Babyville (2 page)

They talked about it at first. Tentatively. Nervously. Neither of them wanting to admit that there might be a problem, although at that stage neither genuinely thought there was a problem. They were still having sex spontaneously then. Making love without checking the chart, or taking a temperature, or lying, as Julia is now, with legs raised perpendicular to her chest, to give the sperm the easiest, laziest, route to her—hopefully—welcoming egg.

In the old days they used to lie in bed after each lovemaking session, spontaneously or otherwise, wondering whether they had done it, whether they had created a baby. Friends of Julia said they knew. Sam said she knew. The very moment it happened Sam said she knew, but other people she'd spoken to said it was rubbish, that you don't feel different, that the only reason they ever suspected was because their periods were late.

And Julia has spoken to many other people. Many, many, many, because making a baby has become an obsession, succeeding in making a baby her mission in life. She will gladly speak to friends of friends, distant colleagues, total strangers, in a bid to find out how it is done, how she can make it work.

It is as easy to approach strangers, to quiz them on the most intimate subjects (which, luckily, mothers don't seem to mind, all privacy and intimacy having presumably been removed from their lives at some point on the birthing table), as it is hard to be around people she actually knows who have children.

Stupid. Selfish. Self-obsessed. Julia feels all these things, and yet she knows she cannot handle it. Cannot handle the pain when she sees those precious children, cannot handle the ugly side of herself, the only side that emerges on those occasions.

She has managed to admit to Sam her true feelings: She is jealous and angry about other people's ability to have children. Not strangers; she can happily be around strangers and their children. But friends? Family? There have been times when Julia has been filled with hateful fury. Furious hate. There have been times when she has not been able to speak, so overwhelmed with this anger that she has been scared it will project from her mouth in a stream of invective.

Don't hate Julia for it. She is not a bad person. She's a woman filled with jealousy and resentment, a woman who hates herself for it, but cannot help it.

Hates herself for avoiding situations where she will see people she knows who have children. Avoids family parties because her brother-in-law's sister has a ten-month-old girl called Jessica. She last saw Jessica when Jessica was three months old, and Julia had not yet discovered she might have a problem having a Jessica of her own.

She held Jessica and felt her heart swell with joy, but she can't hold her now. She can't see Jessica's parents, because she so resents them for being able to have her. Time, she prays. It is surely just a question of time before she gets pregnant and she will be able to have a baby of her own.

Once upon a long time ago Julia had an abortion. She hadn't thought about it for years. Recently she finds she thinks about it an awful lot. What she thinks most is that there is nothing wrong with her. She has been pregnant. This is not her fault. And if it's not her fault, then whose fault must it be?

She tries not to dwell on that one, frightened of where it might lead.

And still she stops mothers and asks for their tips, still she tries every old wives' tale in a bid to become pregnant.

The
latest is this position, this legs-in-the-air position. This was passed on by a woman in the children's playground. (Yet another place she has been frequenting, eyes filling up with tears as she watches chubby little bodies toddling around, mouths filled with sand from the sandbox while their mothers are too engrossed in chat to notice. Just for the record, Julia thinks as she sits on the bench, she wouldn't be too engrossed. Just for the record, she would be the perfect mother.)

The woman sitting next to her had four children, and this was her tip: legs in the air for five minutes, not a second less. Julia doesn't believe five minutes is long enough for sperm to reach their destination, so she has taken to lying like this for an hour, Mark quietly snoring beside her as she rereads her books on getting pregnant.

Creative Visualization. That's another one. From time to time she lays the book down by her side, closes her eyes, and visualizes those sperm, fighting their way along the fallopian tubes to meet the egg, and sometimes she thinks so hard, she believes she can actually feel it happening.

In fact, is it happening now . . . ? Could that be . . . ? Is it . . . ? Please God, she prays, Let this work. Please God, let me have a baby. Let the More to Life than This be fertilized even as I lie here with my eyes tightly shut.

Just in case you're wondering, Julia hasn't been to see anyone, a fertility expert, anyone like that. God no, she would say. Not yet. On a good day she will tell herself that it's only been nine months, really not that long.

