CHAPTER ONE
‘RELIGION IS FOR those who believe in hell, spirituality is for those who have already been there.’ Shyama had to squint slightly to read the laminated sticker on the side of the receptionist’s computer. It must be the light, she consoled herself. She shifted slightly in the queue, catching a whiff of perfume from the woman in front of her – something woody and expensive, blended with a scent she recognized intimately, a musky aroma with a bitter undertone: the familiar smell of desperation. The woman exchanged a few hushed words with the receptionist and then took a seat on a faded chintzy sofa, giving Shyama a better look at the owner of the computer.
A new girl. She was young – too young, Shyama felt, for a place like this, a discreet Harley Street address where women under the age of thirty-five ought to be banned. With a faint nod, Shyama handed over her appointment card and stole a longer look at her. Sun, sin and saturated fats had not yet pinched the skin around her eyes or spider-legged their way around her smiling mouth. She was a natural redhead, with that translucent paleness and a smattering of tiny freckles, dusting on a freshly baked cupcake. How could this snip of a girl have ever had a glimpse of hell, as her sticker proclaimed? Then Shyama spotted her earrings: silver discs with the Hindu symbol ‘Om’ engraved on the surface.
‘Do take a seat, Mrs Shaw,’ the young girl said. ‘Mr Lalani won’t be long.’
There was a moment’s hesitation while Shyama considered commenting on those earrings. But that would spark a conversation about where Shyama came from and yes, she was Hindu, but no, born here, and no, she hadn’t been to half the ancient sites that Miss Cupcake had visited, and yes, isn’t it humbling that the Indian poor have so little yet they would give you their last piece of chapatti and, despite living knee-deep in refuse, how on earth do they always seem so happy? Then there would be some more chat about the charming guest-house the receptionist had found in Goa or the unbelievable guide who had practically saved her life in the teeming, chanting crowds of Haridwar, or that moment when she had watched the monsoon clouds rolling in over Mumbai bay, dark clots curdling the horizon, the air turning metallic and tart to the tongue.
Shyama had done all those things, many years ago, before motherhood and divorce and laughter lines – though frankly, when she looked at herself in a magnifying mirror nowadays she wondered if anything could have really been that funny.
They could have swapped life-changing anecdotes, Shyama knowing she would always be able to trump the earrings simply by pointing to her skin. ‘The real deal, see?’ Though she knew she wasn’t. She hadn’t been to India for years. The only branch of the family she had ever been close to were now not speaking to her, and it seemed highly unlikely that she would be going there in the foreseeable future because every penny of her savings had gone on this clinic. The clinic where the redhead with the Om earrings was now staring at her.
Shyama flashed her a warm smile, wanting to reassure her that she wasn’t one of those bitter women who would give her a hard time simply because she had youth and insouciance on her side – no sir, not she – and she sat down heavily on a squishy armchair, trying to steady her nerves.
She started as a metallic ping announced that a text from Toby had just arrived. ‘U OK? Phone on vibrate next to my heart…’ She knew the dots denoted irony. They did a lot of that: self-conscious romantic declarations, inviting each other to join in and trample on the sentiment before it embarrassed them both. It was cute, it was becoming habit, maybe she should worry about that. There might come a point where one of them would need to say something heartfelt and sincere without being laughed at. She texted back, ‘Glad phone vibrating next to heart and not in trouser pocket as usual. Not gone in yet…’ It was only after she had sent the text that she realized she’d ended with dots too. Surely he would know that they denoted a resigned sigh, rather than an invitation to let the joshing begin. Oh well, it was a test. If Toby misunderstood and texted back with some quip, she would know that they weren’t really suited and that it wasn’t worth carrying on with any of this time-consuming, expensive grappling with Nature. Best to walk away with a sad smile and a good-luck-with-the-rest-of-your-life kind of wave. Then she could just let go. Let the belly sag and the grey show through, and blow the gym membership on vodka and full-sleeve tops to cover up the incoming bingo wings.
A text from Toby. A single unironic X.
* * *
‘Mr Lalani will see you now.’
Shyama stood up at exactly the same time as the woman who had come in before her. Smart suit, perfect hair, pencil-thin, one arched eyebrow raised like a bow.
‘Mrs Bindman? Do go through.’
The eyebrow pinged off an invisible arrow of victory and Shyama sat back down, repressing an urge to bang her heels against the chair like a truculent toddler. There was so much waiting in this game and yet so little time to play with. Her life was punctuated with mocking end-of-sentence dots. All those years spent avoiding getting pregnant, all those hours of sitting on cold plastic toilet seats in student digs/shared houses/first flats, praying for the banner of blood to declare that war was over, that your life would go on as before. And then the later years, spent in nicer houses on a better class of loo seat – reclaimed teak or cheekily self-conscious seats like the plastic one with a barbed-wire pattern inside (her daughter’s choice, of course) – still waiting. But this time praying for the blood not to come, for a satisfied silence that would tell Shyama her old life was most definitely over as, inside her, a new one had just begun.
On impulse she dialled Lydia’s number, exhaling in relief as she heard her friend’s voice.
‘Any news?’
‘I haven’t gone in yet,’ Shyama whispered, getting up and going out to the corridor so she could talk at normal volume.
‘You just caught me between my 11 o’clock bulimic and my midday self-harmer. Great timing.’ Lydia’s cool, measured voice felt like balm.
Shyama’s shoulders dropped an inch. ‘Think I need a free session on your psycho-couch right now.’
‘That’s what last night was for. Therapy without the lying-down-and-box-of-tissues bit. And as I told you then—’
‘I know.’ Shyama sighed. ‘Que sera sera and all that. Out of my hands. It sounds more palatable in Spanish somehow.’
‘Oh, hang on a minute, Shyams. Got another call coming through … stay there…’
Before she could tell her that they could talk later, Shyama was put on hold. She looked across the corridor at her fellow patients, absorbed in old copies of Country Life. They were all, as the French so politely put it, women d’un certain âge, maturing like fine wine or expensive cheese, ripening into what might be regarded in some cultures as their prime years, when the children had flown the nest, the husband had mellowed, and the time left was spent in contemplation, relaxation and generally being revered. She, Lydia and Priya had talked about this very subject last night at their local tapas bar, the three of them hooting gales of garlicky laughter.
