I lowered my finger to touch the subtly ribbed button but didn’t press.
You need to be drunk to make this kind of thing work. I tried to channel my six drinks, locate my inner sambucas. I pressed the button, held it. Above me, a soft sound of Christmas bells.
“Hello?”
“This is Ray.”
“Ray?”
“Yes, Ray,” I said. “Garthene’s husband.”
“Oh, Ray, it’s nice to fina—”
“Open the fucking door.”
Swearing is always a risk with a voice like mine, but I felt like it landed.
The bolt buzzed back. “I’m at the top.”
I stomped up the carpeted stairs, two at a time, sliding my palm along the textured wallpaper, trying to remain out of control. This man knew who I was, probably because they had been saying my name, speaking of the devil, to intensify the sex act. They had summoned me. That was their fetish.
On the carpet running up the stairs, there was a trail of dots, bin-juice stains, that led directly to the feet of the man standing on the landing. He was very tall—six foot four or five—right on the boundary between commanding and absurd, and I imagined he could tip himself either way, depending on his shoes. In this instance, brown loafers with goaty little tassels. I recognized him. I’d seen him at the hospital. It was her colleague, the pillow-lender.
“I’m Peter,” he said.
He offered me his hand but I didn’t want it. I went straight past him and inside the flat, where Garthene was leaning against the round dining table with all her clothes on. She was holding a mug of what appeared to be bag-in herbal tea. I looked around the room for something to react against. There was a frosted-glass screen that tried to suggest the kitchen area was a separate room from the living area but convinced no one. On the fridge-freezer was a microwave and on the microwave a kettle. The quality of the handles on the cupboards was dreadful. The only thing that was arguably a betrayal was the slightly burnt lasagna in a large oven dish on the counter. He was feeding her, feeding my wife her death-row meal. That was a start. I saw a small camp bed set up in one corner of the room. I went over and sat on it, bounced on the mattress a little, just for the evocative sound of the springs.
“Oh, I see,” I said. “Came here for a quick sleep break, did you?”
Peter was now standing in a corner of the kitchen area, head slightly bowed, fingers threaded around a mug in front of his stomach. I sensed he was trying not to look physically intimidating, which was, in its own way, physically intimidating. There were cards on top of the television. One of them said: Happy 40th.
Garthene said: “Peter and I were just having a chat.”
“I bet you were,” I said. “Deciding on a safe word.”
Garthene and Peter looked at each other, then he slid along the counter and opened the front door. “I get the feeling it’d be easier if I gave you two space,” he said. “So I’ll just be out on the landing.”
The door shut very gently. His exit took something away from me and I was unable to continue my baseless accusations. Garthene was now sitting, staring at her hands, her legs set wide and geezery.
“How did you get here?” she said.
“I’ve been following you.”
“Oh God,” she said. “Ray, you should try talking to someone. You might find it helpful.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Because a problem shared is a problem halved.”
“It is.”
“And then you share your genitals.”
She rubbed her right eye with her knuckles.
“What do you and him even talk about?” I said.
“Anything.”
“About how your husband has no job, no prospects, will never own a home, how people in the street despise him.”
“Sometimes.”
“Great,” I said, and I stood up. I began to pace, trying to build momentum. “I bet Peter can really listen. I bet he makes you feel heard.” I said this loud enough for him to hear outside.
“Take it easy.”
“All hail the male nurse!” The room was so small it required a neat turning circle. “Kindness upon kindness! Sweet Peter, never judging, always sensitive to difference.” I picked up speed. “I bet he’s never crossed a line in his whole—”
“Shut-up-Ray. Just shut up.”
There was a tremor in her voice I was a little surprised to hear. She covered her eyes with one hand. Her mouth-breathing became audible. I hoped that Peter might choose this moment to step inside and ask me politely to leave, let me wrestle him a little and throw a punch, have Garthene hold me back. But there was no sign of him, which was disappointing. I went over and opened the door, looked out into the dark communal space with bike-wheel scuff marks on the walls, a smell of drains.
“That was your cue to step in, old boy,” I said. “I’m making your guest uncomfortable.”
He wasn’t even waiting to come in. He was sitting on the top step with both of his thoughtful hands over his mouth, staring directly ahead. I watched him for a moment, let the door close on its own weight, then turned back to Garthene, who still had her eyes covered. They were both covering up bits of their body. There was an atmosphere in the room that someone who’d drunk fewer sambucas might have been alert to.
“Just for clarity,” I said, “you’re upset because of my wild-man behavior, right? There’s no subtext I’m missing?” I looked around the flat. “I only ask because I thought Peter might have intervened by now. That feels like something he would do.” I went and opened the door again. He was still out there, unmoving, both hands at his mouth. “Now’s your chance,” I told him.
He didn’t move.
It was one of those modern homes that was so well insulated, when the door fell shut it felt like the room held its breath.
Garthene stood and walked to the sink.
“Now’s the moment when you tell me that I’ve got it completely wrong,” I said. “Ray, you’ve gone crazy. That sort of thing. I’m worried about you, Ray, have you been drinking?”
