OMG Baby! (5 page)

‘No, I’m just amazed.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re performing at someone’s wedding?’

‘Yep. I can dance. I got moves.’

‘You’re not Lady Gaga, though, are you, Vivienne?’

‘No, Christie, I am not Lady Gaga. What’s your point?’

‘Just that every time I’ve ever seen you dance, you’re a
bit
out of time with the music,’ she lectures, widening her eyes and shaking her head slowly.

‘Am I? Hold on, when was that?’

‘The Hawaiian night at Barnes and Worth?’

‘I’d had a lot of rum punch that night, and it’s hard to do my kind of dancing to “Agadoo”.’

‘Your kind of dancing?’

‘You know, street dance,’ I say, holding her stare and trying not to think about my humiliation the one time I thought I’d nip in for a dance class at Pineapple Studios. I do a head roll, ear to shoulder, ending with a chest pop, to back up my argument.

‘All I know is, people were laughing at you. “Look at her,” they said, “nana dancing.”’

‘Well, that just goes to show you,’ I say vaguely, beginning to pack up.

‘What?’ she says.

‘That nanas can dance great.’

I
decide
to call into Max’s studio on the way home. I find him arranging canvases in a line along the wall, all of them landscapes. He’s cleared the portraits to the side and has actually tidied up his crap. There are no more piles of newspapers, the old rags have gone, and the wooden floorboards look swept. The studio seems to vibrate with a different energy, something more organised, and less sexual somehow without the naked women. When I see him crouching there in his old striped shirt and faded grey jeans, I get a flutter inside like a paper fan. I have to stop myself from running in, jumping on his back and shouting, ‘Hey, you, I love you!’

‘Ah, Viv,’ he says, glancing up, ‘which one do you like?’

I look along the line. A couple are painted totally in a red brown, and only when you look more closely do you see a kind of landscape within the textures and layers of paint. Others are more literal but stylised with sweeping, curving trees and swelling mountains. I choose one of Cadaqués, a view of the sea between stacked blocks of houses.

‘No, no, that’s not the best,’ he snaps, shaking his head and moving the painting to the end of the row. ‘Choose again, and come on, really look this time and try to feel something.’

I go for one of the redder abstracts.

‘So how does it make you feel?’

‘Calm,’ I say. ‘Calm and strangely warm.’

‘That’s good.’ He places the painting at the front and stands back with his hands hooked in the back pockets of his jeans. ‘See, I’m sorting these for the exhibition.’

I stand beside him, looking at the Spanish views lined up like expensive picture postcards. He puts an arm round me and gives a squeeze, but he stares intently at the paintings. He steps forward suddenly, crouching to swap them round again.

‘Ah, maybe I should have painted more of these abstracts, a whole series. These are the stand-out pieces. The way the colour behaves at the edges I really like, and the texture of the paint. The different pigments were actually an experiment. I started with pure powder, but in the end I used acrylic.’

He sits on the floor, leaning back on his elbow, the long shanks of his thighs out in front. I look at his old paint-spattered biker boots, the leather moulded into the shape of his feet. These are not the shoes of a daddy, and yet they are.

‘Acrylic, did you?’

‘Yeah. Acrylic gives a true colour, but you can still get some translucence.’

‘Translucence, hey?’

I’m standing behind him. He lets his head fall back to look at me, eyebrows raised.

‘Yeah, translucence,’ he says. ‘I’d like to see you in something translucent . . . transparent even.’

‘I’m sure you would.’

He reaches an arm towards me. ‘Come here.’

I go and sit with my outstretched legs next to his. My trainers reach the top of his ankles. He looks sideways at me and smiles. I stick out my belly, trying to make myself look pregnant.

He places his hand on my thigh and croons to my tummy in a quiet sweet voice, ‘Hello, baby . . . This room is where you were conceived. You don’t know this yet, but your mammy is a shameless hussy and she bent over that very table . . .’

‘And your daddy is a very bad and dirty man.’

He kisses me, gently pushing me back until we’re lying on the floor. ‘I have an idea. Let’s re-enact the whole thing.’

‘Erm . . . no, ta. At the moment I’m really only lusting after egg mayonnaise.’

We lie side by side looking up at the ceiling rose.

‘This baby controls me, you know. It speaks to me like a sort of angel robot,’ I tell him.

He turns his head to the side. He’s now looking in my ear.

‘Like now it’s going, “
Egg mayonnaise, egg mayonnaise, egg mayonnaise
. . .”’

‘She is, you mean.’

‘Yes, she is . . . like an angel.’

We look at each other. He smiles.

‘Angel,’ he says dreamily, stroking a palm through the air.

‘Angel . . . what, as a name?’

‘It’s a great name for a bump, don’t you think?’

‘Say it again.’

‘Angel,’ he says, again with the hand gesture.

