Love Is a Thief

by Claire Garber

  ‘Maybe we should ski down the mountain now, Julien?’ Good girl. ‘I think I should do some work before tomorrow.’ Chad would be proud.

  ‘Kate, you can work another time—you can work all the time. This is for now, this moment, this view, us ‘ere alone. Be here, with me. Just be. It’s important to live a bit in the moment, is it not?’ Damn him, yes, it was. And it was one of my newest mantras. ‘Kate, we are safe to ski down a bit later. I know the mountain,’ he reassured me, leaning in for a kiss. ‘I promise you, Kate, I promise, I really know the mountain at night.’ I really knew the mountain at night too and it involved kissing, and over-the-thermal touching and very occasionally a bit of frost bite on the bum.

  10It’s not; it’s not overrated. It’s bloody lovely. Especially when cold.

  mirror mirror on the wall

  the following day | french alps

  French boys do breakfast. I woke to fresh espresso, to croissants, to a little flower left on my pillow and a note telling me I was wonderful and to meet him on the mountain.

  French boys do the morning after. As soon as Julien saw me on the piste he skied straight over. He beamed at me as if I were a marvellous creation he’d been toiling over all night, which was sort of true.

  French boys do compliments. I spent the entire morning being told I was the best thing ever and that everything I did was brilliant.

  French boys do epiphanies. Or at least they can stimulate epiphanies, and when I say that I am not trying to be crude.

  I had spent all morning skiing with Julien and Sue, watching him teach her, watching her grow in confidence and self-belief. Sue literally whooping with joy every time she made a turn.

  ‘I can do it!’ she kept yelling to me. ‘I can bloody well do it! Woohoo!’ she’d shout before losing control, skiing off towards a tree and bursting out laughing as she fell to the floor.

  After her lesson Julien asked if I wanted to help him teach a beginner ski group. As I held the hands of the different students, helping them make their first turns, picking them up when they fell off the button lift, reassuring them that everyone has to be crap before they can be great, I finally started to feel The Thing.

  The Thing is what Mary feels when she’s fixing cars; The Thing is what Annie-pants feels when she sees clothes; The Thing is what Leah feels when she does her therapies or Beatrice feels when she plays the piano. In the ski lessons I felt content in a way that wasn’t connected to anyone else, couldn’t be taken away by anyone else, wasn’t dependent on anyone else. The mountains, the ski lessons, the ski-instructor boyfriends. I was starting to develop a theory and it involved a mirror mirror on the wall.

  Because what if we are attracted to people whose qualities or lifestyle we actually desire for ourselves; qualities or skills that perhaps we have not embraced in ourselves? So we choose to date or marry someone who does have these qualities, skills and achievements, as if proximity will be enough. Sue had serially dated ridiculously capable physically accomplished men; Mary married and then watched Len work on cars; I dated a bilingual ski instructor but I never went off and became fluent in French myself or qualified to teach skiing. I happily lived with Gabriel, enjoying his life choices rather than making them my own. A bit like being a Gatsby-esque nosey neighbour living adjacent to my dream house and dream life, or an overbearing parent living vicariously through the successes of her kids, or a sycophantic fan who sleeps every night with a discarded cigarette butt that may or may not have been smoked by her star. Julien was a Sign Post, just as Gabriel had been before him. They were the mirror showing me the reflection of what I think I had wanted for myself all along.

  important disclaimer: Just because you realise something is a mirror doesn’t mean you have to give it up straight away. Mirrors and sign posts can be fun. I for example may have re-looked at the mirror (Julien) one or two times (more) before flying back to London. Well, it was a watershed moment, wasn’t it? The first kiss after Gabriel, the first intimate naked moment after Gabriel, the first other things that are not appropriate for the page.

