by James Meek
‘Just hang on,’ said Dougie. He took a net and stood over the water.
‘How can a fish in a little English stream be this strong?’ said Alex.
‘It’s throwing its weight like punches. It’s fighting for its life. Pull, rest, pull. After the next pull start reeling it in.’ The line slackened, Dougie leaned over to flip the catch on the reel and Alex began turning it.
‘Turn and pull. Fast! That’s it! Now pull it out!’ Alex swept the line up and across and the fish, so much smaller and brighter than he’d imagined, flew out of the water.
58
Maria sent Alex the documents from their conception files without a covering note and with the papers about herself weeded out. Bec read through them; it was as she’d been told. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong and Bec saw the years change in the dates on the documents and understood how long Alex and Maria had been trying. There were places where the dry language of the doctors softened. However … unfortunately … always possible …
Bec said they should be tested again together and Alex said it had only been a few years since he’d sat in the bathroom of Maria’s house, trying to produce a sperm sample into a tiny plastic cup with a sharp, abrasive rim while their elderly Polish cleaner was vacuuming the hall outside. So Bec went to the fertility clinic alone. They measured her hormones, scanned her womb and told her that for a woman of thirty-four she was in fine reproductive shape. She waited for Alex to ask how the tests had gone, but he didn’t; he told her with strained cheer We need to be patient.
One night in February, when she came home from work, Alex was waiting for her in the hall with a pair of African drums. Beating a complex rhythm with his hands, he announced a special dinner on the occasion of the first anniversary of their Tanzanian betrothal. Dougie was out and Alex had cooked ugali and stew with some kind of meat; London bush meat, he swore, a little bit of rat, fox, pigeon. Look in the bin, the bones are there. Afterwards they watched a Daktari DVD and drank the best part of two bottles of wine before they went to bed and made love in a warm, drunken way. In the small hours of the morning Bec woke up thirsty. She’d gone to sleep glad, and now was full of anxiety that they’d been rehearsing to be a lifelong binary, affectionate, amiable.
It seemed to her that Alex’s yearning for children had been the cause of the precious hard-edgedness of their lovemaking, the shadow that had moved between them when Alex was inside her, when she enclosed him, the savage ghost that stripped their tenderness of all that was cloying, when they’d bare and clench their teeth as if possessed by the beast they were fighting to break.
A couple of weeks later, when Alex went to America with a film crew, Bec was strangely joyful, and he noticed this. He asked why she was in such a good mood and she didn’t tell him she was several days late. She wanted to surprise him with a phone call, perhaps the same day, when he got off the plane in Los Angeles. It would still be Saturday in California, and Bec anticipated she would be in bed, after midnight, telling him everything. Pregnant! Why not? When Alex had gone she went to the chemist’s and bought a testing kit. She’d supposed the sales assistant would smile at her or wish her good luck but the young girl scanned the packet and took the money without her expression changing as if Bec were buying a toothbrush.
Bec remembered that the last time she’d bought a test it’d been more in fear of pregnancy than in hope of it. At home she came out of the bathroom, sat on the bed and watched the display flash. Words appeared. NOT PREGNANT, it said. Her heart jumped. She stared at the tester and shook it and wondered if she’d done it wrong.
She looked towards the open doorway. Dougie was there, tapping the door with a single knuckle. She hid the tester in her fist, got up and slammed the door in his face. She shouted at him to leave her alone and mind his own business. She walked trembling around the room. Outside she heard Dougie talking and what sounded like a little girl’s voice. She came out and saw Dougie leading one of his daughters downstairs.
‘I’m sorry,’ she called, and Dougie looked round.
‘Come and have lunch with us,’ he said.
