He coughed, I remembered his little cough. “Actually we're not. We're living together.”
Now what the hell can you reply to that? I glared at him. Weedy Old Condom, eh? By A-levels he was the only one in the history group who hadn't got his leg over. Well, who'd admitted it. After all, Bayliss used to frequently show us a different pack-of-threes, but I'd always suspected he'd just rotated them. Devious bastard. He ended up a barrister.
The hall was filling. I gazed furtively at Condom. He'd not only impregnated, but illegally. There's something irritatingly highly sexed, isn't there, about unmarried couples. Compared to married ones.
As if on cue, Angie came in. She sat down, lowering her weight with a sigh.
“Meet the wife,” I said.
“I have a name.”
“This is Angie,” I said. “And this is Condom.”
“Edward Codron.” He leaned over to shake her hand.
They had one of those conversations about where are you living now? Condom, thank God, lived miles from us. How was he going to introduce his what's-her-name, when she arrived? If he didn't, how would I? Lover? Partner? Life-comrade? I resented him having to make me decide, just because he wanted to make some social bloody statement.
Come to think of it, he'd always done things thoroughly; doggedly carrying them through. He'd been a terrible swot. Nobody admitted they crammed for exams, except him. He didn't even drink. And there was I, numbed with hangover each assembly, Oh, Come Emmanuel hitting my head like a gong. The wickedest thing he ever played was chess. I thought: bet he drives one of those neutered little Citroëns, putter-putter, that I'm always getting stuck behind.
“What was he like at school?” asked Angie, indicating me.
“Terry? He wore winklepickers. He was a real tearaway.”
“No!” Angie gazed at me.
“Don't look so surprised!” I said.
“He smoked Players Untipped,” said Condom. “Quite a Jack the Lad.”
“Really?”
Her look annoyed me. “I went out with the birds from the art school,” I said. “Twiggy eyelashes…thick white lipstick…long thighs…”
“I painted on my lashes with charcoal,” said Angie. “I remember now.”
“You didn't.”
“You didn't know me then,” she said. “You don't know what I was like. You've never asked.”
“Course I have.”
“You haven't.” She paused, then smiled. “And just look at us now.”
“This is what you did it for,” I said.
“What?” said Condom.
“This,” I said. “Reproduction.”
Then a woman came into the room. She was a gigantic creature in one of those Indian tents that liberated fat women wear. She started to chat to us, and introduced the plastic thing which she called, with a simper, Pauline the Pelvis. Everyone sat in solemn silence.
I remembered our biology classes, fifteen years ago.… The raucous giggles, our teacher breaking down. But we were older now: we'd put our matchboxes behind us. Today nobody laughed.
In fact Angie was holding my hand - there, in front of everybody. She'd called this an important moment for us both. I watched Pauline the Pelvis being tilted back and forward, and thought of all the pelvises, or pelvi, I must have known, unbeknownst to me.
By now the tent was burbling on about relationships, and how the birth process was about bonding, and opening up to each other. I thought: they've opened. I pictured, with longing, a pint. A bag of dry-roasted peanuts. Nobody talks about relationships in pubs.
“Your hand's clammy.” Angie whispered.
“S'not mine, it's yours.”
“Terry, don't be tense.”
It was then that they opened the cupboard and started taking out the cushions.
“You sure they're for us as well?” I hissed. “The blokes?”
“Of course. That's the point.”
“Can't we just watch?”
It was at that moment, when my mouth had opened for the next sentence, that the door opened and Sue walked in.
I froze. It was her; it was Sue. Her blonde hair was curly now; her smock billowed in the breeze from the fan and she was walking straight towards me.
“Ouch!” whispered Angie. “You're hurting.”
I let go her hand.
Sue hurried over.
“Darling,” she whispered to Condom, “Have I missed a lot?”
Her face looked scrubbed; her skin bleached and freckly. Those light-blue eyes.…She looked cleaner, and older, and even more beautiful.
