Dinner for Two

by Mike Gayle

  ‘Yeah,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think it’s good for us. I think we’re obsessing.’

  ‘So we can’t say anything about this thing that we’re not talking about or the whole pact will be rendered null and void and pointless?’

  ‘What? Do you mean, what if you were to ask me something like . . . “Had any interesting baby thoughts today”? Yeah, I think the pact would indeed be rendered null and void and pointless.’

  ‘But you’ve just said it,’ she says. She takes her hands out of the bag. They are covered in the rich black compost.

  ‘I’ve just said what?’ I ask playfully.

  ‘The word that we’re not supposed to say, the topic that we’re not meant to discuss.’

  ‘Damn. You’re right.’ I pause. ‘Oh, well, then, had any interesting baby thoughts today?’

  Friday mid-afternoon on the internal line at our respective places of work

  ‘Levi,’ I say.

  ‘Maxwell,’ says Izzy. ‘Second choice?’

  ‘Dave,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she says. ‘Vernon.’

  ‘Sounds like “vermin”,’ I say. ‘And for girls?’

  ‘Still Jasmine,’ she says.

  ‘Still Lois,’ I say. ‘Second choice?’

  ‘Adele,’ she says.

  ‘Izzy,’ I say.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she says.

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  Saturday morning at my parents’ in Streatham, south London

  ‘Mum, Dad,’ I say, ‘Izzy and I have something to tell you.’

  Izzy and I are round at my mum and dad’s house to tell them the good news. ‘We’re . . .’ I look at Izzy and squeeze her hand ‘. . . we’re going to have a baby.’

  My dad explodes. ‘Congratulations! Well done!’

  ‘That’s such wonderful news!’ says my mum. ‘The best news I’ve heard in a long, long time.’

  All the parties in the room stand up, shake hands, hug, kiss and generally congratulate each other. I revel in seeing my parents so overjoyed. They insist that we stay for lunch. The second we agree Izzy is whisked off to the kitchen by my mum under the ruse that she needs assistance with the food. I know full well that Mum won’t let her so much as get her fingers wet in the washing-up let alone cook. I stay in the living room with my dad, watching TV and talking about the events of the day.

  Sunday afternoon at Izzy’s mum’s in Oxford

  It’s just coming up to midday and Izzy and I are at her mum’s in Oxford, standing in the kitchen. The original plan was that Izzy would ring her mum yesterday and tell her over the phone but each time she tried to dial she couldn’t do it. When I had asked why not she’d replied, ‘Because I want to see her face,’ and I understood straight away. We arrived at Izzy’s mum’s under the pretence that we’d just dropped in, and she, too, insisted that we stay for lunch. Izzy’s unsure when it would be best to tell her mum so she instructs me to stay with her at all times in preparation for the moment. It comes as Izzy is peeling potatoes and I’m standing beside her holding a kettle of boiling water in one hand and a packet of chicken stuffing in the other while carefully studying the instructions, and her mum is crouched down at the oven peering through the glass at the chicken inside it. That’s when Izzy says, ‘Hey, Mum, I’ve got some news for you. I’m pregnant.’

  Her mum turns to face her and right away begins crying. Barely able to get her words out, she says, ‘Your dad would’ve been so proud.’ That’s it. Izzy starts crying too and her mum cries even more, then hugs Izzy, and me, and finally she makes all three of us hug together. She really is that happy.

  friends

  Now that my parents and Izzy’s mum know, the only other people we decide to tell at this early stage are our close friends, two couples: Jenny and Trevor, and Stella and Lee. I wanted to keep it quiet until we were a little more sure but Izzy says, ‘They’re the people I’d turn to if I had some bad news so why not tell them when the news is good?’ I have no answer to that but I still have reservations. Friends can be funny about change. Especially our friends, who aren’t in the kind of relationships where settling down, let alone having kids, would end in anything but tears.

