Four New Words for Love (5 page)

‘I don’t want her chucking conscience money at my kid to excuse all the things she didn’t do for me.’ It was brutal and true and it shut him up. If she was still alive
she’d be the type of person who gives a gift and wants instant and disproportionate thanks, and when she doesn’t get it, sulks. ‘We don’t need anything given
grudgingly.’ That was the first time I’d said ‘we’. Early as it was I already felt a sense of ‘we’ that I hadn’t the first time round. We against the
world. People come and go. We’d get by.

And all the things I’d predicted in that mental list I should have delivered to Nick, did happen. I got piles, heartburn, hot flushes, everything God designed to make pregnant woman
unattractive. Sometimes I’d get into my dressing gown for an early night by half past three, and it was catching myself in the mirror, in that merciless mid-afternoon slanting light, that I
had one of those stop-your-heart moments and realised the difference between love and romance. Romance is flowers and chocolates and sex on tap and the novelty of another body you’re not used
to. Romance isn’t compromise because you haven’t had time yet to find out all the things you don’t like about the other person. Romance is thrilling because you know it
isn’t real, and you know it’s more intense because it’s temporary. Love is in it for the long haul and staying because of, not despite, all the irritating things about the other
person because the good things outweigh the bad. Six months ago my fantasy would have been Nick with intelligence. Now it would be a man whose face I can’t quite imagine because he’s
defined by what he does, not what he looks like. He gets me the stuff when my heartburn comes on. He isn’t irritated by my clumsiness, my size, my instant tiredness, my banished libido. We
lie like spoons in a drawer and he tells me things. Stupid little things. The amalgam of nothings that add up to the day. Do men like that exist? I’ve grown up around people who think
sensitive men are really women. Any man with those credentials around here hid them till they died. Or if they didn’t they were treated like you might imagine. And that last thought cut me in
half, because I realised that finding the kind of man round here I thought I deserved was as likely as dad and Gina Lollobrigida.

Lolly came with me to the antenatal classes. I nominated her my birth partner. She turned squeamish at the explanation of childbirth, which I thought a bit thick, considering all the traffic
she’d seen in the other direction. The men who turned up with their partners were a mixed bunch. There was a vegan couple who looked as healthy as Dad except they looked as if they’d
knitted their own clothes with egg noodles. There was a rich-looking couple in their mid-twenties who both looked very, very clean. He looked like an oversize preppy American schoolboy and
I’d have given hard cash to see his face when the fun really started. There were two normal guys, Tom and Duncan, who turned up with their partners and obviously found the whole thing
embarrassing, especially being lumped with the vegans. They linked up and stood outside, smoking and farting and talking about football as a relief from the Zen music and aromatherapy birth plans.
I know this because Lolly went outside to join them and tell them we weren’t lesbians. I looked up from the half-hearted pummelling she was giving in back rub classes, to catch her trying to
give Duncan the glad eye in the mirror. Her reasoning was straightforward – the nearer the time the more grateful he’d be for a bit on the side. ‘Have some morals,’ I said.
‘Put yourself in her position. She’s got enough to contend with without finding her man’s playing away from home.’

But she wasn’t capable of thinking herself into someone else’s position, and it didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t respond. Either he was frightened or had more morals than
she gave him credit for. Personally I think he was one of those men who refused to see the attraction in a fat orange Amazon. Someone with taste. For whatever reason he made it clear that she left
him cold, and the more he ignored her the more she wanted him.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone faithful like that? Not like Nick and all those other bastards. Someone you could settle down with.’

‘So why are you trying to sabotage his marriage when it looks as if that’s what he’s already got? Are you jealous?’

‘Of that boiler? Have you seen her?’

‘And if you had him at her expense then he wouldn’t be the kind of person you’re pretending to look for. You’d lose interest in him quicker than Nick did me.’

‘I suppose.’

My time came closer. My belly was like a drum. When I got tired it was like turning the light out. I peed in spoonfuls. Lolly said that if your waters break in Marks and Spencers you get a fifty
pound voucher, or a hamper, or something. I told her it wasn’t enough of an incentive to hang around and get fallen arches. We were watching
Emmerdale
when my waters did break. I
already had the bag packed and told Lolly to call a taxi. She turned all fingers and thumbs and I had to take the phone from her.

