I took the fifteen-minute walk to the pharmacy and bought two more test kits, each a different brand. After using the Clearblue test stick, I looked away for a couple minutes and prayed that this time I’d get the real results: Please, God, let it be a minus blue line. Let it be a minus blue line when I look.
I looked. It was a plus blue sign. I screamed. “No, God, no. Please, no!”
I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I was so angry at myself for being so irresponsible, and angry at my doctor for telling me I couldn’t get pregnant. So I could, after all. And I was. I was having a baby.
Dizzy was going to fucking kill me.
I was shaking like a lamb on her way to slaughter when I called him. I left a trembling voice message. Fifteen minutes later, when I was out wandering the streets—looking for new pregnancy test brands, as if that would fix everything—he called back.
“I’m pregnant,” I told him, terrified. “Are you mad at me?”
“Fuck! You told me you can’t get pregnant.”
“I know. My doctor told me I have very low fertility. Listen, I’ll take care of it. I’m so scared, Diz.”
“I’m freaked out,” Dizzy said. “We can’t have a baby. Fuck!” He went on and on, but I couldn’t hear him because it felt like my head was underwater.
I was crying, standing in a back alley with people unloading meat and garbage all around me.
I knew what I wanted to tell him: I’m sorry. I’m sorry I fucked up. It’s my fault. I love you, Diz, and want to have this baby, but I know I can’t because you don’t want me to. You would never look after me and take care of our baby, because you already have four children by three different women. You have all this stress from touring. You don’t need this shit.
After we hung up, I called my doctor and tried to be a rational human being.
“I need to make an appointment with a clinic. I am pregnant and . . . I don’t . . . want to be.” The National Health Service offered the service for free, but because of their waiting list, I was told, I wouldn’t be able to have the termination until late October. By then, I’d be three months pregnant. That was not an option. No way did I want this baby to grow, to continue forming an identity. I called every help line listed in the phone book. Finally I found one that told me they could do it in a few days. It would cost about £500.
That night I dreamed I had a baby boy. He was running in a forest and had blondish hair and intensely wild blue eyes. He was creative and intelligent, and he talked to me and laughed. He looked at me, and I knew I loved him. I loved my boy. His name was going to be Tiger.
When I woke, I e-mailed Dizzy. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted this baby. I told him about my dream, and I couldn’t stop crying as I wrote. I could barely see what I was writing because it was like a rainstorm on the screen. Everyone at the Internet café looked at me with such curiosity as the tears streaming down my face fucked up the keyboard.
“It was good to hear your voice, although I couldn’t hear what you were saying very well,” I wrote. “I’m kinda scared. I have to be honest with you and say that all I wish is that you were here with me when I go to the clinic. I have never done this and it upsets me that I have to kill my baby, especially because it’s yours. It’s kind of heartbreaking, but I know I have to do it. I wish you could hold me and comfort me. I cannot tell anyone apart from a couple of girlfriends. I need to see you very soon. I can come over in mid-September and we can have lots of fun. xxxxxxxxxx.”
Dizzy replied the same day: “I’m sorry you have to go through all of this. I’m pretty freaked out. I’m in the middle of a U.S. tour with my other band trying to make some $. Totally burnt. Let me know how you are doing and we will hook up when u get over this way and when I know my schedule. I wish I was there, too. We do need to talk. I hope u r okay. Fuck.”
I walked all over town, through shops and past people under the clouds. People with McDonald’s and sugared cereals and children. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I just needed Dizzy. I needed him to help me get through this. And he was so far away. I decided to see my mum.
“You have to get rid of it,” she said. “It’ll ruin your life.”
“But I love this baby.”
“You love it, but think about your future. Is this man going to help you? Will he support you? He has four children by three different women. He doesn’t sound like a very responsible person. Please don’t keep this baby.”
“You don’t understand. He’s on tour. He can’t do anything now. He’s a very kind person. He’s so nice to me.” I was conflicted, defensive, anxious.
