2
By rights Julia should not be able to see Sam, with Sam's stomach growing, her mind focusing on childbirth, labor, and chocolate ice cream with green olives and prawns. But somehow Julia can cope with Sam, because she loves her, and because, even though she can admit she's jealous, it doesn't seem to overwhelm her as it does with others.
But Sam is only pregnant. She does not yet have the baby Julia so desperately craves, and try though Julia will to be in her life post-baby as much as she is now, she cannot make any promises.
Julia stopped at Pizza Hut on the way. Two large pepperoni pizzas, extra green olives and prawns, to make Sam smile. As expected, Sam sits and picks all the topping off, mixes it in with the ice cream in the freezer, then throws the crust away while Julia makes disgusted faces.
“It could be so much worse,” she says, mouth full of the revolting concoction. “Think of all those really disgusting cravings people have. I could be on my hands and knees in the garden shoveling soil into my mouth.”
“First of all, what makes you think what you're eating is any better?” Julia ventures. “Anyway, isn't that stuff all an urban myth? I mean, people don't really do that, do they?”
Sam smiles, as she always does. “Yup. And coal. I could have sent you down to the garage for huge bags of coal instead of to Pizza Hut. It's called pica, some kind of iron deficiency. That's the interesting thing. Your body always tells you what it needs when you're pregnant.”
“So what exactly is the chocolate ice cream, olive, and prawn thing telling you?”
She shovels a bit more into her mouth. “Probably that I need to put on weight,” and with that the pair of them start laughing.
Sam has always been cuddly. She is a mass of blond curls, a tiny waist, and a bottom and thighs that could well have inspired Rubens. But what Julia loves most about Sam is how much Sam loves herself. She has none of the self-doubt we are so used to hearing from women in these times of aspirational skinniness. Sam never asks anyone if she looks fat, or if that skirt is unflattering, or if the heels make her legs look longer.
Sam loves the fact that she's voluptuous, and is loving her pregnancy more than any woman Julia has ever seen. The first thing she did when she discovered she was “with child” was dash out and buy What to Expect When You're Expecting. The second was to rip out the chapter about the “Best Odds Diet.”
“Bloody Americans,” she said, tearing out each page, crumpling it up with relish as she lobbed it into the bin in the corner. “They're all food obsessed. God, this is the one time in your life when you're allowed to eat whatever the hell you want, so bollocks to this. As for putting on no more than twenty-eight pounds, Jesus, I think I put that on in the first twelve weeks.”
“So go on, how much have you put on now?” Julia asked.
“No clue. I stopped weighing myself after four weeks. Can't be bothered.”
And now Sam is almost entirely round. Rather like a Weeble, she wobbles but she doesn't fall down. And still she looks gorgeous. She is one of those lucky women who don't suffer from spots or lank hair while pregnant. Her skin is smooth and clear, her hair is thick, lustrous, and ever-growing.
“Jesus, don't think I'm lucky,” she said a couple of weeks ago, when someone at the hospital, another woman waiting to see the midwife, had commented how gorgeous her hair was, how lucky she was that it grew so quickly. “As quickly as it's growing on my head it's growing everywhere else on my body,” Sam had said, rolling her eyes. “I've got a jungle on my legs that only gets waxed when I go to the hospital because I don't want the midwives gossiping, and as for my beard . . .”
Sam's not a natural blonde, and consequently states that were she to be stranded on a desert island for approximately a month, any ship that happened to be passing would simply carry on, unaware that the gorilla waving its arms around under the palm trees was actually Sam.
But no one has ever seen this beard. “Look, look,” she says to Julia, as she often does on a regular basis, craning her neck up and pointing to what looks like nothing.
“I still can't see anything.”
“Okay, feel, feel,” and she grabs Julia's finger and strokes it under her chin, which is when Julia has to concede that she can feel the slightest, but only the very slightest, beginnings of stubble.
“That's the only thing I hate about pregnancy,” Sam sighs. “The bloody hair growth.”
“What about piles?” Julia shoots her an evil grin.
“Oh shit. Did I tell you that?” Sam looks embarrassed as Julia nods.
“That doesn't even bother me that much,” she says. “I go into Boots and bulk buy Anusol, telling them it's for my husband.”
“I don't suppose Chris ever goes in there.”