  them

  Trevor is thirty-one and works for an IT company called C-Tec, installing software for financial institutions. His girlfriend before Jenny was Adalia, a Spanish student whom he’d met in a club in Hoxton. After a short and passionate beginning they had what can only be described as the most vicious break-up in history, but not before Adalia became pregnant. Trevor agreed that he would support the child as best he could but he and Adalia wouldn’t be getting back together. Things were fine between them, even after the baby (a little boy she named Tiago) was born, until Trevor started his relationship with Jenny. Adalia claimed still to be in love with him and started using the baby as a way to get at him. She’d arrange for him to spend time with Tiago then be out when he arrived; she’d tell mutual friends that he wasn’t helping with Tiago even though he was. Eventually she struck the ultimate blow: she returned to Spain. He tried to make her stay – he even said he’d get back together with her. But it was too late. Initially he flew out to see Tiago whenever he could but Adalia continued to make things difficult, so he took a hard decision and stopped going.

  The other side of this partnership is Trevor’s girlfriend Jenny, one of Izzy’s best friends. Izzy and Jenny met in their early twenties when Jenny worked brieflyon Femme. Now at thirty-one Jenny’s doing the kind of job that is always a talking point at parties – she’s editor of Teen Scene, ‘the magazine for girls with go’. She loves her job and takes it very seriously, but I don’t. I tease her constantly about it because, to my mind, it isn’t a real job. From what I can gather she seems to spend most of her day lunching with advertisers, talking about Dawson’s Creek with her staff and extolling the physical virtues of whichever boy band is in vogue. Trevor and Jenny have been together for eighteen months and sharing a flat in Ladbroke Grove for more than half of that. Quite often they acknowledge to us – but never to each other – that they moved in together too early. I reckon they’re so unready to enter the world of parenthood that they use three methods of contraception at once.

  Stella Thomas, of Stella and Lee, is thirty-three and works as a recruitment consultant for blue-chip companies. She’s by and large an angry woman, who tends to take out her frustration with the world on her boyfriend Lee, whom she’s been with for over a year. At twenty-four he is nearly a decade younger. While at first Stella thought it was the coolest thing on earth to have a toy-boy, things changed as she fell in love with him and that decade began to bother her. I like Lee: he’s laid back to the point of being horizontal and treats life like it’s all a bit of a joke. As long as he has enough money in his pocket to get a round in at the pub he’s a self-proclaimed ‘happy chappy’. He works as a runner on a cable programme called The Hot Pop Show, and gets to stand around all day smoking Marlboro Lights with other similarly attired young graduates, all delighted to be working in ‘telly’. On the whole Lee and Stella are about as likely to have kids as the Pope. Maybe even less so.

  talk

  It’s nine o’clock on the following Saturday night and Izzy and I are sitting at a candle-lit dining-table in our living room with our friends. Empty foil containers from the Chinese takeaway are stacked neatly to one side, small polystyrene tubs containing all manner of brightly hued sauces are scattered about the table, and flecks of fried rice and the odd beansprout lie abandoned on the tablecloth. Izzy clinks her fork against her wine-glass to get everyone’s attention. ‘We’ve got some news to tell you all. Some really exciting news.’ She looks at me and I can’t help but send her a great big cheesy smile. ‘I don’t know how to say this so I’ll just come out with it – but this is absolutely top-secret, not to be divulged outside these four walls . . . They say you’re not supposed to tell anyone in the early days because . . . well, you know, but we’re way too excited to keep it in. We’re pregnant!�
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  ‘Congratulations!’ screams Jenny, who is the world’s number-one expert at congratulating people enthusiastically: she makes the whooping noises, she squeals, she beams like a sunburst and kisses us like a game-show contestant. Following her lead, Stella joins in with the whooping, squealing, beaming and kissing and then, in one fell swoop, they rise and whisk Izzy away to the kitchen.