“Do you know how hard it is to be a single mother? This man is unreliable. He’s not going to be there for you. You’ll have to do everything by yourself, just like I did when I had you.”
“I love my baby. Dizzy will help me!” I screamed and ran out like a teenager.
The day before my appointment at the clinic, I went to my university to walk along the river. I was going crazy. I loved my baby so much. I wanted to keep him. I was hysterical. How could I do this by myself? It wasn’t the right time.
There was no one on campus. I walked around the forest and the hills and I talked to my baby: “I’m sorry I can’t keep you. I love you so much.”
That day, I had an appointment with my tutor to get feedback on my final paper for my master’s degree. Throughout the meeting, I bit my tongue so hard so I wouldn’t weep. I had to keep the lump in my throat from exploding, or my tutor would think I was mad for crying in the middle of discussing my essay.
Later that night, I texted and e-mailed Dizzy. I was desperate for anything—a single shred of hope—to change my mind.
“I am going in tomorrow,” I wrote him. “If you want me to keep the baby, tell me now.”
“We can’t keep the baby,” he replied. “Please don’t wig out on me. I got your text. I feel awful but there’s nothing I can do about this right now. We can meet when you come over here. I’m still waiting to get our tour dates but we don’t officially start the tour until Oct. 21 so I don’t know where I am going to be yet. I flew all night, haven’t slept in two weeks. Call me when you get out of the clinic and please leave me a message if I am asleep and I will call you back.”
I texted Diz again a few hours later: “I’m going in to the clinic tomorrow morning at nine a.m. if you still give a shit. If you want us to have this baby, you have to tell me right now.”
God, please let him want me to keep our baby.
Dizzy replied: “I don’t think either of us should have a baby. I do give a shit. I’m 10,000 miles away at this time. I just returned from a tour in a van this morning. My contact via e-mail, myspace, etc., was very limited. Let me know how you are doing 2moro, or I will call you. What time do you go in?”
I was fucking crushed. “What if he is a talented piano player like you?” I pleaded with him. “God, this is so hard.”
All night, I cried and apologized to my baby for killing it. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I can’t keep you. But it’s for the best. I love you so much.”
Chapter 49
The taxi picked me up at eight a.m. I wore a light pink shirt and wide black trousers. It was sunny. I took my checkbook. We drove to a lovely part of town with lots of trees and posh cream buildings. We walked to a tiny cobbled road and there it was: “The Clinic,” all prim and proper and tucked within the shadows. The door was river blue.
The receptionist took my name and told me to sit in the waiting room. There was a teenage girl with her mother, an older woman, and a hot model type with long legs, long hair, and designer sunglasses there. I filled out the form.
“It’s five hundred and five pounds, please,” said a matronly woman in a sectioned-off area of the waiting room. “Will you be paying cash or card?”
“Can I pay in installments, please? I don’t have the whole amount right now.”
“You’ll be pleased to know that we have a monthly plan, but you ne
ed to give me three backdated checks now.”
I wrote the checks out as if I were in an office and it was the start of my working day.
“Thank you. Please have a seat in the waiting area again and the doctor will see you in a few minutes.” Then she called in the next person.
A nurse took me into a room. I filled out more forms. “Please lie down on the bed and I’ll take a scan,” she said. I lay down and she put this cold jelly stuff on my belly, then rolled a long silver device on it, attached to a monitor.
“Yes, I can see it. It’s there. See?” She pointed at a tiny, white bean shape about an inch long, lodged into the gray mesh of the scan of my womb.
I looked at the monitor, and there it was: my baby. Created by Dizzy and me. Inside me, feeding off me. Needing me. Tears rushed down my face. I was so embarrassed. I felt like such an idiot. The nurse must have thought I was an idiot for crying over something an inch long. I could tell she felt uncomfortable. She was just there to do her job, not to babysit an emotional wreck. She said nothing as she printed an image of the scan.