Lydia had started it. ‘Did you know that some Native American tribes actually used to hold menopause ceremonies? A sort of party to celebrate the end of the slog of childbearing?’
‘A party?’ Priya said doubtfully, wrinkling her perfectly pert nose. ‘Must have been a laugh a minute.’
‘Oh, I can see that,’ Shyama chipped in. ‘Dancing round a bonfire of all your old maxi pads. Bring your own hot flush.’
Priya snorted a considerable amount of white wine out of both nostrils, grabbing a serviette to mask her splutters. She looked a decade younger than Shyama, though she wasn’t. She managed a huge office, two children, a husband and ageing in-laws who lived with her, batch-cooked gourmet Indian meals and froze them in labelled Tupperware, and always wore four-inch heels. She would have made Shyama feel resentfully inadequate if it wasn’t for her expansive generosity and her frank admission of several business-trip affairs.
‘A little respect, please, for the wise women who came before us,’ Lydia intoned, mock seriously. ‘Apparently feathers and drums featured heavily, plus some spirited dancing and the imbibing of naturally sourced hallucinogenics. The point was, they didn’t see the menopause as this terrible curse, they welcomed it, celebrated it. Because it meant you were passing into your next and maybe most important phase of life – the powerful matriarchal elder, the badly behaved granny, take your pick.’
‘Dress it up how you want, honey.’ Priya was filling her glass again. ‘No amount of druggy dancing is going to make me feel any better about intimate dryness.’
‘They saw it as a beginning, not an end. Imagine, a whole tribe of cackling, don’t-give-a-toss hags proudly sailing their bodies into old age. Who’s up for it?’
They had decided they would do just that, once that hormonal watershed had been crossed. Find a leafy spot on Wanstead Flats, gather a tribe of fellow crones – the three of them plus a few of the game birds from their Bodyzone class – choose a full-moon night and chant defiantly at the skies, ‘What do we want? Respect! Adoration! Our right to exist as non-fertile yet useful attractive women! When do we want it? As soon as someone notices us, thanks awfully, sorry to bother you.’ Or something a little more snappy.
But it wouldn’t be like that, Shyama realized now, the phone still to her ear, humming with electronic silence. It would rain, someone would tread in dog poo, they would have to fight for a spot amongst the cottagers and illicit couplings, and after two minutes of embarrassed mumbling, Lydia would suggest they repair to a nearby wine bar where they would crack self-deprecating jokes about their changing bodies over a shared bag of low-fat crisps. Besides, nowadays no one had to have a real menopause. You could just ignore it, take the drugs which keep a woman’s body in a permanent state of faux fertility and parade around in hot chick’s clothing, long after the eggs had left the building. A whole phase of life wiped away, glossed over, hushed up, for as long as you could get away with it. And given how society treated older women, why the hell not?
‘Shyams? Still there?’
‘Lyd – I think I’m next…’
Shyama stood aside as Mrs Bindman exited the consulting room. Shyama noticed that her skirt was slightly askew, a childlike muss of hair at the back of her head confirming a session on Mr Lalani’s examination couch. Oh, but the smile she carried, softening every angle and crisp crease of her. It must have been a good-news day.
‘Got clients up until five, then I’m all yours,’ Lydia got in quickly.
Shyama muttered a brief goodbye and returned to the desk, where she waited until the receptionist looked up brightly.
‘Do go in, Mrs Shaw, and so sorry for the wait.’ And then more softly, ‘It was a bit of an emergency appointment, thank you for being so patient.’
Shyama forgave most things when accompanied by impeccable manners. She hesitated, then said, ‘I always thought hell would turn out to be some kind of waiting room. Sort of weird that this is in here.’
The receptionist looked confused.
‘Your sticker?’
‘Oh, that!’ The receptionist laughed, and it really did sound as if Tinkerbell had fallen down a small flight of steps. ‘That’s not mine. I’m just filling in for Joyce. She’s off sick.’
Shyama had never known Joyce’s name but remembered the middle-aged, comfy woman who usually greeted her with a doleful smile.
‘I just thought … your earrings.’
‘Oh, these!’ The receptionist briefly touched one of the engraved silver discs. ‘My boyfriend got them in Camden. Pretty pattern, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm. Anyway, sorry to hear Joyce’s off. I’ll discuss my spooky-sticker theory with her when she’s back.’
The receptionist hesitated, then lowered her voice. ‘I don’t think she’ll be coming back. Poor Joyce. Who’d have thought it?’
Shyama battled with an image of matronly, sad-eyed Joyce standing on a pile of self-help books whilst looping a dressing-gown cord around her neck, all the way down the corridor and into the hushed beige of Mr Lalani’s private consulting room.
* * *
‘I wish I could give you more encouraging news, but I want to be completely honest with you, Mrs Shaw.’
Mr Lalani held her gaze; he really was absurdly good-looking with his mane of salt-and-pepper hair and limpid brown eyes – Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago but with better teeth.
‘No. I mean, yes, I appreciate that.’
She always put on nice underwear for her visits here, pathetic as that was. Like the old joke about the busy mum who gives herself a quick wipe with a flannel before her gynae appointment; once she’s on the couch, her doctor clears his throat (why are they usually men?) and tells her, ‘You really didn’t need to go to so much effort.’ She has used the very flannel her four-year-old employed to wash her doll that morning with glitter soap. It was amusing the first time Shyama heard it. She had heard it several times now, attributed to different people, some of them famous. One of the urban myths that she and her fellow travellers shared in their many waiting rooms. Except she wasn’t one of them any more.
‘Mrs Shaw? Can I get you some water, perhaps?’
‘No. Really, I’m fine. I’m just … surprised. Because, well, I’ve managed one before, haven’t I? A child, I mean.’
