Dead Lovely (2 page)

When I got home, Sarah rang to say that she and Kyle had just had the most amazing sex and that it was a good thing for me to have said what I’d said.

I felt so sad for her, but I also wondered if moving permanently to their holiday cottage might not be such a bad idea.

You can understand that it was a big bummer for Sarah when I rang to tell her my news.

‘I’m pregnant!’ I said, still not quite believing it myself. ‘I’m bloody pregnant!’

I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. It was part shock and part nervousness about her reaction. Also, I’d had a nightmare day taking a wee tot into care because her mother kept going to the pub and leaving her alone in the house. She caged Jess like a rabbit, with a bottle of milk Sellotaped to the rungs of the playpen for Jess to drink when she got thirsty.

At the Children’s Hearing that day, I had
outlined
the facts of Jess’s case and waited for the volunteer panel members to make a decision about whether to accept my recommendation to take her into care.

One panel member, an arse with a cowlick,
probably
no older than twenty-eight, with no children and no idea about parenting, was even more
indignant
with me than the mother was. While the mother sat and listened and admitted that she wasn’t coping, he started attacking me, saying:

1. ‘But the mother’s admitting her problem.’

2. ‘But the mother’s willing to put in time with the social worker.’

3. ‘How can we justify taking little Jess away from her mum?’

4. ‘How hard will it be for her to get Jess back?’

5. ‘Where will Jess go? Who will look after her? Do you have foster carers identified?’ and

6. ‘We must do everything we can to keep mothers and their children together.’

I was furious. The arse seemed to be more
concerned
about the mother than the child and this, more than anything, incensed me.

I’d always been drawn to children at risk. And despite not wanting to be a mother myself, I was opinionated about mother–child relationships. My own mum, I believed, provided a good role model of how to go about parenting. She’d always worked hard at providing friendship and boundaries for me, at keeping her own life while also devoting herself to me, so there was no unresolved bitterness on either side. Sarah’s mum, on the other hand, had stuffed up Sarah’s childhood good and proper. She was hardly ever there, drank too much when she was, had been divorced
twice by the time Sarah was seven and was
breathtakingly
self-obsessed. The consequences for Sarah’s self-esteem were dire. What do the Jesuits say? ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.’

I believed I could spot flawed parenting a mile away, and felt it my duty to spare children from it. Social work was inevitable, I guess.

Anyway, I got my own way and two of the three panel members (the arse held out) agreed that the child should not be returned home.

Later, in the foyer, the arse with the cowlick said, ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it, not being judgmental – but we should all try.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, looking at his face, and then down at his hand, which firmly gripped my arm. ‘We should all try.’

He let go, and sighed as the mother handed some of Jess’s things over to me for the foster carers. She wasn’t even crying.

I’d headed straight to the doctor’s from the hearing and it wasn’t long before she decided my weight gain and exhaustion weren’t the results of stress. A quick urine test put it beyond all doubt. When I told Sarah I was in shock.

I couldn’t believe I was pregnant. I’d had my periods every month, but my doctor explained they’d just been fraudulent, pretendy ones. Bloody lies!
I was five months gone, and it was too late to do
anything
about it.

Sarah responded to my ham-fisted revelation by going silent and then hanging up. I spent a day arguing with her in my head about this. In cutting one-liners I told her how un-giving she’d been in my time of need and under no circumstances should I be expected to apologise or make the first move.

But I’m not so good at grudges, and after lunch the next day I phoned her from work and apologised.

She said she was sorry, too, and that she shouldn’t have hung up, but my news had arrived at a terrible time.

It transpired that only an hour before I’d called, she and Kyle had been interviewed by a social worker to assess them for adoption.

‘She’s only twenty-one,’ said Sarah, ‘and definitely a lesbian. She sat on our sofa with her nose-ring in the air blethering on about my parents, for Christ’s sake! I tried to show her around the house, but she refused. “All in good time,” she said – and with a nose-ring!’

After I got off the phone I realised that the entire call had been about Sarah’s ovaries, not mine, which to my ongoing horror were having a celebration dinner in my tubes.