‘I like it.’

‘You are our little bump. We shall love you, and we shall name you Angel,’ he whispers to my belly.

‘A boy named Angel,’ I say aloud to myself.

‘Better than Adolf.’

‘Or Judas.’

‘Pontius,’ he adds, and we leave the studio making a list of historic villains not to name your child, and on the way home we compile lists like this one of names that will make your child stand out from the crowd but not in a good way: Ezekiel, Randy, Jezebel, Hades, Fanny, Dick, Satan . . .

B
ack at the flat
, I collect the post. There’s a bag containing my dance dress for Lucy’s wedding, and there’s a note written in a slanted, mean-looking hand.

I
stand in the stairwell
, suddenly hot. A thud like a low drum begins whacking in my chest. I look back outside the door as if she’s lurking nearby. Then I’m holding the letter, staring at the disturbing word ‘Mother’. What bewitching power that word has, anchored in our hearts and chained to the heart of another woman and another before her, all of them mothers, and now Rainey is yanking on my chain. She wants to see me – my mother, who has never really shown any actual interest in seeing me before. I was going to hunt her down and now she’s sniffing at my door. It’s too suspicious. What does she want?

‘Vivienne?’ Max bellows from the door. I put the note in my bag, feeling shaken. The audacity of her. She doesn’t know I’m pregnant, but she just turns up for no good reason, demanding to see me, presuming that a) I want to see her and b) I’m available. What about all the times when I needed her? The letters I wrote and the birthdays she missed? I haven’t seen or heard from her in three years, and the last time she made unwelcome comments about my hair. But then again, she’s here. My mother. I think about a Disney mother, softly spoken and kind and pure fantasy. My mother is not at all like that, but she wants to see me. That’s something. I climb the stairs, and by the time I’ve made it to the top, I’m wide-eyed with excitement. This is the start of something with us. This is it, the big reveal, the reunion. I know it. I can feel it.

O
bviously I’m not going
to let my imagination run wild – traditionally my mother has always let me down – however, in my head she’s already my birth partner, we’re reunited over my pregnancy, and just as I’m becoming a mother, I have a mother of my own to watch over me, to love me even when I’m wrong, to tell me I’m pretty and clever and good. I know this is the fantasy of an abandoned seven-year-old girl, but I have to go through it every time Lorraine appears.

I will stop thinking about her by terrifying myself with this tutu dress and the fact that I’m dancing at Lucy’s wedding wearing it. I say dress; it’s more a costume consisting of leatherette corset and net skirt with sewn-in pants looking as if it’s made for a child. Surely any grown woman’s gusset needs more fabric than that? Any bosom requires more leather? But no, it’s size twelve . . . Hell, it makes my skin all red as I drag it on. I close my eyes and step in front of the mirror.

It’s worse than I thought, hideous. My boobs look like they are being offered on a tray, and I wouldn’t mind so much if they looked OK, but they’re wobbly, huge and they hurt. Oh, why do I have to be the best woman for a crazy sex maniac? Why can’t Lucy have bridesmaids who wear sateen and flower garlands? I can’t pole-dance in a tutu! Not sober! What was I thinking? I’ll have to tell her I can’t go through with it. I imagine Lucy’s face, how she looked this morning, how upset she is about not being pregnant and how stressed about the wedding, how angry she can get.

How bad can dancing in a tutu be? It might be fun! I skip off to perform the dance for Max.

‘And one and two and three and four. I step in here, grab the pole and spin round.’

‘Fucking hell,’ says Max from the armchair.

‘What?’

‘I can see your tits.’

‘You can not.’

Max raises his eyebrows in the direction of my chest. I stretch the tutu skirt a bit, trying to pull it up, but my boobs spill out of the top even more. He rolls a cigarette by the open window.

‘I’m not complaining, mind,’ he says.

‘It’s just a bit snug, that’s all.’ I tug at the front of the corset.

‘Or does it not fit?’

‘Max, shut up, will you? Just watch the dance.’

I go through the routine, concentrating hard. He smokes and smirks.

I switch off the music, panting, and turn to him, hand on hip. ‘Well?’

‘Very good.’ He holds the rolly in his lips and claps.

‘I’m knackered.’

‘Not surprised – that was a lot of thrusting. It must be hard to get air in your lungs in that corset.’

‘Lucy had these specially made.’

‘Is that a bit of nipple I can see?’

I flop backwards onto the sofa, defeated. He’s right – I’ve put on baby weight: the dress is too small. I look like a prostitute, and I can’t dance to save my life anyway. Yet again I’m about to be utterly humiliated. I press the net skirt down over my thighs and try to sit up without giving myself a wedgie.

I look at Max and he grins.

‘You’re mean.’