  On my last night staying in France, after looking in the mirror a few more times, self-indulgent I know, then taking a few photos of the mirror while he slept (for Grandma, obviously) I fell into the deepest sleep I think I’d had since leaving Gabriel. In the arms of Julien, a man who, if I am honest, wasn’t the greatest conversationalist on planet earth, I felt as if I had finally turned a corner. Or at least I did, for about 4½ hours …

  voices in the night

  The call came in the middle of the night. My mobile ringing off the hook. Julien stirred next to me, my hotel room in total darkness. I fumbled for the phone, sending a glass of water to the floor.

  ‘Hello?’ My voice was barely there.

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  His voice a whisper.

  ‘You sound just the same, Kate. It’s so good to hear your voice, so good.’

  My heart was thumping in my chest.

  ‘I miss your voice, Kate. I miss you.’ A breath. ‘Are you there, Kate? It’s me, it’s Gabriel.’

  The voice of the man I loved. He was crying. French words more like weeping French breath.

  ‘I don’t know what happen, Kate. I don’t know what happen.’ A breath. ‘Why aren’t you here? Why did you leave me? I miss you.’ A whisper. ‘I miss you.’

  Silence. I’m holding my breath. Eyes wide open. The darkness of the room.

  ‘She’s pregnant, Kate.’

  I felt the words puncture.

  ‘She’s pregnant.’ A breath. ‘She wants to keep it.’

  More silence.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Kate. I miss you. I miss you, Kate. I don’t know why you are not here.’ Silence. ‘She is here. I have to go.’

  The phone line goes dead. As does a piece of my heart. And I tumble helplessly back to the place I’d existed before the kiss of Julien.

  Back to the reality of my life without Gabriel.

  some things are better on ice

  ‘My relationship just ended. I can’t imagine ever meeting anyone else, or even wanting to. But I have always wanted to have kids. This is already such a painful time. My ex-boyfriend was my best friend in the whole world. I have lost him and possibly I have lost the chance of having a family. It is a second heartbreak on a gigantic scale.’ (Milene, 33)

  ‘I didn’t plan it this way. My relationship ended after 11 years when we were both 35. He has since gone on to meet someone else and have kids but my time had passed. I am now unable to have children. Nature doesn’t wait until we find that we are ready.’ (Anon, 48)

  ‘Having children was always something I just assumed I’d do. I’ve enjoyed every part of my life to date; the travelling, my work, my friends. But I can’t say I ever found The One. So I feel like I’ve been left with a number of really unappealing options, like deciding to get pregnant now, alone, or letting myself get pregnant in the wrong relationship, of which there have been many, or never getting pregnant at all.’ (Aggie, 37)

  harley street | london

  Dong.

  As with so many things in life, the moment you think you can’t have something it’s all you can bloody well think about.

  Dong.

  The morning after the midnight call from Gabriel I flew straight back to London on a mission. I had one thing and one thing only on my mind.

  Dong.

  I knew I couldn’t let the end of my last relationship, or rather the timing of that end, remove any chance I had of having children. I might not be ready now, maybe not for years, but love (or the misplaced love I felt for another) wasn’t going to steal away something I might want for my future.

  Dong.

  So as my biological clock made a colossal DONG I decided to create space in the future for the possibility of starting a family. Actually I wasn’t going to create space in the future, I was going to create space in a deep freeze so that the family I hoped to have one day could live in froz
en safety until the time was right for release. It seemed to draw parallels with the plight of Han Solo in Return of the Jedi when he was put indefinitely on ice by the giant glow worm that was Jabba the Hutt. I hoped for the sake of my future children that their defrost didn’t coincide with an inter-galactic war or result in estranged siblings with an unnatural level of attraction for one another.

  the office of dr patel | harley street

  I’d made an appointment with a world-renowned fertility and embryology specialist called Dr Patel. On meeting him I realised Dr Patel had exchanged his sense of humour and dress sense for intelligence. Brilliantly bright, to the point of communicating like an android, he dressed in a variety of different shades of brown, as if colour or pattern may somehow distract his patients from his mind.

