by Marian Keyes
‘It might be a great film. You never know.’
‘No, it’s going to be a piece of shit,’ she said, and tears began to spill down her face. ‘My lovely script that I worked so hard on until it was perfect, perfect, perfect. I was so proud of it and now it’ll never see the light of day. No one will ever see it. Seven months I slaved on it, to make it wonderful, and now he wants it totally rewritten in a week. It can’t be done! And he’s taken out all my one-liners, all the funny stuff is gone, and any of the touching moments now involve a fucking DOG!’
I rummaged for a tissue while she howled like a child. ‘I’ll be ashamed, Maggie, I’ll be so ashamed to have my name on a cheesy, schmaltzy, moralizing movie about a dog.’ She tried to catch her breath. ‘About a dog called Chip’.
Could you pull out?’ I suggested. ‘Just tell him to stick his money and you’ll find someone else to make your movie, thanks very much!’
‘No. Because no one else does want to buy it. I know all that and I need the money to live on. But there’s no doubt that everything comes with a price tag.’
‘Just refuse to make the changes,’ I urged. ‘Tell him this is the movie he bought and this is the movie he should make!’
‘Then he’ll fire me and I’ll get paid almost nothing, but they’ll still own my script. They’ll just get some other writer in to make the changes.’
‘They can’t do that!’ But I knew they could; in my time I’d worked on enough contracts to know how much power the big studios retained. I’d just never seen it in action before.
‘They don’t just buy your script, they buy your soul. Troy is right to try and get all his work produced independently.’ Emily’s sobbing began to quieten down and she smiled regretfully. ‘You make a deal with the devil, no point complaining if you get a pitchfork in the arse.’ Then tears began to spill again. ‘But that script was like my baby. I loved it, I wanted the best for it, and it kills me to see it torn apart like that, my poor baby.’ Aghast, she stopped. ‘Oh, Maggie, I’ve done it again. I’m so sorry.’
32
When you have a miscarriage, you get given a huge amount of information, but you actually discover very little. People bombarded me with well-meant advice, which varied too much for comfort: some said we should try again immediately; others insisted it was vital that we grieve the loss before moving on.
But nobody could tell me the one thing I wanted to know, and that was: Why had it happened? The best that Doctor Collins, my gynaecologist, could come up with was that fifteen to twenty per cent of pregnancies routinely end in miscarriage.
‘But why?’ I persisted.
‘It’s nature’s way,’ he said. ‘Something must have been wrong with the foetus, so that it wouldn’t have been able to survive on its own.’
I’m sure that was meant to be comforting, but instead it enraged me. In my mind’s eye, my child, wherever it was, was perfect.
‘But it won’t happen again?’ Garv asked.
‘It could. It probably won’t, but I’d be lying to you if I said it couldn’t.’
‘But it’s already happened to us.’ Meaning we’d had our quota of bad luck.
‘Just because it’s happened once is no guarantee that it can’t happen again.’
‘Thanks a bunch,’ I said bitterly.
‘Another thing,’ he said warily.
‘What?’ I snapped.
‘Yeah, what?’ Garv echoed.
‘Mood swings.’
‘What about them?’
‘Expect them.’
I went over the past nine weeks with a fine-toothed comb, searching for the thing I’d done wrong. Had I lifted heavy objects? Accidently gone on a loop-the-loop rollercoaster? Booked myself into a German measles hospital? Or was it just down to the fact – now unimaginable to me – that I simply hadn’t wanted it and he or she had known?
They provided a nurse-counsellor-type person, who told me that there was no way that the baby would have known that it hadn’t been entirely welcome. ‘They’re thick-skinned little creatures,’ she said. ‘But it’s natural to blame yourself. Guilt is one of the emotions everyone feels when this happens.’
‘And what else?’
‘Ooh, anger, grief, loss, frustration, fear, relief –’
‘Relief?’ I glared at her.
‘Not for everyone. And did I mention irrational rage?’
Because we’d told so few people that I was pregnant, there weren’t many who knew I’d miscarried. So almost no one made allowances for us as we tried to fill the hole in our lives.