“Can I have one?” I asked, trying to jostle some sort of emotion from her instead of the money-in-exchange-for-terminating-your-baby transaction she had been programmed to implement. I wanted her to say something warm, comforting, even if it had to be clinical. I wanted her to present me with other options, to hint that I should at least think about this decision. But she didn’t. I knew she wanted to get on with it, move on to the next person waiting, and finish for the day so she could go home and put her feet up and drink a cup of tea. I clutched the picture of my baby.
“His name is Tiger,” I said defiantly. It was a last-ditch attempt to extract emotion from her, tenderness that surely all females must possess.
“Ahh,” the nurse said. “Do you want to think about it a bit more, miss?” She stood in front of me, broad-shouldered, tidy, sanitized.
“I have to call the father,” I said, and walked out.
Outside on the cobbled street, amid the Georgian buildings, law firms, and petite office girls with salon hair, I called Dizzy. My fingers pushed the call button like they were squeezing the life out of a fruit. “Pick up, pick up,” my mouth tripped into the phone. He’s the only one who will understand. He’s my lifeline. I needed him so much.
His usual voicemail message clicked on: “I can’t answer the phone, I’m losing my mind.”
I wailed into my phone like an animal in pain. “Please pick up, Dizzy, please. I’m at the clinic and I just saw the baby. It’s tiny, Diz. You don’t know. It was so beautiful. I don’t know if I can do it. It’s so hard. Please call me. Please. My phone is on.”
I huddled down by the clean white pavement. My body was a burden I couldn’t escape from. It enslaved me to decisions I could not make. I needed Diz. I wished he was here to hold me.
I walked across the street to a café to think. By day it was a café for office types; by night it was a hip-hop joint. I called Dizzy six or seven times but he didn’t pick up. He was with some girl; I just knew it. He knew that if he picked up the phone and I heard his voice, I’d get all lovey and emotional and change my mind and keep the baby. I wanted him to like me, but I knew if I kept this baby, he wouldn’t. He’d be mad. He’d shout at me. How would I live then? How could I be a single mother and have no one but my mum? How could I ever laugh with him and be in his arms if I kept his baby?
I walked back to the clinic with the most disgusting fear I’d ever felt. I felt like I was going to the butcher. If he had bothered to pick up his phone, to talk to me, to be there for me, then I would have kept our baby. I wouldn’t have had to kill it. This was his responsibility, too.
After I filled out more forms, a nurse took blood from my middle finger to check my blood type. My ears were deaf to the blare of white noise, white uniforms, and shrunken doctors around me. They took me to a tiny area next to the operating room and told me to change into a blue dressing gown. I complied. This was my fate, after all, and I must proceed in order to be successful, to get on with life and the order of things.
In the few minutes they left me alone to change, I clasped my hands together to pray. I sobbed hysterically into the cup of my palms, so that if they walked in they wouldn’t see how pathetic I was. “My baby, my baby, I love you. I love you so much. Tiger, Tiger, forgive me. Forgive me, please.” I rocked back and forth. My dressing gown, flimsy and blue, was soaked at the sleeves because I kept wiping my nose on it.
“Dear God, please make me strong. Give me iron strength, because this is what I have to do.”
They were waiting for me when I walked into the operating room. It was the length of a small bed and the width of another. There were three people: the doctor, a nurse, and an anesthesiologist. Next to the operating table was some kind of machine thing.
A huge man with a mustache gave me instructions: “Lie here and put your legs up on the stirrups.”
My knees buckled. I’m so pathetic. I thought I was brave.
I lay on the table, obedient and still. When I put my legs up, I noticed I hadn’t shaved. “Will I still be able to have babies?” I suddenly cried and stupid tears streamed down my face.
“Yes, you should be able to,” the doctor said kindly.
The huge man was the anesthesiologist and he slid a needle into a vein in my left hand. “It’ll just make you drowsy,” he said. “It won’t put you to sleep. You’ll be half awake.”
“So I’ll be able to see everything?” I asked.
