Angels (29 page)

It was the first time that we'd baby-sat Ronan for more than a couple of hours and we weren't at all bad at feeding, burping, changing, and cajoling him. It was good fun because, you see, I had nothing against babies per se. Just the idea of having them myself.

When Ronan cried a couple of times in the night, Garv got up without complaint, then in the morning he brought him into bed with us and sat him on his lap facing us. Already Ronan was chortling, and when Garv held on to his chubby wrists and blew raspberries at him, Ronan nearly shrieked his head off. Garv was laughing almost as much, and with his bare chest and off-duty hair, he looked like the hunky man in that man and baby portrait. I got such a pang of confused yearning, it almost hurt physically.

A great day was had by some, and when Peter and Shelley came to collect Ronan, they asked, “Was he good for you?”

“Good?” Garv said. “He was brilliant! We don't want to give him back.”

“You'll have to get working on a little cousin for him, then,”

Shelley said.

Quick as a flash, I indicated the raw walls and said, “How could we bring a baby into this building site?” They laughed and I laughed and Garv laughed—but his laugh wasn't as loud as ours. Even then I knew that it had been one excuse too many and not long afterward the rabbits showed up.

Time passed and I still didn't feel “ready.” Some of my fear had lessened, specifically the one about the pain of childbirth; 230 / MARIAN KEYES

I now personally knew enough women who'd had children to know firsthand that it was definitely survivable. But whenever I heard stories about people having their first baby at thirty-nine, it brightened my day. Then there was something in the paper about a woman of sixty having a baby by using some artificial process and that too was good news.

But, a lot sooner than I expected, my thirty-first birthday arrived and tipped me into panic: I'd said I'd have a baby when I was thirty and I was now a year older than that. When would my full-blown maternal instinct arrive? I was running out of time; if it didn't get a move on, it would show up just in time for my menopause.

Like I say, Garv is no fool. And finally, he sat me down gently—but firmly, mind, he can be firm when he wants to be—and made me talk about it.
Really
talk about it, instead of fobbing him off as I had been for the previous twelve months.

“I'm just not ready,” I admitted. “And it's not really the pain I'm worried about anymore, I'm a bit better about that.”

“Good woman, we'll get you the finest epidural that money can buy. So what is it then?”

“Well, my job.”

Once I said it out loud, I realized what a problem this was. For over five years, both in Chicago and Ireland, I'd been working very, very hard, pushing against the current, and I was still waiting for my job to plateau, to get to a position where I felt “safe.” Where I was established enough to be able to take maternity leave, sure that I'd be reemployed and free from the worry of my colleagues undermining me in my absence and poaching my work. But I was on my third temporary contract.

“You'll get maternity leave and…”

“But how easy will it be to get back in? And what will it do to my promotion prospects? If I take four months off, how will I ever get to be Frances?”

“So you can sleep under one of the desks and wash in the ANGELS / 231

staff toilets like a bag lady? Anyway, they can't discriminate against you if you take leave, it's against the law.”

Easy for him to say. He hadn't heard a partner at my firm (a man, of course) complain about someone on maternity leave: “If I took four months off to sail around the Mediterranean, and expected to be paid for it, they'd laugh in my face!”

This was what I was up against, and compared to his, mine wasn't much of a career, but it was important to me. Even though it drained and stressed me, to a certain extent I defined myself by it.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Yes. What if it turns out to be like one of my sisters? Like Rachel and the drugs, say? Or Anna and the insanity? Or Claire and the rebelliousness? I'd never be able to control them, they'd break my heart.” I stopped. “Listen to me, I'm already sounding like my mother. Anyway, I'm too irresponsible to have a child.”

That made him laugh. “You're not irresponsible!”

“I am! You and me,” I urged, “we have a lovely time. We can go away for weekends at the drop of a hat. Think of Hunter and Cindy!” Friends of ours in Chicago who'd had a baby and, overnight, had had their life upended. Once upon a time the four of us had gone on trips together, but post-baba they seemed perpetually ensnared by their screaming child, while Garv and I swanned off to the lakes for the weekend, feeling both guilty and relieved.

