After our appointment, things spiral quickly. In the next three weeks, with little work to keep me busy and the added stress of wondering if Tom is sending pictures to other women, I put on half a stone sadly and easily. The drugs make me nauseous and give me headaches, and I avoid Anais and in fact everybody – except Tom, who is working in London; I suspect he has made sure of that because he is worried about me.
It doesn’t work well, though. Alone at home with our thoughts and our worst fears, and with my suspicions crawling around the insides of my brain, we trip over each other, snapping and biting. Should I say something? I wonder constantly. Should I, should I? But I think about how he laughed about the knickers. I think about what would happen if he admitted cheating. I think about my womb and I know: I don’t have room for this.
‘What happened to all your running?’ says Tom, faux-lightly one night, and I scream at him that he is being cruel at a time when the last thing I need is cruelty.
How dare you! I think. How dare you criticise me when you are doing what I think you might be doing when we are in the midst of this? But I don’t believe it really. He couldn’t be, could he?
‘It wasn’t meant to be cruel,’ Tom says, chastised, and I notice bags under his eyes that I haven’t seen before. ‘I just thought running might make you feel better.’
But I know he’s been building up to it, rolling the phrasing around in his head and debating saying it for hours. I realised when he went to the gym a few days ago that he was making a point to me then, too, and it’s a horrible thing to know. Especially when. If.
I rage-eat a family-sized chocolate bar and read Zadie Smith in bed until he comes up after a late night working at his laptop.
‘Sorry,’ he whispers in the dark, but I am too suspicious of him now to be able to go to him and seek solace. I pretend to be asleep.
The next day I stay in bed until ten thirty and it’s only when Tom sticks his head in that I’m shamed into getting up. I don’t have much clarity but even I can see that I am lacking a purpose and that makes me sadder. A baby would be my purpose.
When I open my Zadie Smith I can feel her clever, feminist eyes on me, ashamed. Women: discard me.
But this is how I feel at my grimiest, deepest core.
A text pings in from Anais.
I’m worried about you, she says. You’re so quiet. Have I done something? Is something going on?
I put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ and throw it across the room.
Tom comes in and glances at it.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asks, echoing Anais.
‘I’m just over everyone being so attached to their phones,’ I mutter. ‘I think I might bin it so they all go away and leave me alone.’
And then I skulk past, animal, tying up my greying dressing gown and heading for the bathroom.
The worst thing is that I know I am pushing Tom away. Even before the message from Rachel. We’re strong enough to handle Bad Me for a while, I had reasoned. But is that the thought that gets people and screws them over from the inside? Is that thought why he is sending these kinds of messages to strange women?
This is the pitiful and honest truth: I haven’t looked any more into what this woman said, because if I did and Tom finally did admit that something happened, I would have to make a decision about whether or not to cut him out of my life and most likely to press stop on fertility treatment. And I am full of hormones and not strong enough for that.
Instead I shelve it, like one of those photo albums from the past with the funny cards shoved inside, and I shut the door on it, vowing to revisit it later at a time when I am feeling stronger. And hoping that that time does come.