by Hazel Hayes
Know your audience.
After dinner we collapsed on sofas and chatted a while longer. Theo played Lego with the kids and they each presented their new truck or spaceship to the group for inspection. When they grew tired of building things they lay Theo down, covered him in Lego bricks, and laughed when he rolled over and they all fell off. They repeated this several times and never found it any less funny. He was good with them, I thought, he always had been.
Soon after, hugs were given, goodbyes were said, and kids were carted into the backs of cars, all tired eyes and heavy heads nodding towards sleep. Sally and Lily didn’t want to leave. They clung to my legs and begged to stay for a sleepover. They’d go to bed early, they insisted, and wouldn’t drink any more Coke. They’d be good, they promised, they’d be the very, very best.
The pair of them looked up at me, oozing cuteness, and I found myself laughing at their ability to master the basics of manipulation with absolutely none of the subtlety required. I caught Donal’s eye and he smiled a smile that said he’d seen this routine many times before.
‘Is that all right with you?’ I asked.
‘Is it all right if you take care of my kids for the night?’
‘Fair point,’ I said. ‘See you in the morning.’
‘See ya!’ said Donal, laughing as he took off to tell his wife. The girls ran straight to the sofa to fight over which movie to watch. They settled on Toy Story and fell asleep halfway through.
Theo helped me carry them to their bed in the spare room. My mother set it up the way they like it – with fairy lights on instead of the bedside lamp, and their favourite teddies peeping out of the covers – and I felt guilty for not knowing all this, for being the kind of aunt who visits every other month, who sees all the milestones but misses the minutiae of their little lives. But being their aunt was a responsibility I hadn’t asked for, I told myself; I didn’t choose to have five extra humans in my life to love, and miss, and worry about, yet here they were. And even though they had all just recently come into being, I’d give my left lung to any one of them who needed it. I would kill for them. I would take a bullet for them. And let me be clear, there are very few people I would jump in front of a bullet for; it’s a shockingly short list, which takes a very long time to get on. But by merely existing, by doing no more than being born, these kids automatically get a spot on that list, along with my unwavering, unconditional, oftentimes totally irrational devotion. Once kids come along, loving them is not a choice, it’s an inevitability.
And these aren’t even my kids!
Sally had refused to get out of the Batman costume, so I knelt in front of her now, clumsily trying to remove it. Her body flopped against mine as I peeled black Lycra from her limp little arms. Sally is my goddaughter as well as my niece. On paper that means I’m supposed to teach her about a bunch of Catholic nonsense I don’t believe in, but in reality it means I find myself looking out for her that little bit more. There’s an affinity there too, and when she tells me that Spider-Man is her favourite superhero, or that she quit ballet because she ‘just didn’t like it’ and she’s decided to do karate instead, that she doesn’t ever want to get married because she’s ‘too independent’, I see a wildness, an ambition, and a disregard for the established order that’s rare in someone so young. She reminds me of me, there’s no easier way to put it, and I suppose I’m drawn to her because nurturing her feels a little bit like nurturing myself.
I managed to slip a nightdress over her head and pull her arms through the sleeves, then I helped her climb sleepily into bed next to Lily, who was already snoring a soft, child’s snore. Lily is the water to Sally’s wildfire; her gentle nature tames Sally in the best way and I’m glad that they have each other to lean on in this life. I kissed them both on the forehead and before I stood to go, Sally looked up at me and muttered, ‘I love you.’
My phone beeps. I look down and see a blue cross materialising in the window on the stick. I know what it means but I check the instructions again just to be sure. Then I check them again.
I’m pregnant.
How unceremonious this all is: a world full of women, alone on toilets, pissing on sticks. Each new life heralded by a piece of urine-soaked plastic.
What am I supposed to do now?
What does she do now, I wonder, the woman who wants this? I suppose she cries, a giddy little cry. Then she gets ready to tell the father. Maybe she cooks him a nice meal, and wears a nice dress, and sits across the table from him, beaming. And he leans over to pour her some wine and she says, ‘None for me,’ and at first he doesn’t understand but then recognition dawns and he kisses her and holds her hand and they laugh and embrace and make plans late into the night. And she worries she’s not ready but he tells her that she is. And he worries they don’t earn enough but she tells him they’ll make do. And they share their hopes and fears about it the family they’ll become.
Maybe it’s fucking magical.
I wouldn’t know.
Theo left early yesterday morning. I was just waking up as he placed a cup of tea on the bedside table for me. I mumbled my thanks, then reached for the cup and noticed he was already dressed in his new suit.
‘I have to go soon,’ he said, as I took in the sight of him.
‘You look great!’
He gave me a little twirl.
‘You think?’
‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘you look really good.’
He smiled then, a proper, ear-to-ear smile that I hadn’t even realised I’d missed.
‘I wish I could come with you,’ I said.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow night.’
He made one last hair check in the mirror, delicately tousling his dark blonde locks with one hand as he pouted at his own reflection. Finally, he was satisfied.
‘Gotta go or I’ll miss the train.’
‘Okay. Text me when you get there.’
‘I’ll try, but I might not have signal in the country, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. Enjoy your tea!’