They went to a pizza restaurant on Upper Street. Kirsty, who was seven, was quiet and shy and wary of Bec, who told her she was sorry for shouting at them. She’d been cross about something, she told Kirsty. She wondered if Dougie had seen what she’d been holding. The deceptive candour of his eyes, which looked so frankly into hers but gave no indication of what they saw, gave their table of three an intimacy and a unity, drawing her closer to Dougie and Kirsty and pushing everyone else in the restaurant further out. She felt she was always looking away from him; each time it was as if at the very moment of her looking away a delicate change came across his face that made her curious, so she looked back.
A woman in her sixties at the next table kept turning to look at Kirsty, smiling and trying to catch the eye of Bec, who smiled back and wished Alex was there. When they brought Kirsty’s ham and pineapple pizza the woman said to her that goodness, it was a large pizza, was she really going to eat all of it? And Kirsty said yes, she was, and the woman laughed hard and looked at Bec and Dougie and tried to hook them into joining in, and Bec laughed a little. Kirsty didn’t finish the pizza, but she had chocolate cake afterwards, and the woman leaned over and said to Kirsty that the chocolate cake looked absolutely fantastic! She said to Bec: ‘Their eyes are so much bigger than their stomachs at that age, aren’t they!’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bec. ‘I’m not her mother.’
She didn’t think she’d been rude, but the woman’s face lost its jollity and she turned away and didn’t speak to them again.
Later, alone at home, Bec loaded the washing machine in the scullery at the back of the kitchen. In theory there was a common basket for dirty clothes and it was a general chore to do the washing. It seemed to Bec that she did it more often than the brothers. She’d noticed that Dougie scrupulously kept his underwear out of the basket. She imagined him sneaking downstairs in the small hours to perform his secret laundry of intimate things. His shirts and jeans and t-shirts were in with the rest. Their colours and fabrics and patterns were as familiar to Bec as her own and Alex’s. The sleeves of Dougie’s rose-coloured denim shirt were twisted in a braid with the sleeves of Alex’s sky-blue dress shirt and a white blouse of hers. She lifted the tangle out of the basket and carefully unpicked the garments from each other. She put her blouse and Alex’s shirt in the machine and put Dougie’s on the floor. She went through the basket separating Dougie’s clothes from theirs. The closer she got to the bottom of the basket the angrier she became. I’m not Alex’s brother’s skivvy, she thought. When she had the basket empty and Dougie’s clothes lay in their heap apart at her feet, older and more worn than Alex’s or hers and of strange old fashions, she saw in them only evidence of her own madness. She picked the clothes up and crammed them into the machine with the others and swirled them round with her hands till she was up to her elbows in tangled cotton and polyester and her eyes were hot and wet. She tore her limbs free, went to the kitchen, grabbed a half-full bottle of wine and poured a glass and sat at the table trying to tilt the tears back into her head. According to the kitchen clock Alex’s plane would land in LA in an hour.
Dougie came in. Bec stood up and he hesitated on the threshold, each tensed to take steps back as if each had caught the other doing something they shouldn’t.
‘I was going to get a bit of supper,’ said Dougie.
‘Have some wine.’
‘Not for me. Are you OK?’
‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
Bec smiled and fetched kitchen paper to blow her nose. Dougie approached and she let him put his arms around her and hold her. She pushed gently on his chest and he released her and stood back.
‘I miss Alex,’ she said.
‘Place feels empty with just the two of us.’
‘It was nice to meet your daughter.’
‘Aye she liked you.’
‘I nev
er asked about your fishing trip.’
‘It was fine. We had a rare time. Did he not tell you?’
Dougie stopped to clamber up a small step of courage. ‘I’m thinking of leaving, going back up to Scotland.’
‘Oh.’
‘I shouldn’t have stayed so long. I’ve been imposing.’
‘We like having you.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I like having you around.’
‘It’s getting hard for me, Bec.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ah, you know what.’
‘I don’t know. What’s getting too hard?’
‘You know.’
‘You keep saying that. Maybe you should leave.’
‘Aye, maybe I should.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to stay?’
‘I can’t. Not like this.’
They stared at each other.
‘I don’t know what you’re offering,’ she said.
