“I should think so,” I replied, and tried to keep my voice sexy. “I miss you.”
We hung up the phone soon after. When I left my bedroom, I found a Post-it on the door, and on it was the phone number for Marie Stopes International.
It was a week for unusual phone conversations.
I called Marie Stopes on Monday morning. They told me that I needed to have a consultation first, then they gave me a list of clinics I could see in Ireland. There were two in Cork. After a doctor had seen me, they would refer me to a private clinic in the UK.
In the years since, I’ve spent so much time interviewing, reporting, and editing various Irish women’s experiences with abortion that my mind has fused my own experience with theirs. Our road maps are too similar. It always starts with a phone call, and then a consultation, and after, you select a clinic based not so much on safety or medical prowess but on where Ryanair is doing a deal with that month. Sometimes Manchester is cheaper, and sometimes London is.
There’s a limited field of options, and a limited field of emotions to go with them. Frightened, sad. Angry at having to travel. Angry at yourself for being irresponsible. Angry at the doctor for asking if I was absolutely sure that I wanted a termination, which I suppose is sensible to ask, but pissed me off anyway. Or did it piss me off? Have I just read so much about this particular experience that my feelings have attached on to a global nerve centre of Irish female thought on abortion?
It’s impossible to say.
The only memories that are clear are the ones with James in them.
We went to the clinic in Cork together on Wednesday, where I took another test, and where the doctor confirmed that I was nine weeks pregnant. I counted that it was only six weeks since Carey and I had unprotected sex, but apparently that didn’t matter. Pregnancy was, bafflingly, counted from the date of your last period. Then he left the room and said that a nurse would be back to discuss “our options.”
“Oh my God,” James said. “I bet he thinks I’m the father.”
“Well, good. I hope he does,” I replied. “I don’t want him to think I got pregnant by being a slapper. I want him to know people love me.”
It was the first time that James ever looked shocked by something I said. If we hadn’t been there to schedule my abortion, he would have taken me to task over it.
He looked at the brochures for clinics in England. “You don’t have to feel ashamed of any of this,” he murmured.
I scoffed. Made a little disgusted throat-clearing sound, like it would be insane for me to feel that way.
But my Irishness got the better of me. “It’s illegal, though.”
“Yeah.” He raised his eyebrow. “And so was sodomy, until like, nineteen ninety-three or something, so we’re both basically criminals.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Yeah, like Bonnie and Clyde.”
We smiled at each other, because we had seen the Faye Dunaway film not long before. James took my hand, putting on his warbling Southern-belle voice.
“They call them cold-blooded killers, they say they are heartless and mean. But I say this with pride, that I once knew Clyde…”
My friend put his lips to my knuckles and pressed hard, then met my eyes to finish the verse.
“…and she was honest, and upright, and clean.”
The nurse entered the room with James still holding my hand, and he didn’t let go while she talked to us. She told me that she could schedule a termination in the UK for two weeks’ time, which would bring me to eleven weeks, and that I had a choice between medical and surgical. Medical was just taking a pill, but it was painful, and you did it over two days, which meant booking two nights in England. Surgical was more common for Irish women travelling. I nodded. If surgical was what most Irish women did, then that is what I would do.
I drifted out of the room then as the nurse was still speaking. I imagined my return to Ireland, all empty and scraped out.
“Excuse me,” James said, jolting me back in the room. “Did you say five hundred euros?”
“Five hundred?” I squeaked. “Are you fucking serious?”
“We don’t have that,” he said.
“Yes, we don’t have that,” I echoed.
The nurse nodded with a practised sympathy. She probably had this conversation a dozen times a day. “Part of that is the consultation fee you’ll pay today,” she said unhelpfully. “Which is sixty-five. The rest you’ll pay when you’re there.”
I was to phone later that day when I had decided what I wanted to do. I paid the sixty-five and we left the clinic. I leaned my body over the railings of the River Lee, trying to breathe in the wet air.
“Don’t throw yourself in, for the love of God.”
“How am I going to pay that, James?” I said. “And then there’s the flights.”
“And the hotel,” he said gently.
“And the fucking hotel,” I echoed.
He sat down by the railings. “And realistically, there’s public transport, cabs, lunch, dinner for the two of us. We can bring sandwiches but not for every meal.”
“The two of us?”
“I’m not letting you go alone.” He looked into the river. “There’s five hundred and fifty-seven euro in our fund.”
“That’s half your money.”
“It’s our money. We’ll make it back. We’ll just have to emigrate later.”
I hugged him, my arms around his waist, his around my shoulders. We really did look like a couple. I felt his slim body tense, and I loved him, not because it was easy for him to say goodbye to that money but because it was unbelievably hard.
“We need another two hundred, at least, for flights and all that,” I said. “And we have to book it soon, too, so it’ll be even more expensive.”
“Two hundred!” he scoffed. “Three, at least.”
When we got home we looked at flights. London flights were all in the high hundreds; we found a few Manchester ones for sixty-five euro each, provided we didn’t book luggage.
“Do you think Ryanair makes all their money from abortions?” I said limply. “It’s a pretty amazing business model, when you think about it.”
I called the clinic back to confirm that I had decided on Manchester. We booked the flights using the card from our savings account.
“We need to go begging,” he sighed. “Let’s make a list.”
Here was his list.
Rachel parents
Carey
James parents
Ben?
Call centre
Harrington-Byrnes
“My parents don’t have it,” I said. “And I’m not telling them, anyway. My dad is pro-life.”
“And Carey?”
“Definitely doesn’t have it. He’s got no job, and he’s looking after his parents.” I looked at his list. “And I can’t ask your parents, I don’t know them.”
I crossed out the first three, along with Ben, who was a stupid idea.