We mull over hypotheticals, and eventually, we crack out the laptop. Aideen Harrington, Deenie Harrington, Deenie Harrington-Byrne, Fred Byrne, Frederick Byrne, Dr. Frederick Harrington-Byrne.
The only social media that either of them has is Deenie’s locked Facebook page. The only photo we can see is her, in sunglasses, in front of a white wall in a hot country. The photograph has not changed in four years.
Dr. Byrne still teaches at UCC. He hasn’t published a book since The Kensington Diet, and when we’re feeling egotistical, James and I wonder if that is because of us.
* * *
I took the test as soon as I got home and climbed into bed with it. The result turned positive and I phoned James.
“Where are you?”
“At work,” he said sternly. He was resentful that I no longer had to work weekends.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Fuck.”
“I know.”
“Hold on. I’m coming home.”
I don’t know what he said to Ben, but he was home in five minutes, and then stayed with me for the rest of the day.
“What are you going to tell Carey?” he asked. “It is Carey’s, isn’t it?”
“Of course! Who else’s would it be?”
“Well, I don’t know! I didn’t even know you were late. Who knows what secrets you’ve been hiding.”
He didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’ve never been good at melting down at the right time. A few years ago, when my mother was ill, I was glacially calm. I effortlessly went through the movements of good daughterhood. I looked as though I was coping magnificently, and so my friends stopped checking in as much, and then when the real breakdown happened a month later I found myself not just in tears but curiously alone.
That reserve, which James describes as my “ancestral middle-classness,” had taken over management of my psyche. I was completely still, not able to compute the idea of a child growing inside me.
“What do you want to do, Rache?” he said, his arms around me.
“Do you still have your mum’s car?”
Nicola was on holidays, and had let James keep the car for two weeks.
“Yes.”
“Can we go to a drive-thru?”
“Sure,” he said. “Which one?”
“I don’t mind. I just…want to…” I didn’t know what I was asking for, or why I wanted it. There was a McDonald’s drive-thru near my parents’ house, and it was where my mum would take us if we’d had a bad day at school.
We got in the car.
“Is there a chance it’s a false positive?” James asked, trying to politely break my silence on this issue. “Should we buy another test?”
“No, there would be no point,” I said. “The way I’ve been feeling…it makes sense.”
We joined the queue at McDonald’s. The car in front of us had two children in it, twin boys, and they were gurning their faces at us from the back window, pretending to be puffer fish. They flapped their hands next to their cheeks, miming the gills.
“How old do you think they are?” I asked.
“Six?” James ventured. “Seven?”
“I need an abortion,” I said. “I don’t…How do you get one, again?”
“Um…England.”
“Well, obviously England,” I said. “I mean…who do you call?”
I couldn’t believe how little I actually knew about this process, despite the fact that I had been steeped in the abortion debate since I was a teenager. There was a defeated referendum to allow abortion for women whose health was seriously at risk in 2002, which was the year I first got my period. It was the earliest news story I remember paying attention to. It’s impossible to think about your period without thinking about sex, and the long shadow of a potential abortion hung over every thought about it. I thought a lot about rape, and having a rapist’s baby, and whether or not I would be suicidal enough to convince the state that I needed an abortion. I created huge soap opera narratives for myself, terrifying simulations that opened up like a flow-chart quiz at the back of Mizz magazine.
I read fitfully, discussed endlessly, got into huge fights with my dad about it. My dad, although he voted in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment in 2018, was not so convinced in the early noughties. He talked about slippery slopes, abortion as “the new morning-after pill,” and about women who regretted their decision to travel to England, of which he claimed to know many. He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t.
But in all those dinner-table debates, some of which ended in us not speaking for days, I never once looked into the practicalities of getting a termination. Who you phoned, how much it cost, all that.
“There are pills,” James said. “You can order pills in the post. They’re illegal, but you can get them.”
I had read about the pills, mostly in situations where the pill-taker had either haemorrhaged or died.
We were at the drive-thru window now. I ordered fries and a milkshake. James got some nuggets. We sat in the car park and ate them so slowly that everything was cold.
“I really don’t want to go to England,” I said. “I really don’t want to do this.”
James’s eyes went wide. He looked like one of his mother’s cats.
“You want to keep it?”
“No,” I snapped.
“You want to…give it up for adoption?”
“God, no. I’m not in the nineteen fifties.”
Adoption was somehow the most terrifying option of all. The idea of having Carey’s child and giving it away, yet another part of him that was in the wind, and always a mystery to me.
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.