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.”
“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.