She looked at me, annoyance and then shock contorting her face. “Pardon? Must you embarrass me?” she said through gritted teeth, looking around. “We do not talk about our vees in public.”
“But I didn’t say vagina, I said cervix,” I replied. Her lips tightened. “Anyway, the bus is here!”
The 136 crawled down Lewisham High Street, Maggie speaking a hundred words for each yard we moved.
“You know, back in the day, when Mum came over, they used to put implants and IUDs in black women without us knowing to stop us getting pregnant.” She cocked her head. “To stop us procreating. That is true, you know!” She raised her eyebrows. “Mum’s friend Glynda, the one who eats Mum out of house and home when she visits? Well, she couldn’t get pregnant for years and she had no idea why. So you shouldn’t even have had that thing put in in the first place, politically as well as physically. You don’t know what it’s doing to you.”
She was talking so frantically and moving so drastically to support her chat that her gigantic plastic earrings were providing a soundtrack to her words.
“Black women’s bodies don’t work well with this sort of thing. Have you read up on it? Chemical imbalances, the absorption to our melanin—that affects the pineal and pituitary glands. Swelling also.”
Maggie stopped talking to call Diana, so I tried to call Tom. The first three times it had rung out, but now it was going to voice mail. It was past six, he’d be out of work by now.
“Is he still not answering?” Maggie asked.
“Huh?” I looked out the window. “Who, Tom? Yeah, he sent me a text to say that he’d see me at home.” She knew I was lying, but my stop was coming up so she couldn’t interrogate me about it.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come to church with me on Sunday? All are welcome. Even you, with that IUD.” She looked at me out of the side of her eyes. “God will save even the most wanton. . . .”
I rolled my eyes and stood up. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said before I pinballed my way down the bus, careful not to touch anything or anyone with my hands, and stepped off.
I stood waving at my aunt as the doors closed and the bus pulled away. It’s a family thing. It is an annoying and time-wasting thing.
* * *
When I got home, the flat was cold. I ran a bath and wriggled out of my clothes. I crinkled my nose at the goo from the ultrasound that had stuck itself to the gusset of my knickers and chucked them into the wash basket. I doubled over and sat on the edge of the bath. The bleeding had stopped, but the cramps hadn’t.
I wrapped my hair in my headscarf and stepped into the bath. I sat in the water and prodded at my stomach, wincing as I hit tender spots. Why had this happened? I was twenty-five; I wasn’t going to have a baby. Obviously. But it would have been nice to have the choice. Having a contraceptive placed in my body wholly suggested that I was not wanting to have a baby; so, yes, my choice would be to not actually carry a child to term and then raise it—but that wasn’t the point. “Would I have been ready?” I asked myself aloud, stroking my stomach tenderly. My mum was twenty-five when she got pregnant with me. I guess that says everything about how unprepared I’d be. I lay back, numbness cloaking my body as the hot water swathed my cold skin.
* * *
Midnight, and Tom still wasn’t home. I couldn’t sleep because my womb felt like it was trying to make its way out of my body, so I assembled some boxes and started to wrap up and pack my half of our separated belongings in the living room so it at least looked like I was going somewhere soon. A snow globe from Paris, mine and Tom’s first holiday together; a comically ugly porcelain donkey from Spain, our second holiday together; and a Turkish eye ornament from our third. I wrapped all of these memories of our relationship with care, swaddling them in layers of newspaper and sealing them with tape. I moved on to the plates, then the mugs, before I stopped to get the donkey back out of the box. I unwrapped it and put it back on the mantelpiece. If I was going to leave a reminder of our relationship, it was going to be the thing I didn’t want in my new place. I carried on wrapping until I got into a frenzy of paper and tape, only pausing when I got to two mugs on the drying rack. One embossed with a T, the other with a Q.
? ? ?
“Why have you got so much stuff?” Tom asked, leaning on a cardboard box marked MISCELLANEOUS 7 and wiping sweat from his forehead. “I’ve only got a few hoodies and two pairs of socks.”
“I don’t know, maybe I’ve become a hoarder without noticing?” I said, cupping his face in my hands. “But you wanted to live with me, so you’re going to have to live with it all.”
“Fine, I regret nothing,” Tom said, kissing me on the forehead. “Queenie, you have a very dry forehead for someone who is meant to be lifting boxes.”
“Yes, maybe so, but I am organizing, as opposed to lifting,” I told him. “And making sure that the boxes marked KITCHEN are in the kitchen.”
“Well, if you’re going to be in the kitchen, could you at least make some tea?”
“Yes, now that you mention it, your clever girlfriend has just found the box with the kettle and bought milk and tea bags on the way here,” I said. “But I don’t know where the mugs are.”
“Look in my rucksack, my mum bought us mugs. Moving-in present, she said.”
I found Tom’s rucksack in the hallway and, when I opened it, found two gift boxes containing a white mug each. I washed them out and made us tea, plucking the hot tea bags out with my fingers in the absence of a spoon. “How do your fingers not burn?” Tom asked, walking into the kitchen, a box under his arm.
“They do, I just don’t talk about it,” I said, handing him a hot mug. “These are fancy, where did she get these from?”
“No idea,” Tom said, taking a sip.
“Oh, hold on, you’ve got the Q mug.” I reached out for it.
“This one’s going to be mine.” He lifted it out of my reach. “Like you’re mine,” Tom said, putting an arm around me.
“Do you know,” I said, “whatever tone you’d said that in, it would have sounded creepy and possessive.”
“Creepy and possessive.” Tom took a sip of tea. “Were they the qualities that initially drew you to me?” He laughed.
? ? ?
I packed until I was exhausted, falling asleep on the sofa boxed in by years of accumulatively unimportant stuff that I probably didn’t need to continue carting through life. When I woke up the next morning, my alarm chirping obnoxiously from the bedroom, Tom still wasn’t back. I sat on the Tube to work, doubling over when pain ripped through my stomach. A woman handed me a plastic bag, saying, “If you’re going to be sick, can you at least do it in here? Nobody wants to see a splattering so early in the morning.” I snuck in late, turned my computer on, and fake-smiled my way through the morning. The television listings got confused with the club listings, and I asked Leigh to fix it before our boss, Gina, noticed. One day he’s going to tell me to do my work myself, but as long as I listen to him talking about his own work and his boyfriend Don’s faltering DJ career in great detail, he lets me get away with a lot.
At midday, I walked over to Darcy’s desk, a gray metallic dock in the quiet corner of the office that she shared with Silent Jean, the world’s oldest and the Daily Read’s longest-employed subeditor. She was a ghostly pale waif of a woman who didn’t fit with the aesthetic of a flashy news institution, one who seemed to hate me without having ever spoken to me. Or to anyone, actually.
“Good afternoon, Jean,” I said, bowing. She tutted, nodding swiftly before putting her surprisingly snazzy earphones in. I placed both hands on Darcy’s head and began to plait her thick, heavy brown hair, an activity that, thankfully, she found as satisfying as I did, so no HR summons for me.