Tamar no, but she’d be surprised. Ari . . . huh, actually, Ari might be both surprised and interested.
She asked if he was thinking about failing in order to surprise and interest Ari. (If so, then Harriet was off the hook: She didn’t deserve Tamar’s wrath for holding on to an ill-loved son in this way; she was just a necessary step in Gabriel’s plan to produce paternal surprise and interest.)
He came to her and said yes, or no, he came to her and she didn’t care what he said.
12
Dear Perdita, dear dolls, it’s almost morning. You’ve already been told that Harriet and Gabriel were thin in those days, and now you must hear it again: even after Harriet and Margot left the Minimum FrankenWage zone, Harriet and Gabriel were thin. They were too nervous to eat properly, too precariously happy (If I stay close, can’t I just stay close to him/her?), too worried that they’d be made to stop what they were doing. You know that they were both thin and that Harriet’s thinness meant she couldn’t track her periods with any regularity. And you know that she and Gabriel were . . . you know that Gabriel Kercheval was spending more time inside Harriet Lee than he was anywhere else. As they lay in bed watching TV one morning, he ran his hand over the curve of her stomach and frowned. She moved away without quite knowing why, but he brought his hand back to the very same spot and pressed down, hard. She slapped his hand.
Get off.
They were watching The Jerry Springer Show, and usually they talked over it . . . OK, not talked . . . usually they fucked their way through all the shrill mudslinging and the shock testimony of the secret mistress, philandering father, dowdy-looking housewife who was also a pimp who defended her girls and boys with such violence that customers took care not to even so much as raise as their voices to them. That day Harriet and Gabriel just watched the show. And when the credits rolled, Gabriel handed Harriet her clothes and got dressed himself. They bought a pregnancy test at Boots, and some food. From now on we’re eating more.
She wondered about his saying “we,” especially after the test said she was pregnant.
Dunno how accurate this thing is . . .
They waited two days, and Harriet took another pregnancy test—a different brand. That test said she was pregnant too. He didn’t even bother saying “we were so careful”—she was a fecund farm girl, and he was a stud and they hadn’t been careful. It was simple; Harriet didn’t want to go to the Kerchevals’ family doctor, so she booked an appointment at a clinic in Bradford. Harriet didn’t want a kid. She was seventeen, and she wanted to go to Oxford and study and not have to look after a kid. Keeping an eye on her mother was preoccupation enough—Harriet felt she’d been doing that since she was born. And it wasn’t just that Harriet didn’t want a kid; she didn’t want to have one with Gabriel Kercheval. Gabriel Kercheval didn’t want a kid either. His not wanting a kid was initially quite understated, but when Harriet missed her appointment, he made her sit down at his computer and book another one. She missed that appointment too, and the next. They didn’t stop having sex—they couldn’t somehow, but they left scratches and bite marks on each other that were deeper than before, and the bruises reminded Harriet of the pinching session at the Gingerbread House, the semiautomated spite of it.
Harriet. Harriet, I can’t have a kid. I can’t, OK?
OK. I don’t want to either. She had a few reasons for saying so, but the primary one was that he was holding her by the throat at the time—a pleasurable sensation for the moment, but one that could become rapidly less so if she said something he didn’t like.
Don’t say it like that. It’s not about wanting to; it’s that I can’t. We can’t. It’s not the right time. I—we’ve got to . . .
That’s true, that’s true. We’ve both got a lot of things to do first. You’re right, it’s not about wanting to, you can’t, we can’t.
He kept saying he didn’t want to hurt her, but he couldn’t have a kid.
When he said that, Gretel spoke up. Not at the back of Harriet’s mind, more speaking directly in her ear: Change alert. Hurting you has occurred to him as an option.
You may have noticed the absence of informational boundaries between Harriet and Margot, but it was at around this time that one went up. Harriet tried to tell Margot that she was worried about certain actions Gabriel might take in order to see to it that he didn’t end up with a kid, but Margot didn’t believe her.
An uncommon occurrence, so Perdita and the dolls have to wonder in what manner Harriet’s concern was conveyed and whether Harriet really wanted Margot to believe her. The line of thought could have gone something like this: If Margot doesn’t believe it then it can’t be true. Even though Margot saw no dark potential in Gabriel (Shall I tell you who’s a complete wrong ’un? That girl you went around with for a bit at the farmstead . . . Gretel . . . ), that didn’t keep her from making a fuss of her daughter and the possible Third Musketeer she carried, getting in supplements and keeping a “Days Since Last Bout of Morning Sickness” count going. Margot also took an average of the number of times Harriet had told her she wanted the kid as compared to the number of times Harriet had told her she wanted to just keep being a kid.
(I do still count as one, don’t I? Sort of? Upper end of kidhood?)
It was exactly fifty-fifty.
I don’t want to rush you, Margot said. But: tick tock.
Can I ask you something, Margot Lee?
Go for it.
Would you say you’re a good mother? Hand over heart, would you say that?
Would I say I’m a good mother . . . but why would I need to be one of those when I’ve got a daughter like you?
Mum. If you get any worse than this I might not be able to take it anymore . . .
Oh, poor Harriet. So persecuted. But you shouldn’t glare at your mother like that . . . you should be good to your mother while she’s still alive to be good to. Listen . . . just listen a second . . . when I was younger, my dad was always shouting that things wouldn’t go well for me. Just make sure you have a child of your own! Have a child just like you, and you’ll know how I feel. He loved dishing out curses like that. And obviously that curse was a flop, because you—well, I think it’s one of the hardest things in the world to somehow make sure that the ones you love receive your care for them as physical information, as definite as—raindrops hitting your palm. Like when you hold out your hand to check if it’s raining and it is. But with you, it’s that definite every time I hold out my hand to check. So just . . . maybe it won’t be this child, but at some point, if you do want to give it a go, you should . . . have one just like you and you’ll know how lucky I feel.
Harriet’s stomach felt full of what she could only describe as glitterfizz; it seemed the baby had decided to have some fun and convert its amniotic fluid into prosecco.