Sarah and Kyle’s adoption process grew along with my tummy. There were many more interviews with social
workers, both with and without nose rings. Family trees were drawn, stories written, love–life/coping mechanisms/support networks scrutinised.
Eventually
someone ticked a box somewhere giving Sarah and Kyle permission to take on someone else’s child.

We celebrated at Cafe Rosso with a bottle of chianti (yeah, I know, but at least my foetus wasn’t on heroin like numerous mothers I had to deal with at work), three courses, and an argument about the Middle East. The perfect evening.

Sometime after our night out, Sarah collected a six-year-old foster child from their local social work office and took him home for the weekend. It wasn’t the real thing, just weekend respite ‘to break them in’, Sarah said.

Kyle was waiting for Sarah and the child when they arrived, biscuits and diluted organic blackcurrant juice Sarah had bought at the ready, plus three DVDs about wildlife in Africa.

The wee boy took his place on the leather sofa with a cashmere throw, looked at the biscuits and juice laid out on the coffee table, and stared at Sarah and Kyle for several minutes. He had large green eyes and bright red hair and was as cute as a Glaswegian button. Sarah could have eaten him up, and Kyle started to feel quite manly having a boy who needed fathering in the house.

‘Can I use the toilet?’ the boy asked after a few minutes of awkward silence.

Sarah showed him to the en suite in his
specially-painted-
for-the-weekend room, shutting the door behind his delicate little features with the satisfied sigh of a loving mother.

He climbed out the window.

Before Sarah and Kyle had time to pour the organic juice into the specially-bought-for-
the-weekend
plastic-cup-with-groovy-straw, he was probably half a mile away. They had no idea until Kyle had watched all the trailers to the first African animal DVD.

After that Sarah decided fostering was a bad idea – irredeemable ginger underclass goods and all that. So she concentrated on the snail crawl of the
adoption
waiting list. And on me. She started coming with me to every antenatal appointment. She
decorated
my spare room, wrote endless lists of things to do, made mixed tapes for me to listen to during the birth, helped me write my drug-free birth plan, and cooked piles of freezable meals for afterwards.

At Sarah’s urging I gave up work three weeks before D-day.

My colleagues gathered together to give me Marks & Spencer vouchers and a selection of cakes. My boss, who I soon learnt said ‘fuckit’ a lot, made a speech.

‘Congratulations to Krissie and her husb – fuckit … I mean, by all accounts, you will make a great parent, mother … fuckit. Here’s to Krissie.’

After leaving work, I decided that this motherhood thing might be bloody fantastic. I slept in, went for strolls, had lunch in cafes, watched
Quincy, ME,
read books, and ate at least one whole banana cake a day.

I laughed and laughed with my new antenatal friends, dined with Sarah and Kyle at least twice a week, shopped with Mum and Marj, went to the movies. I bobbed along to aqua aerobics, ate curry, drank raspberry tea, gave in to desperate urges for cauliflower, and then, just as I was about to get bored, I gave birth.

It started when I was walking up the stairs of my Gardner Street close, eighty steps in total, breathing more loudly than I have ever breathed in my life. My face was raw, like a blind pimple that has been left to ripen the perfect amount of time and, if any pressure is applied, will pop a most satisfactory core. I had suffered the indignities of a vaginal probe when I bled at week twenty-two, of peeing my pants at week thirty-three when the check-out chick in Sainsbury’s cracked a very funny joke, of farting in front of my ‘Ms Has-No-Body-Functions’ colleague when I bent over at work to pick up a case file, and of fainting during a ‘cervical sweep’.

At nine months and ten days pregnant I fully expected an explosion of water. What I didn’t expect
was to bump into twenty-nine-year-old bass-playing Marco from downstairs.

I’d been flirting with Marco for about a year. One night I was listening to him and his mate jam through my floorboards and I decided to knock on his door. ‘You need a bit of rhythm,’ I said, before waltzing in to join them with my tambourine.

An awkward hour or two followed as I realised that the evening was purely about music, and not about drinking, smoking, flirting or talking. I said goodbye at ten and, though they seemed really pleased I’d joined them, the whole situation had made me feel a little unsure of myself, so I went home to self-hate with a bucket of ice-cream, like the Americans do.

