Three Wise Men, page 18
Gloria wants to bolt for the kitchen but manages to lift one leg and then the other at a normal pace. She holds the kettle under the tap: Oh God oh God oh God, not again.
They have a deal: hostilities suspended for three IVF attempts, animosities pushed to one side while the common goal is pursued. Except it’s not a common goal, it seems to be only her chasing it, and this is too hard to manage on her own. It needs two people working at it: one to undergo the treatment and the other to hold your hand and promise you a happy ever after. It doesn’t have to be true, just say the words and ease you past the next injection, the next scan.
Mick feels excluded: her body, her treatment, her fixation. ‘You’re doing this for you,’ he accused her last week.
‘I’m doing it for us,’ she pleaded.
‘You’re impossible to live with,’ he accused.
‘My hormones are being tinkered with, be patient with me,’ she pleaded.
‘You don’t even want me to come to the hospital with you,’ he accused.
‘Of course I do, but I know it isn’t easy for you to manage time off work and I don’t mind going on my own,’ she pleaded.
‘You only came back to me for a baby,’ he accused.
She fell silent.
In a few days’ time they’ll be ready for a second egg extraction. Already Gloria can feel her ovaries swell, her stomach is slightly distended and she’s uncomfortable in trousers. She tries to blot out the first failure, the crushing disappointment when she bled the night before she was due for a pregnancy test.
‘Focus, focus, focus,’ she chants, leaning against the worktop. The kettle has long since boiled but she makes no move to spoon granules into the waiting mugs. She can’t let herself think about the first failure when she’s in the middle of a second attempt. But Gloria is unable to suppress the memory, it floods back.
The anaesthetist has crinkly eyes, they smile at me above his green mask as he slaps my hand repeatedly, searching for a vein. It seems odd to feel a wave of affection for a man who’s walloping the back of your hand. He’s the only one in the operating theatre I don’t know. The doctor and nurse at the bottom of the table are both familiar from my regular checks in the past month. I’m flat on my back, knees apart, but they chat as though we’re all lining up in a supermarket queue.
‘Mick’s outside waiting for you,’ says the nurse. ‘He seems worried about his parking meter but I told him we wouldn’t be long.’
It’s Jackie, my favourite, she has a tortoiseshell kitten called China Blue and we talk about cats whenever I come for scanning and to give blood.
‘Give’ is a misnomer – they prise it from my reluctant veins. The blood-letting is the part I hate most, they syringe it out of me at every appointment. I know they need it to store my eggs in, I don’t begrudge it for the babies, but I still cringe as it’s taken.
‘I’m such a coward,’ I winced apologetically once as a nurse approached with a needle.
‘Cowards don’t have IVF treatment,’ she replied.
‘They do, they just whinge about it more.’
She laughed and plunged the needle in, while I closed my eyes and concentrated on not pulling away.
The crinkly-eyed anaesthetist has found his vein and now he’s stroking my arm … the comfort of strangers. Did he see my bottom in this unbelievably silly open-backed hospital gown as I climbed on to the trolley, I wonder, as I float off. It’s only an Omagh derriere, not a surgically enhanced London one.
It feels like seconds later when I’m back with Mick, a cup of sugary tea in my hand.
‘I like this, put more sugar in it,’ I instruct him muzzily.
He’s excited. ‘They extracted thirteen eggs, Gloria, that’s three more than average. The medics seem very pleased with you. You should’ve seen where I had to masturbate while they were working on you – it’s just a little room with no facilities. They offered me a magazine for “stimulation”, but I said no, it didn’t seem right. It was bleak in there I can tell you.’
What were you expecting – dancing girls?
My brain asks the question but my tongue can’t help out with the verbalising.
In the next cubicle I hear a woman being dressed by a man. Rustle, rustle, murmur, murmur. The man ends each sentence with ‘darling’. She was the first one into the operating theatre, there are four of us up for extraction today. It’s like being at an upside-down dentist’s.
Jackie’s head materialises through the curtains.
‘Knock knock,’ she says.
