The Rachel Incident(57)

Then it hit me. Properly. Carey’s child. The first man I had ever really loved, who had ever really excited me, and now he was stuck in Derry indefinitely and I was carrying his baby.

I imagined a world where I kept it. There was a romance to this, and it was worth entertaining. There were no jobs in Ireland, anyway. I could bed down in motherhood and treat it like hibernation, poking my head back out in five years when the kid started school and I could take a real lash at the job market. I could tell Carey. I pictured myself, six months pregnant and looking like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, waiting at the train station in Derry. He would be shocked, and then once the shock wore off, he’d say something delicious and unexpected, the way he always did. He, who had always loved the bigness of my body, would fancy me even more when I was pregnant. Cradling my curves, my new puffy breasts, the big firm stomach.

There would be something beautiful about it. His mother failing, our pregnancy thriving. She would meet her grandchild, and she would love me. There were already so many young children in Carey’s family that another strawberry-blonde kid running around would make next to no difference. We could live in the house with his parents for a while. It was a big place, or so he told me, and it was almost empty now.

I could see it. I could see it in the same way I could see London, a parallel universe that was accessible with just one definite step from me.

“What do you think?” I asked James.

He put both his hands up. “I’m not saying a thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because this has to be your decision. I don’t want to accidentally persuade you one way or another. But…whatever you do, Rache, I’m here. I’ll go to England with you, or I’ll help you with the baby, or whatever. We’ll make it work.”

A third world opened up. One where me and James Devlin raised a baby together in Cork, and that world, despite its sitcom value, was the most horrifying of all. I had ideas and an imagination, but James had an actual dream. James had to be a TV writer, and that fantasy was far-fetched enough when he was a gay Irish man with no connections. It would be impossible if he was helping to raise a baby.

I realised that the world where I moved to Derry, which was the one most attractive to me in this buffet of bad keeping-it options, was also the world where I didn’t live with James any more. Would hardly see him. And while that sounds childish and clingy, I was, at that time, very childish and clingy. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing him, not living with him.

“I guess we should start ringing places in England.”

It was gone six o’clock, and a weekend, so calling England was out of the question until Monday.

“Will you phone in sick?” he asked. “At the call centre?”

I had just spent twenty minutes living in several related fantasy universes, and the fact that the call centre still existed despite all of them was shocking to me.

“No,” I said. “It will cost money, won’t it? Flights and all that. I’ll need money.”

I don’t know how we got through that weekend. Despite the fact that I had decided to get an abortion, my inherited middle-classness told me that I should not drink. I did not want to harm the baby that I was planning to kill.

James did not drink either. We went back to our January routine of living in his bedroom. It felt like the days following a death, where the air stands still and cloaks you in a protective blanket. The stillness that says: A big thing has just happened, and the atmosphere will stall until there is space in the universe for more things to happen. We watched every movie that Cher had ever been in that we could find on DVD. Mermaids, The Witches of Eastwick, Moonstruck. We ordered two large pizzas and ate them slowly over the weekend, heating up slices in the frying pan.

Carey phoned me twice on Saturday. I didn’t pick up either time. He called me for light relief, for a distraction from sickness, and I couldn’t offer it to him. I knew that if I answered the phone I would want to keep the baby, and I would want to tell him about it.

It was the only time that James offered me any kind of directive. “Don’t punish him,” he said. “Tell him or don’t tell him, but don’t freeze him out. He’s going through a rough enough time as it is.”

We spoke on Sunday night.

“How’ya, my gorgeous girl,” he said, sounding like he’d been in sunshine. “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Phone sex.”

It was the first time I had laughed all weekend. He was such a deeply silly person, and he had no idea I was pregnant, and I suddenly wanted to do nothing more than to take a holiday within this phone conversation.

“Why are you laughing? I think we’d be good! We’re both verbal enough, aren’t we?”

“Oh, I don’t know if I could take it seriously.”

“Go on, give it a lash.”

“Now?”

“No, let’s talk for a few minutes, and then you can spring it on me, like a surprise. Just announce your clothes have fallen off, or something.”

I laughed again, and we talked about what was going on in Derry. His eldest niece had started secondary school. He wanted to know when my graduation was going to be.

“I don’t know, middle of this month sometime.”

“You don’t sound bothered.”