  Later that night in bed, Izzy and I exchange notes on the evening. I tell her about my conversations with Trevor and Lee and she tells me about hers with Stella and Jenny. While her friends had been less forthright with their opinions than mine – Lee wouldn’t be following me into fatherhood at any time soon – Izzy thinks that she could sense varying degrees of resentment at our news. Not nasty stab-you-in-the-back resentment, but the kind that might instinctively spring from a generally good-natured child before good manners kicked in. Izzy thinks that Stella and Jenny were put out because it forced them to look at their own relationships. In direct contradiction to what Trevor told me, Izzy says that Jenny has never raised the subject of kids in all the time she and Trevor have been together: she knows the subject is off limits because of what happened between him and Adalia.

  Stella went for a passive-aggressive comedy routine. ‘You’ve activated my biological clock, Izzy,’ she’d said. ‘I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman who’s going out with a twenty-four-year-old who’s not going to want to have kids until my eggs are old and shrivelled.’ Izzy thinks she’d only been half joking. After Stella had met Lee, Jenny and Izzy had acted as agony aunts to her while she hadn’t been sure about the relationship. As good friends do, they didn’t tell her the truth – i.e., that Stella and Lee were pretty much doomed from the start – because that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Instead they told her that opposites attract, love conquers all, and everything would be all right in the end.

  All in all, our announcement had without question managed to upset and partially alienate every one of our four friends.

  look

  It’s the following Tuesday, early evening. It’s been really hot all day and it’s still warm. Everyone’s wearing short sleeves, and all the pubs and bars I pass are surrounded by alfresco drinkers. I’m on my way over to Covent Garden from Holborn to meet Izzy so that we can go out for the evening for the first time in ages. We decide we’re going to be really cool parents-to-be even though all we want to do in the evenings after work these days is sit at home, firmly ensconced on the sofa in front of the TV. In short, nesting. So tonight we’re back, just to show that we can still do it. The plan for the evening is to meet Lee and Stella for a few drinks at the launch party of a new bar on James Street, and after that the four of us will meet up with Jenny and Trevor, then head over to the Astoria for a gig – I’m on the guest list, plus five. Afterwards we’ll probably spend half an hour or so at the after-show party then head home.

  Izzy calls to say she’s running late from a photo-shoot at a studio in Kentish Town and won’t be with me for another half-hour. So I turn on my personal stereo and head towards Long Acre, hoping to lose myself in window-shopping to an old Elliot Smith album, XO.

  Half-way there, I find myself drawn towards one shop window in particular and stop. I look at the sign above my head: babyGap. I glance furtively from side to side then I walk through the doors into a place that is, to all intents and purposes, on another planet. Strolling along the aisles are women of all ages, whom I guess are expectant mothers, mothers with children, mothers-in-law or friends of mothers. I am the only male who isn’t attached to reins or being manoeuvred in a pushchair. I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the store’s mirrors and realise I stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, but it doesn’t bother me. My personal stereo gives me the illusion of detachment – a cloak of invisibility – allowing me to roam without embarrassment.

  Suddenly I’m drawn towards a sky blue romper-suit for children aged six to eight months. I pick it up by its hanger and hold it up in the air in a similar fashion to many of the female shoppers in the store and again my imagination goes into overdrive. I picture my baby-to-be in it, then with an orange sun hat adorned with animal ears. My child is going to be the best-dressed kid in the crèche. Then I pick up a pair of lime green corduroy dungarees and I’m lost. Right there in the middle of the shop I conjure up my child from head to toe. Izzy, I decide, should be the main contributor as she has the kind of face, thoughtful, sweet-looking, that will take a child far in life. Perhaps I’ll chip in with the ears or the chin, but on the whole I want the baby to be more her than me. Its personality should be split fifty-fifty between me and her. I’ll contribute a relatively analytical mind, the ability to keep calm in a crisis and a love of music. Izzy can give it her generosity, the way she makes people feel good about themselves and just enough neuroses for it not to feel superior to its peers. Together we will give it a love of the written word, a sense of humour and a pretty good dress sense. What’s left: the rest of the child can be made up of various parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and maybe a little bit of the unknown thrown in for good luck. That’s what a pair of dungarees is making me think about in the time that I hold them in my hands, they make me think that anything and everything is possible.