“Only on a Saturday and they've got different staff in on the weekend, so no one asks him how his hemorrhoids are doing.”
“Yeah, but Sam, piles are expected during pregnancy, it's not exactly embarrassing.”
“Yes, it is. Embarrassing and itchy.”
“Okay, okay. Just a little bit of oversharing there, thank you. Tell me about work.”
Sam is a graphic designer. You might well buy tins of her soup regularly. It sounds like a glamorous job, but she finds it boring and dull, and not at all creative, not for someone as talented as Sam.
Away from her work she is inspired. Those cushions on the sofa? Sam made them. The beautiful simple blinds with the tiny leaf motifs at the bottom? Sam made them. Those stunning Rothko-esque oils lining the hallway? Right again.
Although she would never admit it, much as Julia wants this baby to heal her relationship with Mark, Sam wanted an excuse to leave her job, and more than that wanted to prove that she would be better at mothering than her own—unavailable—mother.
Sam and Julia had long talked about having babies. Said how fantastic it would be if they had kids the same age, but Sam never expected it to happen so quickly, and Julia, naturally, never expected it to happen so slowly.
There was a third wheel to their gang. Bella. They say threesomes never work, but somehow it always did with them. Maybe it helped that Sam and Julia were friendly first, before Bella came into the equation, but they never had any of the petty jealousies that you so often associate with triangles.
Julia and Sam met first, years ago, at a party. Julia watched Sam turn the music up and start dancing in the middle of the living room, while everyone else stood around chatting, watching her out of the corner of their eyes because they also wanted to dance, but no one else had the nerve.
She saw Julia watching her and went over, grabbed her arm with a smile, and Julia started to dance too. Suddenly Julia didn't care that it was one of those snobby parties where you're not supposed to let your hair down and actually have fun. She didn't care that you were only supposed to stand around sipping wine and making small talk. Sam and Julia, despite having never met before, flung their arms around, gyrated their hips, and bonded over a Saturday Night Fever–style pointed-finger movement.
They collapsed on the sofa after about two hours, and once there didn't move for the rest of the night, talking about everything, sharing their lives. Numbers were swapped at the end of the evening, and the next day Sam phoned to suggest going out dancing again. The seeds of friendship were sown.
A couple of years later, Bella joined London Daytime Television. Bella and Julia were both researchers on a newsmagazine show, and hit it off almost immediately. I say almost, because the first time Julia saw her she wasn't at all sure. Bella was twenty-four going on thirty. Actually she has always said that thirty-five is her true age, and even when she was sixteen she was mistaken for someone much older.
Bella, in short, intimidated all but the most confident of people, and it was only when they were sent up to Leeds together to interview a couple of people for the show that they bonded.
For a while Julia would see them separately. With Sam she would go clubbing, to trendy bars, wild parties, and Bella was reserved for sophisticated restaurants, chichi dinner parties, even the odd bit of extremely badly played tennis.
Bella and Sam had met. Their paths crossed at Julia's house from time to time, and although they hadn't disliked one another, they hadn't much liked one another either. It was only when Bella met Paul, Sam's then-boyfriend's best friend, and fancied him, that she and Sam started to become friends, but Julia is still the link between the two, the one that binds them all together.
Bella has moved on now. Literally and figuratively. She was offered a job two years ago in New York: producer of a national morning magazine show, which naturally she couldn't turn down. She was so busy she barely had time to throw a leaving party, and now Julia considers herself blessed if Bella manages to return a voicemail more often than once a month.
On the rare occasions they do catch up, Bella sounds as if she is having a blast. Resolutely single after Paul broke her heart, she has thrown herself into the New York dating scene with wild abandon, astounding her friends back home with the sheer number of men she seems to meet. Most surprising, this, Sam is fond of saying, because she had always thought 90 percent of the single men in Manhattan were gay. Evidently not, according to Bella.
Bella is paying a disgusting amount of money for an apartment roughly the size of a shoebox in a much-sought-after doorman building at 75th and Second. Second Avenue is not quite Fifth, Bella has laughed, but it's still Upper East Side, and in New York address is everything.
Bella has taken to Manhattan like a duck to water. She goes to the gym every morning before work, which Julia and Sam find completely ridiculous, given that the odd sloppy game of tennis Bella used to play was the most she could muster, and even that was only ever an excuse to exchange loud gossip while feeling immensely virtuous.
