order a glass of red wine and a few more and refuse to feel guilty about fertility advice not to drink. We have a plan now. This is my last hurrah.
‘Pitch to me!’ says my old editor.
‘I will,’ I promise, and I mean it.
And you know what, I think, as I look round the bar full of men with their ties pulled off and a waiter walking around asking anyone if they ordered chips, no one else is perfect, either. I am okay. I am going to be okay.
‘You’ve been so off radar, Lexie, we’ve missed you,’ says Shona as she squeezes me in a one-arm cuddle.
And because we’re on our own at the table, everybody else standing, I make a snap decision.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, one-arm cuddling her back. ‘I’ve had some fertility stuff going on. I don’t think I’ve been dealing with it well.’
I hold by breath. I said that out loud, I think. I did it.
‘Oh, bloody hell, Lexie,’ she sighs. ‘I wish you’d told me. Me, too. That’s why I’m leaving work, to be less stressed.’ She pauses. ‘And that’s why …’
‘You’re drinking Diet Coke,’ I fill in, laughing. ‘Oh God, the booze guilt is the worst, isn’t it?’
‘Only beaten by the sugar guilt, and the wheat guilt, and the ‘are you having enough sex’ guilt,’ she replies, eye-rolling.
I’m laughing harder than I have in a long time and it’s that easy not to feel alone. You confide and you’re confided in and you empathise, and you find the comedy in the awfulness. Why did I imagine some invisible rulebook that said I had to keep this to myself? That no one wanted to be burdened by my problems? That it was kind of … tacky to bring it up?
A psychologist would probably track it back to my childhood. I think of my mum, flitting into a room and out again, and my dad, heading away for work for two weeks at a time, and I think – there were no windows. There were no windows available for people to ask for help or to analyse. Was that deliberate? Did my parents – the children of postwar stoics – avoid leaving any windows open, so that things didn’t get too emotional?
‘I hope things get better for you soon,’ I say, still squeezed into her, close. ‘You’d make such a cool mum, even though I know it’s crap when people say that.’
She cuddles me, tight.
‘We should meet up soon,’ I say to her, mid-hug. ‘I’ll go nuts and buy you an elderflower pressé.’
I feel her shoulders shake and I don’t know if she is laughing or crying, but I tighten my arms around her, just in case.
I am not the only one here living this, consumed by it. They’re everywhere, the other mes. I’ve just been so wrapped up in my own narrative that I haven’t seen them. But I want to. I want to help them, and bond with them, and cuddle them. I hold onto Shona, even more tightly.
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