And it was a hole. We’d already thought up names – Patrick if it was a boy, Aoife if it was a girl.
The due date had been April 29th and already we’d started looking at baby clothes and planning the decoration for the bedroom. Then overnight we no longer had any need of teddy bear wallpaper or revolving lamps that throw patterns of stars on the walls, and that was hard to get used to.
Even more painful was that I’d been excited about getting to know my child. I’d been looking forward to a lifetime with this new person, who was part of me and part of Garv – and abruptly it had all been whipped away.
You know how it is when your boyfriend ditches you –out of nowhere the world is full of loving couples, holding hands, kissing, clinking champagne glasses, feeding each other oysters. In the same way, as soon as I’d lost my baby, out of the woodwork suddenly emerged busloads of heavily pregnant women, ripe and gorgeous, carrying their swollen bellies with pride. And worse still, there were babies everywhere I turned: in the supermarket, on the street, by the sea, at the optician’s. Perfect little creatures with their dolphin-smiley mouths and lustrous skin bursting with freshness, flapping their pudgy arms, clapping their sticky hands, kicking their socks off and making high-pitched, swooping, singing noises, like bald mini-Bjorks.
Sometimes it was too painful to look at them, but at other times it was too painful not to, and Garv and I used to eyeball them with hungry gazes, thinking We nearly had one of them. Then Garv usually whispered, ‘We’d better stop, we’re being weird, the mother will call the peelers on us.’
My instinct was to get pregnant again immediately, so that we could almost pretend that the first loss had never happened, and Garv said he wanted to do whatever made me happy. So I went straight out and bought a temperature thing, because I wanted to leave nothing to chance. My life was pared down to just one all-consuming need, and terrible fear tormented me. What if this time it took a year? What if – unthinkably – it never happened? But we were lucky: I’d miscarried at the start of October, and I was pregnant again by the middle of November. It’s hard to describe the giddy mix of relief and happiness I felt when the blue line appeared on the stick; we’d been given a second chance. Breathless, we squeezed each other and we both cried, as much for the loss of the other child as the joy of the new one.
But almost straight away the joy was overtaken by anxiety. Blind terror, actually. What if I lost this one too?
‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice,’ Garv said, even though it does, and it wasn’t lightning anyway.
I became so very, very careful; I stopped going to pubs, because I was afraid of inhaling cigarette smoke; I drove at about fourteen miles an hour (quite fast for Dublin, actually), so there’d be no danger of any sudden braking; I refused to give cream cheese house-room, and I never permitted myself the luxury of a belch – quite understandable when you consider that I even worried about breathing too hard, in case it dislodged the baby.
Horrible dreams dogged me: one night I dreamt that the baby had died and was still inside me, another night I dreamt I gave birth to a chicken. And this time round, there was no skiving off work and buying handbags from JΡ Tod’s; we’d been so badly punished the last time for being happy that we were scared of doing anything that smacked of celebration. Mind you, I wasn’t at all as sick the second time – apart from when I found something very funny (almost never), and my laughter segued seamlessly into dry-ret
ching. (I was a model dinnerparty guest.)
We cautiously took the reduced nausea as a good sign. Though there was no medical basis for it, I said to Garv that the terrible sickness the first time round had probably been a sign that something was wrong. Then he repeated it back to me and thus we tried to reassure each other and ourselves.
But every twinge in me could indicate the onset of disaster. One night I got a really bad pain in my armpit and I was absolutely convinced that this was it. Garv tried to restore calm by pointing out that my armpit was miles from my womb, but I countered defiantly, ‘Yeah, but when people have heart attacks they get a pain in their arm,’ and then I could see I’d put the fear in him too.
But we survived that night, and in the seventh week we went for our first scan, where anxiety stripped the event of the joy we’d had with the first baby. I kept asking if everything looked OK and the nurse said over and over that it did.
But how could she tell? If I was completely honest, the picture they gave us looked more like a poor black-and-white photocopy of ‘Starry, Starry Night’ than a baby.