Bella has always been good at adapting, at adhering to “When in Rome . . . ,” and weekly manicures, lunches at Bergdorf's, and navigating her way down Madison Avenue in a pair of lethal skyscraper slingbacks is now second nature to her.
She comes back rarely. Sam and Julia almost failed to recognize her on her last fleeting visit. They had arranged to meet her in the lobby of the Sanderson, and walked straight past the skinny girl dressed in black, huge Jackie O–style sunglasses obliterating her face.
Most of all Bella adores her work. She is passionate about the show, about the way Americans work, and loves her colleagues to distraction. (Quite literally at one point, given that she was seeing one of the big cheeses at the network for a while, but he was married and that's quite another story. A whole book in itself, in fact.)
We get the show here, if you're lucky enough to have Sky, Cable, or Digital. It's on every day at 2 P.M., so Julia only ever manages to catch it if she's ill or working from home, which she is tending to do rather more often these days, her career taking definite second place to her desire to have a baby.
So Bella. Bella who would like to find the perfect man but does not believe he really exists. Bella who has not the slightest desire to have children. Not yet anyway.
Bella who is genuinely happy. At least that's what she says.
But then again, people say that about Julia, and who knows what goes on behind closed doors?
“Work is as boring as usual,” Sam says, hoisting herself up from the sofa with great difficulty to put the empty pizza boxes in the kitchen. Julia considers offering to do it for her, but desists, knowing how insulted Sam gets. “I'm pregnant,” she will say, “not a bloody invalid.”
Of course God forbid no one offers her a seat on the tube in rush hour. “Hello?” she shouts, sticking her stomach out as far as it will go and making sure she catches the eye of some businessman sitting down. “Can't you see I'm eight months pregnant?” They always stand up for her.
Incidentally she isn't eight months pregnant. She's five months. But she could pass for eight. Especially when she sticks her stomach out.
“Can't talk about work,” she returns, huffing and puffing from her walk of ten feet. “Just can't wait to leave the bloody place. Chris thinks I'll be going back after four months' maternity leave and I haven't got the heart to tell him he's got another thing coming. But what about you? Any news on the pregnancy front?”
“Too early to tell. Not due for another two weeks.”
“I hope you're having sex for Britain, then, because you're at the height of the fertile season.”
“Actually we're not. We're trying to have sex every other day, because apparently if you do it every day the sperm get weaker, so it's best to give it a rest, and someone told me Day Thirteen is the important day, which was the day before yesterday, and we did it, so now it's the waiting game again.”
“God. Sex. I remember what that was like.”
“Sam! You're only five months pregnant. What do you mean, you remember what that was like? You can still have sex, for heaven's sake.”
“Julia, not only do I not want to have sex, I can't even stand the bloody smell of him at the moment.”
“What?”
Sam sighs. “It's true. He rolls over to face the middle of the bed about thirty times a night and each time he does it I'm awake and I can smell his breath and I want to vomit.”
“So what do you do?”
“I hiss at him to roll over and most of the time he just does it automatically without even waking up.”
“And if he wakes up?”
“Then he starts shouting at me and I start crying. And as far as I'm concerned right now, actually having sex would be a fate worse than death. Apparently it's a hormonal thing. Chris was dead excited because most of the women we know were like rabbits, but sod's law, I'm the bloody one who gets turned off.”
“At least he still wants to have sex with you. Mark says he feels like a machine. He can't stand how sex has become so mechanical, just a means to an end.”
“Is he right? Has it?”
Julia thinks back to the day before yesterday. How excited she was because it was Day 13, how she was convinced that tonight would be the night. They ate in front of the television, as they do so often these days, passing the odd comment to one another, but not really talking.
At eleven Julia went up to bed. Mark said he'd come up after the film, at which point Julia gently reminded him that tonight was one of those nights, and could he please come up earlier. He huffed and puffed a bit, but didn't say anything. Just crossed his arms and continued staring at the screen.
Not perhaps the best of starts. It wasn't going to get any better. . . .