She sat down beside me, hip to hip. You know the saying: his bowels turned to water? Mine felt like that. At any moment she would recognise me. She mustn't.
Sue, of all girls. Sue. I kept my face turned away.
I was gazing straight into Angie's eyes. “What's the matter?” she whispered.
“Nothing.”
“We'll all be doing it together. You needn't be worried.”
“Me, worried?”
Chairs scraped as everybody stood up. I tried to escape but Condom tapped my shoulder.
“This is Susan,” he said.
She said, “Hello,” before she met my eye. Then she said, “Good grief.”
Condom said, “You knew each other?”
She paused. “Briefly. Slightly.”
“Terry was just talking about girls from the art school.” He turned to her. “But you've never mentioned him.”
She smiled. “We hardly knew each other.”
My shirt was sticking to my armpits. Now we were all walking over to the cushions. I tried to nudge Angie towards the far corner but Sue and Condom were behind us, and when we were told to lie down we all lay down together. Angie one side of me; Sue the other.
The Indian tent picked its way amongst us, smiling down.
“First we have to relax. I know this may seem strange to some of you.…We'll be doing First Stage breathing…Deep breaths, one, two, three…”
In the corner of my eye I could see the dome of Sue's belly. Stretched beside me, she was breathing heavily, in and out, as instructed. I could smell her perfume.
Sue and me, lying beside the gas fire. I'd got the living breathing Sue in my arms. Her suede mini-skirt up around her waist…her leg wrapped around me.…And my hand sliding down through the elastic waistband of her tights…We were rolling over, bumping against the fender.…
“OK? Relaxed? She's fully dilated by now, and moving into the second stage of labour.…Time for the shallow pants.”
Sue, panting in my ear.…The rasp of her tights as she re-arranged her limbs.…She'd done this before…After all, she was an art school girl.…
“Can I?” My voice was husky; I had to clear my throat. “Can I?”
I squeezed my eyes tight shut. Around me, rising and falling, they were panting en masse.
“Can I?”
“Yes yes!”
But could I?
“The contractions are coming on stronger now, keep panting, with each wave….Each wave growing more and more powerful.…”
Crouched over myself, I was lumbering to my feet to switch off the light.…Behind me she lay waiting, glowing in the fire-light.…I was fumbling for my wallet.
A whisper. “Can I help?”
“Help by rubbing,” said the voice. “Rubbing her back, Dads.…Help by breathing with her, breathing her through.…Now she needs your support.…”
Crouched there, my trousers round my ankles, I kept my back to her. Silence. I could hear her breathing behind me, waiting.
Stealthy, crackling sounds. My hands big and useless as sausages. And there it lay, dwindled.…
I sat, hunched like a miser over my humiliating little offering.
“She's needing reassurance now, Dads. The contractions are much, much stronger….”
“You all right?” she asked.
Untruthfully, I nodded.
She put her arms around me, “You've done this before?”
/>
A pause. Then, untruthfully, I nodded again.
She set to work, tender and deft. Tenderly she tried, with her warm hands.
…No bloody good.
All those matchboxes… All those sessions in our arctic toilet…. And in my creaking bed, through the wall the answering scrape-scrape of my sister's hamster going round its wheel. And when it came to it…
“Terry.”
A hand touched my arm. I jerked upright. Angie was sitting up; so were the others. I heard grunts as the women got to their feet. Angie dusted down my suit, and smiled. “You did it marvellously.…Sounded as if you were having the baby not me!” She paused. “Wasn't so bad, was it?”
Behind my head I heard Sue murmuring to Condom. Was she telling him all about it now? Or would she save it till later, for the togetherness time on their corduroy sag-bags? Some things are best left unsaid…But you can bet they'd talk this through. Laugh it through, more like.
It's the film now,” Angie said. “Tamsin is Born.” She paused. “Where are you going?”
“I'll wait in the pub.”
She pulled me back. “Terry, don't feel threatened. I've seen it before….It's terrifically moving.”
“Well, I've got this terrific thirst.”
