by Jackie Clune
.10.
Rob? Stu. Listen, mate, no can do tonight,” shouted Stu into his mobile, one hand on the handlebars, the other fiddling with his hands-free kit.
“What a result, mate! Guess where I’m going?”
“Claudia Schiffer’s penthouse suite,” said Rob, clearly pissed off with the disruption to their dull drinking routine.
“Close, my friend, very close.”
“What?”
“I have just picked up—no, correction, been picked up, outrageously picked up—by a gorgeous woman in a pub, and I’m on the way to meet her at her place. Mate, she drives a BMW!”
“Jesus.”
“I know!”
“So I’m guessing you won’t be joining us for a game of Winner Stays On at the pool club tonight?” said Rob, aware that it was a ridiculous question but hopeful anyhow. It was always a depressing night for the remainder of the gang when one of them was out getting laid.
“Tough call, mate, tough call,” laughed Stu. He’d tried that strategy himself many a time when it was he who had been dumped by a gang member in favor of some totty. He wasn’t about to cave in under a bit of laddish pressure, and anyway, he knew that secretly they’d all be willing him on, glad that at least one of them was getting his end away. No doubt they’d want to know the details when he saw them tomorrow night. Presuming, that was, she didn’t keep him captive for weeks on end, addicted to his prowess. It had happened before. Well, once. Stu tried to suppress the little voice at the back of his head, which was whispering nonsense about this girl possibly being “the one,” about how this might be the first night of the rest of his life. What would Rob think if he knew the girlish hopes that beat beneath his mate’s muscular chest?
“But yeah—you guessed right. Listen, I’ll see you tomorrow, mate—where you going tomorrow night?”
The earpiece jiggled loose in Stu’s ear. He tried to nudge it back in with his shoulder.
“Fantastic night tomorrow, Stu—” started Rob, but now the earpiece fell clean out of his ear.
“Hang on, mate,” Stu shouted as he lurched for the cord; it was dangling down from the phone in his bag strap and threatening to get tangled up in his back wheel.
If he’d not been temporarily distracted, if the earpiece had fit better, if he’d been prepared to let it drop and be crushed on the road and pay out for a new one, if he’d not been on the phone in the first place, if he’d just looked up a split-second before the ice cream van pulled out into his lane, perhaps things would have been different. But life makes no allowances for “if onlys,” so things being as they were, that evening Stu found himself not in the arms of a beautiful stranger but thrown rudely onto the crossbar of his aluminum bike. It had happened, as all accidents do, in the blink of an eye. The pain didn’t come straight away. First there was indignation, then fear, then anger. But just as Stu opened his mouth to hurl abuse at the stupid van driver, a pain so intense, so compelling, so all-consuming, shot through his shorts and straight up into his testicles.
“Bollocks!” rasped Stu, and for once it was wholly appropriate.
. 11 .
Jules? Amy here.” “Hi, hon, what’s new and different from the singleton frontline?”
“Very funny. I’ve been dumped. Again.”
“What do you mean ‘dumped’? I didn’t know you were seeing anyone!”
“I wasn’t. I was trying to, but he dumped me before it even began.”
“Ah—wounded pride. Ouch. What happened? Tell mama all about it.”
“It was a sure thing! I chatted up this courier in the pub and arranged to meet him back at my place and he just—never showed up! Three hours I waited! I ended up drinking a whole bottle of champagne on my own and shouting at Question Time!”
“That’s bad, Amy, that’s bad.”
“Tell me about it! I was wearing my Agent Provocateur panties!”
“Ouch again. Doesn’t sound like you, Amy. I’ve never known you to sit at home waiting for a man that wasn’t going to show. Is the old radar failing? Are you losing your pulling power?” There was just a hint of pleasure, the tiniest touch of schadenfreude in Jules’s tone. It was always Amy who got her man on their nights out together when Jules’s relationship was on the rocks.
“I’m telling you he was gagging for it, and then nothing! That’s twice in two months I’ve been rejected. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do I look old?”
“Oh, Christ, that’s not fair.”
“Come on, you’ve had all that surgery, you’re the expert. Do I look old?”
“Look, it’s not your laughter lines that’s putting them off, but it might just be the stench of desperation! Honestly, what’s got into you? Why the sudden concern? So a couple of guys have blown you off—big deal! Welcome to my world! Not everyone is going to fall under your spell. Plenty more out there that will. Just get back out there and find them!”
“I know, you’re right. But it’s not normal. One rejection, OK, take that on the chin, character-building and all that, but two? Two’s a pattern. A pattern I can’t afford.”
“Hello? Is that Amy? Sorry, for a minute there I thought I’d got a crossed line with Sad Bitches Anonymous. Why can’t you afford two rejections? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you! I thought you weren’t interested in settling down?”