Tonight, as she practices her Creative Visualization with her legs in the air, Julia swears she can feel something happening. Not that she's entirely sure, but this time she thinks they really might have done it.

2

By rights Julia should not
be able to see Sam, with Sam's stomach growing, her mind focusing on childbirth, labor, and chocolate ice cream with green olives and prawns. But somehow Julia can cope with Sam, because she loves her, and because, even though she can admit she's jealous, it doesn't seem to overwhelm her as it does with others.

But Sam is only pregnant. She does not yet have the baby Julia so desperately craves, and try though Julia will to be in her life post-baby as much as she is now, she cannot make any promises.

Julia stopped at Pizza Hut on the way. Two large pepperoni pizzas, extra green olives and prawns, to make Sam smile. As expected, Sam sits and picks all the topping off, mixes it in with the ice cream in the freezer, then throws the crust away while Julia makes disgusted faces.

“It could be so much worse,” she says, mouth full of the revolting concoction. “Think of all those really disgusting cravings people have. I could be on my hands and knees in the garden shoveling soil into my mouth.”

“First of all, what makes you think what you're eating is any better?” Julia ventures. “Anyway, isn't that stuff all an urban myth? I mean, people don't really do that, do they?”

Sam smiles, as she always does. “Yup. And coal. I could have sent you down to the garage for huge bags of coal instead of to Pizza Hut. It's called pica, some kind of iron deficiency. That's the interesting thing. Your body always tells you what it needs when you're pregnant.”

“So what exactly is the chocolate ice cream, olive, and prawn thing telling you?”

She shovels a bit more into her mouth. “Probably that I need to put on weight,” and with that the pair of them start laughing.

Sam has always been cuddly. She is a mass of blond curls, a tiny waist, and a bottom and thighs that could well have inspired Rubens. But what Julia loves most about Sam is how much Sam loves herself. She has none of the self-doubt we are so used to hearing from women in these times of aspirational skinniness. Sam never asks anyone if she looks fat, or if that skirt is unflattering, or if the heels make her legs look longer.

Sam loves the fact that she's voluptuous, and is loving her pregnancy more than any woman Julia has ever seen. The first thing she did when she discovered she was “with child” was dash out and buy
What to Expect When You're Expecting.
The second was to rip out the chapter about the “Best Odds Diet.”

“Bloody Americans,” she said, tearing out each page, crumpling it up with relish as she lobbed it into the bin in the corner. “They're all food obsessed. God, this is the one time in your life when you're allowed to eat whatever the hell you want, so bollocks to this. As for putting on no more than twenty-eight pounds, Jesus, I think I put that on in the first twelve weeks.”

“So go on, how much have you put on now?” Julia asked.

“No clue. I stopped weighing myself after four weeks. Can't be bothered.”

And now Sam is almost entirely round. Rather like a Weeble, she wobbles but she doesn't fall down. And still she looks gorgeous. She is one of those lucky women who don't suffer from spots or lank hair while pregnant. Her skin is smooth and clear, her hair is thick, lustrous, and ever-growing.

“Jesus, don't think I'm lucky,” she said a couple of weeks ago, when someone at the hospital, another woman waiting to see the midwife, had commented how gorgeous her hair was, how lucky she was that it grew so quickly. “As quickly as it's growing on my head it's growing everywhere else on my body,” Sam had said, rolling her eyes. “I've got a jungle on my legs that only gets waxed when I go to the hospital because I don't want the midwives gossiping, and as for my beard . . .”

Sam's not a natural blonde, and consequently states that were she to be stranded on a desert island for approximately a month, any ship that happened to be passing would simply carry on, unaware that the gorilla waving its arms around under the palm trees was actually Sam.

But no one has ever seen this beard. “Look, look,” she says to Julia, as she often does on a regular basis, craning her neck up and pointing to what looks like nothing.

“I still can't see anything.”

“Okay, feel, feel,” and she grabs Julia's finger and strokes it under her chin, which is when Julia has to concede that she can feel the slightest, but only the very slightest, beginnings of stubble.

“That's the only thing I hate about pregnancy,” Sam sighs. “The bloody hair growth.”

“What about piles?” Julia shoots her an evil grin.