‘Yes, of course. And I hope that’s some comfort, though I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. But you had your daughter nineteen years ago. Your body was very different then. And, of course, I am pretty certain at that point you did not have the problems that…’
Mr Lalani became pleasant background noise, though Shyama remembered to nod knowingly as she caught the odd word drifting by – ‘Laparoscopy … endometriosis … ICSI … IUI … IVF…’ – soothing as a mantra in their familiarity. She had a strange and not unpleasant sensation of floating above her body, looking down at the smartish, attractive-ish woman in her casual yet edgy outfit, looking rather good for forty-eight (because of her Asian genes, you know – black don’t crack, brown don’t frown) and feeling surprisingly calm. Ridiculous to expect there wouldn’t be some issues at her age; women half her age had issues. There were plenty of other options, surely?
‘… very few other options available, I’m afraid.’
Shyama blinked, came back to earth with an uncomfortable lurch. ‘What? Sorry, I missed that last … paragraph, actually.’
Mr Lalani’s eyes softened. Only on men could wrinkles look empathetic. ‘I’m sorry if I’m not being clear. Let me discard the jargon for a moment.’
His archaic use of language and impeccable grammar hinted at expensive foreign schooling. She had been seeing him for over a year, the third expert during two years of trying, and still knew nothing about his life. The discreet gold band confirmed a wife, presumably a family. How many children had he fathered, or helped create? How many women had sat here in this chair and received his judgement like a benediction or a curse?
‘… very little point in pursuing IVF or any other kind of assisted reproduction. Even seeking donor eggs would not solve the issue of your inhospitable womb and the dangers of attempting to carry a child yourself.’
An inhospitable womb! There, she had been looking for a title for her autobiography. It was a game she played with her girlfriends; every so often, usually when one of them was going through a particularly challenging life phase – rebellious children, a recalcitrant partner, money slipping through their fingers like mercury. So far her favourite title had come from Priya, who had proffered In These Shoes? Later on, Shyama found out that ‘In These Shoes’ was the title of a song, but still, coming from Priya at that moment, it had seemed like poetry.
‘Of course, it is always your choice. You can get a second opinion, many women do. But the medical facts remain as they are. I am sorry.’
‘So it’s me, then?’ Shyama exhaled. ‘I mean, I know Toby has passed all his tests with flying colours. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Thirty-four-year-old men, that’s their prime, isn’t it? And he loves red meat, though we try and limit the lamb chops to once a week. Or is it zinc you have to eat? Is that in eggs? Eggs have good cholesterol now, don’t they? And after all the warnings they gave us … so doctors can be wrong. You just find out way after the event, usually.’
Mr Lalani let the silence settle, mote by mote, like fine dust. He had been here many times before. He knew not to argue or over-sympathize. He knew it is always best to let the woman – and it is almost invariably the woman – talk and cry and vent her rage at the world, at Nature who has betrayed her. At forty-eight, the betrayal was almost inevitable. Not that he would ever say that out loud.
‘As I said, Mrs Shaw, please feel free to seek a second opinion, I assure you I won’t be offended. I just don’t want to raise your hopes and see you spend even more money.’
‘Well, there’s not much more of it to be spent, I’m afraid!’ Shyama attempted a breezy chuckle, which sounded more like a ragged, repressed sob. ‘Toby’s got some temporary work, but he’s looking for something better…’
She knew how this sounded. It sounded exactly as her mother and some others presumed it was. Silly older woman of modest means falls for predictably handsome younger man without a steady career. She gets an ego boost and unbounded energy in bed; he gets use of the house and the car, and the soft-mattress landing of her unspoken gratitude. He kisses the scars left from a disastrous marriage – there’s not much that youthful tenderness cannot mend. He says he loves her, he wants a life with her. Above all, he would love a child with her. He is kind towards her daughter – he treads that fine line between friend and guardian, but never tries to be her father. (She has one of those, occasional as he is.) There are only fifteen years between Toby and Tara – why on earth would she want to call him Daddy? Tara didn’t call her own father that.
‘Mrs Shaw? Maybe you want to discuss this further with your husband before making any decisions? Perhaps you and Mr Shaw would like to make an appointment to come and see me together?’
Shyama ought to tell him now – this gentle man who had navigated his way around her reproductive system like a zealous plumber, undaunted by the leaks, blockages and unexpected U-bends that confronted him – that she was not, in fact, Mrs Shaw. Never had been. That in a fit of misplaced modesty she had assumed Toby’s surname when they had begun this whole process four years ago. She had hurriedly reassured Toby that this was not some devious feminine wile to trap him into marriage, as she was pretty sure she never wanted to marry again – nothing personal. But she had to admit that some part of her felt, well, embarrassed to be publicly declaring their fertility issues as a co-habiting couple. She knew it was one of the few traditional tics she had left, stemming from the part of her which she always imagined to be a middle-aged Indian woman in an overtight sari blouse and bad perm, standing at her shoulder clucking, ‘Chi chi chi! Sex and babies and no wedding ring? And none of your clever-schever arguments about Indians doing it all the time and everywhere and look at population and old naughty statues. Kama Sutra was always meant for married peoples only!’
Shyama often wished her Punjabi Jiminy Cricket wasn’t so lippy. And spoke better English. Besides, Toby had pointed out several times that declaring themselves to be a married couple wouldn’t guarantee them a faster or better result.
‘I mean, look at who gets knocked up the quickest. Pissed teenagers under a pile of coats at a party. I’m pretty sure marriage is the last thing on their minds…’
‘That’s because they’re teenagers, Toby. Youth is the one thing we can’t put on the overdraft.’
The elephant in the room had woken up and scratched itself, sending a few ornaments crashing to the floor. There, she had said it out loud. They both knew that it didn’t matter how many sit-ups and seaweed wraps and nips and tucks a woman went through to pass herself off as a decade younger. In an age where you could cougar your way around town with a wrinkle-free smile, inside you were not as old as you felt, but as old as you actually were.
‘Mrs Shaw?’
Shyama rose unsteadily, the room swimming into focus. She gathered herself, layer by layer, each one hardening into a protective skin. She and her inhospitable womb left the building.
