I thought about Carey. I even thought about calling him for phone sex. Anything for a bit of distraction. What would he think of all this? That I had just used our baby to scam a married couple out of two grand?
Our baby.
Our baby.
I rubbed my stomach again and again, like I had seen pregnant women do on TV. There was nothing to rub, really, except for the alcohol gut I had developed over the past year. It was now Saturday. In ten days I would be getting the plane to Manchester, a 6 a.m. flight for a 2 p.m. appointment.
For everything I had read about abortion, there wasn’t very much about how it actually felt. People often described it as a Hoover for your insides. My insides.
James came back. It was just after seven, and I had given up on sleep. I sat with a blanket around me on the couch, Frasier once again on the TV.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
He smelled of cigarettes, and like a drink had spilled on him.
“Did you go out?” I asked. “Out out?”
“I started walking to Fred’s house,” he said. “And then I realised that I didn’t know his address.”
“Oh.”
James sat down next to me. I bunched my feet up to make room for him. He massaged his eye sockets, both palms flat to his face.
“I just…It was all pretend, wasn’t it?”
“You and him?”
“Me and him.”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it was all pretend.”
“It was like he was a tourist, wasn’t he?”
It was funny that he found the word “tourist” so easily, because it was the one I had found the night before. Dr. Byrne wanted to visit our youth, our poverty, our liveliness. But he didn’t want to live there.
He wiped at his face. “I had sex last night.”
“With who?”
He shrugged. Not because he didn’t know, but because it didn’t matter. Tears trickled down his face, his big eyes wet and green like young grass.
“I’m sorry about your phone,” I said.
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
“With what money?” he said automatically. “Oh. Yeah. That money.”
“I should have held out for more,” I said, creeping my toes towards his leg. He nodded, swallowing his sadness down in big gulps.
“I’m worth five grand, at least.”
“You’re worth a million.”
He smiled, grateful, even though it was corny.
“But they didn’t have a million,” I finished.
“Right.”
We listened to Shandon Street wake up. There was a Nigerian food shop on the corner that got meat deliveries in the early morning, and we heard the sound of the van reversing, the metal shutter opening up, the boxes being handed from one person to another.
“I just don’t think…” James said. “I don’t think I’m one of those people that gets to be happy, in this area.”
“What? What area?”
“Like”—he fiddled with the string edges of the blanket—“you know, people like me. I’m funny. I can write jokes. I can always get laid. I can always make a living. I can always get a job. That’s a lot, you know?”
He braided the pieces of string together. “That’s a lot for one person to have. I think it’s okay if I never get to have, like, romantic love.”
I was so insecure, then. I never thought that someone could have an insecurity that I myself hadn’t thought of. James was sure he was an unlovable person. Maybe it was why he had decided to accept scraps of it from Dr. Byrne.
“I just think you’re someone who wants a non-standard life, you know?” I began. “Like the TV stuff. Like the agent. I don’t know anyone who chases after stuff the way you do. I think you just want this big huge exceptional life, and you’re probably going to have a huge big exceptional love that goes with it.”
He kissed my kneecap. “All I got was a huge big exceptional bastard.”
24
WHENEVER I THINK ABOUT October 2010, I remember it as a month spent waiting. But there were movements and eras within that wait. The first few days of my pregnancy, the weekend where we waited for my first appointment, the days directly after where we thought about the abortion, that was one era. And the days after the dinner party was another.
James had been my support group and my parent during the first era; by the second, we were completely adrift. James was deep in grief for Dr. Byrne. I think he assumed that, because he and Dr. Byrne had already broken up once and got back together, they would go on uniting and parting for ever. It was dawning on him now that he and Dr. Byrne would never have a third act, and would never have a goodbye. His phone number had been blocked. He used my phone. My number was blocked also. The cheque cleared, and we now had close to three grand in our savings account.
I went to work. My performance was terrible, and I could tell that my manager was on the brink of firing me. I robotically went through the script that was provided for me, and I often went a full work day without committing anyone to increasing their direct debits. The worst days were the ones where I had to raise money for people in other countries. “Don’t we have enough problems here?” was the frequent answer, when I spoke about children walking miles to collect dirty water.
“You seem like an intelligent, compassionate sort of girl,” said one woman. “Why don’t you go work for something closer to home? Why don’t you go work for the Deaf?”
My eyes started to brim, a combination of pregnancy hormones and being called “compassionate” when I had both deceived and extorted a reproductively challenged woman who—give or take a little exploitation—had never been anything but nice to me.
“We’re not that sort of organisation,” I said, the tears dripping onto my desk. “I have to take what’s given to me. It’s a new one every day.”
The woman on the other end of the phone softened, moved by my lack of conviction. “Oh, pet. It’s the recession, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You should try to get a better job.”
“Do you know of any?”
“No.”
My manager, who was next to me, took the receiver out of my hand and finished the call. Then she brought me into her office and told me that if I didn’t cop on I would lose my job.
James was working six days a week in the bookshop now. Almost everyone else had been let go by that point. We never understood why he was always kept on, except for an, as yet, unproved theory that Ben was closeted, too. When we came home in the evening we talked past one another, poor receptacles for the other’s unhappiness because we were both so brimming with our own.
It was only a few days, I realise now, but it felt like a year.
I had made the choice not to tell Carey. I knew it would devastate him, and I suspected that—despite us never talking about it—he didn’t have wholly positive things to say about abortion. There was something ancient and Catholic in him, a pure defiant streak of old Rome that had been strong in his family and kept alive by living in the North. He wore a miraculous medal. He knew his saints.
I didn’t want to argue with Carey about abortion, but I didn’t want to burden him with it either. It seemed like I had unwittingly ruined the lives of so many people, and I didn’t want to ruin his, too. He was already going through so much.