This would be so romantic if he wasn’t married and if they hadn’t asked me to have their baby. I knew why he was doing it—because we hadn’t spoken in over a week. He’d been round and he’d called, but I was always “unavailable.” I couldn’t speak to him after what Stephanie had asked, so had started to avoid them. He was forcing my hand, doing something that would get my attention.
I hauled open the window. “OK, I get the message,” I said. “Stop.”
The lights went on in the living room of the flat downstairs, suddenly drenching him in a yellow glow. He carried on singing, seemingly oblivious to the fact he was about to get seven types of hell kicked out of him by the body-building ex-bouncer-turned-Elvis-impersonator who lived below me. “Quick, get inside!” I hissed.
Mal continued to sing, that grin on his face. He wasn’t moving until I came downstairs to speak to him.
Jerking myself inside my flat again, I grabbed my keys from the side table and ran into the corridor. On the way out, I threw on my poncho to hide my pajama top and bralessness. Taking the carpeted communal stairs two at a time, I flung open the front door and ran into the night, to where he stood. All the lights in the four flats in our building were now on. Like a coordinated Mexican wave, the lights of flats and houses on our street blinked on one after the other; then people pulled aside curtains to see outside. It wouldn’t be too long before someone would be calling the police or coming out to shove Mal’s guitar down his throat.
In a book or film, all the people looking out would be won over by the romance of the situation: the women would be clasping their hands together and awwing at us, the men would be noting down the reaction such a grand gesture had elicited and would be planning something of their own. Mal and I would have a talk, we would kiss passionately, and my neighbors would applaud our love.
In real life, Mal would be arrested for disturbing the peace and my neighbors would gang up and impress upon me how much I really did want to move. As soon as possible.
“Stop now, stop,” I said, placing my hand between his fingers and the guitar strings. “Stop. I’m here, stop.” I liked living on this street.
He sang one more line and then lowered his guitar, resting the base on the pavement. “Are you avoiding me?” he asked, with his head on one side, determination in his eyes—we were going to “have it out.”
“What did you expect?” I replied, trying to keep my voice down. “How can I speak to you after …?”
“You only had to say no,” he said. “You didn’t have to blank me. Us. Steph’s convinced herself that she’s ruined things between us forever. And, you know, I don’t like it when we don’t speak. It doesn’t feel right.”
“How can I say no?” I flopped my arms up and down, all the despair, frustration and guilt I’d felt in the past week rushing to the surface of my mind, tumbling out in my words. “How can I sit in front of you or Stephanie and say, ‘I’m going to put an end to all your dreams of becoming parents’? How can I do that? How can I face you after doing that?”
“This isn’t the end of all our dreams. We’d find another way. We’d find someone else.”
“Yeah? Who?”
While I waited for him to answer, the lights around us were being extinguished. Now the disturbance had calmed down, people could return to their beds, their lives, their own complicated relationships.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’ll find someone. We can’t stop being friends because of it. That’d be stupid. You and me not talking. It’s inconceivable. Excuse the pun.”
“OK. But you can understand why I can’t do this, don’t you? I could never give away my baby. Not something that had been a part of me. Look how upset I get when goldfish die. I couldn’t … And how could I be friends with you, seeing a little boy or girl and knowing they were half mine? It’d drive me insane. I’d be … And what would we tell them? Do you think they’d understand why I gave them up? I couldn’t do that.”
“No, you couldn’t, could you?” he said. “We shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, no, I’m honored in many ways that you asked. It shows how much you think of me. And you know I’d do almost anything for you. But … No. I’m sorry, no.”
“All right. I can understand that. But don’t do that to me again, yeah? I can’t function without you around. Don’t ever shut me out again, Nova. I can’t cope with it.” His honesty, his blunt frankness was disarming. I remembered suddenly the time Stephanie had been in the hospital, the nights he spent at my flat, curled up inside, so scared and fragile. I knew he would have been brave for her, made her think her accident, whatever it was, was no big deal, but he would wilt once he was with me. He would come apart and stay that way until morning, when he would put himself back together and go back to his normal life. Few people saw the Mal I did. Not even, I guessed, Stephanie.
“Be my friend again, yeah? Always be my friend.”
“OK.” I nodded. “OK.”
He rested one of his hands on the back of my head and kissed my forehead, then my cheek. “OK. Thank you.” He kissed my other cheek. “OK, now, I can go home and I can sleep.”
“I can’t wait to be a dad,” he said.
“So that you can boss everyone around and tell everyone what to do and stay up really very late?” I asked.
“Yeah. And so that I can get to look after people. Like your dad. My dad doesn’t do that. But when I’m a dad, I can do that. How do you get to be a dad?”
I shrugged. “You have to get a baby.”
“Like the ones outside shops in prams?”
I shrugged again. “I think so. I asked Mum the other day and she pretended she didn’t hear me. And then I asked her all over again and she told me to ask Dad and he sent me to bed. Cordy laughed at me. So Dad sent her to bed, too.”