* * *
Outside the world still turned, the sky a torn grey rag pulled apart by a restless wind, behind each jagged seam a glimpse of blue so bright that Shyama had to look away. She walked blindly past the gracious four-storey mansions, like rows of faded wedding cakes with their tiered creamy façades and stucco doorways flanked with pillars, once rich family homes with servants in the basement and attic. Now the airy drawing rooms welcomed international medical tourists and the locals who could afford to pay, the basement kitchens where floury-armed women used to dice carrots and stuff chickens now given over to hi-tech equipment and strobing green screens, where bodies were tested and assessed.
The wind buffeted Shyama across the A40, the main arterial road running east to west, always pulsing with traffic, the steady drum and bass of London throbbing in time to her own heartbeat. She found herself in Regent’s Park as a weak sun finally broke through, starkly yellow against the heavy clouds, the light so fluid in the breeze she wanted to open her mouth and take great gulps of it, willing it deep into her body, the body that had let her down.
Shyama found a space on a bench, next to a mother trying to persuade her apple-cheeked toddler to take a sip from a fluorescent plastic beaker. The child, almost rigid in her quilted snowsuit, all four limbs starfish-spread, shook her head slowly and gravely from side to side, as if she was frankly disappointed with her mother for even trying this on. Everywhere there were children swaddled in warm layers, being wheeled in buggies, trotted after on tricycles and scooters or waddling along like demented ducklings, giddy with freedom, entranced by their own feet and shadows, squealing with joy, all the pre-schoolers whose carers needed to exercise them like puppies to avoid tantrums at bedtime. Shyama could just about remember Tara at this age, sensory memories mostly: the smell of her after a bath, nectar-sweet and kiss-curled; sitting in her stripy booster seat at the table, mashing spaghetti between her fingers with fascinated concentration; her laugh, which sounded unnervingly like her crying. There were so many occasions when Shyama had rushed upstairs expecting to find her trapped under the wardrobe or missing a digit, only to discover her sitting in a circle of her soft toys, serving up tea in plastic cups and chuckling loudly like an over-eager dinner host. Tara’s own favourite memory – and she claims it is her first – is when she was about fourteen months old. She had cut her two bottom teeth and Shyama suspected the top two were also trying to push their way out, so she told Tara to open wide so Mummy could have a quick feel of her gums. And as soon as her finger was in, Tara clamped her mouth shut.
‘It was like being savaged by a piranha, honestly!’ Shyama said, dressing it up a little just to see Tara’s delight in the retelling. ‘I mean, whoever thinks babies aren’t strong … the power in those little jaws – I couldn’t get it out. And the worst thing was you thought it was a game. The more I yelled and said let go, the more you laughed and laughed. But without letting go. You laughed through clenched teeth like some mad little goblin. That was the disturbing bit.’
‘No,’ said Tara. ‘I knew it wasn’t a game. I remember thinking, that’s hurting Mummy but I can’t stop. It’s too much fun. That’s the really disturbing bit, wouldn’t you say?’
Tara then tossed her hair, or rather her hair plus the extensions she’d insisted on adding to the defiant bird’s nest perched on her head. Shyama had made the mistake once of telling Tara her theory that an Indian woman’s virtue was measured by her hair. Respectable women – in the movies and paintings, on the street – always had long straight tresses untouched by perm or primping, tamed into matriarchal buns or thick tight plaits hanging heavy like stunned black snakes. Only wild ‘junglee’ women or women in mourning uncoiled the serpents and set them free. The shorter and wilder the haircut, the looser the morals, wasn’t that the inference? It was only a theory, but within days Tara’s hair seemed to have grown up and out by several inches. Shyama’s, meanwhile, was getting longer, as if she was trying to blow-dry her way back into respectability. Well, too late for that now. Divorced, toy boy in tow and a stranger for a daughter. Who would have seen that coming?
An ice-cream van pulled up at the park entrance and chimed out ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, the dissonant notes dancing into the park and sprinkling on the shifting wind. It worked. Every child suddenly stopped mid-activity, ears pricked, sniffing the air expectantly. They are like little animals, Shyama thought as several of them started galloping towards the siren call, pulling adults with them. Others less fortunate were told Not Before Tea and the coordinated wailing began. The fury of injustice made them cry louder, but No Means No and Life Isn’t Fair – best you learn that one early. Shyama’s mother had told her that when that jingle sounded it meant that the ice-cream man had just run out of ice cream and was on his way home. For years, Shyama wondered why he always seemed to finish his supplies just as he reached her house. When the truth finally dawned, she couldn’t decide if she was horrified by her mother’s cruel lie or impressed by it. How odd it was that children believe anything we tell them for years, and then one day mistrust every word that comes out of our mouths. Why did she want to do this again?
A faint beep sounded from the depths of Shyama’s overstuffed handbag. She rummaged amongst her usual debris of tissues and vitamin-pill bottles and a half-read newspaper until she found her mobile. A text from Toby. ‘All OK?’ She hesitated. She didn’t want to talk to him yet. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to say or even how she felt … Doomed and defiant in alternating waves. Of course, she could call him back and quote him any number of women who had defied the odds and given birth way past their medical sell-by date: that woman who was a judge on some dancing talent show, she was forty-nine when she popped one out, wasn’t she? With a grown-up daughter, like Shyama herself. Probably all those years of pliés kept her fit and flexible. What was her name? Then, of course, there were all those OAPs who Zimmer-framed their way to that notorious Italian doctor who got them pregnant, though she recalled that one of them had died before her daughter’s fourth birthday. She had been a single parent, too. What had happened to that child, she wondered? Who would explain to her that Mummy had spent her savings having her in her sixties, had brought her into this world only to depart it soon after from cancer, rumoured to have been triggered by the amount of drugs and hormones she’d imbibed in order to create and sustain a life she would not see into double figures. Shyama’s finger hovered over Toby’s number. Why did she want to carry on with this?
