I closed my eyes to stop the tears from falling and shook my head very, very gently, breathing out.
‘What if I don’t want to have a baby?’ I formed the words very carefully, smoothing out the telltale bumps in my voice.
‘Now?’ he asked. ‘Or ever?’
I still hadn’t been to see Dr Laura, I didn’t know what she was going to tell me, but there, in that moment, it didn’t matter what she was going to say. All that mattered was what Alex would say. If there was no baby, if there was never a baby, would I be enough?
I couldn’t say anything so I just shrugged, forcing myself to open my eyes and look up at him through heavy wet lashes. All the fight was gone from him. He looked so sad. Without warning, he shoved the cot away from him, sending it crashing into the bed, and stormed off out of the bedroom, striding across the showroom floor. As I watched him go, I noticed everyone around us was frozen like waxworks, eyes trained on the show, until the second he passed by them and they suddenly snapped back to life. No one made eye contact with me – it seemed they had all taken a keen interest in the contents of their own giant yellow shopping bags. Abandoning my haul, I shuffled off the edge of the bed, climbed over the broken cot and headed straight for the outside world. Ikea really did terrible things to people.
‘I just wanted to have a nice Christmas,’ I shouted as he left. ‘Is that too much to ask?’
My phone vibrated in the bottom of my handbag as I reached the entrance. Waiting for someone to activate the automatic door from the outside, I ran out into the cold, happy to feel air that didn’t come through an air-conditioning system. It was freezing but it was sunny and I turned my face up to the sky, trying to soak in some vitamin D and convince myself that the world was still turning. With a deep breath and a brave face, I pulled my phone out, expecting to see Alex’s name in big white letters. Instead it was Louisa. Blindly, I pressed the green answer button and praised her psychic abilities.
‘What do you mean you’ve dropped the tiniest of bollocks?’ she demanded. ‘What have you done now?’
‘How did you know?’ I asked, clearing my throat and ignoring a man holding three hot dogs. Three. At once. Bastard.
‘Because you sent me a text saying that you had dropped the tiniest of bollocks?’ she said, the line crackly with a wind that wasn’t present in Red Hook, Brooklyn. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Ohhhh.’ I really was outdoing myself today. ‘Yeah. That. Um, it’s probably nothing but I might have accidentally told my mum that you’re here. But she promised she wouldn’t say anything. Sort of.’
‘You did what?’
Louisa didn’t sound that pleased.
‘It just came out,’ I offered, my row with Alex still whirling around my head. All I could think was that I needed to stand under a shower for a really long time. ‘Listen, can I come over? I’ll fix it, I promise.’
‘Shouldn’t you be doing house-moving things?’ she asked with a resigned sigh. ‘Because I think you’ve probably done enough already.’
‘She wants to come over? Tell her to come over!’ I heard Jenny shout to Louisa. ‘He’s gonna be here soon. Tell her to bring Alex.’
‘Who’s going to be there soon?’ I asked, twisting my wedding and engagement rings with my thumb at the sound of his name. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing that’s going to make your day any better,’ Louisa replied.
‘I don’t think anything could make it any worse,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’
Hanging up, I stared at my phone for just a second and then turned towards the car park, squinting to see our van. It was still there, Alex must still be inside. Leaving it any longer would just make things more difficult, I decided, and so I took it upon myself to be the bigger person and dialled his number. My heart thudded against my ribs when the call connected but with each unanswered ring it fell a little, until I was sure I felt it hit the bottom of my stomach when my call finally went through to his never-checked voicemail. If I learned one thing about Alex in the time that we’d been together, it was that when he was seriously upset, he needed to be left alone. Of course, for the most part I’d learned this through the process of other people upsetting him. Knowing I was the reason for the look on his face when he had walked off was almost too much to bear. Maybe if I gave him a while to cool off, took myself to Jenny’s while he calmed down, we could talk properly in a while. When I’d had a lot of caffeine and a shower and time to think about how to explain everything I hadn’t had a chance to explain in the past seven days.
‘You win this round, Ikea,’ I said, staring up at the giant yellow and blue sign. ‘You can stick your hot dogs up your arse.’