“We’ll get through this,” she said.
“Get through what?” I said.
She held on to the kitchen counter with both hands.
“I have been drinking, by the way, so that would explain why I seem a bit out there.”
“We’ll get through this.” She said it again.
“Get through what?” I said. “Are you going to make me guess?”
I stood directly behind her as she observed the plughole.
“Okay, first try. Let’s get the obvious one out the way. Have you two slept together?”
There seemed to be something of great interest in the sink.
“I’ve got other, better guesses,” I said. “That one’s a total cliché.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, it’s a cliché? Or yes, you’ve slept with him?”
“Yes, I’ve slept with him.”
It’s possible not to hear a sentence, if you really concentrate. Even after you’ve heard it, you can go back and unhear it, if you really try. When she turned around to face me, her eyes were wet, but I don’t think you would say she was crying. The wetness just saved her from having to see me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
All my sambucas were with me now and I wasn’t standing. At some point I’d crossed the room and sat back down on the small camp bed. She had changed from gripping the kitchen counter to gripping the back of a chair. There was a muffled noise from outside—a throat noise, presumably Peter’s.
“Ray, I’m so sorry,” she said. “We were drunk.”
“Of course you were,” I said. “What did you drink? Sambuca?” That was an in-joke between me and myself.
“It only happened once,” she said.
“Only once?” I said, my voice suddenly loud. “Why didn’t you say so? Once is only one more than none.”
There were two reflective vertical strips on her cheeks. They flashed in the light as she turned to th
e window.
“I guess it happened right here,” I said. I prodded the puffiest bit of duvet with my forefinger. I prodded it again, really worked a knuckle in. I was crying now too. What a loser.
“Where was I when you did it?” I said.
“Away.” Her voice was quiet.
“Away where?”
“At a conference.”
“Which conference?”
“In Bonn.”
“In Bonn!” I said, yelling it. “So I was in the Rhineland!” I wanted to find a way to loudly say “Rhineland” again. “If I was in the Rhineland that means it happened in January.”
I heard the floorboards creak as Peter’s weight shifted in the corridor. I paused. There was a thought hovering above us. January. There was something special about January, but the sambuca was protecting me from it.
Peter was in the doorway now, his hands unclenched at his sides.
“And here he is,” I said, “looking super virile.”
Garthene bowed her head, sobbing silently. Her mouth had strings of saliva in it and some of the saliva had come out onto her chin and it was sticky and white. She was dehydrated. It was infuriating to find that even now I could want to give her a glass of water. I rejected that instinct and, instead, rose to my feet and backhand-swiped her half-full mug off the table. It bounced three times on the linoleum, then landed upright, unharmed. It said Save the NHS.
PART FOUR
I MOVED INTO DAVE’S ONE-BEDROOM EX-LOCAL FLAT. He’d finally managed to buy his own place, thus joining Marie in the elite category of landowner. We stacked the boxes of my belongings two-deep and three-high in an L-shape in the corner of his lounge, creating for me what we called a private gated development. I slept on a blow-up mattress behind the walls of boxes. It was not at all a metaphor to say I was living in the shadow of what was left of my marriage.
Since I no longer had any paid work and mostly did not sleep, I had plenty of time to research Garthene’s betrayal. January was the month in which we conceived a child. Or, to remove all uncertainty, January was the month in which she conceived a child. I examined the calendar on our fertility app. It showed that I was away in Bonn eight days before she ovulated. That meant that Peter’s sperm would have needed to survive for over a week in order to fertilize my wife. This was, I discovered, possible.
On the family-planning forums of cleverstork.com and everythingmybabyknows.co.nz, there was much impassioned anecdotal evidence from people who said they had first-hand experience of it. In one scientific study, sperm had been kept alive in a test tube for ten days in an alkaline solution that was designed to imitate the environment created by the female orgasm. The bigger the orgasm the friendlier the habitat. Thus Peter bringing Garthene to climax—the kind of full-body screamer only attainable through condomless home-wrecking while the husband is away at a predictive analytics conference—would create the ideal conditions for his sperm to test the limits of human biology.
The whole debate was, of course, dependent on whether they had used a condom. I was certainly not going to ask Garthene or Peter for confirmation. I preferred to let both narratives exist simultaneously. Schrödinger’s sheath. The more I thought about it, the no-condom narrative was actually better than its alternative. If there was no condom then at least you could say they were hammered and sloppy and did not think of anything but slamming their bare genitals together as quickly and as firmly as possible. Unprotected sex could be attributed to temporary mania. But if they did use a condom then that meant they had the time to think about it, had time to visualize me eating potato pancakes alone in the Bonn Ibis, and still go ahead with it.
I lost touch with day and night. I read a fat book called Expecting Everything. I liked its cover, a picture of a nonidealized baby, a baby with blotchy skin. It had no chapter on ambiguous paternity, nothing on sperm survival rates in cervical fluid. Instead I worked through the huge section of alphabetized diseases. It was a relief to know that all birth defects would now be her fault because she had maintained a stressful lie throughout the child’s uterine development.