And then, on cue, because the universe sometimes works that way (or at least we like to think it does, so we create patterns from random collisions and see omens and signs in every coincidence, otherwise what’s the alternative? Accepting that we are merely random specks flicked around by the gnarly finger of indifference?), the apple-cheeked toddler returned. She was still in her buggy, but now holding an ice-cream cone triumphantly between her fat fists. It was already beginning to melt; vanilla tears were making their way down the rippled orange cone on to the little girl’s fingers. As her mother braved an approach with a wet wipe, the child looked up and smiled the way only children can – in the moment and with unadorned purity. Shyama’s guts clenched, holding on to nothing, muscles contracting around an empty space waiting to be filled. In a year’s time, she would look back at this moment and tell herself, there, that was the brief window when you could have recognized this yearning for what it really was, the ten seconds when you could have made a different choice and walked into a different future. But instead, she picked up her bag and wandered over to the playground, her phone to her ear, waiting for Toby to answer her call.
* * *
‘Ew, sir! Sir! That pig’s dead, innit?’
Toby looked up from the sty to face a row of schoolkids with their faces pressed against the iron railings, wild delight in their eyes at the prospect of seeing a real-live dead thing.
‘There! In the corner! Can we touch it?’
Toby whirled round, dry-mouthed. Christ, maybe he’d inadvertently stepped on one of the piglets – he had been so distracted since Shyama’s call. A quick glance at Priscilla confirmed she was still sprawled on her side, eyes shut, whilst her recent litter fought their squealing, desperate battle to find and hold on to a teat. It was an undignified scramble with piglets kicking each other’s snouts and climbing over each other’s heads to get to the milk. It reminded him of the buffet queue at a Punjabi wedding that Shyama had dragged him to, not long after they had first met.
‘This,’ she had told him, ‘is what’s known as a trial by fire. Not unlike the one that Sita had to walk through in order to prove her purity to Ram. Don’t ask now, we’re doing Hinduism on Wednesday. Today is Meet the Family day – all of them in one place, plus all their friends, acquaintances, hangers-on, people we don’t like but have to invite because we went to their kids’ weddings, and anyone else who will want to gossip about us, which is everyone. This is what’s known as the one-rip-and-it’s-off approach.’
‘You’re not going to make me take my trousers off and pretend it’s some ancient Indian custom, are you?’ Toby was only half joking.
‘No, though that’s tempting. When you have to take off a plaster, there are two ways, aren’t there? You can pick up a teeny corner and try to peel it off really slowly, wincing and hurting all the way. Or—’
‘One rip and it’s off?’
‘Exactly. Me and you becoming an item is possibly the biggest scandal on the Birmingham kitty-party circuit since Uncle Baseen’s son announced he was gay two days into his honeymoon and ran off with the cocktail waiter.’
‘I’m not sure we could top that.’
‘Well, you’re the wrong colour, you live in a bedsit, and wait till they find out how old you are.’
‘You don’t have to tell them, do you?’
‘No, I don’t have to. I just want to. Ready?’
They were standing at the rear of a purpose-built banqueting suite, a low-roofed concrete building that from the back could have been a factory or a modest shopping mall, except for the garlands of fairy lights festooned over every available inch of outside wall. ‘The only man-made structure in the West Midlands visible from space,’ Shyama told him as they pulled into the car park, her ancient hatchback out of place amongst the Mercedes and Lexuses with their personalized number plates. Now they were standing outside the car, trying to ignore the slight drizzle that had just started, and Shyama was waiting for Toby to say yes. Or go home. Those were his choices. Toby had never liked an ultimatum; he reached decisions slowly, almost unconsciously, letting the seeds of the pros and cons settle into the primal mulch in his back brain whilst he got on with something physical like chopping logs or mucking out a sty. Then hours later, when he was thinking of nothing in particular, the answer would bud and unfold, and it was always the right one because it came to him. He didn’t chase it. He wasn’t prepared to chase this woman he had only known for six months either.
Their meeting had been like one of those moments you read about or see in cheesy films but never think is actually going to happen to you. Not to someone like him, at least, who didn’t even like surprises. It had been six years ago, not long after his twenty-eighth birthday. He had been clearing out one of the stables. Then he had heard this voice, this guffaw, deep and full-throated enough to make him turn. She had been laughing at the rabbits, a child at either side of her. Not hers but Priya’s, he found out in due course. An hour later, she’d asked for his number and in a daze he’d given it. Dates followed swiftly, increasingly; she always suggested the venue or event: restaurants he had never heard of, bars he would never have gone into without her, films he would not have chosen but usually loved. She took the lead, but subtly, without ever making him feel he didn’t have a choice. And he kept choosing to say yes.
And now here they were, in a car park in Birmingham, on the verge of their first and maybe last row. She stood, hands on hips, only a couple of inches shorter than him, but in this mood seeming feet taller. Her normally unruly hair was a straight sheet of dark brown with red streaks. (‘I nearly did the full Sharon Osborne after the divorce,’ she told him. ‘Short and traffic-light scarlet. But I haven’t got the guts. Or the cheekbones.’) She was wearing a sari, red and black shot through with gold thread, very dressy. He was used to seeing her in work clothes: casual suits, mannish jackets. It sounded stupid, but he hadn’t thought of her as Indian until now. The sari – what was it, just a long piece of material? – clung to her generous bust and revealed a waist and hips he knew by touch rather than sight; the jewels at her neck and on her wrists imitated the raindrops caught like tiny prisms in her hair. She looked so … foreign, like one of the busty beauties pouting out of the painted mural in his local Indian restaurant. What used to be his local – in fact, the only one within a twenty-mile radius of the Suffolk village he used to call home. Eating an occasional chicken tikka masala was the nearest he had ever come to Indian culture. And now her. Doe-eyed, firm-jawed, angle-browed, soft-curved, older than him, dark to his blond, pugilist to his pacifist – too many contradictions to work. Then he caught a glimmer of something in her eyes. Those eyes; he wasn’t a poetic man but they made him think of chocolate, fresh earth and twisted sheets. Beyond the brown was something he recognized from years of tending to unwanted animals, a kind of fear or maybe a resigned acceptance that however much you barked and spat, in the end someone was going to kick you where it hurt. He realized she didn’t want to fight. She wanted to get in first before he disappointed her. I never want to disappoint you, was his first thought, and his second caught him by surprise. That he loved her already.
