Expectation

by Anna Hope

  The women’s names are called and they rise, their small bags in their hands, saying goodbye to their partners. Nathan stands before Hannah and presses his forehead against hers.

  Then the women are taken away through swinging double doors, to a waiting room where a television is playing – the gaudy blare of morning TV. It scratches at Hannah’s nerves and she does not want to watch it or listen to it, so she pulls out her book and tries to read, wishing she had brought headphones. Her name is halfway down the list that is pinned to the wall.

  They are given hospital gowns to wear – strange garments, open at the back. They sit so their knickers are not on show.

  The morning passes like this. There is weak squash to drink. One by one the women leave and Hannah watches them go – each with their precious cargo, full of hope. She tries to read their faces, their bodies, as though she might see their destiny written there – which one of them will have the longed-for child. As though if they win, then she loses. As though fertility were a zero-sum game.

  She thinks of Cate. Sometimes I feel I was irresponsible, having a child at all.

  The carelessness of her comment. The luxury of a gift that came so easily.

  In truth, her words had made Hannah furious, but she’d said nothing, packing away the anger she has no spare energy to feel.

  The woman beside her is nervous. She keeps getting up to go to the toilet. It is making Hannah nervous too.

  ‘Is it your first time?’ asks Hannah, when she returns.

  The woman nods. ‘You?’

  ‘Third.’

  ‘Really?’ The woman looks unhappy to hear this, and Hannah wishes she had kept quiet.

  ‘I don’t like anaesthetic,’ the woman says. ‘Don’t like being knocked out.’ Her face is ashy in the hospital light.

  By the time Hannah’s turn comes, she too has grown nervous. How many eggs will there be? The more she has, the higher her chances. It looked like eleven on the monitor, when she had the last scan, but sometimes they are just empty sacs.

  ‘Hannah Grey? Follow me.’

  She pads after the nurse into the small cupboard-like anaesthetic room, where she climbs on to the table.

  ‘OK there?’ The anaesthetist shoots her a quick look.

  Her hand is taken, the anaesthetist asks her to count backwards, and Hannah does and …

  ‘Thirteen,’ she says to Nathan, in the recovery room. ‘I got thirteen.’ She is dizzy, jubilant.

  ‘Blimey.’ He reaches over to kiss her. ‘Aren’t you clever?’

  ‘How was yours?’

  ‘Fine.’ He grins. ‘It was funny, though, they had the same magazines in the drawer they had last time.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Do you think they disinfect them? Do you think that’s someone’s job?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  They are laughing and she is light, sitting here, high on hospital tea in the wipe-clean recovery chair. Other women sit opposite her. Some look happy, some less so. And she knows. She knows this is their time.

  It is still early afternoon. They walk home, through the back streets, over the park, where leaves spin and fall in golden light. The flat has the calm, clandestine feeling of a midweek afternoon and they are playing truant, together. They open the windows and let in the day, and then, for the first time in weeks, they lie on their bed and make love.

  She wakes early. She has been dreaming but she is not sure of what.

  Beside her, Nathan sleeps on. She stands softly, pulls a blanket from the bed and goes into the kitchen, where she makes herself camomile tea and then takes out her laptop, wondering if she should distract herself with a movie, but there is nothing she wants to watch, so she clicks through some other pages, the IVF message boards – the thousands of women posting their queries, and the thousands who answer them – the pastel-hued sorority of anxiety and reassurance. She cannot bear these message boards and yet they call her, again and again, with their siren, sister song.

  After a while she casts the computer aside, takes the blanket and goes over to the window, looking out over the park to the city beyond. She thinks of those embryos, tinier than sight. How many of them have fertilized? How many of them pulse now with the smallest possible pulse of life? She wants to be near them. To walk back to the hospital and find the room where they lie and sit beside them. To watch over them in these long, small hours before the dawn. She is their mother, after all.

  They call her the next morning while she is at work. As soon as she sees the unknown number on her phone she jumps up and takes the call in the corridor. ‘Eleven have fertilized,’ the nurse tells her, and she feels her heart leap.

