“But it’s actually more like a grape by now than a grain of rice. So okay, what if you did cast the deciding vote? What if it was your body?” He noticed her hands slipped beneath her jacket to her lower belly, still muscled, still firm. It was unimaginable that beneath the sleek concavity of her navel could be anything so sinister and alien. Then her hand moved from her own stomach to his, demonstrating, inviting.
He lay down on his back, though the hard ground was cold beneath him. It was easier to speak freely if he shut her out, and instead watched the crimson capillaries of his closed eyelids. “We’ve talked about it. I think to have it would be a major-league mistake. I can’t make you do anything.” This was the dutiful line, and he discharged it with feeling. “But I think it would be a huge mistake. We’re way too young. It’s a nightmare. Neither of us has finished school, and I’d want any son of mine to have everything I have. We’ve been insanely privileged, really. And I’d want to provide my kids with what I’ve had, you know, educationally, and travel; I’ve lived in two countries already . . .” Here he tapered off because, apart from having a vague awareness that his parents had argued over his own monstrously expensive school fees, he was at a loss to articulate the innumerable ways in which he felt ill-equipped for parenthood. It came down only to this—he didn’t want it. He could do it, he felt. If there were nuclear war, or the aliens came and it fell upon him to repopulate the earth with his bevy of flaxen-haired warrior-women, he would step up. But unless he found himself in those circumstances, where in any case he would have awesome weapons and iron-hard biceps and a life-and-death battle against evil forces, and the cameras never showed screaming infants but instead dwelt on the necessary and heroic adrenaline-charged trysts amid the rubble; unless it would be like that, he did not want children. Not now, maybe never. Panic like a trapped sparrow fluttered in his chest.
“I know.” She nodded in enthusiastic agreement, as if warming to an established theme. “I know, totally. And we could have waited and got married first and been all organized and— But I mean, this happened now, so plans change.”
It had not escaped Nathan’s notice that she had begun to speak as if their lives together were inevitable, already planned and committed. Just weeks before, he remembered her saying something about a possible barbecue, if they were still together by summer. At the time he had been touched, and happy she saw their relationship continuing. He was at his best with a girlfriend, fortified by the knowledge that there was one person who would dependably choose him first. But now the conditional tense had been entirely abandoned. He had, apparently without noticing, acquired a wife. Still, they could not talk sensibly if she was defensive. “I never knew you wanted kids so young,” he said, carefully.
“I guess I hadn’t thought about it until this happened”—she had flopped onto her back beside him but sat up again, speaking urgently—“and maybe some parts aren’t ideal but it just feels right, it’s like my whole life is clear suddenly, and makes sense. I know I probably sound crazy but it’s like it was meant to happen. This is everything.”
He gave a dry chuckle, frowning and pinching the bridge of his nose, a position in which he looked, for a moment, exactly like his father. He sniffed. His eyes were stinging in the sun and watering, inexplicably. “This was meant to happen, you think?”
“I know I sound insane. And even a few days ago I would have said it’s the worst luck in the world but yes, really really really I think this is my good luck. I have never felt more certain of anything in my life, I was meant to have this little grape, I’m its mother already. I feel it. It wasn’t what I planned but now it’s happened.” She beat a small fist above her heart, tightly clenched. “I feel it, this is who I’m meant to live for. I’m not against it or anything; if you’d asked me before, I would have said I’d totally have an abortion and feel relieved and we’d plan our lives all neatly and go to university first, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t think things happen like you plan, do they? And this way I’ll take, like, six months or a year out now, and then go back to everything and go to uni a year late and just start my job one year later. It will be like, my gap year.”
“I don’t think having a kid is much like a gap year. It’s not like, I don’t know, counting starfish on some eco mission in the Philippines. It’s not hiking the Inca trail.”
“But I would never want to hike the Inca trail. Don’t look at me like that, you’re making me laugh and I’m being totally serious. I’m not that type, I’m a homebody. Compared to most of the country we’re rich, really, and obviously I’ll get a job part time or whatever, but I know my mum will help look after it once it’s here, because she’ll want me to go back to school. They were probably going to have a baby themselves.” She lifted her chin, defiant, and an indecipherable expression crossed her face. Her eyes flashed. “Now they won’t have to.”
Nathan glanced at her oddly. “Isn’t your mother, like, fifty?”
“No!” Gwen looked wary. “She’s forty-seven.”
“I mean, it now seems fairly obvious the men of the Fuller family have supersperm”—here Nathan paused, dusting lint or perhaps falling confetti from his imaginary epaulettes—“but I don’t think even supersperm can do much with forty-seven. Why do you think they’d even want another kid anyway? In five years my dad will be sixty. There’s no way. They’re just getting rid of us and starting their new phase or whatever, it would be craziness. My dad goes on about whisking your mom off into the sunset to hear Scriabin or Messiaen or whatever. He can’t wait to be done with school fees.” Nathan reverted to their own case. “And what if taking the Pill has like, fried it in there?”
“They might have done. They might.” Tears threatened.
“Okay, okay, if you say so, they might.”
“They won’t anymore!” She stroked his arm and her voice softened. “We make such a good team. We’ve grown up more than our friends already; think about Katy or Charlie or anyone. We’ve had to.”
Nathan had no other way to get through to her, and could not raise his voice. She shifted slightly, and her shadow fell across his face so that after the dazzling glare of the sunshine he could see again, and with this fleeting clarity of vision he spoke, as frankly as he dared. “I’m not ready for a baby. I’m not ready to be a father. I, I just don’t want to. Please don’t—I can’t.”