  Ten minutes later my phone rings again and I think it must be Izzy calling to tell me she’s in a cab and will be with me soon but it isn’t. It’s a woman from the photographic studio in Kentish Town where Izzy has been all afternoon. She tells me that Izzy has been taken to hospital with stomach pains. She says I should get there as soon as I can. I leave the shop and start running.

  words

  It’s nearly seven o’clock by the time I arrive at the obstetrics unit in the Whittington Hospital. I tell a nurse my name and she asks me to take a seat while she finds a doctor to come and speak to me. I don’t sit, I remain rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed on the door through which she has just left. In the cab on the way over I played out the worst-case scenario in my head several times. I told myself that if I anticipated the worst it couldn’t possibly happen.

  The nurse returns with a doctor at her side. He is tall and young, younger than me, and I tell myself that this is good: everything he’s learned will be fresh in his mind. I tell myself that this is a man I can trust. This is a man who won’t fail me. The doctor says hello, shakes my hand and takes me to one side. He explains that Izzy is fine but that she has had a miscarriage. He tells me that miscarriages are relatively common during the early stages of pregnancy, that they happen for any number of reasons, that it shouldn’t stop us trying again in a little while. I ask him if I can see Izzy yet, but he says she’s waiting to see a consultant. His pager goes off and he apologises: he is needed somewhere else in the hospital. I thank him for his time, then watch him walk away. I’m sure he did his best, I tell myself, because he looks like a man who would.

  I know I should call people, Izzy’s mum and my parents especially, but I can’t bring myself to tell them that after all this time and all this soul-searching, everything has been for nothing. The names Izzy and I have dreamed, the hopes we’d had for our child’s future, the love that has filled our hearts – all wasted. It is this that I hate most of all: the loss of potential – the thousands of things that will never take place now because of what has happened. I can find nothing to take comfort from. No matter what happens in the future this child will never be.

  Impatient for further news of Izzy I pace the waiting room. I buy myself some coffee from a drinks machine then let it go cold. I buy a Mars bar from the machine next to it, open the wrapper and throw it away, then finally spot a diversion: a wall display of hospital literature. I scan the dozens of leaflets for one that might help me. There it is. I take it down from the display and then, leaning against the wall, begin to read.

  As I digest the contents I can’t help but think about the person who wrote it. Was he or she a journalist, like me and Izzy? Did they make their living writing hospital pamphlets just as I make mine writing about music? I try t
o picture them sitting at their computer with a list of ailments and diseases that have to be translated into digestible chunks of normal-speak. Did this person ever imagine who their audience might be? Or did they just sit at their computer, working their way from A to Z of the things that can go wrong with the human body? When I finish reading I screw up the leaflet and throw it into the bin next to me, which is already overflowing with empty drinks cans and polystyrene coffee cups. Of the many facts in the leaflet only one remains lodged in my head: thirty per cent of first pregnancies end in miscarriage.

  One in three people.

  I look around the room and count out three people from the dozen or so with whom I am sharing it: a young girl reading a magazine; a middle-aged woman with a bandaged leg; I look down at my trainers and count myself.

  Two people get away with it for each time that another doesn’t. This time I’m the unlucky one. But it doesn’t seem fair that it has happened. The fact that, as the doctor told me, ‘Sometimes these things just happen,’ didn’t help me to understand why it had happened, clutching as I do to the eternally optimistic theory that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people.

  When I eventually get to see Izzy she doesn’t look any different. She’s still wearing the clothes I saw her put on this morning. This morning when everything was so different from how it is now. It makes me think – if only for a second – that this is a bad dream. That somehow everything will still be all right.

  ‘I love you,’ I say, holding her tightly. ‘We’ll be all right.’

  ‘I didn’t love him enough,’ says Izzy, as tears stream down her face. ‘That’s why he’s gone.’