‘Shall we?’ He smiled, offering her his arm with a self-consciously gallant swoop.
She raised one eyebrow, Bollywood style. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, sweetie.’
* * *
‘There! In the corner! Nah, behind you! Behind you!’
Feeling like an unwelcome pantomime dame, Toby peered into the far corner, where sunlight couldn’t penetrate the overhanging tin canopy, and saw the outline of a motionless prone piglet. He scooped it up in one fluid movement, shielding it from the little darlings now baying for blood.
‘Is it dead then? Can we see?’
The piglet was barely breathing; each tiny inhalation seemed a mighty effort.
‘Fighting for life’ made sense to anyone who had held the runt of any litter, battling its early and inevitable demise. He’d seen so many of them and still didn’t understand why Nature bothered creating them in the first place. What was the point, throwing together a weaker, smaller version of a species just so its mother could reject it, its siblings bully it and some other passing predator get a free and easy meal? Maybe it was the Darwinian equivalent of the naughty step, a way of warning your kids to behave, of reminding them how hard life could be and how lucky they were. Maybe Priscilla had lined up all her piggy kids this morning before opening hours and pointed a quivering trotter at their unfortunate brother, coughing in the corner.
‘If you don’t listen to Mummy and eat all your swill, that’s where you’ll end up. All eighteen of you. Take a good look. That could have been you.’
The piglet gave a little quiver as if he was reading Toby’s thoughts. He wouldn’t last the night, not unless they chucked money, time and resources they didn’t have at him. In any case, not intervening was policy at Broadside City Farm.
‘We want the children to have as authentic an experience as we can give them,’ Jenny Palmer, the farm manager, had told him on his first day. Jenny was an earnest, friendly sort and had tried very hard to look as if she lived on the premises and was up at sparrow’s fart to milk the herd. But Toby had already clocked the designer wellies and the line where the fake tan ended and her neck began. What did he care? He was grateful to have a job, even a temporary one such as this.
‘You have to remember,’ Jenny continued, ‘that many of these children have never even seen a real cow or a pig or a horse. They have no idea that vegetables come from the ground. Many of them don’t even have gardens…’ She shook her head sadly.
Toby tutted in what he hoped was a sympathetic manner.
‘So that’s why we have to let them just come here and be. Explore. Breathe. But this is a working farm. We sell our milk and eggs and meat, as you know, and we don’t want to shield the children from that either. They need to know how we make our food – that all those cute little piggies will end up as bacon. And if an animal is sick or dies, well, we let them see that too. I mean, if it happens during opening hours, obviously. Otherwise we put it on the website. The most important thing is, we let Nature take its course as far as possible and we don’t interfere.’
Toby wanted to ask what ‘as far as possible’ actually meant. If a fox broke into the henhouse and they caught it in the act, would they just sit back and enjoy the majesty of a good feathery massacre? Could they shoot or poison rats? Or drown the kittens they couldn’t give away? He knew the answer to the last one: kittens were cute, and nothing cute deserved death, apparently. Just the under-achieving uglies that no one really wanted anyway.
The children’s whooping stopped as Toby turned round and made his way carefully towards the gate of the sty. They vied with each other for a good look at the piglet. Some of the girls oohed and aahed, wanting to stroke it. The boys laughed, pointing at its tiny spiral of a tail, its muddy snout. The boys always laughed, at least the ones over the age of eight, when it seemed to become deeply uncool to show any kind of emotion other than mockery. But when no one was looking, they were all the same, all these hard-nosed, urban, feral kids on their school trips. Alone and unobserved, they talked to the animals, private crooning conversations, offered them inappropriately sugary snacks from their lunchboxes, ventured tentative strokes of furry ears and velvety muzzles. Toby knew that under all the bolshy backchat, their first instinct was to be kind. Maybe that’s why runts were created, he mused. Not to encourage us to kill the weakest, but to help them.
‘He’s not dead,’ Toby said loudly as he eased his way out of the swinging iron gate, careful not to jostle any of the chattering schoolchildren, all runny-nosed and red-cheeked.
‘He looks rough, man!’ laughed one lad at the back.
‘Can you make him better?’ asked a voice at his elbow.
A young girl – mixed race, Toby guessed. He’d learned not to say ‘coloured’ any more after Shyama had threatened him with violence the first time he’d used the term in front of her.
* * *
‘Coloured? Sorry, have we just slipped through a hole in the time and space continuum and landed in 1971? Maybe you’d like to call me Little Lady and smack my arse while you’re at it.’
He would have quite liked to do both, but he guessed that would also be a big mistake.
‘Listen, there weren’t any col— different races of people where I grew up…’
‘Except those nice smiley Bengalis in the local curry house,’ Shyama sneered.
‘Well yes – except they weren’t Bengali. They were Kashmiri. And they couldn’t go home – lots of trouble there, apparently. Riz left a wife behind. Awful story. My mum was always inviting him over. He always came but he never ate much except for the chips. Probably a bit too bland. My mum thought brown sauce was a step too far. He’s a bloody mean darts player though, Riz…’ He trailed off, wondering which bit of his story had offended her most.
Instead she pulled him to her and kissed him so hard, his head swam.
‘You’re a good man, Toby. And the nice thing is, you don’t know you are. Hope it lasts.’
That was in the early days, when they danced around each other, pulled and pushed by lust and longing, wondering and dreading who would walk away first. Though if ever there was a time to cut and run, Toby guessed this might be it. Before they started a process that would tie them together irrevocably.
* * *
‘Can you make him better?’
This girl was stunning, blue eyes against burnished skin, hair like a dandelion clock, so full and fine he wanted to blow on it and see if it would break into feathery seeds and fly away. Is this what his children with Shyama would have looked like? People said that mixed-race kids were especially beautiful, maybe getting the best of each gene pool. He didn’t know why, but he liked the thought of it. And the thought that he might never have a child with Shyama made him feel so weak and empty that he stumbled for a second, provoking a good-natured cheer from the slowly dispersing audience.
