by Marian Keyes
“Sorry,” I gasped. “I lost track of the time.”
“I’ve fed Kate,” she told me. (Thank God! That must mean that she’s still alive!)
“Thanks, Mum.”
“Five times.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“And I’ve changed her.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“Three times.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“I hope you’re grateful.”
“Oh, I am, Mum.”
“She’s not my child, you know.”
“I know, Mum.”
“My childbearing days are over.”
“I know, Mum.”
Then she was really suspicious.
Why was I being so nice?
Hurriedly, I raised my voice at her.
“She’s your flesh and blood too, you know,” I told her.
But it was a poor effort.
I just couldn’t concentrate on getting annoyed by her. I’d think to myself,
“My God, but she’s being particularly irritating,” but just as I was getting myself worked up into a nice bit of a lather of annoyance my thoughts would slide Adam-ward, and I’d suddenly feel happy.
Well, happyish.
My head didn’t know where it was. All manner of unusual behavior going on.
A large battalion of my thoughts was marching determinedly on its way to Annoyance but it was distracted and took a wrong turn at Adam and found, to its surprise, that it had ended up in the entirely different destination of Dreamy Contentment.
Which caused no end of confusion and consternation amongst the ranks, I can tell you.
I rushed upstairs to see Kate.
She was in her bassinet, fed, changed and asleep.
The little angel.
She snuffled contentedly in her sleep, moving her fat pink little legs.
With a shock I realized how lucky I was. This beauti- ful miniature human being was my child. I gave birth to her. She was my daughter.
For the first time I realized— really realized—that my marriage was not a failure.
James and I might not be together but we had created this wonderful little person.
This living miracle.
I was not becursed.
I was not benighted.
I was very, very lucky.
fifteen
I spent Friday night watching television with Mum. I felt that I had done enough gallivanting over the past couple of days. And I was totally exhausted. Taking care of a young baby is a grueling task. Although how would I know, I hear you asking.
All right, all right, I admit that I’d had a lot of help from my parents, but I still felt exhausted.
How I was going to cope with returning to work was beyond me.
How do people do it? It made me feel so inadequate.
Especially when I thought of women in, was it China? You know, when they’re out digging up the fields with their bare hands and they say, “Oh excuse me for a moment,” as if they were going to the ladies’ room at a posh reception and they lift their skirt and out pops a newborn baby into a plowed furrow or onto a bag of seeds or whatever.
“Aaah, that feels better,” they might say.
And on they go, tilling and plowing and uprooting mighty oaks with one hand, their newborn child attached to their breast.
And they’re pregnant again by nightfall.
And the newborn child has been given a suit of clothes and set to work driving a tractor.
As I watched television with Mum, my thoughts kept straying to Adam.
And in true adolescent fashion I would get a little tingle every time I thought of him. I’d had such a lovely time with him. If I hadn’t loved James, I might have been attracted to Adam.
That’s not to say that I was un attracted to him.
I mean, he was very attractive.
Hypothetically speaking, it is possible to be in love with one man—in my case, James—and have a crush on another—in this case, Adam.
It wasn’t as if a crush does any harm.
It didn’t mean that I’m a fickle person.
It was good for me.
Because I didn’t have to act on that crush.
And, even if, God forbid, I did act on it, well it wasn’t the end of the world, now was it?
Yes, if Helen found out about it, it could well have been the end of the world.
But that was assuming that Adam was attracted to me.
But I thought he was.
Was that very conceited?
Maybe he used that trick with all the women.
You know, coming on all sincere and vulnerable and adoring, so the women would think he was the nicest man they ever met, that he was really different.
And before they knew it they’d be in Adam’s bed with their underwear flung to one of the four corners of the room and Adam would be clambering off them, saying, “When I told you that I’d respect you in the morning, I lied.”
And then he’d call them exactly seventy-two hours later to say, “Oh, by the way, the condom burst. You did say you were ovulating, didn’t you?”
Yes, I thought angrily, I bet he’s a bastard. How dare he! Making me feel beautiful and special. The barefaced arrogance of him!
Well, if he thinks I’m going to have sex with him now, then I’m afraid that I’ve got some very bad news for him.
Adam, darling, I’ve changed my mind!
It took me a couple of seconds to realize that I had talked myself through an entire affair with Adam, from falling for him to being dumped by him to being furious with him.
Whoops, I thought. It’s that bad penny, Temporary Insanity, back again. “What’s wrong with you?” said Mum, tearing her attention away from Inspector Morse. “You’re looking very angry.”
“Nothing, Mum,” I told her, my head reeling slightly. “Just thinking.”
“You can think too much,” she told me.
For once I agreed with her.
But before she could expound on the evils of a university education and the dangers of opening your mind, the phone rang.
“I’ll answer it,” I yelped, and ran from the room, cutting her off mid-sentence.
