August
There’s a surrealist painting by the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington that shows a giantess cradling an egg.
Her feet are bare, her pale face moon-like and fringed with a golden mane.
Geese flock around her while a hunting party of tiny men, women, children and dogs scurry past her toes.
On and in the water are white-sailed ships and ghostly sea creatures.
In the distance, mountains rise and rain lashes down from an overcast sky.
The egg, a symbol of new life, is safe in her dainty hands. At least for now.
That was the image projected onto the inside of my shuttered eyelids as I sat on the bathroom tiles waiting for Noah to administer my trigger injection.
I’d picked up the final pre-filled syringe from the clinic that afternoon and caught the Tube home with it clutched to my chest like a loaded gun.
I tried to remember how I’d felt before the hormones, and I tried not to think about what it would be like to live with them for nine months.
I considered that my eggs would soon be released, and that one of those eggs could one day become a baby. At least in theory.
‘OK, are you ready?’
In my semi-delusional state, I decided to test that theory.
I exchanged the image of the giantess cradling the egg for an image of me holding my baby.
Me, alone, a single mum. Me, with Noah, a part of a team.
I thought of my parents, and the fact that even though I’d always been closer with my mother, we were three.
‘Cathy?’
‘Sorry, yes, I’m ready.’
He pushed the needle into my side and pressed down on the plunger. When all the liquid was gone, he slipped it out.
In its place, I saw a single spot of blood.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a piece of loo roll.
I thanked him and dabbed at my skin. It was the only time I’d bled.
Thirty-six hours later, I took the day off for the procedure, which meant being put to sleep while a needle perforated the wall of my vagina.
The eggs would be harvested by draining the fluid in each follicle, which, during my last scan, Doctor Day had told me were looking ‘mostly good and even’.
That would happen in one ovary, then the other ; the needle was attached to a scan probe that would enable him to see if he needed to move it up, down, left, right.
If Noah had been there when Doctor Day was telling me this, he would have laughed and said something about it sounding a lot like a computer game. He wasn’t.
He did message me, though, saying he was thinking of me.
The night before, as I was removing my nail polish, Robyn had done the same and I’d remembered with a jolt of guilt that I hadn’t wished her luck for her own procedure or checked in since.
I thanked her and apologised and said I would call her after.
She told me not to worry and wished me luck in the form of a four-leaf clover emoji.
Doctor Day said the actual process would take no longer than fifteen minutes, but that I shouldn’t expect to be back in my room for about an hour.
Waiting to be wheeled down, I lay flat on my back, arms by my sides, rigid.
I tried to ignore my rumbling stomach, which beneath my backless gown felt both empty – cheated out of that morning’s breakfast – and the most bloated it had ever been.
I poked at it, gently, with one fingernail, and imagined it flattening like a helium balloon, pricked with a needle.
I shook my head and tried something different, cradling it in my palms, waiting to feel …
something. I imagined it swelling, slowly at first, then quickly.
Up above me, one of three strobe lights was flickering, on the blink.
I bit my lip and told myself there were no such things as bad omens.
An image of the whale spilled out of the surf at Scheveningen flashed before me.
Ten minutes later I was in theatre, and the anaesthetist who’d taken my blood pressure when I’d first arrived was talking me through what was about to happen.
In my field of vision were white lights and scraps of blue fabric.
The radio was sounding, a song I vaguely recognised.
A cannula was eased into the back of my hand.
I was instructed to count down from ten.
There was a metallic taste on my tongue, and that’s the last thing I remember.
When I woke, my jumble of emotions – anxiety, fear, longing – had been replaced with a dull ache.
In the recovery room were three other women, with whom I exchanged a half-smile.
I thought of Robyn and how it would have been nice to have seen a familiar face.
Still, there was a sense that, although we were strangers, we were in this together.
One woman looked significantly younger than the rest of us, her skin soft and dewy even in the garish hospital light, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was here because she was unwell.
When a nurse came to wheel her away, she turned to us and made a joke about heading for the eggsit .