Toby sat on a nearby hay bale to steady his breathing. Where had that come from? He’d never wanted a kid before, even when confronted by one as adorable as the little girl who was now back at his side, staring at the shivering piglet. He’d never been one of those men who had an urgent desire to scatter their seed far and wide to ensure their immortality. He’d had one scare, some years back now, with his first long-term girlfriend, who had run out of their small shared bathroom in a fury, waving a plastic stick in Toby’s face.
‘Negative! See? You can’t even do that properly!’
What had annoyed him was that he hadn’t even known she was trying to get pregnant. She had just assumed that because they had got engaged and were discussing wedding plans, why not? He called the relationship off the next day, horrified when he imagined what would have happened if her plan had worked. There would have been no paternal outpouring of joy, no swelling of his manly breast at the news that his boys had got in there, done the job and done it good, he was sure of that. Maybe he had spent too long around animals, watching reproduction in all its messy, grunting reality and clinical efficiency, attended by bored farmhands and busy vets, where it was merely a process that would keep mothers breeding and babies coming so bills could be paid.
The little girl extended a gentle finger and stroked the piglet along its heaving back. Her clumsy tenderness stirred a kind of yearning in Toby, full and bittersweet. He had always considered himself to be an ordinary man in every way: average at school, OK-looking, modest ambitions, not the kind of bloke you’d notice in a room full of people, but if you had a drink with him, the kind of bloke you might want to see again. ‘Solid’ was an adjective he provoked in others, steady and unexciting as timber. He had always assumed he would find a regular job in some branch of animal husbandry or agriculture, settle down with a nice local girl with dimpled knees and cheery common sense and live a contented, uneventful life. Good enough for most of the human race. But then, what was that Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’? Since colliding with Shyama’s unapologetic sun, everything he had mapped out was thrown into stark relief; the world he thought he had created and occupied so fully had revealed itself to be a mere speck of leaf litter eddying on a fast-flowing river. Time wasn’t linear or graded, as he had always assumed, it was unpredictable, relentless motion. This was a lot to take in for an average kind of man. This is what he wanted to tell her, but he never found the words, and on the rare occasions he did, his mouth was too busy kissing her.
* * *
The day they did Hinduism – and yes, it had been a Wednesday – Toby had been flicking through a child’s picture book of Hindu gods (she had told him not to take this too personally) and had paused at one illustration of a blue-skinned deity with heavily lidded, blissful eyes. What struck Toby, however, was his mouth, half open, a tiny galaxy of stars, moons and comets within it.
‘What’s he swallowed?’ Toby asked her.
She paused, looking up briefly from the family photo album that had diverted her attention. ‘He hasn’t swallowed anything. He holds it in his mouth.’
‘What?’
‘The universe.’
She then spent another ten minutes trying to explain how the gods were both part of everything and yet also created everything, but he wasn’t really listening. He was too astounded by this image of a universe within a mouth, the infinite residing within the ordinary. He knew this was important, maybe the most important thing he had ever discovered in his life, if only he could articulate it.
He still couldn’t, but remembering that feeling led him quite easily to name the one that overwhelmed him now. And he realized it was true that he did not want a baby. He wanted his and Shyama’s baby. And if they had to seduce Nature into cooperating with them or pummel her into submission, so be it. Despite today’s bad news, they would keep trying. Anything.
‘He won’t die, will he?’ the child at his side asked anxiously.
‘No,’ said Toby, in a blatant violation of company policy. ‘He will be fine.’
* * *
As Shyama reached her front door, it swung open to reveal her mother, Sita, with a tea towel in her hands, as always.
Sita cocked her head on one side like a small bird, neat, bright-eyed, her silver hair coming away from its loose bun. ‘You’re early! I was just doing some tidying.’
Shyama ignored the subtle rebuke – the breakfast dishes were rarely cleared before she and Toby dashed out of the house in the morning – and instead gave her mother a swift hug. She was shocked to discover that her mother seemed to have shrunk, her head barely reaching Shyama’s shoulder, and that beneath the comfy leisurewear top her bones felt brittle and delicate. One hard squeeze and she might shatter. Shyama followed her mother into the kitchen, noticing the slight curve in her shoulders and her gentle, uneven gait.
‘Your back playing up, Ma?’
‘Oh, you know. How about nicecuppatea?’
It always tickled her, hearing her parents peppering their conversation with what they imagined to be casual English banter. It was even funnier when there was a group of them, when the cards club or kitty-party stalwarts met up, their loud Punjabi spliced with Enid Blyton slang such as ‘That takes the biscuit!’ or ‘Mind your business, loafer!’ or ‘You hop it, bloody fool!’
‘Oh and Tara’s friends are here,’ Sita added pointedly.
Shyama sighed. She had planned to flop on the sofa and eat her way through the biscuit tin. Instead, Tara and an assortment of her student friends were doing just that.
In amongst the tangle of limbs and empty crisp packets she recognized a few familiar faces – the pretty blonde girl and her razor-cheekboned surly boyfriend – Tara sitting between them and some god-awful show at full volume on the television. Tara barely looked up at her mother’s loud hello, glued to the screen, where a group of silicone-busted, orange-skinned young women were watching two other luminous-toothed girls trying to pull each other’s hair extensions out.
‘Sorry!’ Shyama raised her voice, not sorry at all, but actually bloody fed up and in need of a good cry. ‘Could you…?’
Tara huffed loudly and grabbed the remote, reducing the volume by one bar.
‘Hi, everyone.’ Shyama made an effort to sound friendly, though she barely got grunts in return. ‘Thought you had a screening today?’
‘Four o’clock. We’re going in a minute … ohmygod, did you see that?’
The whole sofa erupted in whoops and cheers. One of the orange women had decided to join in the fight, her pneumatic mammaries strangely motionless as she administered some ineffectual slaps with tiny taloned hands.