“We couldn't leave a baby with Dermot, the way we can with Hoppy and Rider. And parenthood never stops,” I pointed out.

“Not until the babies are grown up. And maybe not even then.”

“Okay, a baby will cause you agony, break your heart, end your career, and destroy your social life for the next twenty years. Other than that, have you any objections?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“It sounds stupid.”

232 / MARIAN KEYES

“Tell me anyway.”

I made myself voice it. “What if…like…anything happened to it? What if it got bullied at school? Or if it died? What if it got meningitis? Or knocked down? We'd love it so much, how could we bear it?

“Sorry for being so crazy,” I added quickly. I'd never met anyone else who felt like this. Any friends who'd gotten pregnant had admitted to mild regrets, but they'd all been along the lines of “Well, that's our last romantic weekend away for the next three years.”

Or “I'm reading as much as I can now, because you can't concentrate on a book for the first two years. Your brain just goes.”

But no one had expressed the kind of morbid misgivings that I had. The closest any had gotten was when they said, “I don't care if it's a boy or a girl, so long as it's healthy.”

But Garv said, “I do understand how you feel.” And I knew he did. “But if we thought that way all the time, we'd never love anyone.”

For a moment, I was afraid he might suggest that I go to therapy.

But of course he didn't—he was an Irishman.

Unlike most of my friends, I'd hardly ever been to therapy. Emily said it was because I was too afraid of what I'd find out. I agreed; I said I was afraid of finding out that I'd paid forty pounds a week every week for two years to entertain a stranger with the story of my life.

“Can you see anything positive at all about getting pregnant?”

Garv asked.

I thought long and hard. “Yes.”

“Yes?” The hope in his voice shamed me.

“Chocolate.”

“Chocolate?”

“Food, generally. I could eat as much as I liked and never feel guilty.”

“Well,” he said with a heavy sigh. “It's a start, I suppose.”

Another year passed, I turned thirty-two, and I still didn't feel

“ready.” More than I had, admittedly, but not quite ANGELS / 233

enough. Until one day, feeling as if I was giving myself up after years on the run, I just crumbled. I knew I had to. The silent struggle was exhausting and I suspected that things with Garv and me had gone a bit weird since Hoppy and Rider had arrived. I loved Garv and I didn't want things getting any worse.

When I turned myself in, Garv almost burst with happiness.

“What changed your mind?”

“I don't want you becoming one of those women who steal babies from outside a supermarket,” I said.

“You won't regret this, I promise,” he enthused.

And while I suspected that I probably would, my resentment was defused by the knowledge that he didn't understand how great my qualms were. That he genuinely thought that once he'd knocked me up, all my trepidation would be washed clean away in a great tide of estrogen.

“So should I buy a thing that tells me my temperature and all that?” I asked. Garv looked startled.

“No! Can't we just…”

So we just…

The first time we had sex without contraception, I felt as if I'd jumped out of a plane without a parachute, and even though we'd been told it could take between six months to a year, I still became watchful of my body immediately.

But despite the risks we'd taken, my period arrived and not even the squeezing cramps could dampen my relief. I relaxed a little—I'd bought myself another month. Maybe I'd be one of the women who could take up to a year.

Not a hope. I conceived in the second month; and I knew about it within minutes. I didn't immediately start demanding peanut butter and wasabi sandwiches, but something in me didn't feel settled, and when I abruptly took agin' BLTs, I
knew
.

Mind you, I'd been fairly sure the previous month too, when I
hadn't
been. But within days it was clear that this was no neurotic imagining. I really was up the pole. How was I so sure? It might have had something to do with the

234 / MARIAN KEYES

fact that until after eight in the evening, I couldn't even keep down water. Or if anyone passed within three feet of my boobs, I wanted to kill them. Or that I was chalk white. Except for when I was mint green.

It was all wrong. When Shelley had been five weeks' pregnant, she'd gone on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees (Why, indeed?

Your guess is as good as mine), covered ten grueling miles a day and never once felt light-headed. Claire hadn't even known she was pregnant for the first month and was out partying day and night, without recourse to a single bucket.