  She tries to call Nathan, but his phone rings and rings and she gets his voicemail. A text comes through. In a meeting. All OK?

  Eleven, she writes, and he sends back one word. Great!

  Now she must wait.

  There is no news the next day. Nathan is working late, and the flat feels large. She opens the door of the little room. This small room faces west, towards the hospital. She slides down to the carpet and sits there in silence. After a while she lifts her phone and calls her parents’ house. Her father answers.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘Hannah. How’re you doing, love?’

  ‘I’m good.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘How’re you?’

  ‘Grand.’

  Have they ever said more than this to each other on the phone?

  ‘Hang on a sec, love. I’ll just get your mum.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  His soft call. She sits in the dusk of her empty room and imagines her mother getting up from whatever she is doing, watching telly most probably, feet up on the low table in front of her. Wearing the slippers Hannah bought for her from the catalogue last Christmas. Here she comes, padding into the hall. Shooing the dog away from the little armchair by the telephone table.

  ‘Hannah, love.’

  The soft vowels.

  ‘Hiya, Mum. Did I disturb you?’

  ‘No, love. Not at all. Just catching up with a bit of Strictly. Hang on a sec, I’ll just get comfy.’ She can hear her mother settle further into the chair. ‘How’re you? Have you had the thingy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how did it go?’

  ‘Well, I think.’

  She doesn’t go into details. Her mother’s concept of IVF is hazy at best.

  ‘Oh, that’s good, love. You know, I saw Dot the other day. Her daughter’s little one is one now.’ The talismanic properties of Dot and her daughter’s daughter – conceived by IVF and born last year – are strong. They were wheeled out last Christmas, all three generations, invited over for an awkward cup of tea.

  ‘One?’ says Hannah into the darkness. ‘That went quickly.’

  ‘Such a poppet.’

  ‘How’s Jim?’ she asks.

  ‘Good. They’ve exchanged on the house. They’re moving in a week or so. Just in time for the birth.’

  ‘Hayley must be getting close now.’

  ‘She is. She’s big all right. You’ll be an aunty soon.’

  ‘That’s good,’ says Hannah.

  ‘How’s work?’

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Well, that’s a blessing. And Nathan?’

  ‘He’s … good.’

  ‘Well, that’s grand, love.’

  She closes her eyes. She wants to be up in Manchester in her parents’ little living room, watching Strictly with her mum with the gas fire turned up too high.

  ‘I’ll pray for you, love,’ her mum says.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Hannah. She never knows what to say in response to this.

  Thanks, Mum, but there’s no such thing as God.

  ‘I’d better go. Leave you to your telly.’

  ‘All right. If you’re sure?’

  ‘Nathan’s got something on the stove,’ she lies.

  ‘Oh good, well,
you give him our love, won’t you?’

  ‘I will. Bye, Mum. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too, Han.’

  The next day, early, there is a call from the hospital.

  ‘The embryologist would like to do the transfer today.’

  She thanks them, and goes into the bathroom, where Nathan is brushing his teeth.

  ‘They want to do it today.’

  He spits, rinses his mouth. ‘Did they say anything else?’

  ‘It was just a receptionist. They must not look good, the embryos.’ The smallest flickering pulse.

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine, Han. It’s just – science.’

  She fiddles with a bit of toilet roll.

  ‘Hey. Hey, Han.’ His hand on hers.

  They are shown into a tiny, dimly lit anteroom. She is told to take off her clothes from the waist down and given a gown to wear.

  The room is dark but for small lowlights set in the wall. There is a nurse. A doctor. Her on the gurney. Her feet in stirrups. The monitor beside her. Her heart. Her heart. Nathan’s hand, steady on her arm. The embryologist appears. ‘Ms Grey? Mr Blake?’

  She nods.

  ‘Well, the thirteen eggs that were taken three days ago have been watched closely. There were seven still developing last night.’

  She nods.