As we approached the ninth week, the tension built and built. During the ninth week itself, time slowed down to the ticking of each individual second. We breathed as though the air was rationed. Then – unbelievably – it had passed without incident and we’d moved into the clear blue waters of the tenth week. The cloud lifted and suddenly we were gulping breaths like the air was chocolate-flavoured – you could actually see the change in us. I remember smiling at Garv and watching him smile back at me and being shocked at how unfamiliar it was.
Week ten passed. Week eleven arrived and we went for our second scan, where we were a lot giddier and lighter than at the previous one. Then something happened which upped the ante more than I could ever have imagined – as I was lying on the table, the nurse indicated that we should be quiet, she flicked a switch, and the sound of our baby’s heartbeat filled the room. A lightish pitter-patter, so fast it was absolutely belting along. It is impossible for me to convey the depth of my wonder and joy. I was transported with it. As you might expect, we both cried buckets, then we had a little laugh, then shed a few more tears. Our awe just knocked us sideways. And the relief was glorious: it had a heartbeat. Things must be fine.
And just as soon as we were over week twelve, we’d really be in the clear. ‘Two days to go,’ I said that night, as we squeezed hands before we went to sleep.
The pain woke me. There hadn’t been pain the last time, so I wasn’t immediately alerted. Then when I understood what was happening I went into a dreamscape: I cant believe this is happening to us.
When bad things happen, I’m always taken by surprise. I know some people react to disaster by stomping around shouting, ‘I knew it, I just fucking KNEW this would happen!’ But I’m not one of them. Bad things are supposed to happen to mythical ‘other people’, and it comes as a shock when I discover that I am one of the ‘other people’.
As we hurried out to the car, I looked up to the night sky, silently begging God not to let this happen. But I noticed something that seemed like an omen. ‘There are no stars tonight,’ I said. ‘It’s a sign.’
‘No, baby, it’s not.’ Garv slid his arms around me. ‘’The stars are always there, even in the daytime. Sometimes we just can’t see them.’
The sense of dßjé vu as we drove to the hospital turned reality into a nightmare. Then we were sitting on the orange chairs again, then someone was telling me that everything would be OK, and once again it wasn’t.
It was still too early to tell the sex, not that I cared. All that mattered was that this was the second time I’d lost a child: a ready-made family, gone before it had arrived.
This time it was far, far worse. Once I could live with, but not twice – because the one thing we’d had the last time, that we didn’t have now, was hope. I hated myself and my defective body that was failing us so terribly.
People provided stories that were supposed to be comforting. My mother knew a woman who’d had five miscarriages before carrying to term and now she had four fine children, two boys and two girls. Garv’s mother could go one better: ‘I know a woman who had eight miscarriages and then she had twins. A lovely pair of boys. Mind you,’ she added doubtfully, ‘one of them ended up in prison. Embezzlement. Something to do with a pension fund and a villa in Spain…’
Everyone tried to instil optimism back into Garv and me, but I didn’t buy it. Hope was utterly absent and I was in the grip of a burgeoning belief that this was all my fault. I’m not given to fanciful nonsense, talk of hexes and jinxes and the like (that’d be Anna you’re thinking of), but I couldn’t chase away the conviction that I’d brought all of this on myself.
33
I opened the front door. Emily was on the day bed bent over her laptop, working hard.
‘Hi,’ I said cautiously.
‘Hi,’ she replied, equally cautiously. ‘Good night?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘Yes.’
‘How were Troy and Shay?’
‘Fine. Helpful. They both say hey.’
I nodded at the computer. ‘So, ah, how’s Chip the Dog going?’
‘Nightmare. I’m getting cramps in my stomach from writing this stuff. Did you get off with her?’
A pause. ‘Yes. Sorry’
‘Not at all, whatever floats your boat. So what was it like?’
‘It was… different.’
‘Like licking a mackerel?’
‘It was only the first date,’ I said. ‘What kind of girl do you think I am?’
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said faintly. ‘And what did you do?’ Then she hit her forehead. ‘Doh! Not like that!’