But I was the sickest person I'd ever met, which was especially hard for me because I didn't often get sick. Even my brain was affected; I couldn't
think
straight.

Just to make it official we did a pregnancy test and when the second blue line rose to the surface, Garv cried, in a manly, I've-an-eyelash-caught-in-my-eye sort of way. I cried too, but for different reasons.

Sick though I was, I just about managed to keep working—though God only knows how much use I was to them—and the only thing that kept me going was the vision of my bed at the end of the day.

By the time I reached home, almost whimpering with relief, I'd make straight for the bed-room. If Garv had gotten there before me, he'd have already flung back the covers and all I had to do was crawl between the cool, forgiving sheets. Then Garv would lie beside me and I'd grasp his hand and tell him how much I hated him.

“I know,” he crooned, “I don't blame you, but I promise that in a few short weeks you'll feel better.”

“Yes,” I whispered gratefully. “Thank you, yes. And then I'll kill you.”

Sooner or later I struggled to sit up and Garv knew the drill.

“Puke bowl?” he'd ask solicitously as we prepared for yet another round of dry retches.

“Watching the game, having a Bud,” Garv murmured as I whas-sup'd into the pretty fuchsia basin he'd bought specially for this.

It was after the first month that something began to ripple ANGELS / 235

through me, a sensation so unfamiliar that I couldn't categorize it.

“Indigestion?” Garv suggested. “Wind?”

“No…” I said in a daze. “I think it might be…excitement.”

Garv cried again.

Call it hormones, call it Mother Nature, call it whatever you want, but to my great surprise, I suddenly really wanted the baby.

Then at seven weeks, when we went for the first scan, my love just exploded. The grainy gray picture showed something tiny, a little blob that was slightly darker than the other blobbiness around it, but it was our baby. Another human being, new and unique. We'd made it and I was carrying it.

“It's a miracle,” I whispered to Garv as we studied it.

“De murkil'f new life,” he agreed solemnly.

In wild celebratory mode, we took the rest of the day off from work and went for lunch at a restaurant that I sometimes went to with clients and consequently had never been able to enjoy before.

I even managed half a chicken breast without barfing. Then we wandered around town and he persuaded me to let him buy me a Tod's handbag (the one that Helen now covets). It was so expensive, I'd never have been able to buy it for myself, not even out of my Ladies' Nice Things account. “Last time we'll have the money for this kind of thing,” he declared skittishly. Then I bought him a CD of some saxophonist whom I knew nothing about but whom he loved. “Last time you'll get the chance to listen to music,” I declared, also skittishly. It was one of the nicest days of my entire life.

That was when we decided to give Hoppy and Rider to Dermot.

He'd become very fond of them, and though we were sad to lose them, we'd decided they'd have to go anyway when the baby arrived. We'd heard enough horror stories about jealous animals attacking babas, and even though Hoppy and Rider had never shown signs of meanness, we felt we couldn't take any chances. So, tearfully, we waved them off to Dermot's, promising to visit them regularly.

236 / MARIAN KEYES

Around then, other things changed too. I'd never been crazy about my body. I mean I didn't hate it enough to starve it or cut it, but it had never been something to celebrate. But with my pregnancy came a profound shift; I felt ripe and gorgeous and powerful and—I know this sounds funny—
useful
. Up until then, I'd regarded my womb in the same way as the key ring on my Texier handbag: it was neither decorative nor useful, but it came with the rest of the package so I was stuck with it.

Another by-product of my pregnancy was that I felt blessedly normal; for so long, my lack of maternal instincts had me thinking I was almost a freak. For the first time in a long time, I felt in step with the rest of the world.

You're supposed to wait until after the twelfth week to tell people, and I'm normally very good at keeping secrets, but not in this instance. So, on week eight, we broke the news to our families, who expressed delight—most of them anyway. “I reckoned you for a Jaffa,” Helen coldly told Garv.

“What's a Jaffa?”

“An orange that doesn't have any seeds.”

He still looked confused, so she elaborated. “I thought you were firing blanks.” Then she added, “When I could bear to think about it at all.”