  ‘The process is long, Miss Winters,’ he said after welcoming me into his office. ‘The process is expensive.’ He signalled for me to sit in a brown plastic chair. ‘There is preparation. There is harvesting. There is storage. There is thawing.’ He listed them on his fingers. I did the same. ‘And there are no guarantees of success.’ I looked around the room at all his certificates. It looked to me as if he’d been very successful indeed. ‘First we would need to take some blood to assess your current fertility levels. The higher the result, the more eggs you have left.’ I winced at the thought that my egg supply was running dry and there was no supermarket on earth that could supply me with more. I was like a drought-affected river in Africa, the animals wanting to drink from me and there being nothing bloody left. I clutched the edge of Mr Patel’s desk for support. I felt the imprint of a thousand different women’s hands placed there before me. Dr Patel poured me a glass of water and told me to relax. Dr Patel had lots of water. He was like a fountain of hope but in brown.

  ‘Subject to you being a suitable candidate,’ he continued, ‘there would then be various different stages culminating in collection of your eggs, which is called harvesting.’

  ‘Mr Patel,’ I whispered, ‘I’ve never had any kind of surgery in my life. And I’ve certainly never been harvested, to my knowledge.’

  ‘Oh, you do not need a surgery for the harvesting. You will be lightly sedated while a fine needle is inserted into your vagina and up into your ovaries.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ I felt as if I was slipping closer to the floor. A needle up my vagina! I’d need more than sedation. They’d need to chain me down and lobotomise me, if that’s even a word.

  ‘The successfully harvested eggs would then be stored for up to ten years in liquid nitrogen.’

  ‘Like Han Solo in Star Wars?’

  ‘Is she a patient at this clinic?’ he asked, typing her name into his computer until he saw me gently shaking my head. ‘The eggs would then be thawed when you decide you want a baby. We inject them with sperm, insert them into your uterus and then, if successful, you’d be pregnant.’

  ‘Wow. I’d be pregnant.’

  ‘If successful.’

  ‘Well, how successful is it? How many women have had babies this way?’

  ‘200. Worldwide.’

  ‘200? Worldwide? Only 200 babies worldwide! It doesn’t seem like an awful lot, Mr Patel.’

  ‘It’s Dr Patel, Miss Winters, Dr Patel, and 200 is more than zero, is it not?’

  ‘And presumably the younger I am when I freeze my eggs—’

  ‘Time is not your friend, Miss Winters. Time is not your friend.’ Bastard.

  ‘Well, is there another way?’

  ‘No.’ Great. ‘But a more successful process is freezing an embryo. Embryos can better withstand the thawing process and there have been huge successes with babies going full term.’

  ‘You mean extract my eggs and fertilize them with someone’s sperm. Make an actual embryo and freeze that? And who would I make an embryo with? Because I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, Mr Patel, but if I already had someone to make a baby with I don’t think we’d be having this chat.’

  ‘Is there someone platonic in your life that you would be happy to create a child with? Healthy family tree, good level of intelligence, good skin, teeth and so on; someone unlikely to marry and have children of their own. If not we can recommend a donor but the laws are changing regarding anonymity and children are seeking out their donor parents. It can be distressing for them later on. Have a think, Miss Winters. You don’t have to be romantically involved with this person. Just someone who you have a good stable relationship with, perhaps someone who doesn’t want a child per se but would support you wanting one.’ He looked at the brown wooden clock on the brown wooden wall in the brown-coloured room. His office was in the autumn of its life, like my ovaries. ‘I think we have gone as far as we can today. So please, read all the literature, take your time and if you have any questions call the clinic.’ He handed me a pink leaflet with the words ‘IVF is for us!’ blazoned across the front and a really happy couple high-fiving. ‘Let me show you to the door, Miss Winters,’ he said, standing up from his brown chair and walking out through brown corridors to the brown front door. He opened it onto a noisy, rainy Harley Street, a stark contrast to my thoughts of eggs, sperm, fertilization and lone parenting.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Patel,’ I said, shaking his hand and stepping out into the rain. I was about to walk off when I remembered something. I turned and stopped him from closing the door.

  ‘Is there something else I can help you with, Miss Winters?’