I often bumped into Marco after that, and we’d chat on the stairs for a few minutes. He’d ask me how my rhythm was going, and I’d say fine, and I’d ask him how the songs were coming along and he’d say fine, and all the while I wondered why he didn’t seem to notice the smouldering sexual tension between us.

As time went on and my tummy got bigger, we’d play a game of who can ignore the increasing belly before us. We’d look each other straight in the eye and talk seriously – ‘How is the rhythm?’ ‘How are the songs coming on?’ My gaze would be so determined that any attempt by him to move his eyes in a
downwards
direction would have been positively illegal.

On this occasion, however, the sexual tension and anxious eye gazing were interrupted by an audible pop.

‘What was that?’ asked Marco.

‘I think it’s my mucus plug,’ I said.

I left Marco dry-retching on the stairs, went into my flat, took my pants off, examined them, and phoned Sarah.

Sarah arrived about half an hour later, having already established with the midwife that I should not come in till things ‘got serious’. I discovered later that this meant I should not come in until I felt so out of control with pain that I could kill myself and/or others.

For four hours Sarah played me tapes, made me tea, massaged my back, and ran me baths.

‘These are a piece of piss!’ I said as I breathed correctly through an irregular tummy twinge. ‘I could do this forever!’

I’d always had an inkling that I had a very high pain threshold. I didn’t like blood, but I could handle pretty much anything else. As a kid, I hadn’t cried during any of my immunisations. When I broke my nose windsurfing, I was calm and steady and sensible even though it was the worst fracture the doctor at Stirling hospital had ever seen. I never understood all the fuss about period pain. Other women
appeared to me to be wimps. And I regularly found bruises on my legs and had no idea where they’d come from. All sure signs that I had a superhuman tolerance to pain.

But the irregular tummy twinges turned to regular stomach pains and the regular stomach pains turned to agonising never-ending cramps, and the agonising never-ending cramps turned to
earth-shatteringly
incomprehensible poundings, which made me want to kill myself and/or others.

It was time to go to hospital.

I can see why they say you forget the pain of childbirth, and that it’s not so bad, and that at the end of it, all that matters is the bundle of joy you’re holding.

They say it because they are lying bastards.

I will never forget having a huge set of knitting needles inserted into me by a student nurse who wasn’t sure if she could feel my cervix at all, let alone break it to set my waters free. I will never forget several fists ‘examining’ me in the fourteen hours that followed. I will never forget a huge set of steel salad servers somehow barging their way inside me and yanking so hard that my bed flew across the room. And I will never forget being rushed to the theatre after all that, after Sarah had made sure my birth plan was followed to the letter, because my placenta was quite happy to stay put, thank you very much.

What I have forgotten is what Robbie looked like when he came out. I don’t remember. And when I came back from surgery, I didn’t ask where he was. And when I slept that night, I didn’t hear him cry. And when I woke up the next morning and someone placed him on my tummy, and his mouth found its way onto my nipple, I didn’t forget the pain of labour and I didn’t feel that I was holding a bundle of joy.

I felt like an alien was sucking on my tit.

Sarah stared at Krissie with a mixture of awe and fear. She couldn’t believe Krissie had actually done it. Krissie had a child, who was now crying in the cot beside her. Krissie herself was lying on her back, watching the ceiling, the bottom half of her hospital nightgown covered in blood. Sarah was surprised that the nurses hadn’t helped her to maintain her dignity, although she, of all people, knew how busy nurses were.

Krissie’s face was ghostly white and spookily vacant. She didn’t seem to notice the baby’s crying nor Sarah hovering over her, perplexed.

‘Krissie! Congratulations. You clever clogs. Kriss!’ said Sarah, kissing her on the forehead. She put flowers, magazines and fruit juice on the bedside table, and sat down.

‘He looks like Mike Tyson,’ Krissie said after a while, her voice uncharacteristically flat.

Sarah had to admit that he did look a bit
battered.
The forceps had obviously pulled him by the temples, and both were squished in and bruised. They’d also scraped his eye as they tried to get hold, and his left eyelid had a small gash across it.