The man beside me looked up sharply, half a hot dog sticking out of his mouth. I frowned and hung up the phone.
‘Oh, not you.’ I stood up and waved at a waiting taxi. ‘Please enjoy your lunch.’
But it didn’t look like he was much in the mood for hot dogs anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Even though I knew the right thing to do was to leave Alex alone, every second of the cab ride to Jenny’s was torture. I stared at my phone screen, refreshed my email every minute and started writing about fifteen different texts but it was all for nothing. Soon an hour had passed without a word and I had a horribly familiar feeling. We’d only ever had one row this bad, two years ago, almost to the day, and somehow that time we’d ended up getting engaged. Of course, it wasn’t because we were both so mature and openly communicative that we were able to sort ourselves out. Oh no. Our friends had more or less knocked our heads together until we saw sense and it was with an incredibly forced sense of optimism that I arrived at my old Manhattan apartment, hoping against hope that they would be able to do the same thing again.
‘Sorry it took so long. The bridge was a nightmare.’ I let myself in without knocking and shrugged off my coat. ‘I need coffee so badly. I really, really need to talk to you.’
‘Hello, sunshine. You look like shite.’
I stopped in the living room doorway, blinked twice and felt my forehead fold into a frown.
‘James,’ I said, both as a ‘hello’ and a ‘what the hell are you doing here?’
‘Angela,’ he grinned.
James and Jenny weren’t close. In fact, they barely knew each other. We’d hung out a few times and they’d chatted a little at my wedding but as far as I was aware, they weren’t exactly brunch buddies. So what was he doing perched on her windowsill drinking a cup of tea?
‘There’s coffee in the pot.’ Jenny, all bright eyes and bushy ponytail, sat on the armchair closest to James, positively vibrating with excitement. She had never been very good at keeping her mouth shut and she clearly had something she wanted to say. ‘Come sit down.’
‘Where’s Lou?’ I asked, backing slowly towards the kitchen counter, pulling my favourite mug out of the cupboard and filling it to the brim, only leaving room for enough sugar to put me in a diabetic coma.
‘I’m in here,’ she shouted from what used to be my bedroom. ‘I’m just putting Grace down for her nap. Can you please tell me exactly what you said to your mother?’
‘As soon as someone tells me exactly what’s going on here.’ I leaned down to the too-full mug to slurp my coffee before I even tried to pick it up. ‘James?’
‘Uh, didn’t you say you really needed to talk?’ Jenny replied before he could. ‘And yeah, how come you look like you slept in the park last night?’
‘Long story short,’ I began. I could still feel my brows knitting together. Hopefully Sadie had bought me Botox vouchers for Christmas. Again. ‘Work Christmas party last night, Jesse hit on me in the cab home, I got hammered, we had to move this morning and me and Alex just had a screaming row about having a baby in Ikea.’
‘Alex wanted to have a baby in Ikea?’ James placed his own coffee mug on the windowsill beside his huge thigh, only to have said thigh slapped by Jenny. ‘Utter filth.’
‘Bad boy,’ she scolded. ‘Yo
u know what she means.’
‘And how does that play into you telling your mother that I’m in New York?’ Louisa emerged from the bedroom, hands on hips, long blonde hair curling around her shoulders. I noticed the dark circles that had been so prominent when she arrived on my doorstep were all but gone and her cheeks were glowing and pink. In fact, she just looked great in general. They all did. I felt like I’d arrived on the set of a makeover show, two hours too late. They were the ‘after’ shot, I was the ‘before’. Or more like the ‘never would be’.
‘She called me and I wasn’t thinking straight and she caught me off guard and she isn’t going to say anything.’ I shook my head, careful not to shake my coffee. ‘I’m sorry. It was a massive cock-up.’
‘Yes, it was.’ Lou didn’t move. ‘I can’t believe you’ve put me in this position.’
‘It’s not like I was planning on it,’ I replied, really quite keen to find out what was going on with the odd couple over by the window. ‘And being brutally honest, I wasn’t the one who put you on the plane. You really do have to call him.’