‘Who’s there?’ I answer.
‘Only me.’
‘Call that a punchline?’ I complain.
‘How’s this for a punchline: Gloria, you can go home as soon as you’ve finished your tea. Take it easy for the next two days and we’ll see you back on Wednesday for the egg replacement, provided everything goes according to plan. Ring up tomorrow to check that fertilisation has taken place.’
‘You mean it mightn’t?’ I’m alarmed.
‘It probably will,’ she soothes. ‘Mick provided his sample while you were in the operating theatre, I’m sure everything will be hunky dory.’
The head disappears.
‘David Bowie had an album called that,’ I tell Mick.
He looks at me anxiously.
‘Hunky Dory.’
‘You’re rambling, Glo, it’s the anaesthetic. Finish your tea and we’ll get you home to bed.’
‘A hunk a hunk a burning love,’ I sing in a squeaky voice.
Mick removes the teacup from my hand and pulls a shirt over my head.
‘Did you say you were making a sandwich?’ Mick’s voice, calling from the living room, jolts Gloria from past to present.
‘Coming right up,’ she shouts back and opens the fridge door in search of ham, the only sandwich filling Mick tolerates. The eggs catch her eye and she’s back with the thirteen specks of eggs marked McDermott in a laboratory of the Rotunda hospital. That was four months ago. Seven of them fertilised but they only needed three, that’s as many as the experts return to the womb.
It’s a different doctor replacing the eggs, only now they’re forty-eight hours old and embryos; no anaesthetist is needed this time.
‘They’re good quality embryos,’ says Jackie, making conversation.
I’m relieved, although until this second I had no idea that embryos were graded like fruit and vegetables.
The fertilising doctor doesn’t speak much, she’s concentrating on my vagina. Mick is waiting outside with his newspaper.
‘There,’ says the doctor. ‘Lie quietly for twenty minutes and then you can go home.’
‘Is that it?’ I’m astonished.
‘It only takes a few minutes,’ smiles the doctor, unpeeling her rubber gloves.
‘We’ll send Mick in to you,’ Jackie tells me. ‘Three good-quality embryos,’ she beams at him.
He throws her a look of incomprehension, as though she’s just announced: ‘The mother ship is waiting, we must leave your planet now, earthling.’
‘Tell me when twenty minutes is up,’ I order, to give him something to do. He enjoys chores like that, he checks his watch and nods.
‘So you’re pregnant now,’ he says when we’re alone.
‘Pregnant? Not quite, I just have three embryos inside me. We won’t know if I’m pregnant for a couple of weeks.’
He virtually carries me to the car, clips me into the seatbelt and drives along in third gear to the fury of every car behind us.
‘Dublin drivers – cowboys the lot of them,’ he frowns, but as he speaks he hits a pothole and my head bounces off the car roof.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’ve miscarried,’ I bellow.
Mick pulls over in front of a set of traffic lights – cue more honking from behind. ‘Have you? Are you bleeding? What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s no thanks to you if I have lost them,’ I shriek. ‘Just watch where you’re going and get me home in one piece.’
‘The important thing is to stay calm,’ he says, as he pulls out in front of a bus which has to do an emergency stop. ‘I’ve moved the television set up to the bedroom so you’ll be snug as a bug for the next few days.’
Mick stands at the kitchen door, outrage emanating from every inch of his not inconsiderable bulk. ‘My stomach thinks my throat’s been slit.’
Gloria starts and shuts the fridge door, there’s a pool of water at her feet where something leaked from it. ‘We’ve no ham, would you take a cheese sandwich?’
‘I suppose I’ll have to, but only if you toast it. Give us that coffee to be getting on with.’
As she spoons granules into a mug, her mind flits back to that week, an endless seven days of waiting and hoping and believing.
The days pass with daytime soaps and crossword puzzles (the simplex version, I can’t manage those cryptic beasts), visits from Kate and Eimear, but separate ones because we’re still at loggerheads, which suits me fine because it doubles my company, and phone calls between Omagh and Dublin. Even my feckless sister Marlene rings from London, ostensibly to enquire after my health but in reality to foist offensive baby names on me. Like Imogen.