I laughed, thinking it was the kind of thing Noah would say.
Half an hour later, I was back in my own room.
Beneath the hospital bedsheet, I inched up my gown and peered down at my flesh.
To my surprise, I still felt bloated. Again, I tested the skin with my fingers, then I reached over to the bedside table for my phone and typed into the search bar : Is it possible to miss eggs during egg-retrieval?
I scrolled through the first of many forums, frowning at some comments and feeling my heart speed up at others.
I told myself I would close the tab as I neared the end of each page and message Noah instead. I didn’t.
Doctor Day interrupted my self-induced spiral to tell me how the procedure had gone and to give me my initial results.
‘We’ve retrieved fourteen eggs.’ I must have been grinning like an idiot because he promptly reminded me that they wouldn’t all be mature.
‘Still,’ he said, the corners of his own lips curling upwards, ‘you should be pleased.’
After eating a slightly soggy cheese-and-pickle sandwich and proving to the nurse that I was able to go to the loo, I was allowed to head home. Noah had said he would collect me, but when I called him, it turned out there was a last-minute lecture he couldn’t miss.
‘You can’t sneak out early?’ I asked, pressing my phone to one cheek and the palm of my free hand to the other in an effort to prevent my voice from wobbling.
‘I’m sorry, Cathy, I’m the one giving the lecture.’
If he was giving it, had he also arranged it? I felt a curdling in my stomach, a sour mix of disappointment and resentment.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, again.
I accepted that he really did sound it, and when he swore under his breath, I knew that he too was frustrated. ‘Maybe Anna can help?’ he offered.
The thought made my throat pinch. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said again, doing my best impression of a smile. ‘I’ll think of something.’
When I said being collected wasn’t even mandatory, that some people head home by themselves on the bus or the Tube, he made me promise to find someone, anyone.
‘OK,’ I said, smiling for real now.
‘And message me when you’re home? I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘I will. Bye.’
Before he hung up, I heard a sigh that made me think of the sea.
I considered my options, then I called Anna. I had to tell her at some point, and this was the nudge I needed.
She answered after the first ring, which caught me off guard.
I thought I would have longer to recite in my head the information I intended to share with her.
She was saying something about the fact that she’d been messaging me.
‘Where are you?’ she asked, a tad sulkily.
‘Why haven’t you been getting back to me? ’
I waited until I couldn’t wait any longer, the hiatus stretched tracing-paper thin, then I mentioned the clinic.
She remained quiet. I heard her lips part before pressing together again. Eventually she asked why.
‘I’m freezing my eggs.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’ll explain. Please, Anna, can you come?’
She was pissed off that I’d kept something from her, I could tell from the sound of her voice, which was even more brisk than usual, and only forming short words and sentences.
I couldn’t blame her – I would have been pissed off too.
We were each other’s confidantes ; we had been since school.
She’d told me when she’d overheard her dad yelling at her mum about another man, how her mum had cried and begged as her dad had walked out the door ; he hadn’t come back that night, but the following morning he’d been there at the kitchen table, the pair of them eating breakfast like nothing had gone on.
She’d told me when she’d said to her first boyfriend that she didn’t want to touch him, and he’d taken hold of her hand and shoved it down below his waistband – neither of us knew at the age of thirteen what we know now.
Even after she’d suggested that Noah and I get together, and he’d asked me on a date, I wouldn’t give him an answer until I’d spoken to her again, recounting what he’d said, word for word, making doubly sure she was all right with it.
Forty minutes later, she was walking towards me, with a squashy handbag slung over her shoulder and a firm expression on her face.
She put the handbag down on the small table at the foot of my bed.
Unhooked her sunglasses from the V of her shirt and slid them into the bag’s side pocket.
Eventually, she lifted her gaze to meet mine.
I don’t know what she saw, but there was no more frostiness.
‘Oh Cathy.’ She walked towards me and went to give me a hug. ‘Wait, is this OK?’
I smiled a small smile and opened my arms wide.