“Darling - look, it's no reflection on your masculinity or anything if you find it a bit overwhelming. Nobody will mind.”
“I'll faint,” I said. “I'm off.”
But just then the lights were extinguished and it was too late. Grey numbers wobbled on the screen, and I was trapped. The film began, in startling Technicolour.
And when tiny, red Tamsin was born, shall I tell you what happened?
Condom passed out. He did. No kidding. There was this crash, as his chair tipped over.
Later, in the pub I said, “Fancy old Condom fainting.”
Angie gazed at me over her orange juice. “You're smiling.”
“I'm not.”
“Why? Why this macho power-game? This stupid competitiveness? What are you afraid of?”
I shrugged genially. I was well into my second pint; Jesus, it tasted good. I lit my third fag, I felt more genial altogether. She couldn't get at me now.
Then she spoilt it. She sighed and said, “Your nice friend, what's-his-name?”
“Condom.”
“Edward. He doesn't behave like that.” She gazed at me. Around my skull, the band tightened.
“Behave like what?”
“Behave as if he's frightened of failing.” She paused then she said, “Real men don't.”
END
Changing Babies
Christmas was coming and nothing was the same as it had been last year. Being small doesn't mean you don't notice things….
Duncan was only little, but he noticed more than they thought. He knew, for instance, when the phone rang and it was his dad on the other end, because his mother always got out her cigarettes. She only smoked when his dad phoned up.
He knew Christmas was coming, but everybody knew that. In the shops, tinsel was strewn over microwave cookers. There was a crib at school, with a black baby in it. He had already opened two doors in his Advent calendar. Inside the first door was a bike and inside the second was a Walkman. 'My God' chortled his mother. 'It'll be video recorders next! The Bethlehem Shopping Experience! No baby Jesus at the end, just a credit-card hotline!'
No Jesus! There had to be a baby; it was Christmas. He wanted to open the last door, just to make sure, but he didn't dare.
It was his granny who told him the Christmas story. She said that the birth of Jesus was a miracle, and that Joseph wasn't his real father. God was. Sometimes she took Duncan to church. She went up to the altar to eat God's body. Once, when they came home for lunch, she tried to make him do it too. 'Come on,' she said. 'Eat it up…lovely cod.'
Apart from that moment of alarm he liked being with his granny. She watched TV with him, sitting on the sofa; she wasn't always doing something else. Nowadays she came to his house a lot, to babysit. Before he went to bed, she made him say his prayers. His mum didn't pray; she did exercises. Once he went into her bedroom and she was kneeling down. He thought she was praying for his dad to come home but she said she was tightening her stomach muscles. He often got things wrong; there were so many big, tiring adjustments he had to make. Anyway, she didn't want his dad back. She was always on the phone to her friends. 'He's so bloody self-absorbed. It would take a miracle to change him.' But Christmas was a time of miracles, wasn't it?
His dad had moved into a flat with a metal thing on the door which his voice squawked through. Duncan visited him twice a week. If it wasn't raining they went to the zoo. Duncan knew every corner of the zoo, even the places hardly anyone went, like the cages where boring brown birds stayed hidden. Years later, when he was a grown man, words like 'tapir' and 'aardvark' always made his sad.
Christmas was getting nearer. He had opened seven doors on his Advent calendar now. He went shopping with his dad and they bought a very small Christmas tree. Motorbikes leant against the pavement, chattering to themselves. But Duncan kept quiet. He wanted to ask his dad if he was coming back for Christmas but he didn't dare. Instead he searched the pavement for rubber bands the postman had dropped.
They stood at the bus stop. When he was with his dad they were always waiting for things. For a waitress to come, when they sat in a café. For the bus, because his dad didn't have the car.
'At school,' Duncan said, 'we've got a black baby Jesus. Last Christmas there was a pink one.' He was suddenly conscious of the stretch of time, since a year had passed, and how old he was to remember. What had happened to the pink baby? Had they thrown it away? But it was supposed to be Jesus.
His dad rubbed Duncan's hands. 'Bloody buses,' he said. 'Where's your gloves?'