Amy took a deep breath. It was the perfect opportunity to let her friend in on her guilty secret. So far only Brendan knew, and for once he’d kept his word and not spread it about, probably because he was so weirded out he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud. But she hadn’t told anyone else, and it felt odd to be undergoing such a life-changing process without her female friends as sounding boards. She wasn’t entirely sure why she hadn’t told them. It was partly because they were all pregnant themselves and she didn’t want them to pity her or keep asking her if she’d “had any joy” yet. It was also because she couldn’t bear the idea of them laughing at her abrupt change of heart. She was sure they’d assume she was feeling left out of their club, and the idea appalled her so much that she was determined to keep her plans from them until the last possible moment, then perhaps present her pregnancy as a happy accident, a sort of “oops, oh well, this might be interesting” kind of thing. If she were honest, there was also an element of fear that they would disapprove of her methods. There was Ang, in her stable, traditional marriage with her “old woman who lived in a shoe” brood of kids, Greg and Soph with their conventional IVF response to “unexplained infertility,” and Jules with her on/off long-term boyfriend of many years—all in their own ways coming at parenthood by acceptable routes. If she were to announce her wayward, scattershot, au naturel plans, they would probably be horrified and try to talk her out of them. In the back of her mind, Amy knew this was also part projection. She had started to feel as though the two rejections were nature’s way of telling her to stop being such a trollop and find the right man first. She wasn’t normally given to such paranoid assumptions, but these were extraordinary times. She needed her friends now, if only to stop her from freaking out. Nothing for it but to bite the bullet and tell Jules.
“Well, I’m trying to get pregnant,” she blurted.
There was a pause—Amy noted how pregnant it was—before the inevitable mirth. Jules roared down the phone.
“All right all right! It’s not that funny!”
“Sorry—I can’t help it—I’m not laughing at you—did you say ‘pregnant’?”
“Yes.”
More laughter. Amy waited until it began to subside.
“Finished?”
“Yes. Sorry. What do you mean? You’re seriously trying to get pregnant? How?”
“This is no time for the birds and the bees, Jules.”
“No, I mean who with? Why? When? What for? So many questions! Answers needed right now!”
“Look, I don’t know why, at least I don’t right now, but I just am, and I’ve decided to t
ry a different man each month for a year, and if it doesn’t work then that’s it, it wasn’t meant to be, and we’ll say no more about it. No fuss, no messy drawn-out relationships with sterile, needy men, no hospital intrusion, no petri dishes with frozen embryos, just me, my ovaries, and a one-shot chance per man. Got a problem with that?”
There was silence at the end of the line.
“Oh my God, she’s serious,” said Jules quietly.
“Please don’t go all moral on me, Jules—not you, not now.” Amy was suddenly terrified that she might be disapproved of. It was an unfamiliar and wholly unpleasant feeling.
“No, no I’m not. I actually think . . .”
“What? What? What do you think?”
“I actually think it’s rather—wonderful,” said Jules, before bursting into tears. “Fucking hormones,” she wailed.
Whether it was relief or her own little burst of ovulation madness, Amy found her own eyes prickling with tears. What was happening to them?
“We’ll have none of this! Come on, pull yourself together, fatty, ’cause I haven’t done it yet, and who knows, I might not be able to! For all I know I could be shooting blanks!” said Amy, dabbing at her eyes with the cuff of her dressing gown.
“Not you,” said Jules firmly. “You’re from good Irish peasant stock. You’ll just bang one out in the potato fields one day. No problem.”
For once not rising to the casual joky racism of her friend’s comment, Amy’s face broke into a huge grin.
. 12 .
I don’t understand this at all,” said Soph, sighing as she wriggled free of her Birkenstocks.
“Not six months ago you were virtually King Herod and now you’re prepared to risk your sexual health to conceive a baby via a complete stranger.”
Ah, the AIDS lecture—I wondered when that was coming, thought Amy. Soph had been one of those scare-mongers who’d gone around as if every vanilla, monogamous, non-drug-using, healthy person in the Western world was in mortal danger from HIV. She’d done all the ribbon-wearing, fund-raising, and benefit organizing, and every Sunday she’d volunteered for The Food Chain, a sort of Meals on Wheels service for people living with the disease—though quite what these innocent people had done to deserve Sophie’s cooking was beyond Amy. Soph was big on AIDS and HIV awareness, to the point where one time, after a powwow with some lesbian friends who scared the living daylights out of her with tales of female-to-female transmission, she’d insisted on Greg using a dental dam for oral sex. Despite Sophie’s hysteria—a word Amy had used unwisely one late night after too much Chianti—Amy knew that her friend had a point. It was something that she had thought about, but somehow she felt she was safe. She’d read Brendan’s leaflets about how foolish such a fatalistic approach to the issue was, and about what other horrors there were lurking in every sexual encounter—chlamydia, herpes, crabs, and apparently gonorrhea and syphilis were making a comeback. Retro-mania had even hit diseases. But she’d always subscribed to the belief that you pays your money and you makes your choice in this life. No point skirting around the edges of life trying to avoid all danger—where was the fun in that? Grandiosity, perhaps, but she had decided to proceed with her plan. Besides, she’d read somewhere that, post-privatization, as a heterosexual woman living in the UK you had more chance of dying in a train crash than transmitting HIV.