‘She doesn’t have to do anything,’ Jenny interrupted, her hand still on James’s knee and now safely covered by one of his own. ‘We’ve told her she can stay as long as she likes.’
‘We?’ I turned back to stare at the lovebirds. If I didn’t know better … ‘What is going on? Have you hit your head or something? You do know you’re gay, yeah? And that she’s a girl?’
‘Oh, Angie.’ Jenny stood up and clasped James’s fingers through her own. ‘Of course he knows I’m a girl. How else would I have his baby?’
Right. Of course. Made perfect sense.
‘Have I actually gone mad?’ I asked everyone in the room. ‘I mean, seriously, have I lost it? Because if not, it would seem that everyone else alive has and that just seems quite unlikely.’
‘I told you I wanted to start a family.’ James looked far too relaxed for someone who had just dropped a baby bomb. ‘And when you said Jenny wanted to have a baby, it all made sense. So I called her after the party, we went for lunch yesterday and I made a proposal.’
‘You’re getting married?’ I squeaked. ‘Because that worked out so well for Tom Cruise?’
‘Not that kind of proposal,’ he tutted. ‘A co-parenting proposal. And Jenny said yes.’
‘Is Tom Cruise gay?’ Louisa asked from across the room. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Of course he isn’t,’ James said with a theatrical wink. ‘What planet have you been living on?’
‘Isn’t it perfect, Angie?’ Jenny gushed, her excitement spilling over into a little hop. ‘James is going to move into the city so he can be involved right through the pregnancy.’
‘And I already have a real estate agent looking for townhouses,’ James added. ‘Even a couple in Brooklyn.’
‘But don’t get your hopes up,’ Jenny warned me. ‘I kind of have my hopes set on the Village, maybe near Erin.’
‘Wherever the best schools are,’ James replied in a see-how-serious-I’m-taking-this voice. ‘Only the very best for our baby.’
It was all too much. Completely and utterly overloaded, I edged my way to the arm of the sofa and sat down, drinking my coffee in silence. It would have been wonderful news, Jenny had the man she’d always dreamed of – handsome, intelligent, rich and desperate to give her a family. Except he loved cock every bit as much as she did.
‘I know you weren’t one hundred per cent behind this,’ Jenny said, letting go of her baby daddy’s hand and coming over to the sofa. ‘But that was before James. This really is what I want, Angie. And uh, we were talking about it before you got here, there’s something else.’
‘Can I?’ James jumped up, all six feet something of him blocking the bright, bitter sunshine out of my eyes. ‘Can I ask her?’
Jenny nodded and took hold of my non-coffee-holding hand.
‘We want you to be the godmother.’ James pushed his way onto the sofa behind me and threw his arms around my neck. ‘And Alex to be the godfather.’
And that was when I burst into tears.
‘Oh lord, Ange, can you not?’ Lou ran to pull the bedroom door to as gently as possible. ‘If Grace hears you, she’ll start and then I’ll never get her to sleep.’
‘I’m. Sorry,’ I choked, letting James take my coffee away and Jenny rub my back. Every part of my body was giving up on me. There was nothing to do but sob. I could feel my common sense giving up and packing its bags too. I mean really, what was the point? ‘This isn’t OK.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ Jenny soothed, holding me close while James patted the top of my head. ‘It’s fine. You’re emotional, that’s fine. Maybe we should have waited to tell you. I’m sorry, I’m just so excited. And you know you and Alex will work this all out. You always do.’
‘I’m not sorry for crying.’ I wriggled out of her arms and shook my head away from James like an awkward pony. ‘I mean this, this isn’t OK.’
Apparently pointing manically at the two of them wasn’t clear enough.
‘You can’t have a baby with James,’ I wailed. ‘You don’t know him, you don’t love him. You cannot have a baby.’
‘Do we really have to go through this again?’ I recognised Jenny’s expression. It was the same one she pulled whenever she had already made up her mind but knew that she was making a mistake. I’d seen it a couple of times this week but not on Jenny, on Grace. It was the same expression she made when she reached for a biscuit when she’d already been told no. ‘If you can’t be happy for me, Angie …’
‘It’s just like that time you wanted that Hermès Birkin.’ I was clutching at straws but I had to try to explain what I meant in a language she would understand. ‘Remember? You were saving and saving and you got halfway and then you couldn’t be arsed to save anymore so you bought a knock-off and pissed all the money away. But you weren’t happy with the knock-off, not really. You still really wanted that Birkin.’