By day six I’m starting to feel cautiously optimistic, by day nine I’m working out the baby’s star sign, by day fourteen I’m wondering whether to use caterers or go to a restaurant for the christening party, by day fifteen I truly feel like a mother-to-be – go for my pregnancy test on day sixteen. Mick is caught up in my excitement, part of it all now at last.
‘Can you feel anything?’ He stares at my uncovered stomach.
‘No, it’s like a late period except that you definitely know you’re growing a baby.’
He grins. ‘We’re growing a baby.’
I grin back.
‘Would you like a neck massage, Glo? I saw you rubbing at it earlier as though you’d twisted it.’
‘That would be lovely, Mick, I’ll just use the bathroom first.’
I sit on the toilet seat for decades. Traces of pink are mixed with my urine, the early-warning signal of a period. It’s a mistake, I’ll look again and it will be clear-coloured. I gaze into the bowl and see pink splashes. I touch myself and my fingers are stained.
Pink makes the boys wink. My father used to say that whenever I wore a pink top, then he’d wink with exaggerated slowness and I’d wink back.
I drag myself to my feet and walk towards the bedroom, where Mick is waiting for me.
‘I was nearly coming to look for you, you were ages,’ he says. ‘Ready for that neck rub?’
‘I’m bleeding,’ I say.
His stare is bewildered.
‘There’s no baby, I’m bleeding,’ I repeat.
Tears well exquisitely slowly from Mick’s eyes and trail down his face, snot bubbles from each nostril. I watch him dispassionately for a moment, then I pull him towards me and he weeps on to my chest. They’re sobs now, noisy, gulping, snorting howls of anguish.
‘We gave it our best shot, at least we tried,’ I stroke his hair. ‘The odds are against you, we knew that when we started.’
‘I really thought it had worked,’ he gasps as he cries. ‘You were so confident, you had me believing it as well.’
‘You need to be confident to go through something like IVF. You may realise there’s only a 25 or 30 per cent chance of success when you start but you push that knowledge aside once you’re in the middle of it – you tell yourself all this pain is front-loaded experience, it will be worth it when you hold a baby in your arms. It’s called self-preservation. A willing suspension of disbelief.’
Mick’s tears seem to be easing, he lies still against me, a crushing weight but I carry it.
‘We’ll do this again as soon as they let us and it’ll work next time,’ I promise him.
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘I have to believe it, Mick. If I don’t, who will?’
‘I’m not sure I’m able to go through it a second time,’ Mick whimpers against me.
‘Of course you can,’ I say dully. ‘If I can do it so can you.’
I don’t cry for two weeks, but when the tears come they trip me. I weep for every toe I stubbed, for every test I failed, for every dress I spoiled, for every snub I suffered, for every cross word flung at me. I mourn the father I lost, the husband I’m losing, the three embryos that can’t or won’t lodge in my womb.
I cry in bed every night so long and so pitifully that finally Mick loses patience. He tries to comfort me and can’t: I don’t want his arms around me, I want my own around a baby.
Gloria is weeping again now, into the coffee mug on the kitchen worktop, she’s clutching the speckled pottery, cradling its warmth.
‘You’re in a bad way,’ says Mick.
‘I know,’ she agrees. ‘It’s those hormones again.’
‘You’re not well enough for this treatment, we should have waited longer between attempts.’
‘We had the holiday in New Orleans, that was a break for us before trying again,’ Gloria reminds him.
‘Some people leave it a year before their second go, to recover their strength and their marriage. A couple of months isn’t long enough, Glo.’
‘It’s all a lottery anyway,’ she shrugs. ‘We might as well press on. I couldn’t put it out of my mind for a year, every month I’d be thinking, “Another wasted month.”’
Mick sighs like one gazing into the abyss. ‘This is kill or cure. You’ll either have a baby or wreck our marriage.’
It’s a fair trade, she says, but only inside her head.