‘What makes you think I’m offering anything?’ said Dougie.
‘I’d like you to stay for as long as you want and for you not to get crazy ideas about me. And I’d like to be sure, absolutely sure, that the day I tell you to go, you will go, and not come back.’
‘Not come back? Why would I not come back? What am I going to do?’
Bec blushed. She left Dougie and went to her room and called Alex and on the twentieth try he answered and said he’d just landed. Speaking to him took the weight out of the day and she only told him that she’d spent time with Dougie’s daughter. She went to bed calmer and happier. The next morning her body confirmed what the tester had told her, that she was not pregnant.
59
On Monday morning, forty-eight hours after Alex left, Bec had the first meeting of her new job. At lunch she turned down an invitation from an Indonesian-Austrian WHO official and went by herself to a sandwich bar, dazed by the number of things she had to do and by the knowledge that in the year to come she would have to make speeches at banquets and circle the world. On her way she passed a woman walking in the opposite direction who caught her eye, slowed down and turned her head to follow as they drew level. Bec didn’t recognise her. She smiled a quick uncertain smile and went on and into the sandwich bar. She stood in the queue and glanced round when the bell fixed to the door rang. The woman entered and came up to her.
‘Are you Rebecca Shepherd?’ asked the woman.
‘That’s my name,’ said Bec.
‘I recognised you from your picture in the paper. I’m Maria, Alex’s ex.’
She had short black hair, chestnut eyes and dark skin, with little constellations of olive freckles on her cheekbones. She was shorter than Bec, a few years older, and prettier than Bec had imagined. Maria’s black coat was open over her loose white top and black leggings and Bec could see that she was pregnant.
‘Congratulations,’ she said.
Maria laughed, thanked her and looked to the side with a quick I’m-not-worthy hunch of her shoulders.
‘It’s due in March,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I came in after you. You must think I’m a stalker.’
Bec told her not to be silly and instead of waiting in the queue for a sandwich she led Maria to a table by the window, where a waitress served them. Bec had lost her appetite and felt that she must look miserable. A horrible thought came to her.
‘This isn’t some sort of delayed IVF thing, is it?’ she asked. ‘From when you were together?’
‘Oh no!’ Maria held Bec’s arm. Her sympathy and apparently sentimental rather than visceral concern for Alex’s wellbeing unsettled Bec. ‘We made it the natural way, me and my new partner.’ She became grave. ‘So he told you about the IVF? Of course he did, of course he did, why wouldn’t he?’
Bec wanted to give herself time to think, but her mind didn’t come up with the pleasantries, and she stared at Maria with an expression that must have provoked pity in Alex’s former lover, because she grasped Bec’s hands and wrinkled her forehead and made a long, motherly ‘Ooooh’ sound. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you. My office is just around the corner, though, we were bound to meet. Your institute’s near here, isn’t it? I have been a bit of a stalker. I didn’t see your picture in the paper, I saw it on the Internet. I did a search and found the pictures of you. You’re quite a celebrity. I was a bit shocked, to be honest.’ She looked at Bec as if she’d swallowed something bitter. ‘Of course he went for someone younger.’
‘There was nothing going on between us while you were together. And you’ve obviously found someone you like.’
Maria showed by smiling and looking away that Bec was right. She became serious and said: ‘I haven’t told Alex I’m pregnant. Are you going to tell him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘He’ll find out eventually.’ She’s showing that she knows him better than me, thought Bec.
‘He won’t find out so soon. We’re moving to Italy for my partner’s job. I don’t know how things are between you. It’s none of my business. But if he told you about the IVF he must have talked about why we broke up. I’m sure you asked him.’
‘Is there ever one reason?’
‘He never said but I’m sure he always thought it was my machinery that was broken, not his. He has this crazy pride. Ego.’
‘Why shouldn’t he find out?’
‘It’d be too cruel. It’d seem so final.’ Maria drew in breath and put her hand to her mouth. ‘My God I’m sorry, I haven’t been thinking clearly. I was thinking about him, not about you.’