My left arm froze, and I felt like I was drunk and floating in the sky with balloons. There were flowers underneath me and my skirts were light. The doctor, a short bony man with canals of wrinkles gouged in his pointy face, smiled at me.
“Are you okay?” He had an Italian accent.
I nodded. He put something in me, and twisted and turned it. He kept twisting and turning, like he was a plumber or something. I squeezed my eyes tight. I thought of my grandmother smiling and holding my hand. I thought of our house in Iran, the sunny garden where I played all the time. I was losing Tiger. The doctor was pulling, twisting, pulling at my insides. Then he removed something. It was my fucking baby. I knew it. It was out of my body.
He placed it in a container. The container was metal.
“There. It’s done. You can go.”
Slowly, I stood up. I was so woozy that I stumbled like I was doing a comedy walk. A nurse held my arm and helped me to a room to sit back with other women who’d also just come out. There were scores of them scattered around the airy, sunny room, lying on lounge chairs and drinking tea. We were women in unison, lolling around, dazed and drunken, quietly mulling over the decision we’d all just made that had changed our fate. The nurse handed me hot water and biscuits, and said I could leave when I felt ready. I was in shock, my body hummed like a fridge, buzzing serenely. I did my best to leave.
At my mother’s house, she made me soup. I lay on the plaid sofa and slept. Later that day we took a bus to my flat, where an e-mail from Dizzy awaited.
“I’m worried about you,” he wrote. “Let me know how you’re doing.”
Later, I was sitting with my mother, who was telling me how proud she was of me for making the right decision, when Dizzy called. He sounded terrified, as if he’d been holding his breath all day to see whether I had chickened out and kept the baby.
“I did it,” I told him. “I went through with it.”
I heard him sigh with immense relief. “We couldn’t have had this baby, honey. The world is such a fucked-up place to bring a baby into. It wasn’t the right time for both of us.”
“I wish you’d been there,” I said. “I really needed you.”
“I am sorry I wasn’t there. I’ve been so busy with Guns N’ Roses. We’re going on the road again.”
“Can I come and see you? You said I could stay with you.”
“I don’t know my schedule.”
“Okay. Let me know when I can come then,” I said. “The clinic, it was
really expensive. About five hundred pounds.”
“I have to go,” he replied. “I’m in the middle of rehearsal.”
I just wanted to be numb. To forget. The only thing that would help me was being with another rock band.
Chapter 50
My Abortion was Running Down My Leg. I was Dead. I knew there was Only One Thing that would make Me Feel Better. I had to be with Josh Todd.
My abortion was running down my leg. I was dead. I knew there was only one thing that would make me feel better. I had to be with Josh Todd of Buckcherry. It would smooth the pain like cream marble on dry rot.
I had nothing. I had lost my soul. It had dissolved into the fumes of garbage trucks, and it resided above them now, singing a homeless song. I was walking like a mannequin. I was relieved that my legs worked, because my brain didn’t talk to my body anymore. My heart pumped out its wrenched pain. I needed to find Buckcherry’s tour bus. It was the brilliant warm light that would heal me.
My abortion was thick and clumpy, heavier than a period. So I let it be, to run free. I wanted to liberate it. It was the remnants of my baby with someone I loved. I marched to forget, to numb and to deaden.
I had bathed myself that day. I had washed and scrubbed, and wished that my child would come back. I missed Dizzy so much. But I knew that being with Josh Todd would make it better. He would be the smooth pink pill of happiness.
I was a groupie. This was what I deserved. Pain and tears and heartbreak should not—could not—enter the sphere of groupiedom. We were all meat. I had been slack, and I had paid the price.
So I focused on my destination: the Buckcherry tour bus, parked somewhere on the Nottingham streets, full of fish and chips and yellow lights and skint students on that September night. In my Tesco bag, I had a vibrator, condoms, wipes, and a vitamin shake my mother had made for me, worried that I’d become too pale from the loss of blood.
The Last Living Slut Page 21