‘You should’ve listened to me, Glo, when I said let’s take a break from this fertility business but you just pushed ahead and made the appointment to start all over again. I’m not married to a woman, I’m married to an IVF handbook. This is not what I want.’
‘Mick, please, I have eggs growing inside me, they think I’ll be ready for extraction in a few days. Now’s not the time to question whether we should be doing it – we ARE doing it, take a reality check, I need your support right now.’
‘But if it doesn’t work this time we take a real break,’ he insists.
Gloria is suffused with rage.
‘What do you mean “if it doesn’t work”? You’re the most negative person in the stratosphere. Everyone else has husbands holding their hands each step of the way, I have one who doesn’t even think the treatment will be successful – and then hasn’t the decency to keep his doubts to himself. Have you any idea how completely, utterly and desolately alone I feel? How desperate, how isolated, how loveless?’
‘You have your friends, you’re always off whispering secrets to them and excluding me from your circle,’ he yells back.
‘Yes, I have my friends, praise be to God I have my friends because I have no one else to rely on, I don’t have a husband, that much is clear.’
‘You mean you don’t want a husband.’ His face is close to hers and contorted with hate. ‘Well, you carry on, you have your precious eggs extracted, but don’t come looking for sperm from me. The bank is closed.’
He doesn’t mean that, Gloria thinks, as she slides on to the floor, too rattled to stay on her feet any longer. Mick has slammed out of the house without a jacket, and she can see rain drizzling through the kitchen window.
‘I hope he catches pneumonia and dies,’ she mutters. ‘I hope he’s in one room of the hospital gasping his last as I’m in another giving birth to twins.’
The notion is so ridiculous, she laughs humourlessly. He’d be nine months dying from pneumonia for starters.
Fury courses through her, energising, healthy ire.
‘He can keep his sperm,’ she fumes. ‘I’ll use donor sperm, I’ll ask another man to oblige.’
She casts around for a suitable candidate.
‘Pearse is too spooky, Marlene’s boyfriend’s in London, there’s a few men at work but they might not go along with it. There’s no one else suitable, it’ll have to be Jack O’Brien.’
CHAPTER 23
Kate’s in a frenzy. ‘You want to ask Jack for what? The loan of his sperm? You mean you plan to return them afterwards, slightly used, one careful owner?’
‘Well of course I can’t return them, they’ll be dead after they’ve fertilised my eggs – they can’t survive for long outside the body,’ explains Gloria.
Heavens above, she thinks, Kate’s acting like a maniac – anyone would think she wanted to sleep with her ex-lover. Besides, Kate’s already established that’s a forgivable offence as far as Eimear’s concerned.
‘There’ll be no physical contact,’ explains Gloria.
Kate looks like someone who thought she bought a cinema ticket for a slusherama but finds herself sitting through a slasher flick.
‘He’d only have to ejaculate into a glass container. I wouldn’t even be in the same room with him,’ continues Gloria helpfully.
‘Right, and then you’d have his baby and there’d always be this bond with him. Look, you’re talking about Eimear’s husband, Gloria, you’d both be the child’s parents. You haven’t thought this through, it would never work. Eimear’s bound to learn the truth sooner or later, she’ll be in ribbons – it could destroy her.’
‘She might never find out – she might not even mind if she does discover it years from now, when she’s not so raw. There’s no point in speculating; sure, how do we know till we give it a lash?’ Gloria suggests.
‘You don’t have to stick your hand in the fire to know it burns,’ protests Kate. ‘And believe me, I’ve singed my fingers in Jack O’Brien’s grate, you really don’t want to go down that road. The man’s a romantic arsonist.’
She tugs at a delicate gold chain on her wrist with an indelicate amount of force.
‘Glo, dote,’ Kate’s tone is kinder now, ‘I know you desperately want a child and I hope it happens for you, I genuinely do, but you must forget this crazy idea. Go back to Mick, he’s your husband, he’s the man you should be having a baby with. Patch up your quarrel and use his sperm.’