‘I will, thanks. I love you.’
‘You too,’ said Theo, as he disappeared out of the door.
*
I get up and throw the pregnancy test in the bin, as though doing so will make this go away. Then I check my phone; I sent Theo a message last night to say I hoped he’d arrived in one piece and was having a good time. Still no reply. I wonder whether to try and call him, what I would say if he picked up. Panic grips me. I feel my chest tighten. I can hear my therapist’s voice in my head, reminding me to ‘stay in the observer role’, to stop and notice my feelings instead of being overwhelmed by them.
I notice I am feeling anxious.
Good.
I take a few mindful breaths, then scroll idly through Facebook while I plan what to say.
I’m about to stop scrolling and call Theo when I see a colleague of his has posted photos of the wedding: the bride, the cake, the speeches, and several shots of their team huddled together in a garden at twilight, drinks in hand and toothy smiles all round. There’s Theo, still in his suit but with his top button open and his green tie loosened slightly. And in every photo, right beside him, under his arm in fact, is Lesley.
Lesley sits opposite Theo at work. I’ve met her several times, and she’s always seemed quite pleasant, if a little stuck-up. Most worryingly, though, she is exactly his type.
I suppose I should be his type, but I’m not. When we met he told me there were three types of women he disliked: women who smoke, women who vote Labour, and women who have tattoos. I don’t smoke, but I do vote Labour, and a few months into our relationship I got my first tattoo, which just so happened to be the topic of our first fight.
Theo’s type is what I like to call a Horse Woman. Horse Women are not women who look like horses, but rather women who look like they spend time around horses. They wear very little makeup. They never dye their hair. They are plain, but pretty. They order salads in restaurants. They come from money. They
vote Conservative. They study at prestigious universities. Then they settle down with a nice Tory boy and throw their degree out the window in favour of raising his bratty Tory children. Basically, a Horse Woman is everything I’m not, but Lesley is one of them.
The frequency with which Theo has mentioned Lesley lately has increased. This is a tactic, I’ve learned, that men employ in order to make their inappropriate feelings for someone else feel more appropriate. Hiding in plain sight, as it were. They’ve also been going for lunch and to the gym together more often. That’s not cheating, I tell myself, you’re being paranoid. But here she is, hair down, tits out, under my boyfriend’s arm. And here I am with his unwanted, unborn child inside me. I see that he’s commented on one photo. BEST DAY EVER!! it says. All caps. Two exclamation marks.
I notice I am feeling incandescent rage.
My mother picks up after two rings.
‘Sally said she loves me,’ I blurt out.
‘She does,’ replies my mother. Then, ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘But I’m never there.’
‘Kids don’t care about that stuff. Are you okay?’
‘I don’t want them,’ I say.
‘Want what?’
‘Kids. I don’t want them.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘What’s—’
‘I’m pregnant.’
A pause.
‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘I mean. Sorry. I didn’t mean—’
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Fuck is a fine response.’
‘I’ll get on a plane—’
‘Don’t get on a plane,’ I say, at the exact same time.
I sit on my balcony with the phone to my ear and as the sun makes its way slowly across the sky, I tell her everything. Not just about the pregnancy test. I tell her all the things we’re afraid to tell our mothers about our partners in case they tell us what we don’t want to hear but already know: that we should leave them.
I tell her that Theo seems almost incapable of being in a room with me any more. That I look forward to him taking a bath so I can sit next to him on the floor and chat, knowing he won’t be distracted by a phone or a laptop or anything that isn’t me. I try to laugh at how pathetic it is that I sometimes make my own boyfriend a captive audience, but I end up crying instead. Then I stop myself because there is nothing I hate more than the sound of my own voice through sobs, and I have so much more to tell her.
‘The other night we were sat in bed,’ I say, ‘and I asked him how his day had been. So he opened his laptop and showed me his calendar for the day. The meetings he had, where he went for lunch, what class he took at the gym …’
It was as if he needed visual cues in order to speak to me, and for a while I actually thought that maybe Theo had lost the ability to conduct a normal, human conversation. I’ve since realised that he just loathes every second we spend together, which to be fair seems a lot more plausible than someone suddenly forgetting the art of social interaction.
‘And all this stuff about him “having no signal” is bullshit,’ I tell my mother. ‘He’s got enough signal to leave a comment on Lesley’s fucking Facebook photo. Same shit. He just doesn’t want to talk to me.’
She lets me get it all out, listening as I recount all the times he’s hurt me: the night I wore lingerie for him and he looked at me and sighed like making love to me was a chore; the time he completely forgot we had tickets to a show and I had to go alone; and my personal favourite, the night of my thirtieth birthday, when he said he’d be home late from a rugby match and asked me to put the dinner on. After we’d eaten the birthday meal I’d cooked for myself, he told me there was a cake in the fridge if I wanted it; it was one of those supermarket caterpillar cakes, still in the box.
I tell her how crazy I feel. That there’s a disparity between his actions and words I cannot make sense of: he says he loves me, that he wants to be with me, but he seems uncomfortable in my presence. He gets up earlier and earlier to go to the gym. He stays later and later after work. He never smiles around me any more.