‘We went to a movie. Look, I’m going to have a shower and get some rest.’
‘Sure, you must be exhausted. I mean, I’m not saying… Oh Christ,’ she clicked, ‘see you later.’
I went into my bedroom, closed the door, then sat at Emily’s desk and wearily flicked through some of her unsold scripts, looking to be distracted.
I wasn’t exhausted; I was terrified. I was way, way, WAY out of my depth here. This business with Lara – what had I been thinking of?
I wasn’t a lesbian. I suspected I wasn’t even bisexual.
The whole night had been a disaster, starting with Lara turning up looking radiant; her hair was swingy and shiny and she wore a clingy jersey dress. Nothing wrong there – until I suddenly understood that she’d made a special effort She’d made a special effort for me. Momentarily I was flattered and seconds later I was freaked out.
We went to Santa Monica to a movie where neither of us understood the plot, and when we got outside into the sweltering night it transpired that each of us hoped that the other would be able to explain it. That didn’t bode at all well, and I had a powerful compulsion to ask Lara what she knew about exchange rates, except I was afraid of discovering that she was as clueless as me.
‘What now?’ I asked. ‘Will we go for a drink?’ There were hundreds of very attractive-looking bars and restaurants all around us. But Lara firmly shook her head and said, with a message-laden smile, ‘Nuh-uh. My place.’
It was as though a full cage of butterflies had been released into my stomach. Nerves, I told myself. Not terror. Nerves. On account of my shyness and inexperience, of course. But Lara would be masterful enough to take control and make it easy for me.
So back to her place we went, where she opened a bottle of wine, put some soft jazzy-type music on the stereo and lit scented candles. It was the scented candles that brought home to me the full extent of my mistake. It was so romantic. She definitely meant business. A lead ball displaced the butterflies and there was no longer any ambivalence about how I felt. I wanted to go home, I wanted to run away as fast as I could –but instead I had to curl up on the sofa, sip Chardonnay and exchange mischievous glances in the flickering light.
Valiantly, I tried. I managed to dredge up a sickly smile each time Lara warmed her eyes a
t me, but as she moved closer along the sofa, my panic built.
Desperately, I tried to keep talking but I was so uptight I sounded like I was interviewing her for a job. ‘How many screens will Doves be opening in? Is it fun organizing the launch party for it? Oh, a nightmare, is it? Oh dear.’
I longed to leave, but couldn’t see how I could possibly extricate myself; the words that might release me wanted to be uttered yet remained locked in my throat. What was stopping me was that I’d gone into this with my eyes open. As soon as it had been offered, I could have told Lara to get lost, but instead I’d given every appearance of fancying her – because at the time I had. Now, though, was a different story, but I felt I’d no right to tell her I’d changed my mind.
A glass and a half of Chardonnay in and Lara suddenly leant right over to me, almost on top of me. Here we go. Automatically, I shrank away from her and the relief was intense when I realized she was just refilling my glass. With a shaky hand I picked it up and gratefully gulped back most of it.
‘Hey, don’t get too drunk on me,’ Lara chided sweetly.
‘Er, no.’ And my anxiety started anew.
I actually prayed, offering to do a deal with God: if he’d get me out of this, I’d never do anything risky again. But God must have been on the other line, because next thing Lara had moved doser and was stroking my hair away from my face. Then she’d kissed me, which hadn’t been too bad, and put her hands under my top and caressed my breasts, which hadn’t been too bad either. At that juncture I felt it was my turn to do something, so I kind of pulled at her shoulder strap to show willing. But I wasn’t expecting her to shrug her dress off her shoulders, down to her waist, then whip off her bra and weigh her breasts in her hands. As soon as she touched herself, her nipples sprang at me and it would have been sexy in other circumstances, but I was paralysed by the inappropriateness of it all. ‘Don’t be chicken,’ she said, so I took a deep breath and gingerly started caressing her breasts, partly to return the favour and partly because I was curious about what implants felt like – but as I’d never felt anyone else’s breasts except my own, I’d nothing really to compare them to.
