoes and, careful not to catch her with a limb, climbed in. I lay on my side, my head propped up on the other pillow, facing her, while she stayed on her back. ‘What happened?’
She slid her hands back beneath the covers and down towards her stomach.
She rested them there, unmoving, and for a moment neither of us spoke.
‘I had cramps,’ she said, at last, her cheek twitching.
When her eyes started to glisten, she widened them a little and forced a smile. ‘We thought it was wind.’
I reached out and started to stroke her hair, something she’d always liked. When we lived together, in the flat south of the river, she would plonk herself in front of me while I was sitting on the sofa watching TV, and ask, Can I have a hair tickle, please?
‘Then I started spotting.’
‘Oh, Anna.’
She took a deep breath, shook her head. ‘They don’t know why, at least not yet. There was no obvious problem.’
I kept stroking, she kept talking.
‘I must have done something wrong.’ She brought her hands back up and covered her face, her fingers trembling. Her nails, normally perfectly painted, were chipped and uneven. ‘My body must have done something wrong.’
I squeezed her shoulder tight with one hand and pressed the other down on the crown of her head. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, OK? And neither did your body.’ As I said it, I heard my own voice break.
‘Then why couldn’t I keep him safe? Why did he die?’ She said it through the gaps between her fingers, through sobs.
Another boy. Theo’s little brother. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, my own cheeks wet. ‘But I do know it wasn’t your fault.’
One by one, she unfurled her fingers from her face.
I quickly brushed at my tears with the back of my sleeve, then attended more carefully to hers.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, again forcing a smile. ‘I’m a mess.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ I told her, firmer now. ‘You have no reason to be.’
She nodded, slowly. Then the smile slipped away, and again she looked up at the ceiling. ‘It’s so strange,’ she said, blinking back more tears. ‘I feel like I’ve been thumped in the stomach, and the ache won’t go away.’
My fertility tests were the following week. I’d spoken to Anna on the phone most days since I’d been to see her, but I hadn’t mentioned my appointment. I couldn’t, not without explaining why I was doing it, what I wanted the outcome to be. And then what? It felt outrageously selfish of me.
During my lunch break, I caught the Tube from Charing Cross to London Bridge. En route, I reread the medical history questionnaire I’d filled out that morning. The clinic should have received an electronic copy, but I’d decided to print out a physical version just in case. All thirty-two pages.
The clinic wasn’t far from the station. I passed people taking bites out of pulled-pork sandwiches, aromatic curries in cardboard containers, and other street food from Borough Market.
It was warm, the sun blushing in the sky.
A man handing out leaflets for a new restaurant down the street was singing a song I wasn’t familiar with.
It was a brick building, with lots of windows letting in the strengthening spring light.
I walked up the steps and through a glass door into the waiting room, which smelled like it had been freshly hoovered that morning.
A receptionist with pearly teeth that probably once wore braces was sitting behind a curved white desk that resembled the prow of a ship.
When I leant forward to tell her my name, she too smelled squeaky clean.
‘Excuse me?’ she asked.
I glanced around the room, which was empty except for a fretty woman chewing a biro and a couple who looked more or less composed.
She had her palm resting on his shoulder and he was pointing out something on his phone, speaking in dulcet tones.
‘Cathy,’ I repeated, a little louder, wondering what Noah would say if he were here with me, how he would be.
I imagined him with his ex-wife, holding her hand during the sonograms, sitting behind her in the antenatal classes, helping her practise her breathing.
I’d seen photos, of course, back when I searched for her online.
She had pale skin and dark features, like mine but stronger, as if they’d been carved in marble.
She was tall, as tall as him maybe, and though she was slender she wasn’t at all fragile-looking, which was something a man once said about me.
Noah described her as more handsome than beautiful, which isn’t necessarily a negative.
‘How can I help you, Cathy?’
‘I have an appointment.’
‘Ah yes,’ she said, peering at her screen, clicking her mouse. ‘Welcome.’
I took in her floral blouse and the little gold bees dangling from her earlobes and wondered if this was the same woman who I’d emailed and spoken to on the phone.
‘Lovely. Perfect.’
It seemed so.
‘Take a seat and the doctor will be right with you.’
I grimaced.
‘No need to be nervous,’ she added, with a sympathetic head tilt, bees swinging.
‘Oh, I’m not—’
The phone on her desk started to ring and a raised index finger told me to wait just a minute. A few minutes later, she was talking in what sounded like her most reassuring voice, punctuating her usual sunny vocabulary with words such as ‘cycle’ and ‘bleed’.
I wanted to explain that I wasn’t nervous, at least not for the reasons she assumed.
Instead, I squeezed onto the unforgiving banquette beside the fretty woman, the biro still lodged between her teeth, her face a blotchy red.
I flicked through the questionnaire again.
Some of the questions were easy : age, height, weight.
Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?
No. Are you allergic to any foods or medicines?
No. Others less so. I tried to work out how much I drank a week on average, then rounded it down, something my mother had once told me doctors expect of all patients.
Have you ever been pregnant? Yes. Total number of pregnancies?
One. Number of elective terminations? One.
I stuffed the printed pages back into my bag.
I spotted a water cooler in the corner of the room and went to pour myself a cup. I was busy focusing on the feeling of the fridge-cold liquid filling up against my clammy palm when—
‘Cathy?’
‘Yes?’
Standing to the right of the receptionist was a man wearing a white coat. ‘You can come through now.’
I took a sip of water. ‘OK.’
The red-cheeked woman beside me gave me a lopsided grin, biro slung between her lips.