“And don’t give me that line about train crashes again,” groaned Soph, who had heard it all before.
“OK, well let’s call it quits then. No more lectures.”
“Well, it’s your immune system, you play Russian roulette with it.”
“Thanks, Mum. And anyway, it’s not as if it’s been under threat recently. I haven’t managed to get so much as a bottom squeeze so far. I don’t know what’s wrong with men today. I thought all this crisis in masculinity was just middle-class blether, but I’ve been knocked back twice, and frankly I’m worried! Me! Spurned! Can you believe it?”
“There must be a crisis,” said Greg, who’d obviously been listening in the hall.
“Girl talk,” said Soph, shooting him a “piss off ” glance.
“Oh, let me play! It’s just getting interesting. I’m a man, I can tell you where you’re going wrong.”
“Go on then,” said Amy, sure that she wouldn’t learn a thing from Greg’s dated take on the sex war.
“Well, for a start, wow! I mean, you—trying to get pregnant!”
“Thank you, piss off, Greg.”
“No, I mean, I think it’s great. You can go to yoga with Soph and share breast-pump stories and everything!”
“Look, have you got anything of value to say or not?” said Soph, always protective of her friends.
“So you’ve been knocked back twice on this mission, have you? And how long have you been trying to get laid—I mean, pregnant?”
“Two months,” said Amy glumly.
“And so far you’ve not even managed to do the necessary at all? Maybe, just maybe, men can hear the ticking of your clock.”
“Rubbish,” said Amy hotly.
“No, I read this thing in Mother and Baby magazine—men can tell when a woman is ovulating, and if they don’t want children, they run a mile. It’s the smell.”
“Right, so not only am I losing my touch, but now I’ve got smelly hormones as well. Thanks a bunch, Greg.”
“It’s true! You’ve got to find men who are actively in the market for babies.”
“That leaves a very small pool of first-date material, Greg. Most guys are willing to hop into bed with you quick as you like, but it’s not babies they’re after. I’m pretty sure most of them want to spill their seed on barren land, as it were.”
“True. Most men. But not all men,” said Greg, adopting his knowing smile.
“There are some men out there who are so broody, they’d be willing to sleep with anyone if they thought she could conceive their child. I mean anyone—even you!” said Greg, pleased with his tease.
“Yes, but you’re missing the point, Greg. Amy doesn’t want the man involved. That’s why she wants it to be one-night stands. She’s doing this on her own,” said Soph, stroking her still-flat belly and placing Greg’s hand lovingly on it.
Greg’s mouth dropped open.
“Oh. I see. So after all those years of trying to get us where you want us—of basically making us into women with willies—we are now redundant, are we? Just milk us for our sperm, pat us on the head, and send us packing, is it? I see. Well, why don’t you go the whole hog and just go on the Internet? Within thirty minutes of ovulating, you could get a jam jar full of hot spunk delivered to your door quicker than you can say ‘Deep Pan Hawaiian with extra cheese’!” said Greg, only half joking.
“I know what it sounds like, but plenty of women bring up kids on their own these days. What am I going to do, spend the next year looking for Mr. Almost Right, then the next grooming him for parenthood? I haven’t got the time. If I do it that way I’ll be pregnant in my forties, and I’m sorry but I’m not Madonna,” said Amy, who was ready for all of this.
“Hey, it’s cool with me. Whatever. Don’t get so defensive.”
Amy always braced herself when Greg said this. What he actually meant was, “Here comes something to get your back up.” She didn’t have to wait long. He paused for a second then took a deep breath, warming to his theme.
“But don’t you know that dads are the new mums? Look at that nutter who strapped himself to Waterloo Bridge dressed as Spiderman ’cause he couldn’t see his kids—he made it on the news all over the world. Everyone knows dads are where it’s at. Mums are so twentieth century,” said Greg. Amy hated it when he got into one of these confrontational moods. Best to smile and nod and change the subject.
“Anyway, enough about me—how’s the bump coming along? You must be about due for your second scan, Soph,” she said, fixing a smile on her face.
“Yes, we are,” said Greg. “In four weeks, actually. And don’t change the subject. I can
see you don’t believe me, but just look around you the next time you go to the park or Pizza Express or the swimming pool—it’s dads who are out and about with their kids. Mums are too busy having it all. Probably sitting at home writing columns for broadsheet newspapers on how hard it is being a working mum while the poor old dads are schlepping round city farms with nothing but a pocketful of organic rice cakes and futile dreams of copping off with the nanny for company. I don’t see how you can contemplate going it alone. It’s just not the done thing anymore.”