'I took them out.' They had been threaded through his coat-sleeves, on elastic. 'I'm not a baby,' he said.
The bus came at last. They got out at the late-night supermarket. It was called Payless but his dad called it Paymore. They bought some Jaffa Cakes. Back in the flat the phone was ringing. It wasn't his mother; his dad didn't turn his back and lower his voice. He spoke quite normally.
'….they've had to re-edit the whole damn thing,' he said. 'Frank's incensed.'
Frankincense! The word billowed out, magically.
His father was still talking. '…I'd better bring it round myself,' he said, ' by hand.…'
Duncan had sucked the chocolate off his Jaffa Cake. He dozed on the sofa. His father, wearing a flowing robe, knocked on the door on Christmas Day. He would come and visit, carrying gold and frankincense and the other thing. Duncan felt his father gently pulling the collection of rubber bands off his wrist.
The next morning he was back home. He opened the eighth door on his Advent calendar. A doll - ugh! After lunch his mother took him swimming. She had threaded the gloves back through his coat-sleeves but he refused to put them on; they flopped at his wrists. 'Next stop, hooliganism!' she said, whatever that was. 'Glue-sniffing. Truancy. It's all my fault!'
At the pool they had another struggle with his water wings. He said he was too old for them now. She liked him wearing them because it meant he could bob around in the water while she swam to the deep bit, up and down for miles. She said she had to do a unit of exercise a day, it was part of her Shape-Up Plan.
He bobbed up and down in the water. A sticking plaster floated nearby. He like collecting sticking plasters and lining them up on the edge of the pool. In fact he liked everything about the pool. When he came with his parents they used to laugh together and splash each other. There was a shallow, baby's bit and an elephant slide. In the deeper bit a whistle blew and the waves started, which was thrilling. He liked wearing the rubber band with the locker key on it, this made him feel important. There was a machine where you could buy crisps: the bag swung like a monkey along the bar and dropped into the chute. He loved going there. That was why it was so terrible, what happened.
After his mother
had swum her unit they got out. She wrapped him in a towel and he watched her as she stood under the shower, rubbing her head with shampoo. She sang, much too loudly: 'I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair!' She didn't mind people seeing her bare, either; she was always striding around the changing rooms, wobble-wobble. His Dad did too; everything swinging about. When his parents were together, and they all came to the swimming pool, Duncan would run from the men's cubicles to the ladies' ones, depending on which parent was being the least embarrassing. But nowadays he had to stay in one place.
Anyway, this particular day he had got dressed. His mother was drying her hair. In the corner of the changing room he saw something he hadn't seen before: it was a big red plastic thing, on legs like a crib. He nudged his mum and pointed.
'What's that for?' he shouted.
She switched off the drier. 'Oh, it's for changing babies,' she said, and she switched on the drier again.
That night his mum went out and his granny came to babysit. She tut-tutted around the house, as usual. She put all his mum's empty wine bottles in plastic bags and dumped them outside the front door. They she sat with him while he ate his supper. 'You've been very quiet,' she said. 'I know what you're thinking about! All the things you'd like for Christmas!'
Later she washed up. Usually the clatter comforted him; granny putting things in order. Tonight it didn't work. He was thinking about the plastic crib. Which babies did it change? Any baby that climbed into it? If his mother put him there, what would happen? At school they had taken away the old baby and put in another one. His mother was always changing things. Granny's presents, for instance. Granny gave her clothes and she took them back to Harvey Nichols. 'Eek! Who does she want me to look like - Judith Chalmers?' She would come home with something completely different.
His head spun. When granny was getting him ready for bed he said: 'Tell me about Jesus in the manger again.'
'I'd read it to you if I could find a Bible,' she said. She looked through the bookshelves, clicking her tongue. 'The Female Underclass,' she said. ‘Aggression and Gender. No Bible, honestly! My own daughter!'
Undressing him, she told him the story. He squeezed his eyes shut. 'Virgin Mary….' he heard. '…wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.…'