  ‘It’s a bit awkward, Mr Patel, but would you mind if I just gave you a quick kiss, on the lips? I can’t leave until I do. It’s for my grandma.’

  ‘Very well, Miss Winters, but please remember, it’s Dr Patel, not Mr.’

  I leant in and gave him the briefest, quickest, barely lip-touching kiss on the lips.

  ‘Are we done now, Miss Winters?’

  ‘Yes, I believe we are. Thank you.’

  Mr Patel closed the door and I stood on the steps rummaging in my handbag for my umbrella. On opening it I remembered why the last time I’d used it I’d made a diary note to buy a new one. Only two of the prongs still extended out fully with less than 50% of the umbrella’s rain-resistant material still attached. It left one strip of possible rain protection that would have been insufficient for a single piece of pre-cooked spaghetti. Resigned to the fact that I would be soaking by the time I got home, I turned to walk to the tube only to find Peter Parker standing on the other side of the road. Force of habit led me to wave enthusiastically until I noticed he was glaring at me and looked for a moment as if he was going to walk off. Instead he sighed heavily, checked for traffic, then strode across the street towards me, towering above me with an enormous and structurally sound umbrella. He exchanged his umbrella for my umbrella equivalent of a shanty town. A large drop of rain immediately plonked on his nose. He didn’t flinch.

  ‘So,’ he said in what was his most flat and irritated voice yet. ‘Your grandma tells me that not only do you battle the evil and conspiratorial forces of love, but now you kiss everyone who stands in your way. I assume I just witnessed another example of your kissing crusade, or have I just interrupted you on a date?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t a date, Peter, it was a … You know what, it doesn’t matter what it was. And Grandma wanted me to kiss people because she thought it might help me move on from Gabriel, something to do with frogs and beating the odds and making him one of a number. And it makes her and the girls at Pepperpots happy so it’s the least I can do really, bring a little joy.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I’ve seen photos of the joy you brought in France.’

  How was it possible he already knew about Julien the heterosexual love God?

  ‘What is your problem, Peter? I didn’t particularly want to kiss most of these people.’

  ‘Most of them?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘And yet you do it anyway. You do as you please without concern for the consequences.’

  ‘I am constantly concerned about the consequences of my life choices actually, and the kissing seemed to be in the sp
irit of things, me doing things I wouldn’t normally do, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, seeing as I’m asking everyone else to do the same.’

  ‘Maybe things worked better when they were left alone. Did you ever think of that? Maybe things were just fine and functional and made sense before this stupid idea and all the ridiculous and irrational decisions people made as a result of it!

  ‘What?’

  ‘I read your article, in True Love, about you and Gabriel.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’d totally forgotten about that.

  ‘About how you compromised yourself and—’

  ‘Peter, that was a massively exaggerated version of the truth—’ by about 1% ‘—and actually I didn’t even write it, Chad’s assistant did, Loosie. I know it’s a bit confusing how we all seem to write under each other’s names but Chad always seems to come up with some compelling reason why it makes sense. In fact the only person who writes under her own name is Jenny Sullivan, although she seems to put her name on an awful lot of my work these days, like the Delaware interview, for starters, and—’

  ‘Kate, I can’t believe you had all these people in your life, all working hard to make sure you remained happy and safe, and you just threw it all away with Gabriel, losing yourself in some relationship. And you go from one extreme to the other. First you throw everything away, now you’re reclaiming everything; flipping between two extremes isn’t progressive, Kate; kissing bloody ski instructors isn’t progressive.’

  ‘So what if I kissed Julien?’

  ‘I don’t like it, Kate!’ he shouted, before looking a little startled. Then he turned on his heel and marched off down the street, chucking my shanty umbrella in the first bin he passed.

  ‘What is your problem, Peter?’ I screamed down the street after him. I’ll be honest with you, it was a bit like a scene from a trashy soap opera, and strangely liberating, until I noticed Mr Patel staring angrily out of his office window. He was jabbering into his phone, probably calling the cops, reporting me for disturbing the peace.