‘So this is part of your course, is it, watching these crappy reality shows?’ Shyama enquired.
‘Yes, actually.’ Tara shot her a brief glance. ‘And it’s called Structured Reality, as it happens.’
‘What’s structured about it?’ asked Shyama. ‘It just looks like a cat fight in a strip club.’
‘Maybe, but it’s real.’
‘A reality show, like I said.’
‘No, actually, because what the producers do is get a bunch of real people and create storylines and situations out of their real lives, so Becca and Tiggy have been actually dating the same guy for weeks and they’ve only just found out.’
‘So they don’t watch their own programme then?’
‘Well, I dunno, maybe it was filmed ages ago, but anyway, Mindy’s the real bitch in all this because she’s only stirring it because she’s after Ade herself and they made her blurt it out in the bar in front of everyone.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘The producers. More dramatic, isn’t it? Otherwise she would have just put it on social media, like normal people.’
‘So it’s producers manipulating abnormal yet real people pretending to be very bad actors?’
‘No, it’s the next stage in the evolution of the documentary genre,’ sighed Tara, rolling her eyes at her mates, who were all studying the same Media and Culture course as she was, although, unlike her, most of them lived away from the parental home. Tara had rejected any thought of leaving London to study, saying it was pointless as she only intended to live and work in the capital when she graduated. That’s if she didn’t get a job in New York or South America. She had ambitious and admirable plans for the future; however, what she hadn’t planned on was being turned down for university accommodation as the family home was too close to her college. So she had ended up living at home and commuting for study. Just like school, but with more unexpected playdates and sleepovers with her mates whenever they fancied a bit of home cooking and all-night TV.
‘You know, I could just drive you down to the local psychiatric ward and you could have a good laugh at the looneys.’
Finally everyone looked up at Shyama. She had meant it as a joke. She wanted to explain that this was a reference to how the Victorians got their kicks from watching the mad and the maimed, and how such programmes seemed to be an extension of the same soulless voyeurism. (It wasn’t her theory, she’d read it in a Sunday supplement in one of her endless waiting rooms.) Clearly this gathering was not impressed in the slightest. Who was she kidding? This was the generation who were defined by their new-media narcissism. Without an audience somewhere, they simply did not exist. I tweet, therefore I am. And at this moment Shyama suddenly saw herself in Tara’s furious eyes: a sour-faced, middle-aged woman who didn’t know when to shut up.
Tara flicked off the television and on cue the gaggle rose up, murmuring their thanks as they sloped out.
‘See you later,’ Tara muttered as she tried to push past Shyama.
‘Have you spent any time with Nanima today?’
Tara stopped at the door, waiting till her friends were well out of earshot. She turned to her mother, talking slowly in the same exaggeratedly patient tone that Shyama herself had used on her daughter years ago.
‘Yes, as I have been here all day and you haven’t. And yes, I have keys and money, and yes, I will text you on my way home. Anything else?’
The bird’s nest on her head had grown; it had graduated from the size of a sparrow’s cottage to something approaching an eagle’s luxury apartment, held up by various butterfly slides and sparkly pins. Shyama hoped to God her daughter never got nits again.
‘No,’ Shyama said, and then, ‘I, er … went to the doctor today.’
She had no idea why she was broaching this subject with the one person who had always been completely uninterested in it. But she felt so alone; a cold damp grief seemed to be seeping into every bone. She would have liked to hold her child – the only one she would ever have now – and comfort herself that she at least had her.
Tara’s expression didn’t change. ‘OK.’
‘And, well, the IVF thing, it’s not going to work. I wore my bits out having you!’
‘So it’s my fault then?’ Stung, Tara flicked the intended joke back at her.
‘Don’t be silly, that’s not what I meant.’
‘So that’s it then, is it?’
Shyama chose to ignore the tiny flame of hope flickering in her daughter’s eyes. She knew Tara had spent twenty years as an only child – Shyama’s best years in terms of strength and youth – her main focus and only joy during a sad and slowly dying marriage. And instead of flying the nest, her daughter had built one on her head and stayed put.
They stared at each other for a moment. Somewhere in the background Sita clattered pans and hummed an old Hindi film song to herself, the soundtrack of Shyama’s childhood, when choices were simple and mostly involved food. They stood in the cluttered hallway, mirroring each other’s stance, hands on hips, chins tilted defiantly, each waiting for the other to break the silence.
* * *
Only the grandmother of the house, who now hovered in the kitchen doorway holding a dripping colander, could see the ironic symmetry that bound both these women. It was at moments like this that Sita wondered how life might have turned out if they had not left Delhi, but had raised their children as pukka Indians. Shyama might have settled with some nice Army officer with a waxed moustache and a pension, and now be busy arranging Tara’s marriage, instead of the two of them standing there shouting at each other like village sweepers. Then again, if they had stayed, she herself would have ended up in a joint family home, cooking for three generations at every mealtime and watching her husband be slowly drained of cash and confidence by his needy family. Easy to be sentimental afterwards about what you might have missed, easy to forget how much worse it could have been. And look at how bad it was now – even from five thousand miles away, their beloved relatives had behaved like dirty snakes in the grass. If it wasn’t for her bad knee, she would kick every last one of them up the bund. Secret thoughts, delicious and dreadful, that she would keep to herself, for now. She had to behave like a proper matriarch, and with the practised ease of all women who were expected to sacrifice personal desire for public duty, she said, ‘What’s the matter with you two?’
Tara raised an eyebrow at Shyama, who swallowed a prickly ball of shame. Her mother had no idea that she and Toby had been trying for a baby and this didn’t seem the right time to drop that particular bombshell on her sweet silvery head.
As it happened, Shyama didn’t have to.
‘Mum and Toby were trying for an IVF baby, but it’s not going to work, apparently. See you later.’ Tara flounced out of the front door, which slammed heavily behind her.
Shyama turned to her mother, who regarded her with a puzzled smile.
‘A baby?’
Copyright © 2015 by Chestwig and Flares Productions Ltd.