Once upon a time Julia wore sexy lingerie. She had drawers of lacy scraps of silk, with shoestring straps that slipped off her shoulders. Now she has oversized T-shirts for summer and pajamas for winter. Usually T-shirts that had been sent to one of her researchers, because someone, somewhere, thought that emblazoning an XL T-shirt with a huge logo would be a good selling point. T-shirts that have faded from the numerous washes over the years, that she wouldn't be seen dead in anywhere other than in her own house.
As for the pajamas . . . very definitely not sexy pajamas you might imagine someone like Meg Ryan wearing, nor even someone like Julia. Not the kind of men's pajamas that look cute and cuddly on models curled up by log fires in the pages of the glossy magazines. These men's pajamas are fraying at the edges. The bottom bags down to her knees, and because the elastic lost all its elasticity a long, long time ago, the waist is held together with a safety pin that isn't exactly safe but, amazingly, has never stuck her. They're baggy, colorless, and shapeless, except she doesn't actually care because they're so comfortable and warm.
That night was a pajama night. Julia made an effort to brush her hair and shake it out to sit on her shoulders in the way that Mark always used to love. She sat up in bed reading, intermittently looking at the clock. Even though she had promised herself not to shout at him, after half an hour her frustration became too much: She stormed to the top of the stairs and yelled at him to come up.
Five minutes later Mark came upstairs and stood in the doorway with a thunderous look on his face.
“I was in the middle of watching something that would have been over in fifteen minutes, and you could have been more patient. I'm fed up with everything revolving around you. Whatever you want, whenever you want it . . .” Julia opened her mouth to interrupt but he carried on. “And now I'm not in the mood. I know all about Day Thirteen, but frankly I find it completely implausible, and the last thing I want to do right now is have sex.” He spat this last word out as if it were the most distasteful thing in the world.
Julia swallowed her own frustration, something she found almost impossible to do, but after all, it was Day 13, and schedules must be adhered to, egos must be stroked, not to mention anything else.
“I'm sorry,” she said meekly, looking up at him from lowered eyelashes as she climbed out of bed and walked toward him. “I was selfish. I wasn't thinking. I'm so sorry.” She reached up and kissed his impassive cheek of stone, knowing that there was only one way for this to go in the direction she wanted. She moved her hand down to the zip on his trousers as she lowered herself to her knees.
“Will you forgive me?” she mumbled, mouth full. Then she knew it didn't matter any more.
Ten minutes later she was lying on the bed, legs up in the air, reading a pregnancy book as Mark went to grab the toilet paper in disgust.
He didn't say anything when he came back to the bedroom. Just shook his head sadly as he looked at Julia and climbed into bed. A few minutes later he spoke, and his voice was muted, weary. “Was it ever better than this? Tell me it was better than this. Didn't we use to make love? Didn't it use to take hours? Wasn't it fun before all this baby stuff?” He looked at Julia, as if expecting an answer, but she chose not to reply, so he turned over with a sigh. Within a few minutes all you could hear was the sound of his gentle snoring.
How could she possibly have answered him? There was nothing to say.
Julia looks at Sam and shrugs. “Don't you think the sex always goes at some point?” she says without feeling. “Sure, it was great in the beginning, but doesn't it always wear off after a while? Mark thinks that trying for a baby has made it mechanical and boring, but I'm sure the passion would have gone anyway because it always does. We've been together four years, and you really can't expect your sex life to be fantastic after four years.”
“But you're not even married,” Sam says, suddenly looking serious. “Are you sure about this baby? Are you even sure about . . . Mark?” She chooses her words carefully, tentatively, for she is voicing things Julia doesn't want to think about, let alone hear. “Julia, all I'm saying is that I don't think it's fair to bring a child into the world if you're not sure you're with the right—”
“Okay, okay.” Julia stops her mid-flow. “I'm sorry, Sam, but this just isn't something I can talk about. You know how much I want this child. How can you say these things?”
Julia knows exactly how she can say these things. Sam is only saying all the things Julia thinks when she wakes up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart, almost suffocating with the panic, the need to escape, only bearable because she knows normality will return with daylight. And how can she trust these night fears anyway? How can she trust them when they leave in the morning? If they were real, if she were supposed to be listening to them, then she'd have them all the time, wouldn't she?
Wouldn't she?
“I'm sorry.” Sam is contrite. These are difficult words to say. Even to your best friend. “I just worry about you.”
“I know,” Julia sighs. “I worry about me too.”