A Friend of the Family (19 page)

‘No,’ said Tony, ‘but you don’t sound very mellow.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s just, I’m so tired and so ill and so fed up. And these fucking mood swings – they’re so tedious.’

‘Why don’t you go home, Millie. Get some sleep.’

‘Hmm. I don’t know. I’ve got a lecture in half an hour. I was going to struggle through that and then see how I felt.’

‘Maybe Sean could come and pick you up?’ Tony ventured tentatively and, he thought, rather cunningly.

‘Hmph,’ said Millie. ‘In what? On the back of his pushbike? Anyway – he’s the last person I feel like seeing at the moment.’

‘Really? You didn’t sort things out on Saturday, then?’

‘Er, no. Not exactly. He was all super lovely for a while that morning. All schnuzzly and going to the shops for me and bringing me tea and I was being all ice queen…’

‘Did he apologize?’

‘Uh-huh. Said he was a selfish bastard, didn’t deserve me, started discussing baby names, talking about the wedding, being all, you know,
gorgeous.
But I could just tell by looking at him that he was finding it really difficult to muster up any enthusiasm, that he was acting the role of happy father-to-be. And then on Monday, when I started feeling ill and didn’t want to go to the cinema with him, he got all shitty again. You know, he went off to his flat yesterday morning to do his washing and stuff and usually he’d come back in the evening. But he wasn’t there when I got home so I phoned him at his flat and he was all off-hand and “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were expecting me to come back.” Said he’d started writing and had got really into it. Which is fine, you know, obviously I understand that that’s his job. But it’s just that he’s managed to get so absorbed and so far away from me and what’s happening that he actually forgot all about us. Me. Everything. And… urgh…’

‘What? Are you OK?’

‘Urgh. Sorry. Just another engulfing wave of nausea. Look. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rant on at you like that. I mean, that’s all I ever seem to do these days – chew your poor little ear off. And I know he’s your brother. I’m probably putting you in such an awkward position…’

‘No, no, no,’ said Tony, ‘not at all.’

‘… But there’s no one else for me talk to, you know? I mean, my hormones are up in the air and Sean’s being awful and I really need to offload.’

‘It’s fine, Millie, honestly. I really don’t mind.’

Millie sighed deeply. ‘Anyway. Look. I’d better go. I’ve got to prepare for this lecture.’

‘Oh. Right,’ said Tony, who’d just started to get into the swing of the whole slagging-off-his-brother thing. Well, anyway – I just wanted to check up on you. Make sure you’re OK.’

‘Thanks, Tony. You’re a real sweetheart. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

‘Any time. Anything you want. You know where I am.’

‘Absolutely, Tony.’

‘Well, bye, then.’

‘Bye, Tony. Lots of love.’

‘And to you.’

Tony put down the phone and smiled, feeling all warm inside. And then he turned to his computer, dialled up his Internet connection and typed ‘remedies for morning sickness’ into the query box. He clicked on to a website called
www.morningsicknessremedies.com
and thought to himself, not for the first time, what a truly amazing thing the Internet was. He speed-read the advice on the site. Plenty of naps. Cool rooms. No spicy food. Blah, blah, blah. And then he found his way into a chatroom, full of women called Kimberley and Teena from places like Minocqua, WI, and Columbus, OH.

‘I am 9 wks pregnant,’
said llena from Berkeley, CA,

and suffering from morning sickness all day every day. Last week my husband went to the health-food store and was recommended Newton Homeopathic Morning Sickness Drops. I put 6 drops on my tongue when the symptoms got real bad and about an hour later the symptoms faded away. However, I was a little concerned when I read that the ingredients included 15% Alcohol. So I will only take this remedy when
absolutely necessary.

Oh, per-lease, thought Tony. Six drops.
Six drops,
fifteen per cent alcohol. You’d be ingesting more booze if you stuck your tongue in a glass of shandy, for God’s sake. No wonder parenting was such a stressful thing these days, with people getting their knickers in a knot about a microscopic drop of alcohol. He could just picture llena from Berkeley, too. All neurotic skin and bone, everything folded and ironed, husband not allowed to use foul language, shoes off at the front door, sex with the lights off. Jeez. He made a note of Newton Homeopathic Morning Sickness Drops in his diary anyway, despite the risk it posed to the welfare of Millie’s
unborn child, and scrolled down to someone a bit more sensible-sounding.

‘Ginger cookies,’ said Jackie L. from Cherry Hill, NJ.

‘Suck a lemon,’ said Tannita from Hawaii.

‘Eat a Graham cracker when you wake up,’ said Sherri from Milwaukee.

Tony scribbled things down as he read. Ginger tea. Vitamin B6. Essential oil of lemon. Peppermint tea. Apple cider vinegar and honey. Fresh ginger. Lemon peel.

And then at one o’clock, instead of sending Anne-Marie down to the sandwich shop next door to get him his usual egg-and-bacon baguette, he wandered down the road to the nearest health-food store and spent the best part of an hour painstakingly searching the aisles for all the items on his list, like a potential suitor asked to complete an impossible task before he would be considered worthy of the hand of a beautiful medieval princess.

Sean’s Diatribe

Sean looked at the time on his laptop: 17.35. He stretched his hands behind his head and felt all his muscles singing out in exquisite pain. He’d been hunched over his computer since eleven o’clock this morning. He hadn’t stopped for lunch and had only got out of his seat twice, to pee. He scrolled back through his document and smiled to himself. Thirty-five pages of text. Thirty-five big, fat lovely pages. He moved the cursor to ‘tools’ and clicked on ‘word count’:

One of the most beautiful sets of statistics Sean had ever laid eyes on. Finally. He’d cracked it. He’d broken through the brick wall he’d been headbutting for the past three months. Stuff was making its way out of his
head on to his keyboard at last. Good stuff. Stuff that felt like it was going somewhere.