“Oh shit. Did I tell you that?” Sam looks embarrassed as Julia nods.

“That doesn't even bother me that much,” she says. “I go into Boots and bulk buy Anusol, telling them it's for my husband.”

“I don't suppose Chris ever goes in there.”

“Only on a Saturday and they've got different staff in on the weekend, so no one asks him how his hemorrhoids are doing.”

“Yeah, but Sam, piles are expected during pregnancy, it's not exactly embarrassing.”

“Yes, it is. Embarrassing and itchy.”

“Okay, okay. Just a little bit of oversharing there, thank you. Tell me about work.”

Sam is a graphic designer. You might well buy tins of her soup regularly. It sounds like a glamorous job, but she finds it boring and dull, and not at all creative, not for someone as talented as Sam.

Away from her work she is inspired. Those cushions on the sofa? Sam made them. The beautiful simple blinds with the tiny leaf motifs at the bottom? Sam made them. Those stunning Rothko-esque oils lining the hallway? Right again.

Although she would never admit it, much as Julia wants this baby to heal her relationship with Mark, Sam wanted an excuse to leave her job, and more than that wanted to prove that she would be better at mothering than her own—unavailable—mother.

Sam and Julia had long talked about having babies. Said how fantastic it would be if they had kids the same age, but Sam never expected it to happen so quickly, and Julia, naturally, never expected it to happen so slowly.

There
was a third wheel to their gang. Bella. They say threesomes never work, but somehow it always did with them. Maybe it helped that Sam and Julia were friendly first, before Bella came into the equation, but they never had any of the petty jealousies that you so often associate with triangles.

Julia and Sam met first, years ago, at a party. Julia watched Sam turn the music up and start dancing in the middle of the living room, while everyone else stood around chatting, watching her out of the corner of their eyes because they also wanted to dance, but no one else had the nerve.

She saw Julia watching her and went over, grabbed her arm with a smile, and Julia started to dance too. Suddenly Julia didn't care that it was one of those snobby parties where you're not supposed to let your hair down and actually have fun. She didn't care that you were only supposed to stand around sipping wine and making small talk. Sam and Julia, despite having never met before, flung their arms around, gyrated their hips, and bonded over a
Saturday Night Fever
–style pointed-finger movement.

They collapsed on the sofa after about two hours, and once there didn't move for the rest of the night, talking about everything, sharing their lives. Numbers were swapped at the end of the evening, and the next day Sam phoned to suggest going out dancing again. The seeds of friendship were sown.

A couple of years later, Bella joined London Daytime Television. Bella and Julia were both researchers on a newsmagazine show, and hit it off almost immediately. I say almost, because the first time Julia saw her she wasn't at all sure. Bella was twenty-four going on thirty. Actually she has always said that thirty-five is her true age, and even when she was sixteen she was mistaken for someone much older.

Bella, in short, intimidated all but the most confident of people, and it was only when they were sent up to Leeds together to interview a couple of people for the show that they bonded.

For a while Julia would see them separately. With Sam she would go clubbing, to trendy bars, wild parties, and Bella was reserved for sophisticated restaurants, chichi dinner parties, even the odd bit of extremely badly played tennis.

Bella and Sam had met. Their paths crossed at Julia's house from time to time, and although they hadn't disliked one another, they hadn't much liked one another either. It was only when Bella met Paul, Sam's then-boyfriend's best friend, and fancied him, that she and Sam started to become friends, but Julia is still the link between the two, the one that binds them all together.

Bella has moved on now. Literally and figuratively. She was offered a job two years ago in New York: producer of a national morning magazine show, which naturally she couldn't turn down. She was so busy she barely had time to throw a leaving party, and now Julia considers herself blessed if Bella manages to return a voicemail more often than once a month.

On the rare occasions they do catch up, Bella sounds as if she is having a blast. Resolutely single after Paul broke her heart, she has thrown herself into the New York dating scene with wild abandon, astounding her friends back home with the sheer number of men she seems to meet. Most surprising, this, Sam is fond of saying, because she had always thought 90 percent of the single men in Manhattan were gay. Evidently not, according to Bella.