  ‘There are three that look viable. One is excellent. A 3.5. The others are a 2.5 and a 2.’

  ‘And the others?’ asks Nathan.

  ‘Less viable. Our recommendation is to transfer the top two.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nathan. ‘Of course.’

  The ceiling has small pinpricks of light, like stars.

  ‘Han?’

  ‘Shall we proceed?’ says the voice of the doctor.

  ‘Yes.’

  She lies back, gasps at the chill of metal as a speculum is inserted. There is a deep, strange almost-pain as her cervix is stretched wide.

  ‘Now, just watch the screen.’

  Nathan grasps her hand.

  ‘There we are,’ the doctor says. ‘There they go.’

  Two points of light appear in the darkness of her womb.

  She looks at them.

  ‘Here,’ the doctor says kindly, reaching down and tearing off a printout. ‘Would you like this to take with you?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Hannah stares down at the photograph, at those two smeared points of light. She looks. She looks and looks and looks.

  Resistance

  1998

  Cate puts her full stop on her final finals paper (Greek Myth in Spenser’s Epithalamium) and steps out into the mild May sun, where she is duly pelted with flour and rice by a small cluster of waiting friends, with whom she drinks a bottle of champagne in the cobbled street. Then she goes to the pub and drinks pints of lager in the beer garden until the ground is tipping, when she goes to the toilets and is sick.

  The next morning she wakes late and sits and stares at the wall, which is peppered with Post-it notes, quotes by Spenser, Rochester, Congreve, Donne. She takes them down one by one and puts them in the bin. She has to be out of this room on Monday. It is over. She has limped to the finish line, patched up on Prozac, pills she has been taking since the end of her second year, when, quite suddenly, standing in the college quad, her mind began to fracture. Grief, was what the college counsellor said to her. Delayed grief, agreed the doctor, writing out his prescription. And of course, he went on, Oxford can be very stressful in itself.

  She took a year out. Went back to Manchester. Stayed in her father’s house.

  She knows she will not finish first or last, but somewhere in between. From her mullioned window she can see hungover students stumbling to the shop for soft drinks and cigarettes. To her right, just visible, the ghoul masks of the Sheldonian Theatre. The Bodleian beyond. She will never set foot in the library again. She has packing to do. She wonders what it was all for.

  There is nowhere to go home to. Her mother is dead and her father is in Spain. Her sister is in Canada. So she goes to stay with Hannah, who is living in a small flat on the edge of Kentish Town, walking distance up a long hill from where Lissa lives with her mother. Cate sleeps on the sofa in the living room of Hannah’s flat. Hannah has a new boyfriend, a man called Nathan. She met him through Lissa (of course.) He is tall and handsome and gentle, and walks with a slight stoop, as though apologizing for his height. In all other respects, though, he seems like a winner in life. Nathan spends nights there, in the small Camden flat. Sometimes, waking in the darkness, Cate hears them through the walls.

  They talk, just once, she and Hannah, about Hannah’s new job – entry level in a management training firm.

  Why would you want to do that? Cate asks her.

  It’s not for ever, says Hannah. But I need money. I want it. I’m sick of not having it. I’ll do it for a bit and then I’ll do something worthwhile.

  But what about Patti Smith? Cate wants to say. And Emma Bovary? And the Pixies? But she says nothing, only nods.

  So, what are you going to do? asks Hannah of Cate. And Cate has no answer to that at all.

  She doesn’t like London. The transport system alone makes her head hurt. Hannah leaves copies of Loot on the kitchen table, drops hints about people who might have a spare room going, but Cate follows up no leads. She is ill at ease with Hannah and Lissa, a friendship that has grown and eclipsed her own. Ill at ease when they go out to dinner together with Nathan and Declan, Lissa’s boyfriend, a laughably good-looking Irish actor, to a restaurant Lissa knows, an Ethiopian place where food is served without cutlery on sour flatbread, which they all tear into with their fingers and dip in sauces with equal alacrity, and drink coffee which is brought to the table and roasted on the spot. They talk emphatically at these meals, using their hands as they speak, they seem certain about all sorts of things, like which films to see, and which books to read, and who they are and what they are going to be.