I learned every disease by heart. AIDS, anencephaly, autism, biotinidase deficiency. I found it helpful to quietly enunciate them. Bronchiolitis, cerebral palsy, classic galactosemia. I whispered to myself, “classic galactosemia.” After each disease, the book gave a figure, a likelihood: 1 in 2,000, 1 in 350, 1 in 100. I found myself hoping some children would take the brunt of maybe three or four serious conditions at once and cook the books a little. It was painful to concede that, even if the child was Peter’s, I cared for it above other children. Cleft lip, club foot, congenital heart defect. Some diseases, I knew, were specific to certain ethnic groups. Tay-Sachs disease I sent up to Stamford Hill before wafting sickle-cell anemia to Dalston. Encephalopathy, Fabry disease, Gaucher disease.
I also reread Let Your Body Lead, the hypnobirthing manual that Kamara had lent us back in April. Garthene had always said hypnobirthing was bullshit, and instinctively I agreed, but I was beginning to like the idea that pain could be a matter of opinion. If one renames contractions as surges or waves then they become no more fearful than any other bodily process and the birth occurs without fuss, the child slithering loose with the ecstatic rush of a sneeze. The book said some women even have orgasmic births where each wave produces a rush of the trust hormone oxytocin which, in turn, brings on another wave, which encourages more oxytocin, and so on, until the delivery room floods with good feelings, all previous grievances washed away as the baby surfs free on a trustgasm.
I got an email from Garthene in the middle of the night. It had been eleven days since our last contact, longer than the lifespan of even the most outdoorsy sperm. She told me she hoped I would still be present at the birth. She sent the message at 04.21, which meant she too couldn’t sleep. I texted her immediately.
Can’t sleep?
No.
Must be the awful things you’ve done.
There were the little dots that meant she was typing. I watched them for a while before her message came through: Yes. And then she added: And I saw the sonographer again.
And?
The placenta is still low. Looks like it’s going to be a C-section.
It was a stretch to associate low placentas with low morals, but I was very limber.
I guess that’s your fault. Along with everything else.
Okay.
Good. And where are you staying?
Marie’s.
Every night or just some nights?
I watched the dots.
Every night. There was a pause. So you’ll be at the birth?
I let her stew for a while. Seconds and seconds. Yes, I’ll be there.
After that, I watched a lot of medical training videos of cesareans on YouTube. My favorite one had a soundtrack of mellow jazz piano as four disembodied hands worked scalpels, needles, spreaders. Every minute or so, a subtitle floated past: the Pfannenstiel incision . . . the right stay suture . . . inspecting the pouch of Douglas . . . Halfway through the video, the hands ripped the wound wider. Apparently tears heal faster than incisions, though it looks medieval. You can hear it, too. A small creaking sound like a tiny door opening. In the comments underneath, someone called TrustMeImA talked about how the electrocauterizing device they use to reduce bleeding creates the smell of burning flesh. He said he used to find the smell distressing but slowly got used to it and now, if he’s had a long shift and not eaten, it makes him salivate. Barbecue is still barbecue, he wrote. The sweet scent of burning subcutaneous fat, like that of a sizzling strip steak. I watched this video on loop, feeling my horror and revulsion reduce with each viewing until I was blissfully desensitized, only the soft diminished chords getting through.
15 September, 8:45AM. The operation was scheduled for ten and we arranged to meet an hour before, to talk things through. I got there early and sat in the too-bright coffee shop attached to the hospital’s reception area. It had plastic wood-effect walls and groups of bl
ank-eyed loved ones eating muffins without pleasure. I ordered a double espresso. That was one good thing about being very tired and very sad: strong coffee could not touch me now. Its only function was to give me something to blame my feelings on. What was that unshiftable inner hollowness? Must be the coffee.
After a few minutes, Garthene walked into reception. She was early too, wearing white trainers and an orange summer dress. She’d dressed up for her cesarean. She looked around, didn’t see me, checked her phone, glanced up at the strange sculpture of a metal fish hanging beneath the skylight, checked her phone again, walked in circles. She was nervous. We both were. I realized then that this meeting most closely resembled a first date. Except with the added pressure of guaranteed co-parenting.
She finally spotted me and waved. I was aware that the decision of whether to hug was mine. I got up and opened my arms. We came together and instantly knew it was a bad connection. Her belly was in the way and so we ended up kind of leaning over it to hug one another, which gave the whole thing a frigid politeness, as of awkward cousins at a memorial.
“How’re you feeling?” I said.
“I’m actually really scared,” she said.
I don’t know why that surprised me. Or why it made me feel good.
“I’m also scared,” I said.
“I’m terrified, actually,” she said. Her voice was thin.
“Well, it makes sense,” I said. “This is all unbelievably frightening.”
Our first date was going well.
Our midwife, Jenny, was waiting for us at obstetrics.
“Showtime,” she said. She hugged us both.
She was wearing skate shoes and a fluorescent purple lanyard that had the word MIDWIFE in huge white capitals on it, the information presented with such aggressive clarity that it could only indicate our soon-to-be-degraded mental capacities.