“What about up here?” Nathan offered, pointing toward a patch of balding grass beneath a giant sycamore. It was less crowded than the larger clearing they had just passed, in which he’d spotted a group of local teenagers he half knew and urgently wished to avoid. A damp chill remained in the air, but an unexpected wash of pale April sunshine had drawn hopeful crowds to the Heath. Nathan’s parents had given him a series of coaching sessions prior to this outing, and he had set out determined to act upon them.
“Ugh. You’re so lucky you get to escape to school. I wish I could escape from Mum and— Julia and James. They’re probably desperate to get rid of me anyway. I’m so sick of crying and being yelled at and groveling and then crying again, it’s not exactly relaxing.”
“I don’t think the throwing up is majorly helpful. Maybe you should consider quitting that.”
“Okay, I’ll think about giving up, but it’s just been so much fun. I feel human again today, though.”
“I’m glad,” he said, with feeling. It had been dreadful to watch her heave, with the surreal guilt and awe that his own ejaculation could have such terrible power.
They sat down on the seam of shadow that fell across the grass, Nathan in the sun, Gwen in the full shade. She had showered and put in her contact lenses and looked pretty and fresh faced again, in a pair of heart-shaped cerise Lolita sunglasses and a denim jacket on which she’d long ago embroidered a seam of prancing, rainbow-tailed unicorns. She had been cheerful since they’d been alone together. Sucking intermittently on an orange lollipop, she looked the picture of youthful innocence. Here was someone he recognized.
“I’m sorry this has all got so crazy,” she said, after a while. The lolly clicked against her teeth as she removed it to speak. “I just get so frustrated that they don’t get it. And I know I’m superhormonal so it seems like I don’t know what I mean because I keep crying but I do, I just express myself badly. It’s like, insanely clear in my head. They’re both so rigid, it’s like they refuse to see that people can take different paths from them. From them? From theirs? Anyway. I think”—she paused to tuck the sweet back into one cheek—“I think sometimes it can be very hard for parents to see signs that their babies have become adults.”
Nathan saw the truth in this statement, and also its dishonesty. Their parents were not upset because their children were growing up but because they had done something infantile. He had never felt less like an adult. This was most acute when he spoke on the phone with his mother, longing for the stifling warmth and reassurance of her soft arms around him. Last night he’d dreamed he had been entrusted with a minute baby in a jam jar. The jar had smashed, and the baby lay gasping and suffocating at his feet like a tiny landed minnow.
Gwen turned to him to speak again and he took the lollipop from her hand, crunched it between his molars and then grinned at her, handing back the remaining shard on its paper stick. She liked these small, exclusive familiarities, he knew, liked sharing his spoon, or his toothbrush, enjoyed the ostentatious intimacy of licking a swelling drop of ice cream from his wrist, or passing chewing gum mouth to mouth. Or carrying his child, he thought, and found himself shaking his head involuntarily, as if the thought could be dislodged like water from his ears. He desperately needed her to listen.
“Tell me honestly what you want.” Gwen began to peel at the damp stick with a fingernail. “I go mental when they ask because they’re so judgmental and it’s none of their business, but it’s different just us. This is our decision.”
“Okay,” began Nathan, slowly. “Well, right now we’re talking about, like, a grain of rice.”
Spoken by James or Julia, this would have tripped Gwen into a spasm of white rage, but alone with Nathan, she did not feel defensive. Nathan was not a threat. To compare it to a grain of rice did not reduce it to the insignificance of a grain of rice. Her chin lifted a fraction.
“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.”
“I think you’re ready. I think you’ll be amazing.” She lay down beside him again and inched closer, curled on her side, one leg slung over his, her hand resting lightly on his chest. After a moment he heard her breath change and realized, startled, that she had fallen heavily asleep.
When on the warpath both his parents were formidable in their own way, but his father’s love for him was vast, he knew, and could conquer cities. James would always protect him. He had not felt able to present Gwen with some home truths, as his father had instructed, nor to threaten, as his mother had commanded, but at least all the adults were in agreement and he had only to survive down this topsy-turvy rabbit hole a little longer; parents were parents and ultimately she would not be allowed to go through with it. Surely there was no need for his throat to tighten like this; no need for the tears that threatened, again, again.
The sun had moved and bright stripes now fell across Gwen’s face. As carefully as he could, he maneuvered himself from beneath her hand and sat up, leaning forward so that the shadow of his back would protect her pale, unaccustomed skin. For the sake of the imaginary film crew he dropped his head into his hands, an exquisite picture of broken, masculine despair.