When Sarah picked Robbie up and, still crying, he looked at her with tiny little dark piercing eyes, she felt them go straight through her and a shudder of emotion filled her to the brim. She cried. And as soon as she cried, Robbie stopped crying. Just stopped and looked at her, as if to say, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here now.’

They say you really fall in love for the first time when you have a baby, that you’re breathless and crippled with love. That would have been how Sarah felt – an overwhelming peace and warmth, a tingling ache of fulfilment – if she hadn’t had to hand Robbie to Krissie to be breastfed.

Sarah watched the two of them for a moment. But her lip began its signature quiver, and she couldn’t take it. It was so unfair. She had to go.

When she got home, Kyle was reading the paper.

‘How’d it go?’ he asked. ‘Boy or girl?’

‘Who gives a shit?’ Sarah said, and went to bed.

Kyle couldn’t recall exactly when it became normal to be spoken to like this. There was a time when it would have seemed odd for his partner to call him
‘useless’, for her to hide in her room and surface only to groom or feed.

If ten years ago someone had said to him, ‘Kyle, in ten years you will live in a very tidy house with a wife who seems to despise you and who comments frequently and sometimes in front of people that you have left sticky skid marks on the side of the toilet
again
,’ he would have found it hard to believe. After all, he was Kyle McGibbon, who got on with just about everyone. He was a doctor. A catch. He had hair and, genetically speaking, a good chance of keeping it. He was slim, and almost always managed an erection.

‘No way!’ Kyle would have said to this unlikely prediction. ‘If anyone treated me like that I’d trade her in so fast she’d still smell new!’

But he didn’t trade Sarah in, mostly because of the great years they’d had before trying to conceive. Years of going to the movies; of waking still linked in bed and smiling. Kyle wondered if the smiling would have continued if his poor wife hadn’t turned mad with the need to reproduce. He’d watched her disappear in front of him, like a dying patient, and all he could do was provide the palliative care of income and shelter.

Year one of the bid to have children, Sarah’s voice changed from soft and loving to snappy and not. Kyle tried to respond with patience. ‘Sarah, please don’t speak to me like that, darling,’ he’d suggest politely,
after his premenstrual wife had pointed a stiff threatening finger at him and said, ‘I hate fish cooked in tomatoes! You know that, you idiot!’

Year two he attempted relapse prevention
strategies
, organising a mystery mini-break for the weekend before Sarah’s birthday. It was Prague and it went very well, but the actual birthday a few days after their return was terrifying.

‘Nothing’s wrong, Kyle,’ Sarah had said, ‘except it’s my birthday and I’m watching the
X Factor
with a glass of stale Morrison’s merlot and YOU MEAN TO SAY LAST WEEKEND WAS
IT
? NOT AN ENTREE BUT
IT
? WHAT DID I DO TO END UP WITH THIS LIFE? I’D RATHER BE THAT FAT BIRD WITH LEARNING DIFFICULTIES STANDING IN FRONT OF SIMON COWELL THAN MARRIED TO SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T EVEN LOVE ME ENOUGH TO GET ME A DECENT PRESENT!’

Year three Kyle tried to fight because his mate Derek had started to call round regularly, and as it turned out he was also married to a psychotic bitch. ‘Don’t put up with it!’ Derek said. ‘They’re all bampots with their own agendas and you have to nip their control freak antics in the fucking bud!’ So one night Kyle told Sarah not to put his papers out for recycling till he’d finished reading them. Then he poured himself a beer and put football on in the formal living room and when she switched it off
he got up and turned it back on, and when she turned it off and looked at him with those eyes he decided that it would still be fighting back to go and drink his beer and listen to the match on the radio in the shed.

Year four he just stayed in the shed as much as he could.

‘I’m turning that fucking pit-hole into a gym!’ Sarah yelled. ‘How are we ever going to conceive if you shut yourself out there in the dark like a mole? Honestly, Kyle, you’ve gone all peely wally from the lack of light and you’ve got a beer belly. It’s
disgusting!
You’re going to have to take me from behind.’

By year five – the seventh year of their marriage – the life had been sucked out of him, and he spent as long as he could at work or at the gym. The rest of the time he walked a tightrope, hoping only to make it to the end, to not fall off.