Bella is paying a disgusting amount of money for an apartment roughly the size of a shoebox in a much-sought-after doorman building at 75th and Second. Second Avenue is not quite Fifth, Bella has laughed, but it's still Upper East Side, and in New York address is everything.

Bella has taken to Manhattan like a duck to water. She goes to the gym every morning before work, which Julia and Sam find completely ridiculous, given that the odd sloppy game of tennis Bella used to play was the most she could muster, and even that was only ever an excuse to exchange loud gossip while feeling immensely virtuous.

Bella has always been good at adapting, at adhering to “When in Rome . . . ,” and weekly manicures, lunches at Bergdorf's, and navigating her way down Madison Avenue in a pair of lethal skyscraper slingbacks is now second nature to her.

She comes back rarely. Sam and Julia almost failed to recognize her on her last fleeting visit. They had arranged to meet her in the lobby of the Sanderson, and walked straight past the skinny girl dressed in black, huge Jackie O–style sunglasses obliterating her face.

Most of all Bella adores her work. She is passionate about the show, about the way Americans work, and loves her colleagues to distraction. (Quite literally at one point, given that she was seeing one of the big cheeses at the network for a while, but he was married and that's quite another story. A whole book in itself, in fact.)

We get the show here, if you're lucky enough to have Sky, Cable, or Digital. It's on every day at 2
P.M.
, so Julia only ever manages to catch it if she's ill or working from home, which she is tending to do rather more often these days, her career taking definite second place to her desire to have a baby.

So Bella. Bella who would like to find the perfect man but does not believe he really exists. Bella who has not the slightest desire to have children. Not yet anyway.

Bella
who is genuinely happy. At least that's what she says.

But then again, people say that about Julia, and who knows what goes on behind closed doors?

 “Work
is as boring as usual,” Sam says, hoisting herself up from the sofa with great difficulty to put the empty pizza boxes in the kitchen. Julia considers offering to do it for her, but desists, knowing how insulted Sam gets. “I'm pregnant,” she will say, “not a bloody invalid.”

Of course God forbid no one offers her a seat on the tube in rush hour. “Hello?” she shouts, sticking her stomach out as far as it will go and making sure she catches the eye of some businessman sitting down. “Can't you see I'm eight months pregnant?” They always stand up for her.

Incidentally she isn't eight months pregnant. She's five months. But she could pass for eight. Especially when she sticks her stomach out.

“Can't talk about work,” she returns, huffing and puffing from her walk of ten feet. “Just can't wait to leave the bloody place. Chris thinks I'll be going back after four months' maternity leave and I haven't got the heart to tell him he's got another thing coming. But what about you? Any news on the pregnancy front?”

“Too early to tell. Not due for another two weeks.”

“I hope you're having sex for Britain, then, because you're at the height of the fertile season.”

“Actually we're not. We're trying to have sex every other day, because apparently if you do it every day the sperm get weaker, so it's best to give it a rest, and someone told me Day Thirteen is the important day, which was the day before yesterday, and we did it, so now it's the waiting game again.”

“God. Sex. I remember what that was like.”

“Sam! You're only five months pregnant. What do you mean, you remember what that was like? You can still have sex, for heaven's sake.”

“Julia, not only do I not want to have sex, I can't even stand the bloody smell of him at the moment.”

“What?”

Sam sighs. “It's true. He rolls over to face the middle of the bed about thirty times a night and each time he does it I'm awake and I can smell his breath and I want to vomit.”

“So what do you do?”

“I hiss at him to roll over and most of the time he just does it automatically without even waking up.”

“And if he wakes up?”

“Then he starts shouting at me and I start crying. And as far as I'm concerned right now, actually having sex would be a fate worse than death. Apparently it's a hormonal thing. Chris was dead excited because most of the women we know were like rabbits, but sod's law, I'm the bloody one who gets turned off.”

“At least he still wants to have sex with you. Mark says he feels like a machine. He can't stand how sex has become so mechanical, just a means to an end.”

“Is he right? Has it?”

Julia
thinks back to the day before yesterday. How excited she was because it was Day 13, how she was convinced that tonight would be the night. They ate in front of the television, as they do so often these days, passing the odd comment to one another, but not really talking.