Bec shrugged.
Maria said: ‘The thing I resent him for is never being prepared to countenance artificial insemination. If he’s so liberal, why does he have to insist the child’s genetically his? What does it matter if the father’s some anonymous donor you’re never going to meet who wanks into a pot in a kiosk in Doncaster?’
‘Why Doncaster?’
‘I don’t know. I imagine sperm donors coming from places where there’s not much else to do on your days off. Have you met his mother? I always thought she was hinting at something. That I should take matters into my own hands. I thought about it. I’m sure it happens more often than we know. If there’d been a decent man I liked and he didn’t look completely different from Alex, I would’ve taken the chance, as long as I was sure Alex would never find out.’ An absent expression came over Maria’s face as if she were remembering an old story and finding new nuances in it. ‘I don’t see anything wrong with that. Everybody would get what they wanted.’
‘What about the other man?’ said Bec.
Maria shrugged. ‘Having sex with random women, impregnating them and never having to worry about the child? Isn’t that what men fantasise about?’
‘Not all of them.’
Maria looked at her coolly. She pushed herself back with her hand on the end of the table so that the front two legs of her chair lifted a few inches off the ground.
‘If I was in that situation again,’ she said, ‘if I was sure, I’d do it. I’d do it in a moment.’
60
The time difference made it hard for Bec and Alex to catch each other to talk. She was moving offices, to a government building; a promising young parasitologist, Isobel, would run her research group while she was doing her new job. But these changes didn’t distract her as she would have liked.
On the Friday after Alex left, Karin came to town to consult with her label. She met Bec afterwards, looking as if she’d stepped out of Vogue. She’d dyed her hair crimson and wore a short tweed dress, red tights, brogues and a jaunty feathered hat. The label gave her a car with a driver. When they arrived at the restaurant Karin chose, two photographers came up to them, took their picture and stepped back without saying anything.
‘Is it always like that?’ said Bec.
‘Maybe it’s you they want.’
‘Why should they?’
<
br /> ‘You and Alex are public figures now.’
‘Are we?’
Karin told Bec how the boys of The What – my young men, she called them – were on tour, and how she missed them, and what good work they’d done together in the studio in Petersmere, and how their album would soon be out. ‘We did a cover of I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight. It’s so Seventies, I sound like Suzi Quatro doing Devil Gate Drive,’ she said. ‘My boys started kicking their feet in time.’ She laughed and wrinkled her nose.
‘I’d love to meet them,’ said Bec, touched that Karin thought she’d know who Suzi Quatro was, and she wished she’d been there in summer in her brother’s garden, making daisy chains and dreamily fending off the boys’ paws, listening to them sing. ‘Do you need somebody to stand on stage with a tambourine?’
In the past, Karin’s terror of being contaminated by scientific knowledge had been an obstacle between them. Now that Bec was able to talk about her immediate future of foreign trips, banquets and escorting film stars on tours of malarial Africa there were no barriers. After a couple of glasses of wine Bec told Karin that trying to conceive had changed her sense of time.
‘It used to be that there was work-world and there was not-work-world, and they stretched in and out together,’ she said. ‘If something big was happening in work-world, like malaria, not-work-world would shrink to make space for it, and if something big was happening in not-work-world, like …’
‘Love?’
‘Exactly like love. Then work-world would shrink for that. It was like one breath passing from lung to lung.’ She held up her hands and stretched one open and closed the other into a fist, then opened the fist and closed the other.
‘You look as if you’re showing somebody how to milk a goat,’ said Karin, and some wine went the wrong way up Bec’s nose. Even while she laughed she was annoyed that Karin wasn’t taking her seriously.
‘But you know what I mean.’
‘Of course.’
‘Now there’s a third world. It’s not work, although it would be a lot of work, and it’s not exactly love, although it would be all about love, I suppose. Anyway, it isn’t happening.’
