to find a place where she could remove the fixed grin and take a shower and let her husband hold her. So she almost ran out of the bathroom, stumbled over the metal bar of an open baby gate and, with a shocked intake of breath, fell flat on her face.
By the time Jessica presented herself in the living room, Michael was on his knees playing peek-a-boo with Chloe, who was now dry-eyed and shrieking with delight – talk about violent mood swings – and Naoko was alerting Michael to the latest bulletins from the kitchen.
‘I tried her on broccoli blended with sweet potato but the funny thing is that she refuses to eat anything green and – my God, Jessica, are you all right?’
Jessica laughed gaily, a lump the size of a tennis ball throbbing on her forehead, a bruise pulsing on one of her shins, the palms of her hands red and sore from carpet burns.
‘Oh, I’m fine, fine, just fine,’ she said, turning brightly to her husband. ‘Is that really the time?’
They sat in the car and Paulo listened to her pouring it out.
‘Have you noticed that everyone’s having a baby these days?’ Jessica said. ‘Gay men. Lesbian couples who wouldn’t touch anything with a penis. Sixty-year-old Italian grandmothers with one wonky ovary. I even read that they might start making babies from aborted foetuses – how about that? Someone who has never even been born can have a baby. But I can’t.’
They were sitting outside Michael and Naoko’s house in Paulo’s blue Ferrari. The car was a perk of the Baresi Brothers, but also a necessity. Michael always told Paulo that you couldn’t sell imported Italian cars when you come to work in a Ford Mundano. Michael’s red Maranello sat in the drive, as well as a BMW with a baby seat in the back.
‘They don’t do it to hurt you. To hurt us. They don’t mean to rub it in our faces. But they’re just so happy with their baby, they can’t help it. They don’t mean to hurt us.’
‘I know,’ she said, hanging her head.
We would be the same, he thought. If Jessica and I had a baby, we would love it so much that we wouldn’t care who we hurt. It seemed to Paulo that having a baby made you care less about the rest of the world.
Because the baby became your world.
‘Do you know what my brother told me? He said that he hasn’t had sex with Naoko for seven weeks.’
Jessica stared at him. ‘Are you listening to me?’
‘I’m listening to you. I’m just saying.’
‘What? What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that it’s not perfect in there. I know Chloe’s great. I know how much you want a baby of your own. Our own. But I’m just saying. Something’s happened to them. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like since Chloe was born, they have something between them now.’
‘She’s younger than me,’ Jessica said, not listening to him. ‘Naoko. Four years younger. Same age as Megan. When Naoko is the age I am now, Chloe will be starting school.’
‘It’s not perfect in there,’ Paulo insisted.
His conversation with Naoko had shocked him. His sister-in-law had a PhD from Reading University. She had been an archaeologist when she met Michael. And now all she talked about was how this week Chloe preferred brown mush to green mush.
Paulo loved his little niece. He had loved her from the moment he saw her. He knew that he always would. But in a secret chamber of his heart, he had his doubts.
He didn’t mind the indignities of making love to a plastic cup. He didn’t feel less of a man because apparently some of his sperm were dozy bastards who couldn’t find one of Jessica’s eggs if you gave them an A-Z.
The doctor had told him they just needed to keep banging away. Plenty of people conceived babies with far worse odds. And whatever his wife had to go through—the endless scans and tests, the laparoscopy, whatever new humiliation they came up with – Paulo would be right there at her side. He would always be there. She was the one for him. He had known from the first time he had seen her face.
But he wondered if he would really be any good at this fatherhood lark – the endless games of peek-a-boo, and in-depth analysis of ‘pooing’ (Jesus, his brother – the arch shagger, the great womaniser, the Don Juan of Dagenham – was suddenly talking like a little kid), and watching it – the baby – every waking second, so that it – the baby – didn’t collide with the coffee table, or crawl out of the window, or swallow the remote control.
It was like you created this new life, but your life was over. Mother Nature had finished with you.
And here was the funny thing. Paulo’s sex life with Jessica had become bleak and desperate because they were trying for a baby. But Michael’s sex life with Naoko was non-existent because they had a baby.
Once Michael had been crazy for Naoko. The only reason Michael gave up Sunday morning football in the park was because it gave him an extra ninety minutes under the duvet with Naoko. But that was before they had a baby.
Paulo still wanted a child with Jessica.
But the most pressing reason he wanted it was because he knew it would make her happy. And was that a good reason to bring a baby into the world?
The job was too much for her.
Megan could handle the workload, but not at the pace required. Her patients still filled the waiting room long after the other doctors had gone to lunch, and more were there when she came rushing back late from her house visits. So it was no surprise when Lawford came into her office and told her, ‘There’s been a complaint about you.’
All those years at med school. All those blood-splattered hysterical nights in A & E at the Homerton. All the tired flesh she had pressed, all the dicky hearts she had fretted over, and all the rubber gloves she had donned to probe some ancient and decaying rectum.
And now the ancient rectums she worked with were kicking her out.
She wondered which of the surgery doctors had lodged the complaint. They had some nerve. Bastards, she thought. Rotten bastards the lot of you.
No wonder female patients flocked to her, away from these old men with hair in their ears and stains on their trousers and contempt for their patients and their talk of ‘plumbing problems’, as if the aftermath of an ectopic pregnancy was no different from having a leaking pipe, as if crippling period pains were somewhat similar, when you thought about it, to having a broken boiler.
Megan could deal with any of it, all these things that she had never experienced herself, only studied in a classroom at medical school. But she just couldn’t do it in the few fleeting minutes allowed. She needed time.
She was just about to tell him to take his job and stick it up the terminal part of his large intestine when he spoke.
‘I think you’re doing a terrific job,’ Lawford said.