He’d got back to his flat yesterday lunchtime, ostensibly to do some washing, but mainly, and in reality, to give himself some space from Millie. He’d taken Tony’s advice on Saturday, tried his best to be positive about things, to reassure Millie, make a fuss of her. But then on Sunday night they’d been watching some TV drama with loads of children in it and there’d been an uneasy silence between the two of them as the TV kids ran around on the screen, as if they’d both stopped breathing. What they’d both been thinking had been obvious: that’ll be us soon, we’ll be like those people on the telly with the unmanageable children and the mess and the toys and arguments. He’d gone to bed that night and barely slept a wink as all his good intentions about getting into the dad groove had fled his consciousness. He couldn’t do it, he thought, just couldn’t.

On Monday night he’d tentatively suggested a trip to the cinema, thought maybe Millie would like to see
Bridget Jones’s Diary,
thought he was being considerate and unselfish. But she reacted like he’d suggested a night out in a crack den. So he’d decided that he needed some time to himself, packed his toothbrush and his shaving foam this morning and come home.

The sun had been shining when he got back, so he’d taken a notepad out on to the balcony, just like when he started
Half a Man.
He’d just been planning to do some warming-up exercises, really, play around a bit, make some notes,
do something.
And suddenly it had come
to him. A whole new story. New characters. New plot. Everything. He’d spent so many weeks cogitating and mulling over the same old turgid, dead material; and, because the first book had started out pretty much as it had ended up, it had never occurred to him to let go of his original concept.
Half a Man
had been a work of pure fiction. A page-turning suspense novel about people and situations that had come entirely from the pungent paddy fields of his own imagination. This second book, he’d now decided, was going to be different. It was going to be autobiographical.

It was going to be about a man whose girlfriend gets pregnant just after they meet and insists on having the baby even though the man isn’t ready yet. It was going to be a paean to men the world over in thrall to the power of woman’s ability to reproduce and hence make the most important decisions in the world. Women carped on about men making decisions that started wars and led to death and destruction, but whose decision was it to bring the Uzi-toting little bastards into the world in the first place, eh? Yes, that’s right: women. One unilateral decision led inexorably to the other. Obviously, there were still women in the world who didn’t have choices, who couldn’t abort or defer or avoid, who were left with no choice but to procreate. But Western women, the very women who complained the most about male oppression, about equal rights, about ‘fairness’, were also the most strident in their right to decide whether or not to bring a child into a relationship and into the world. The only decision left for a man to make was whether
to stick around or not. Great. Stick around while someone else decides what path your life is going to take for the next sixteen years, or bugger off, he branded a bastard and spend the rest of your life haunted by the thought of a child who barely knows you. Some choice.

Sean was a great believer in fate. His approach to life was to sit back, crack a beer, relax and see what turned up and he’d found that this
laissez-faire
attitude to his own destiny generally brought home the existential bacon. It brought him girls and experiences and fun and now it had brought him success, money and true love too. Sean didn’t view the less idyllic chapters of his life as the results of ‘mistakes’. He didn’t believe in mistakes. He believed in a preordained path, and so far every point on this path had felt right. Every bad relationship had felt right, every shitty job he’d done had felt right – because
he’
d chosen them.

But this – this baby thing. Someone else was messing with his life path, with the natural timing of things, and it didn’t feel right. Millie had taken away his power to let his life unfold in a leisurely fashion and be accountable only to himself and he’d never felt so out of control in his life.

So he was going to regain a little control through this book. Give the men’s perspective. Men were supposed to be so accepting these days. All those pictures in the papers all the time of smug celebrity geezers with their kids strapped to their chests, like a pale imitation of a pregnant woman. Men were supposed to share the whole experience these days, go to antenatal classes,
read books,
empathize.
Funny how you weren’t expected to empathize with your woman when she was menstruating, weren’t expected to know all the ins and outs, how all the strange bits of white cotton, straps, wings and strings actually
worked.
Women just dealt with it by themselves and all you were expected to do as a man was to keep your head down and avoid saying anything stupid. You could take an active interest if you so desired but no one was going to call you an insensitive Neanderthal if you chose not to.

And ditto other
girls’
things – vibrators, sisters, girls’ nights, crying at adverts, complicated shoes, discharge, secretions, hair removal and breast surgery. As a man you knew these things existed and that they occasionally impinged, sometimes in a positive fashion, sometimes not, upon your life, but you weren’t expected to
participate.
No woman would complain if you had no idea how to work her vibrator or refused to sit and hold her hand while she had her bikini line waxed. But pregnancy and childbirth… you were expected to be there, every step of the way, to soothe, understand, sympathize –
participate.

Men of his father’s generation had it easy. A bit of chivalrous lifting and carrying for your wife while she was pregnant and a few pints of stout in the pub with your male relatives while she popped it out. You arrived in the maternity ward full of beer and cigar smoke and were handed a clean pink baby, as opposed to something with yellow gunk and bits of placenta all over it. And then your life went back to normal.

‘We’re pregnant,’ said modern men. And that was the problem. They weren’t bloody pregnant. Their partners were. Being pregnant was something that happened to women and women alone, and along with all the physical discomfort came the most amazing experience a human being could ever go through, the miracle of nurturing life within their own bodies, of making that incomparable connection to another human being, an experience that men would never truly be able to conceive of, however many antenatal classes they went to. Women had the monopoly on the whole experience – they made the decisions, they experienced the miracle, they made the ultimate connection. Men could only ever be pathetic hand-holding, back-rubbing voyeurs whose only real contribution to the miracle of life had been the successful launch of one solitary, determined spermatozoon.