He shakes his head. ‘You’re mad to do it.’ I watch him breathe a long stream of smoke towards the open window. He’s aware of being watched and shifts in the chair; he stretches his legs out, resting one boot heel on top of a boot toe. He looks at me and raises his eyebrows.

‘I forgot to mention . . . I said you’d be one of the canapé waiters,’ I say, deciding to gee him up a bit.

‘Did you, now?’

‘You have to wear little shorts.’

‘OK.’ He looks defiantly into my eyes.

‘Sparkly hot-pants ones and a bow tie.’

‘Bring it on.’

‘Now that would be funny.’ I laugh at the thought of him hairily lolloping about.

‘You look totally beautiful in this light,’ he says, leaning forward and staring.

‘What would you call this light . . . Terrible Breath? London Gloom?’

‘Let me draw you,’ he says, stubbing out his cigarette.

‘No.’

‘I want to sketch you just like that. It’ll take five minutes.’

He grabs a pencil and begins to sketch. I watch the tendons in his forearm move as the pencil scratches.

‘My mother wants to see me,’ I tell him.

He glances up. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m a very cool person.’

‘No, I mean why now?’

Good question. I hadn’t thought of that. She’s probably passing through and feels guilty about missing Nana’s wedding and thought seeing me might make up for it. She could be about to tell me some life-changing thing. Maybe my father is actually the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She might want to get to know me. I retreat from that idea like a snail from a salt cellar; that’s abandoned-seven-year-old-girl thinking again and I am a responsible grown woman, a pregnant one, and I was looking for her to tell her about that, don’t forget.

‘She might just want to say hello.’

He looks up, nods. ‘When?’ he asks.

‘Dunno. She might not even call for all I know.’ Hell, I feel upset even as I say that. ‘Let’s change the subject.’

He sketches in silence, looking up occasionally and narrowing his eyes.

‘Did you make a doctor’s appointment?’ he asks after a while.

‘Nine fifteen tomorrow, Dr Savage.’ I stroke a hand over my round belly. ‘Do you think his name influenced his career choice?’

‘I’ll go with you.’

‘What, in case he is actually savage?’

‘He might come at you with forceps.’

‘Or get me with the blood-pressure thing!’

‘Go after you with stirrups.’

‘Stirrups? What?’

‘I’ll go with you.’

‘OK,’ I say, wondering when Rainey will call, if she’ll call and if she’d like to go to the doctor’s with us.

D
r Savage’s
office is a study in beige, practically windowless and extremely hot. I feel a wave of sickness hit almost immediately after we step through the door. I sit next to the desk, and Max is shown to a chair by the wall like a naughty boy (which he is). Dr Savage, whose name is Clive I see from the name plate on his desk, has an oval hairless head that looks like it could be inverted and still be a face. He types importantly on a laptop, while I study his fleshy earlobe, where the scar from a piercing surprises me and has me suddenly imagining his love life.

‘All right, Miss Summers, what can I do for you?’ he asks, looking up.

‘Well, I’m pregnant,’ I say shyly.

‘Happily?’ He glances from me to Max.

‘Oh yeah, delightedly,’ Max says. I look at him with his overgrown beard and dark hair all sticking up and feel like laughing, riffing like teenagers in the headmistress’s office.

‘Well, then congratulations.’ Dr Savage types a line. ‘How many weeks pregnant do you think you are?’ Seeing my blank-as-a-sheet face, he adds, ‘We usually count from the first day of your last period.’

When did I begin my fling with Max? I look at him.

‘When did we . . . ? Mid-July.’

‘That would make you about ten weeks,’ says Dr Savage, consulting a colourful wheel, ‘which means the baby will be due around about 1st April.’

‘Aha. If you’re born on April Fool’s Day, it means you’ll be lucky all your life,’ says Max.

‘Oh really? Wow. Cool!’ I laugh, but Dr Savage doesn’t.

‘Right, Miss Summers. If you hop up on the table, I’ll examine you.’

I lie back while he presses cold, girly hands timidly over my belly, confirms that I’m about ten weeks and sends us home.

Out on the street, I’m deflated. Shouldn’t he have listened to the baby’s heartbeat or something? Shouldn’t we have some sort of information pack? Freebies? He said he’ll ‘book us in’ and then I’ll have an ‘allocated person’ who’ll contact me. We can pay for a scan between twelve and fourteen weeks to check for ‘foetal abnormalities’.

What does that mean? What am I supposed to do now? I wonder if he actually knows what he’s talking about. I mean, I had to tell him how to deal with morning sickness – he agreed that ginger nuts are good and then started going on about fruit and vegetables. He doesn’t know a thing.

We trudge along to the Tube station hand in hand. Dr Savage has burst our bubble.

‘April is a lovely time to have a baby,’ Max says, nudging into me. ‘A spring baby.’

‘You think?’ I sling my arm round his waist, slotting a hand into the back pocket of his jeans.