“What’s the use of being an intellectual?” she shouted after me. “I bet James Joyce couldn’t change a spark plug.”
“Hello,” I said as I picked up the phone.
“Helen?” asked a man’s voice.
“No. Helen’s not here,” I said. “She’s missing, presumed drunk.”
The voice laughed.
“Adam?” I asked, wobbling slightly.
The shock of hearing his voice briefly destabilized me.
I could hardly believe that he had spent the afternoon with me and here he was calling for Helen, my sister.
What kind of sicko was he, playing the two of us off against each other?
I knew it.
He was a bastard, just like all the others.
“Claire,” he said. “Yes, it’s me.”
What do you want? I thought coldly. “Yes?” I said icily. “Well, I’ll tell Helen that you called.”
“No wait,” he said. “I called to talk to you.”
“That’s funny,” I continued with great hauteur. “Because my name is Claire, not Helen.”
“I know that,” he continued in a reasonable tone. “But I thought it might be a bit weird if I called to speak to you and Helen answered and I didn’t acknowledge her.”
I paused.
“I mean,” he continued gently, “Helen is my friend too. If it wasn’t for Helen I would never have met you.”
Still I said nothing. “Are you annoyed?” he asked. “Have I done something wrong?”
Now I felt foolish. Hysterical and female.
“No,” I said in much sweeter tones. “Of course I’m not annoyed.”
“All right then,” he said. “If you’re sure.”<
br />
“I’m sure.”
“I hope you don’t mind my calling you,” he said. “But you ran off in such a hurry today that I didn’t get a chance to ask you if maybe…I mean…that’s if you don’t mind…if I could see you again. You know, if you’ve got time.”
Relief and happiness rushed through me.
As they say, there’s one born every minute.
“Yes,” I told him breathlessly. “I’d love to.”
“I had such a nice time,” he said.
I glowed with happiness and pride.
“So did I,” I told him.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked.
Tomorrow, I thought.
Golly, but he didn’t let the grass grow under his feet.
“I’m going into town to buy some clothes,” I said.
This was news to me.
The first I had heard of it.
“So you can meet me for coffee if you like,” I told him. “But I’ll have to bring Kate.”
“That’s great,” he said, sounding all excited. “Kate’s beautiful. Please bring her.”
“Okay then,” I said, a little taken aback at his enthusiasm, and we made an arrangement to meet in town the following day.
I went back into Mum.
“Who was that?” she asked, looking at my flushed, happy face.
I opened my mouth to tell her and I’m afraid to tell you that I stalled at the final hurdle.
I just couldn’t tell her.
I really didn’t know why.
Or maybe I did.
Maybe because it was no longer innocent.
Maybe it never was.
sixteen
The following day brought it home to me good and proper, not that I had failed to notice already, how my life had been altered forever by my having given birth to Kate.
Especially one of the most important areas of my life.
I speak, of course, of the shopping area of my life.
My old shopping life, like the morning dew in the midday sun, gone forever.
No more running into a clothes shop, picking thirty or so garments up off the racks and then spending a leisurely six hours or more in the changing room admiring myself.
No sir!
You’d be amazed the difference having a child strapped to your front makes. Ease of movement greatly hampered. Not to mention the terrible fear I had that someone was going to bump into Kate and hurt her.
Or worse still, wake her.
It hadn’t been too bad that day in the supermarket where civilized serene mothers glided through the roomy aisles. I trusted them not to jostle and bump Kate.
But this was Saturday afternoon, in clothes shops, for God’s sake!
These girl shoppers were surely mercenaries who had been given the afternoon off from causing bloodshed and mayhem somewhere like the former Yugoslavia.
Vicious, I’m telling you.
Crazed. I couldn’t relax and just look for something to wear.
I stood at the door of one shop, a little bit dazed, swerving and ducking the passing shoppers as I wondered if I was a jeans and sweatshirt girl, or if I was an ankle-length skirt and cropped sweater kind of woman.
I mean, what was I now?
It was so long since I’d bought regular clothes.
Ones that weren’t jeans, I mean.
Or ones that didn’t have expanding adjustable Velcro waists. Or acres and acres of fabric. In fact, it was only a week since I’d started wearing normal underwear again.
Let me explain.
Maybe you don’t know it, but you don’t return to normal living—and, more important, normal clothes—the moment you give birth.
It’s a long time before certain bodily processes stop. I don’t want to sound unnecessarily gory here but can I just say that I could have given Lady Macbeth a run for her money.
Don’t talk to me about blood being everywhere, missus!
And because of that I’d had to wear these funny mesh paper-type underpants.
They were horrible and they were huge.
Armpit huggers.
But I’m happy to announce that the previous week normal underwear had been restored. That’s right, I repeat, normal underwear had been restored.