‘This is the easy bit. I’m going to need you to hold it together a bit better than this. Check the lift’s not broken and hold it on the landing.’

They wouldn’t let her stay overnight with me but promised to call the instant things started happening. For some mysterious reason, having closed off her mind to all the details, she now
thought the whole thing couldn’t happen without her. I didn’t make any bones about it and told them I wanted every drug going. Rumour had it Mrs Vegan had opted for a home birth. I
could imagine her, with the first mediaeval pain, realising that aromatherapy and her hand-knitted husband weren’t going to be of much use when her vagina looks like a python eating a sheep
– in reverse.

They called Lolly in the wee small hours. I knew from her instant arrival that she’d been smoking in the car park, chatting up the A & E porters. I’d been so uncomfortable
I’d been persuaded to have a bath. I was sitting in the water like a convulsing egg, contractions coming thick and fast, when Lolly burst in brandishing her phone like a police badge.

‘They said it’s happening.’ She looked disappointed at the lack of drama.

‘No they didn’t. They told you to come in. I was there when they called. Turn off your phone.’

I lumbered back in my paper dressing gown. There was some complication that delayed the pain intervention and I heard myself making inhuman noises, until I was swept up by a blissful wave. I
looked down, between my thighs, and saw Lolly staring, wearing a look of paralysed horror. The doctor arrived, all business, brushes her aside and draws an imaginary equator across my stomach.
‘I work from here down,’ he said to her, ‘you stay up north.’ He’s young, assertive, reasonable looking and he must earn a mint.

‘We’re not lesbians you know. I’m just her birthing partner.’

He completely ignores her. I have no idea how much time passes. I’m soaked in sweat and the paper gown is stuck in patches. The doctor says something I don’t hear and leaves.

‘We’re going for a ventuse delivery,’ the midwife explains.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Lolly shouts, beating me to it. There’s an edge of panic in her voice that starts my heart hammering.

‘To get his boots on – for traction.’

He reappeared between my legs like he’d sprung up out a trapdoor. A whole new cast has appeared with him. Suddenly, from it being just me, Lolly, the doctor and the midwife, there are now
two female paediatricians wheeling a machine and someone else too – I’ve no idea who. Aside from the paediatricians they’re all wearing different coloured uniforms. It’s
like panto. Lolly’s peeking south and what comes after I get from hysterical description that grew with each telling.

Evidently I’ve some kind of tarpaulin stretching from my arse to the floor. The doctor returns with what looked like a sink-plunger, which he pushes into me followed by, according to
Lolly’s account, two feet of handle. I understand the need for the boots when he begins a tug of war with my organs. A small head appears between my legs. The doctor detaches the sucker.
Lolly told me the next bit. I made her take out the embroidery. The little face is looking down the slipway of the tarpaulin. The eyes open and eerily look at the new world. One of the
paediatricians intervenes and sticks a tiny tube up the new nostrils and mouth to suck out all the stuff. I’m panting and pushing. The doctor gets some kind of grip and, also according to
Lolly, the baby comes out like an artillery shell, smeared in blue grease and without making a sound. The doctor gives the baby to the two paediatricians who take it over to the machine, shielding
the action with their backs. I don’t remember crying for my baby but Lolly said I was howling, shouting and sobbing like an accordion that’s fallen down a flight of stairs.

They turn back and hand the blue bundle to me, tell me I have a beautiful baby girl. The exhaustion vanishes. The universe contracts to this little face no bigger than the ‘O’ I can
form joining my forefinger and thumb. They’ve been cosmetic in their use of the blanket. When it slides back I can see the sucker ring on the top of her head, like a monk’s bald spot.
Lolly said the doctor was still at it, elbow deep, like a vet in a safari park. He hands a large bloody pancake to the midwife. He apologises to me for having had to do an episiotomy. I’m so
happy and pain-free I wave this away. Having no idea what her perineum is called, Lolly takes a look. I’m not convinced that what followed was spontaneous because she manages to miss the
tarpaulin and any sharp edges and fall on top of him.