‘Buds, blossom, chicks, baby rabbits and all that.’

‘Suppose.’

‘Little birds making nests, Bambis . . .’

‘What am I, Snow White?’

‘Post-modern ironic Snow White – that’s you.’

‘
Eat something’s flesh now!
’ says Angel.

We duck into a café for bacon butties. I get a chicken leg with mine.

‘It must be because a lot of women miscarry in the first twelve weeks. They don’t want to be wasting time seeing you and testing you and then you go and lose the baby,’ says Max, thoughtfully chewing.

‘I am not going to
lose
the baby.’

‘My mother lost two.’

‘Well, I’m not going to.’ I lower the half-eaten chicken leg to stare at him.

‘And my sister.’

‘I don’t want to talk about losing babies! Why are you talking about that?’

He takes a slurp of tea. ‘’s common, that’s all.’

I glare at him as he wipes his beard with the napkin.

‘Anyhow . . . doesn’t matter,’ he says carefully.

Now I’m disappointed
and
worried about losing the baby. I wish I’d never darkened bloody Dr Savage’s door. I rub my tummy. Everyone but me is so blasé about me having a baby. I’ll put something about this disappointing feeling in my online research notebook, in a sympathetic tone to reassure others. I’m just taking a bite of chicken and planning it when my phone beeps a message.

I
hear
Christie’s nervous laugh as I struggle from the lift cage, then the rumble of Damon’s voice. As I open the flimsy office door, I’m once again stunned by Damon. I resist the urge to cover my mouth in shock. He’s standing legs apart, feet squarely planted next to Christie’s desk, looking out of the window while delivering a monotone speech about being a Greek Cypriot. Christie tries to concentrate on her computer screen. She winces at me.

‘Morning!’ I say cheerily.

Damon turns, jolted out of his speech. and fixes me with his good eye.

‘I was just telling your friend about my old mum. She lived on this street fifty years . . .’

‘Oh, Damon, I can’t have you interrupting my staff. Christie won’t be able to concentrate with all these fascinating stories.’ I start to unpack my laptop.

‘Vivienne, you kept me awake last night,’ he growls.

‘Did I?’ I ask, desperate not to hear why.

‘I was thinking, Did I give her the back-door code or not?’

‘Yes, you certainly did.’ I sit down at my desk. There’s an awkward silence as Damon looks out of the window. I wonder if ‘back-door code’ is some sort of euphemism.

‘Well, I’ll sod off and let you work, then,’ he declares without moving.

‘If you could, that would be super helpful.’ I smile and blink sweetly. He starts to lumber out, using mostly momentum to get to the door, where he stops and turns.

‘Shame, weren’t it?’

I twist in my seat. ‘What was, Damon?’

‘About Lady Diana,’ he says. Then he shakes his head and leaves.

As the door closes, Christie slumps in her seat, clutching her neck with both hands. ‘Oh my God, Viv, no word of a lie he nearly gave me a heart attack!’

‘He’s just lonely, that’s all,’ I say, switching on my laptop.

She begins marching up and down spraying great jets of ‘Spring Breeze’ air freshener. ‘I can’t understand how he can sneak up like that.’

‘Did you have your iPod on?’

‘No! I just turned round and there he was! Standing right there! I think he might be a ghost.’

‘That would be good, a ghost landlord. Would we still have to pay rent, do you think?’

‘In blood.’

‘Not so good, then.’

‘He’s like the living dead. Viv, have you stopped to think why there’s no one else in this building?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Because he’s
eaten
them, that’s why.’

I look up and frown. ‘Have you been on the Horror Channel again?’

‘You mark my words, Viv, no good will come of this.’

‘Look, Christie, Damon isn’t a ghost, OK. He’s just a bit of a strange man. No need to become Mother Shipton.’

Her eyes go wide, staring at the back wall, and her mouth hangs slightly open.

‘Is he behind me?’ I spin round. Damon is not there.

‘See – you’re terrified of him too,’ says Christie.

I enter into a pact with Christie to meet at the Tube station and always come to work together. Then we make cups of hot sweet tea for the shock and open the box containing Lucy’s wedding crackers.

Under layers of shredded paper there are plastic bags, and in each bag there are four massive crackers.

‘These are grey,’ I say, opening a bag. ‘Does that look grey to you?’

Christie takes a cracker to the window and squints at it. ‘Hmm, they smell of foist,’ she murmurs.

‘And huge. Huge grey crackers. They’re supposed to be mini. These are bigger than Christmas crackers . . . There’s no way that colour could be described as “pearl white”, is there?’

‘More like “wet-rat grey”,’ says Christie.

‘Where’s the fricking brief?’

Christie half runs to her desk and grabs a piece of paper.

I scan down. ‘It doesn’t describe the colour, just a reference number. Did you check it?’