WEEKS AND WEEKS LATER, Iris was sick-gilled and green as lake-weed.
She spilled herself in all unlikely places: flowerpots, saucepans, gumboots, rubbish bins. (Oh, but that one is quite likely, actually: it’s always a relief when pregnant to find a rubbish bin is close at hand.) Popcorn buckets, handbags, desk drawers, plastic bags, wheelbarrows. Her eye was always on what could quickly be grabbed and made receptacle, so she made less of a spectacle of herself, and the floor. She counted back, and would always believe that 28 December, 11:08 p.m., was the precise date and time of the baby-on-the-way’s conception.
Once upon a time, she thought. And so we started you upon all your once upon a times.
She just didn’t quite know how to tell Liam. She mulled. She whispered it to herself. She reconsidered and rehearsed in front of the mirror, shook her head, rephrased, took another run at it, and then when she met him, defaulted to blurt.
‘I’m going to have a baby.’
Then came the eponymous, quintessential, most pregnant of pauses. A woman waits on a fulcrum, feeling her life tip towards the maelstrom.
Liam looked blank.
This was almost worse than a look of shock. There was nothing to go on! Nothing to work with! Not even to fight!
Days of held-back tears rushed to the surface. Yet before the tears could hit air, Liam’s expression careened into wonder. ‘We’re officially a couple?’
She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s too soon. Should’ve been more careful, I—’
‘What have you got to be sorry for?’ He gave her a tender, somehow teasing hug. ‘A quick game’s a good game.’
‘Of Monopoly, maybe, Liam. Or cricket. This—’
He started nuzzling her, laughing. ‘Tiddlywinks! Pick-up-sticks! Poker! I’ll have someone who’ll learn my card tricks!’
‘You have card tricks?’ Iris had a tissue at the ready. ‘I didn’t know that. You see? Four years and still I hardly know you. How can I raise a child with you?’
‘There’s still time to teach you my card tricks before the baby’s here. Promise. In eight months, you’ll know me and my card tricks upside down or your money back.’
She was crying now, and laughing, yet not sure she wanted laughter to shoo away the tears: crying was such a relief. ‘Seven months. I think it might be only seven months left.’
‘Nyeh.’ He pinched thumbs to index fingers, lifting them in a mock-Italian shrug. ‘So, fewer card tricks. Still a bargain.’ He noticed her expression then. He put his arms around her shoulders, kissed her forehead. ‘It’s going to be okay. It was bound to happen some time, right? All that pent-up, incredible sex. The life force has been using us!’ He was using a false, appalled lisp: a cross between Sylvester the Cat and a drag queen. ‘That’s just what biology wants. And secretly I’ve known for a while now that you’re the one. You’re The One!’
Oh, God. Could she have a child with someone this hyper? ‘Liam, there might be someone for everyone, but that’s someone, not The One.’
He managed to goggle his eyes and glower at the same time. ‘I just said something very committed. You’re meant to swoon.’
‘I’m trying to be realistic. This is huge, Liam. Most people have more time to just be a couple. To really get to know each other first.’
‘Iris.’ He pressed his forehead to hers. ‘We’ve been friends for years and I’m a very shallow guy. It won’t take you long to know every tiny thing there is left to know about me.’
And he did this thing — this thing — with the tip of his tongue, and his thumb, and then this patch of skin on her waist, of all places; she’d had no idea there were such sensitive nerve-endings there … Rather soon, she forgot to be the serious, sensible one. It seemed now quite logical: who better to have a child with than someone with such boyish high spirits? She moaned, and he mumbled with his mouth against hers, ‘Wait till you see my card tricks.’
Fun and games; heedless sex; briefly insouciant youth: December 28, 2003, 11:08 p.m. The unconscious start of we’re-going-to-be-a-family.
It was also, she swore, the moment when the sharp-toothed silver cogs of love were finally set running. All that sugar-swim-comet-works, soaring-surge canyon-glide … (You can see the appeal in not sharing what’s behind the bedroom door. Isn’t one point of sex that it’s a separate language? Yet how typical of Iris to set off a cascade of words for any significant episode …) Anyway, until then, her relationship with Liam had been so wrapped up in self-denial (We’re just friends!) that she hadn’t known herself what was going on.
Yet from that moment, in her view, they hadn’t just had sex. Something existed that hadn’t before. Invisible weft. Not-quite-sculpture-of-air, not-quite-bower-of-heat. A presence, yet not as solidly there as cake, potter’s bowl, dance, melody …
Which is why she went quiet whenever her older, garrulous, pharmacist sister laughed at the phrase making love. ‘Why do people say that? Love-shmuv. Screwing will do me.’ Cue trademark smutty bark.
‘Carrie!’
‘What? Don’t be a prude. You’ve heard it plenty of times, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t like “screwing”, it sounds so — what, light bulbs and metal and mechanical and I don’t know, crumple it up and throw it away. Like sex is throwaway. It’s not for me, okay?’
‘No kidding. It’s taken you long enough to even find a screw. Why would you want to chuck it so soon?’
‘Carrie, cut it out.’
‘Sorry, princess, can I say have sex?’
‘Well, if you’re going to split idioms …’
‘Boooooring!’ sang Carrie. ‘You brainy-ise everything. Wanna catch a movie?’
Later Iris repeated this (post-coital, of course) to Liam. ‘So I said, screw sounds so throwaway. What we do is—’
‘Infinitely renewable,’ he said, giving her the glad-eye, feeling the nap of her like velvet and silk and sometimes bumpy cotton because this is real, not Photoshopped, not Hollywooden. His hands were earth parched for the rain of her, because sometimes, actually, reality feels like poetry, and these are the time-fragments we want to remember, the moments that impel momentous decisions.
How could she say to Liam, well, in a way, I didn’t really love you until we had sex? It seemed dangerous for a feminist to admit. There was excitement, attraction, giddiness and urgent hope, yes, but not deep love. That grew gradually: perhaps when it felt safer, because there, she had him.
And really, if sex can accidentally make something as wild, complex, erratic, dogged, miraculous, sensitive, vulnerable, solid, unaware, bizarre, intractable, awful and joyful as a human child, why, in a specific instance, couldn’t it be said to help make love?