* * *

It’s strange, all kinds of skills are monitored and tested. You need a licence to drive a car. I’m sure you have to have some kind of certificate to teach swimming.
You’re not a real plumber unless you’re registered with some body or other that can vouch for you. But you don’t need to pass any kind of test to be a parent. Look at mine.

No one really teaches you anything about having a child. It’s not negligence, it’s just that nothing really prepares you. You can read about the tiredness and the stretch marks and
the soreness, but they’re all surface things. One night, when Millie wouldn’t sleep or feed and cried right through for seven non-stop hours, Lolly said you could understand how parents
could become child-beaters, couldn’t you? And I said no – you couldn’t. Don’t get me wrong – much of looking after a baby is sheer boredom. There were times I craved
adult conversation so much I tried to drag out the midnight exchange at the corner shop, making idle chit-chat through the bars as he checked the camera to make sure I wasn’t casing the
place, before sliding across the Sudocrem. And it’s not as if you get a lot back at first – all you are is a mobile feeding station. And no one can seriously say they
like
changing nappies. If you’re half-way normal you can admit that you find your own kid’s shit less objectionable than you thought you were going to, but any other kid’s as revolting
as you imagined. And I can’t stand those
professional
mothers, not mothers with professions but those ones who can’t wait till they’re
outside
to breast feed,
brandishing nipples like periscopes, changing their kids’ nappies on park benches, who make a virtue of letting themselves go because it’s wholesome to look like a sow with ten kids,
breasts like tubers, sitting smiling in a hurricane of noise and snotters.

What none of those books or classes tells you, because they can’t tell you, is that if you’re any kind of a parent at all you not only love your child, you fall in love with her. Big
things fit into small things. I gushed with more love than I thought the universe could hold and she just drank it all up. I’ve never forgiven Mum because I never really tried to understand
her. What kid does? But all I have to do is to stare at Millie for five seconds and her leaving us is even less understandable. When I told Lolly I couldn’t understand child-beating I was
deadly serious. Dad’s as good a grandfather as someone of his habits can be, better than he was a father. But he didn’t hesitate to raise his hand to me when I was a kid. I don’t
know anyone treated differently. Maybe it was a generational thing. But there’s being hit, and there’s being hit. Not all beaten kids grow up to be child-beaters. No one’s
ever
hitting Millie.

I wouldn’t say life was easy, but I didn’t have it as hard as most of the single mothers round here. I was a veteran for a start. Seventeen is the average. There are thirty-year-old
grandmothers in this block, who dress the same way as their daughters. And I didn’t try and do the same thing as some of the seventeen-year-olds, trying to lead
exactly
the same life
as a year ago except with a kid in tow. I’d been on the receiving end of that arrangement. Dad asked me what I needed his cronies to steal. At first he turned up every second night with the
shakes, because he’d spent the day drying out expecting to see her. I let him hold her for about a minute at a time, Lolly and me either side, propping him up like human scaffolding, my hands
inches from Millie. The strain of staying off the sauce every other day was telling on both of us. I told him to drink more and come round less. The next week he looked radiant, swaying over her
cot with this smile on his face I don’t ever remember being directed at me. The only thing I really minded was his new habit of bursting into tears at the sight of her, setting Millie
off.

I breast-fed for nine months and stayed with her practically every minute of that time. Lolly was a star. She kept offering me nights out. I told her our ideas of a good night out were
different. I said my idea of a night out had nothing to do with men. She lost interest in the detail at that point and offered her services as a baby sitter. I accepted. I was expressing milk when
she arrived. I was excited about the prospect of getting dressed up, even though it was only a girls’ night. Lolly squirted some of the milk in her mouth.

‘Have you tasted this stuff? It’s disgusting.’

Then we had the five minute talk, starting with my mobile number, written headline-size beside the phone, moving on to Millie’s sleeping routine, and household hazards and how to avoid
them. She was wearing a scarf she pretended to hang herself with, sticking out her tongue and rolling her eyes. Millie was asleep by the time I left. Standing waiting for the lift I heard the creak
as Lolly prised the letter box open.