‘Do you have a point you’re trying to get to?’ she asked, clearly making an effort to control her temper.
‘This baby idea, it’s a knock-off.’ I stood up and pulled my hair into a ponytail, securing it with an elastic band I pulled off a pile of paperback books on the coffee table. ‘It isn’t what you really want but it’ll do. For now.’
‘So you tell me, Professor Angela,’ Jenny began, her voice saturated with sarcasm. She didn’t like it when other people psych 101-d her. ‘What exactly is it that I really want?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, grabbing the stack of self-help books. ‘The Five Love Languages, Eight Weeks to Everlasting, Getting the Love You Deserve. What do you think?’
‘Oh, I forgot, it’s so easy to find a relationship,’ she snapped back, standing up, inches away from my face. ‘All a girl needs to do is hop over the pond, grab ahold of the first guy she meets and then cry and mope when he tells her he wants to have a baby.’
‘That’s not how it was at all,’ I replied, refusing to budge. ‘And you know it wasn’t.’
‘Oh sure,’ she said with a sour smile. ‘Alex was the second guy, right?’
‘Maybe you wouldn’t have such a hard time finding a boyfriend if you hadn’t wasted so long knocking off a married man,’ I suggested. ‘Heard anything from Jeff lately?’
‘Please can you stop arguing,’ Louisa begged us. ‘You’re both saying things you don’t mean and you’re going to wake Grace.’
‘We wouldn’t be able to wake her if she was in England, where she lives,’ I pointed out. ‘Would we?’
‘Don’t you start on me.’ She stepped away from the door, her voice hushed but just as serious as mine or Jenny’s. ‘You’re totally out of order and you know it. You need to calm down.’
‘And you need to call your bloody husband,’ I shouted at Lou before turning to Jenny. ‘And you need to fucking grow up. A baby isn’t a toy, it’s not this season’s accessory. What are you going to do when he gets bored of playing daddy and you’re a
ll on your own with a baby and no boyfriend?’
‘Hey.’ James started to speak but was silenced by three knife-like stares. ‘All right, never mind me.’
‘Jenny’s not asking you for anything,’ Louisa said, practically running to Jenny’s side. ‘I haven’t asked you for anything. We just wanted you to be a friend.’
‘And instead we got a selfish asshole,’ Jenny added. ‘What a fucking surprise. It’s all about you.’
‘So I’m not allowed to have problems because I’m married?’ I asked the two girls. James was still sat on the arm of the sofa but was staying absolutely silent. ‘Because that makes my problems less valid than yours?’
‘Your problems aren’t problems,’ Jenny spat. ‘In fact, the only problem that you have is yourself. Maybe that’s my problem too. And Lou Lou’s. And Alex’s.’
‘Fine.’ I threw the stack of books in my arms onto the hardwood floor with a clatter. On cue, Grace started wailing in the bedroom. ‘I’ll just get out of your way and then you won’t have a problem in the world.’
‘Good!’ Jenny shouted.
‘Good!’ I shouted back, stomping out of the apartment and slamming the front door.
Well, that went well.
It was bitter on the street but I was so angry I could barely feel anything. People were drifting up and down Lexington, most of them carrying shopping bags, all of them staring at their feet or their phones in a hurry to get somewhere. Everyone had somewhere to go except for me. I leaned against the building, my first real home in New York City, and stared blindly, trying to calm myself down. I could sit in Scotty’s Diner for a while but I couldn’t face the thought of food, coffee or the company that it would offer. I hadn’t lived in this neighbourhood for two years and I still couldn’t walk through the doors without getting twenty questions. There was the W hotel bar nearby but I wasn’t dressed for it. I wasn’t really dressed for anything but lying face down on the sofa and waiting for my mum to make it all better. Which just went to show you how dire things had become.