  Cate herself is certain of nothing. Life seems at once becalmed and full of danger, as though a wave could come at any moment, rising out of the still waters, a great towering wave, and take her down.

  She receives her finals results. She has scraped a first. She tells Hannah, who looks shocked. It was an accident, says Cate hurriedly. And then hates herself for saying it. Still, she thinks, it was an accident. She never expected that.

  Her tutor calls to congratulate her. So what are you going to do? he says.

  She can only think that she would like to tell her mum. To give her the good news.

  She gets an email from Hesther, a friend from Oxford who is living in Brighton, inviting her down for the day. There is a room going in her house.

  As she steps off the London train, Cate can smell the sea. She walks down to the seafront and stands on the pebbled beach and stares out at the pale horizon. She walks through the city to Hesther’s house. Brighton seems appealingly ramshackle, human-sized. The room is cheap and small with a window that lets in good light. She takes it. She buys herself some furniture from the charity shops on the Lewes Road.

  The other room is occupied by a woman called Lucy. Lucy wears combat trousers and vests and boots with strong soles, as though she is a foot soldier in an unnamed war. She has thick dreadlocks that hang down her back, and her face is small and fine. She is studying for a Master’s in International Development at the University of Sussex. She is half American – grew up between Devon and Massachusetts, and her accent is deliciously confused. Two summers ago Lucy lived up a tree in Newbury, sleeping on a wooden platform a hundred feet above the earth, protesting the destruction of ancient woodland for the building of a bypass road.

  Lucy teaches Cate how to use a drill, how to put up shelves in her room. She has a light cloud of armpit hair and does not use deodorant. When they stand close, Cate catches her musky scent. Walking around the city with Lucy is an education – she has a scavenger’s eye: wood for the wood burner, wine crates for shelves, just-out-of-date food from supermarket skips. Lucy carries herself light
ly, as though she still walks in the forest. As though at any moment she might be predator or prey.

  A rhythm establishes itself. Once a fortnight Cate signs on at the job centre, and once a month money lands in her account. It is not much, but enough to cover the small bedroom, and to buy cheap food – enough to allow her to breathe. She is pleased to find her needs are few. Hesther tells her there is a job going in the cafe in which she works, a cycle ride away, on the other side of town. Cate takes the job. At the end of her first shift she is paid money from the till in cash. The first time is hard – she feels like a cheat. She tells Hesther this, and Hesther tuts. You know how much the British government spends on weapons? Besides, it’s just till you get sorted, till you get on your feet.

  It is easier after that.

  At the weekend they go down to the seafront and drink cider and watch the sunset, watch the starlings stream in to roost on the skeleton of the West Pier, watch them cast themselves in great clouds of murmuration against the evening sky.

  Lucy and Hesther are part of a group of young people who like to gather together at the house and talk – about capitalism, about hierarchies, about horizontal power and the potential for change. They plan actions. Cate has no idea what an action is until, one dawn in late summer, Lucy knocks on the door of her room and tells her to get out of bed. Cate pulls on her sweater and tracksuit bottoms and they drive out along the High Street, where Lucy stops the van and instructs Cate to sit in the driver’s seat. Which she does, nerves jangling, as Lucy covers her face with a bandana and neatly spray-paints the word SLAVERY – the V made by the swoosh of Nike – on the front of a trainer shop. Lucy jumps back in the van and shouts at Cate to drive. Which she does – giddy and fast. She feels like Bonnie, or Clyde.

  She begins to read again, different books: Chomsky and Klein and E. P. Thompson. She starts to join the discussions. At first it is odd to hear her voice in a group – it has been so long since she felt she had anything to say. She begins to think that Oxford, that place of power – that place she hoped would confer power on to her – robbed her of her voice, or rather, that she gave it away. Or perhaps, she thinks, it was only hidden. Perhaps she had only to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to find it again.