What about the rest of my clothes?
I was no longer a pregnant woman.
I was just a woman.
So what was I going to wear?
I had so little to define me now.
I wouldn’t be going back to work for ages, so I didn’t have to buy clothes for that.
So I didn’t even have that to give me form.
I was just shopping for me.
Whoever she was.
I picked up a couple of little dresses from a rack and pushed through the hordes of people to get to the changing room, practically bent double over Kate to protect her.
A further shock awaited me at the changing room.
Where on earth was I going to put Kate?
She wasn’t exactly like a gym bag that you just fling on the floor.
A quick U-turn and back the way I came, easing my way through the throng, with my head lowered and thrust forward so that I looked a bit like a bull. I bought a lot of things anyway, even though I hadn’t tried them on. I had to buy something.
After all, I had a reputation to uphold.
There was a time when my name was legendary among Women Who Shop. A time when there was no such thing as choosing between the black pair and the green pair. No such thing as standing, agonizing, my index finger pressed to my face, my brow furrowed in girlish consternation.
No siree, I bought both of them.
And quite apart from upholding my reputation, I hadn’t a stitch to wear.
And I had a man to impress.
I paid for everything with the credit card.
Or, I suppose I should say that James did.
I was quite amazed that alarm bells didn’t go off when the assistant passed the bags over the counter to me and vanloads of policemen and German Shepherd dogs didn’t rush into the shop and drag me off.
Because I was sure that I had spent miles over the limit.
After my halfhearted, yet nonetheless prolific purchasing, I went off to meet Adam, who was, after all, my real reason for coming into town.
If I’m perfectly honest, the shopping was just a ruse.
A cunning ploy.
I fought my way up the street, arms protectively around Kate.
Wave after wave of shoppers came toward me.
Touch my child and I’ll kill you, I thought fiercely, looking angrily at passersby.
Who, in their innocence, looked very startled and afraid.
Apart from the anxiety about Kate’s getting hurt, I became aware of another funny feeling in my stomach. Indigestion?
With a curious little shock I realized that the funny feeling was butterflies.
Butterflies that were dancing jigs in my intestines. They had obviously pushed back the tables and chairs in my stomach and were going for it in a big way. Linking arms and swinging each other around and high-kicking and whooping and changing partners and generally having a wild old time for themselves.
Oh dear, I thought, realization dawning, so it’s official.
I have a crush on Adam.
Or should I say I HAVE A CRUSH ON ADAM!!!!!
Should celestial trumpets have blown? Should I have suddenly seen the world with pink fuzzy edging? Should I have walked, or indeed run, the rest of the way to meet him in slow motion? And be swung slowly into his arms, twirling around and around, both of us smiling like joyful idiots?
But no, being me, I had to go straight into worry mode. I reluctantly dragged my feet the rest of the way to meet him, my head working at high speed.
Why did I have to like him?
What kind of person was I?
I was in love with James and it was only six we
eks—well, nearly seven, actually—since we split up, so shouldn’t I still have been faithful to him?
I felt so disloyal.
Although why the hell should I?
James was having his fun, so why shouldn’t I?
But it wasn’t that simple.
I was never any good at having sex with people without getting emotionally involved.
Although then again, who said anything about having sex?
Oh God!
I was so distraught.
I couldn’t understand all the different ways I was feeling.
I was so confused. I did have a crush on Adam. But I felt so guilty about it because that must make me a very shallow person when I was supposed to be in love with James. But was I in love with James? I was afraid to think about that one.
It was too huge to contemplate.
And then I felt angry with James. Why couldn’t I flirt with Adam and have a bit of fun?
But then I felt guilty again because Adam was a person, a nice person, and he deserved better than to be treated by me as some sort of ego balm.
A bit like getting my hair done.
Or getting my legs waxed.
And then I felt angry again, because I didn’t think of Adam that way. I got a real thrill from talking to him and being with him. Although I’d only known him a few days.
Which brought me neatly back to the question of how could I like someone I’d only known a few days when I was still in love with James.
Oh, fuck it, I thought frantically.
I squared my shoulders and got ready for Adam.
I saw him standing outside the coffee shop where I was to meet him.
My stomach gave a little lurch.
He looked so good.
“Hello.” He grinned. “You’re only fifteen minutes late. You’re obviously getting the hang of this.”
“Shut up.” I smiled. “Sorry.”
It was wonderful to be with him.
“Hello, angel,” he said, looking at Kate in her little pouch.
Although I preferred to think that he was just using this as an excuse to look at my tits.
Kate said nothing.
And in we went for coffee, fighting our way through the hordes of agitated and excited people.
It was Saturday afternoon and madness was abroad. It was as though people were afflicted with some kind of lunacy. Shopping syndrome, or something. I’m sure there’s a fancy medical name for it.