We fell silent as we thought about how to get a baby. “It doesn’t matter, I can get a baby,” Mal said. “And I’ll be a dad. You can be the mum if you want.”
I smiled at him, delighted.
“OK. You can be the dad and I’ll be the mum.”
I had to do it.
I woke up twelve days after Mal’s serenade and realized that I had to do it.
The same dream plagued me all night, every night. That memory reborn as a dream and I knew it was my conscience and my heart, ganging up together to tell me I had to do it.
Mal had been dealt so many bad hands in his life and he had played each one as well as he could, and he deserved to have a good hand now. He and Stephanie were incredibly happy, of that I was sure. He loved her, she loved him. I was convinced that the plethora of masks she wore were set aside with him and him only. No matter when she told him, he would not have walked away from her because she couldn’t have children, he wasn’t that sort of person. Once you were loved by Mal, you were loved by Mal forever. Even if he stopped liking you, he still loved you. His relationship with his father was testament to that. He hated Uncle Victor for everything he’d done, but loved him enough to wear his watch, to always go to the cemetery on Uncle Victor’s birthday, to never say a bad word about him to his mother. Mal deserved to be a father. To have the chance to do this.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must be like for Stephanie. To know the reason why you can’t have children is because of your biology. Because something in you was preventing you doing what millions of people across the world did every day without a second thought.
Why did I train to become a psychologist? To help people. This was a way to help, to ease suffering, and I wanted to ease suffering like the therapist Aunt Mer saw helped ease her troubles. These two people I loved were suffering, and this could transform their lives. It was only being pregnant. That was no big deal. Women did it all the time. Nine months and then I could give them the baby. They’d be happy, I’d feel great about myself because I had helped two people who were important to me. It was no big deal in the grand scheme of things. If you stood back, removed the emotions and thought about it, i
t wasn’t as big a deal as starting a war, for example.
I picked up the phone beside my bed, dialed while the feelings from the dream still fuzzed around me, and while I was at enough of a distance to know without a shadow of a doubt that I was doing the right thing.
“We have to have STD tests, and HIV tests,” I said when the phone was answered.
“Nova?” he said.
“And we have to sit down and talk it all through. What—and when—we’re going to tell our family, how we’re going to do this. We have to talk about everything.”
He was silent.
“And we have to work out what we’re going to tell him or her when they’re older, or if we’re going to tell them when they’re young so they always know and it’s not a big surprise.”
“OK.”
“And we have to … I don’t know, there’s more. But we need a legal contract or something.”
“Are you saying yes?” he asked, hope and excitement creeping into the peripherals of his voice.
“Um, I suppose I am, yes.”
For the first time in my life, I heard Mal burst into tears. He’d only cried a handful of times in all the years I’d known him, and those were silent, private tears that could be missed if you didn’t look at him. “Oh, God, thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much … I’m going to tell Stephanie now and then we’re going to come over. Is that OK?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll never know how much this means to us.”
I would know. And it would mean the world to me as well.
As I heard him snuffle back his tears, I knew, despite the unease and apprehension that being more awake brought, the dread that was crawling into the deepest recesses of my heart, I had done right.
This was Mal, after all. Of course I had done the right thing.
CHAPTER 20
I shut myself in the bathroom at work and cried.
The only time I’d ever been so happy was when I got married.
I bought her flowers.
I bought her chocolate.
I bought her a little bottle of folic acid.
When I saw her, I noticed all over again how striking she was. She glowed with inner beauty. She was her actions and she was beautiful because she was doing a beautiful thing.
We talked and talked and talked and she said I could come and see her any time I wanted, as long as she was at home. She said it was going to be my baby and that I could be as involved as I wanted.
She was going to change my life.
I didn’t like to think that it was going to change her life, too. But I’d take care of her. I’d make sure she was all right. She was doing something so wonderful for me, the least I could do was look after her in return.
CHAPTER 21
T hree minutes.
One hundred and eighty seconds. Your whole life could be altered in the same time it took to cook a soft-boiled egg. I never appreciated before the idea of living every second as though it was your last until I sat with a timer ticking away on the side table and the long white stick with two windows in front of me.
Waiting.
Waiting to see if my life was about to change. Forever. I hadn’t appreciated that concept before, either. This would mean the end of a lot of firsts. I would never be pregnant for the first time ever again if this was positive. I would never be able to check the boxes on forms that asked if I had children, without asking if that meant having given birth to them or having had them live with me. I would never be able to say to anyone who asked if I got pregnant again, “Oh yes, this is my first” and not feel as if I was lying, or without thinking back to this child.
After the tests, which Stephanie took as well so she wouldn’t feel left out, and drawing up a contract through some of Stephanie’s old work colleagues, I was provided with a sample. I wasn’t sure how they’d produced it, I never wanted to know how it had been produced, but it was waiting for me in a specimen jar, wrapped up in a brown paper bag, when I arrived at their house on the appointed day. Everything else was at my flat.
