The Rachel Incident(58)

“It feels so long ago now,” I said, and I meant it. “College. It seems pointless. I don’t know what I was thinking, an English degree.”

“I really regret never coming to see you at college.”

“To see me? Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Seeing you write your little essays. Following you into the stacks. I’ve always had a library fantasy, since I was small.”

I wondered whether this was the window opening for phone sex. “What was the fantasy?”

“Oh, you know.” I heard a slight creaking of the mattress, and I could tell he had transitioned from sitting up to lying down. “Gorgeous big-titted librarian, trying to find me a rare book.”

I had spent so much of the previous two days in my own interconnected fantasy worlds that it felt incredible to visit someone else’s. “Go on.”

“You know, you might get up on one of those stepladder things,” he said, his tone still breezy. “And I’d…”

It was clear he had done this before. I’ve never been someone who asks about ex-girlfriends, preferring to presume that men were simply asleep before I met them. He talked about looking up my tight skirt (“Pencil skirt?” I asked, ruining the mood for a second), of running his hand up my legs, of feeling that I was damp down to my thighs. I sensed it was my time to take over, and I closed my eyes and talked about his body. It was easy. I had done so much thinking about his body already.

Despite everything, I was able to lose myself in it. Being pregnant almost added to the experience. I wasn’t just a librarian. I was a librarian…with a secret. We touched ourselves and talked to each other, and it was magnificent until he started talking about coming.

“Jesus, I want to come in you,” he started saying, all narrative now thrown out the window. He kept on saying it. I could hear him getting closer. I went cold. He had come in me, after all. That’s why I was in this situation. I went silent. At this point, he was entirely on his own steam anyway.

When he finished, it was with a barrage of my name.

Fuck, fuck, Rachel, Rachel, fuck.

I wondered whether it was normal now to say goodbye and hang up the phone, but his voice returned fairly quickly.

“Sorry, I couldn’t wait,” he said.

“For what?”

“Well, for you.”

“Oh, it’s fine.”

I knew I sounded strange, and that he could tell.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. That was fun.”

“Do we have a new long-distance hobby, d’you think?”

“I should think so,” I replied, and tried to keep my voice sexy. “I miss you.”

We hung up the phone soon after. When I left my bedroom, I found a Post-it on the door, and on it was the phone number for Marie Stopes International.

It was a week for unusual phone conversations.

I called Marie Stopes on Monday morning. They told me that I needed to have a consultation first, then they gave me a list of clinics I could see in Ireland. There were two in Cork. After a doctor had seen me, they would refer me to a private clinic in the UK.

In the years since, I’ve spent so much time interviewing, reporting, and editing various Irish women’s experiences with abortion that my mind has fused my own experience with theirs. Our road maps are too similar. It always starts with a phone call, and then a consultation, and after, you select a clinic based not so much on safety or medical prowess but on where Ryanair is doing a deal with that month. Sometimes Manchester is cheaper, and sometimes London is.

There’s a limited field of options, and a limited field of emotions to go with them. Frightened, sad. Angry at having to travel. Angry at yourself for being irresponsible. Angry at the doctor for asking if I was absolutely sure that I wanted a termination, which I suppose is sensible to ask, but pissed me off anyway. Or did it piss me off? Have I just read so much about this particular experience that my feelings have attached on to a global nerve centre of Irish female thought on abortion?

It’s impossible to say.

The only memories that are clear are the ones with James in them.

We went to the clinic in Cork together on Wednesday, where I took another test, and where the doctor confirmed that I was nine weeks pregnant. I counted that it was only six weeks since Carey and I had unprotected sex, but apparently that didn’t matter. Pregnancy was, bafflingly, counted from the date of your last period. Then he left the room and said that a nurse would be back to discuss “our options.”

“Oh my God,” James said. “I bet he thinks I’m the father.”

“Well, good. I hope he does,” I replied. “I don’t want him to think I got pregnant by being a slapper. I want him to know people love me.”

It was the first time that James ever looked shocked by something I said. If we hadn’t been there to schedule my abortion, he would have taken me to task over it.

He looked at the brochures for clinics in England. “You don’t have to feel ashamed of any of this,” he murmured.

I scoffed. Made a little disgusted throat-clearing sound, like it would be insane for me to feel that way.

But my Irishness got the better of me. “It’s illegal, though.”

“Yeah.” He raised his eyebrow. “And so was sodomy, until like, nineteen ninety-three or something, so we’re both basically criminals.”