She already knows all of this, not the details, but the broad strokes; the things we think we’re hiding from people, we’re only really hiding from ourselves.
‘I thought that stuff with the tie was a bit weird, all right,’ she says, and this actually makes me laugh.
He spent almost the entire trip to Ireland obsessing over the green tie. He’d managed to get a suit and shirt easily enough, but getting a tie with the exact woollen texture he wanted, in the perfect shade of green, had proven difficult. We went to four different shops trying to find one. My mother asks me now if I think it was all to impress ‘that tramp’ – there is no actual evidence to suggest that Lesley is a tramp, but I appreciate my mother getting on board.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I hope not. But maybe it’d make things easier. It’d certainly make me feel less crazy.’
‘I understand,’ she says, and the next words to come out of her mouth will stay with me for the rest of my life …
‘Crazy is the space between what they tell you and what you know is true.’
I’m still reeling from this reality check when I spot something in my periphery: there, in one of the colourful plant pots in the corner of the balcony, among the brown, dying leaves, is a sliver of green. I go to it and find a fresh stalk has emerged from the soil, small but strong. Suddenly, salvaging this plant seems immensely important.
I ask my mother what to do and she tells me to start by removing the dead leaves.
‘Do the same with all the others. Cut them right back,’ she says, ‘It’ll feel like you’re killing them but you’re not. You’re just getting rid of what they don’t need to help them grow.’
I tell her I’ll call her back when I’m done; the sun’s going down and I don’t want to be out here gardening in the dark. We’ve reached no conclusions but that’s okay; my problems are, unfortunately, not going anywhere.
*
With a task to focus on, my thoughts seem to focus too, and as I kneel here, gently tending to each delicate plant, my mind wanders again to Sally. Me helping her into bed that night. Her tiny, heart-shaped lips forming that enormous statement. She loves me. For no other reason than she does. And there’s something heart-wrenchingly pure about that. There’s no bullshit, no games, no complications; she just felt something, so she said it.
Maybe I do want it. Maybe I would be a good mother. Maybe I could do it; raise a child, help them to be a good person, protect them from the evils of this world. Maybe I could write too. Maybe I could do both. Maybe the pregnancy will be gentle and the birth will be easy and my child will be the kind of child who sleeps through the night. Maybe Theo and I will be okay. Maybe it’s just a rough patch. Maybe I’ll talk to him, tell him everything, and we’ll sort things out. Maybe he’ll be kind and understanding. Maybe this will make him fall in love with me again. Maybe it will change everything. Maybe I’ll look back and wonder how I ever dreamed of a life without him, without this. Maybe.
And for a few short moments, alone on the balcony, with an aching back, sore knees and dirt under my fingernails, it all seems possible.
I have just thrown all the dead leaves in the bin and I’m watering the stalks I’ve saved, when Theo comes through the door. He sees me outside with the watering can.
‘Are you still at that?’ he asks, ‘I told you they’re dead.’
*
Later on, we’re sitting on the sofa watching a movie, but he’s not actually watching it, he’s checking his emails, and I ask him to put away the laptop so we can talk. He says he will in a minute.
Twenty minutes pass.
I can’t concentrate on the film. I turn it off.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asks.
‘This doesn’t feel right,’ I say.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Us,’ I say. ‘Something’s wrong. We need to talk.’
He sighs, closes the laptop, and runs his fingers through his ha
ir the way he does when he’s stressed out, dragging it backwards off his face. He looks at me, but it feels more like he’s looking through me, and my heart aches at the memory of his dark eyes staring down at me the first time we made love. He used to see me, really see, and now it’s like I’m not even there, like my very existence is a nuisance to him.
I want to tell him what’s going on, that I’m worried he cheated on me – or that he’s going to – that I know he doesn’t love me, and we’re just flogging a dead horse. Mostly I want to tell him that I’m pregnant. But I suddenly realise two things. Firstly, I’ll never know if he was going to leave me and only stayed out of a sense of obligation. And secondly, he won’t be strong. He’ll need me to be strong for us both and I don’t think I can do that right now. So I say nothing.
‘I think we should call it a day,’ he says.
Just like that.
*
In the morning, I’ll wake up alone and find a package outside the door with Chinese writing on the envelope. I will open it to find a green tie, which I’ll throw straight in the bin. Soon after that, I’ll go to the bathroom and see blood in the toilet bowl. I’ll take two more pregnancy tests, just to be sure. They’ll both be negative. I’ll call my mother and tell her Theo’s gone. She’ll offer to get on a plane. I’ll refuse.
‘I’m not pregnant, by the way,’ I’ll say, and I’ll hear a quiet intake of breath on the other end of the line.
‘Are you sure?’ she’ll ask.
‘I’m sure.’
A moment will pass. When she speaks, her voice will be clear and certain.
‘Probably for the best,’ she’ll say.
The Last Good Day
Theo’s about to leave for work when his phone rings. It’s one of his colleagues, calling to let him know that she got to the office early and was sent home. I can just about make out what she’s saying. Something about a burst pipe. She tells Theo he may as well stay home, and he thanks her and walks back into the bedroom.