I found out from the copious amounts of research I had conducted that the specimen was best kept at body temperature, so had slipped it inside the strap of my bra and fixed my jacket over it before I went back to the waiting cab. Mal had offered to drive me home, but it was best that I do it alone. They stood on their doorstep as I left, her molded into his body, him with his arm around her shoulders, the pair of them looking like two parents sending their children off alone into the big wide world for the first time.
In the cab, I started to have visions of the taxi crashing and having to go to the hospital and them discovering I had a jar of semen tucked inside my clothing. I could just see my parents’ faces as the doctors explained, “Your daughter received secondary injuries from a specimen bottle that smashed against her right breast on impact. It seems the bottle contained a rather large amount of semen. Do you, Mr. and Mrs. Kumalisi, know why your daughter might have almost two liters of semen in her possession?” Of course there wasn’t that much of it, but the crash would have made the volume increase to an incredible amount.
Thankfully, I made it home in one piece and after running a bath, I—
I tried not to think about what I had done after that. I sent Mal a text saying, “Mission accomplished,” and then put it out of my mind. If I thought about it, all the doubts, the worries, the anxieties would resurface. I was doing the right thing, I knew that. But when I thought about what potentially was happening inside me, I got scared.
I wasn’t sure if other women who were trying for a baby ever experienced it, but the thought of it, separate to why I was doing it, was terrifying. I was leaping into a great unknown. I was changing my life and my body. Keith had already left me because of this; now it could be happening. Best to pretend it wasn’t happening until my period was late. Which it was—by two days. Which was why I had to buy the test.
I’d told Mal and Stephanie we shouldn’t talk about it, I’d let them know if I needed another sample, but they should put it out of their minds so that we could all get on with our lives as normally as possible until we got the result we wanted.
Ten seconds.
Ten seconds, then I would know. I would know if I was going to have to go through all this again. Or if I would be one step closer to doing this thing.
BRRRRRRIINNNNNNNNGGGG! sounded the alarm, and although I was waiting for it, I was still jolted. I stared at the stick. My hand shook as I reached out to pick it up. One line not pregnant. Two lines pregnant, I repeated in my head. One line not pregnant. Two lines pregnant.
One line another chance to get out of this, to change my mind.
Two lines … Two lines …
My breathing was shallow and fast as I looked down.
Two lines.
Pregnant.
I dropped the test, looked down at my stomach, looked but could not touch. Could not quite believe.
I’ve made a baby. I’m going to have a baby.
I couldn’t help but smile. We had done it. First time. One go.
I’m going to have a baby.
My eyes welled with tears. I was so overwhelmed suddenly with happiness. With joy. With an avalanche of such feelings gushing through me, I almost forgot. He or she wasn’t mine.
This baby belonged to someone else.
Stephanie was wearing her work mask.
She had her hair piled up on top of her head, her blond locks held in place with four brightly colored and patterned chopsticks. She wore a yellow Chinese tunic dress made from real silk—she wouldn’t wear it otherwise—and with a slit at the side that ended at the top of her thigh. She wore shimmery tights and yellow high heels that added more height to her frame. Her forearms, from wrists to elbows, were ringed with yellow and white bangles. For someone who worked in a fashion shop, I wondered why she didn’t realize that yellow did not suit her. At all. It didn’t suit most people with her pale coloring, and from all th
e pieces in the shop, it was the least successful one on her. But maybe that was the point. Show people that they could still look good even in clothes that didn’t suit them. For me, clothes often reflected your inner state. And if I didn’t know her, didn’t know that this was one of the many ways she disguised herself, I would say she was trying too hard.
The first time I met her, she had been trying too hard. All of Mal’s girlfriends had been worried about Mal’s and my relationship, but because of how enamored he was with her, I knew she’d be particularly hard to get on with. So I had not made any particular effort to dress up, not that I did anyway. I could tell instantly from the way her eyes swept over me when I met her that she took my lack of effort as a personal insult, because she had tried so hard to look effortlessly beautiful and I, it seemed to her, didn’t even think her worthy of slapping on a bit of mascara for. Having said that, if I had made an effort, the only way to make her happy would have been to get it spectacularly wrong so she could feel superior to me.
I navigated my way around the tightly packed rails, noting how truly “individual” the pieces were. And expensive. I also noted that in a few months, I would find it hard to move between these rails.
“Hi,” I said to the back of her head.
She turned around and grinned when she saw me. It was a genuine grin, one of many I had been treated to since I’d agreed to do this thing for them. “Hi!” she said, moving away from the copy of Vogue she had been poring over and coming to the counter. “I was going to call you later. See if you fancied some noodles.” She opened her arms and did a little spin. “Do you wonder why?”
“That’d be lovely. I’m not working today. Maybe we could ask Mal as well.”
“No need, he’ll come because I’ve told him to,” she joked.
“I like your thinking,” I said, reaching into my bag, my hands closing around the sandwich bag I had gently tucked in there before leaving my flat. It had been like carrying the crown jewels in a carrier bag. I had kept wanting to take it out and look at it. Make sure it was real. That it hadn’t evaporated.