Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

Olga calls me just before midnight and says she has to see me.

I am just about to clean my teeth and go to bed, so I suggest tomorrow at morning break, in the coffee shop across from Churchill’s. She says it has to be now, and something about her voice-how quiet it is, how full of an emotion that I can’t quite place-stops me from arguing with her. I get dressed and take a cab down to the Eamon de Valera.

We sit at a corner table surrounded by the dregs of a dozen glasses, and I expect her to tell me that she has had a conversation with Lisa Smith about me, or that she has some kind of visa problem, or that her boyfriend is coming to London. But it is worse than all of that.

“I’m late.”

“Late?”

“My period hasn’t come.”

“Maybe it’s-I don’t know-can’t it be different every month?”

“I took a test,” she says, and it occurs to me how much of the language of procreation resembles the lexicon of student life. Being late with something, taking tests, getting your results. But what’s a pass and what’s a failure? That’s the question. “One of those tests that you buy in a drugstore.”

I say nothing. I am waiting, unable to really believe that this thing is happening at this time, with this girl. This woman. And not my wife.

Rose and I tried for this moment and it never happened. We really tried. It was never ending. I remember the constant cycle of disappointment and her crippling period pains, I remember being asked to produce an erection every time the ovulation arrived. We laughed about it-“You’re performing tonight, Alfie, so no mucking about with yourself in the shower”-but it was slowly breaking our hearts, this longing for a baby, a baby who would complete our world.

Is it that the people who want a baby don’t get it, and the ones who don’t want a baby do? Is that the way it works? Rose and I tried for almost a year. It didn’t happen for us. It will never happen for us now.

“I’m pregnant,” Olga says, this woman who is not Rose, with a little laugh that signals that she feels the same disbelief as me. “I’m going to have a baby.”

We let the weight of it sink in. They are clearing the glasses all around us. Someone is shouting for last orders.

“A baby. God, Olga.”

“I know. I know.”

On Chinese New Year Olga and I returned to my flat and discovered that the Hong Kong souvenir sugar bowl where I kept my supply of Gossamer Wings condoms was empty. And we decided to take a risk. No, that’s not true. It wasn’t as rational as that. We just didn’t think about it. We did not think.

She starts to cry a bit and I reach out and take her hands. They are sticky with beer, because she has been working tonight. She works every night.

“I’ll stick by you,” I say, unable to come up with anything better than the cliché. “We’re in this together, okay? This is our baby.”

She pulls her hands away from me.

“Are you crazy? I’m not having a baby with you. I’m twenty. You’re nearly forty. You’re just a teacher in some little language school. I’ve got my life ahead of me. My boyfriend would kill me.”

So after that we do not discuss the baby.

We only talk about the abortion.

Later I take her back to the flat she shares with three other Russians in a part of south London that gentrification passed by, a neighborhood of burned-out cars and distant cries and sprawling projects.

When I try to kiss her cheek, she turns her face away. After deciding what we are going to do, or rather what we are not going to do-we are not going to have this baby-every gesture of affection or support seems inadequate, laughable, pathetic.

She disappears into her block of flats. We have not even said goodnight.

At the moment of this small miracle, this baby she has growing inside her, we have never seemed more like total strangers.

First Rose, now this baby. I am tired of thinking about it all, too ashamed for words, sick to my stomach with guilt.

I feel like I am getting away with murder.

I CAN SEE WHY she doesn’t want to have a baby with me. I am not so stupid that I can’t see that. But as we make the arrangements for the termination, which seems as cold and clinical as arranging to have a car taken in for its annual service, I can’t shake the feeling that we have somehow contrived to turn a blessing into a curse.

It’s not a baby, I keep telling myself. Not a real baby. Not yet. It never will be. But the problem is, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a second.

It would be a baby, if there was any space for a baby in our selfish, stupid, fucked-up lives. It would be a baby if we just left it alone. That’s not much to ask for, is it? Just to be left alone. Then it would be a little boy or a little girl. If we weren’t making these arrangements to get rid of it.

But that’s what we are doing. Getting rid of it. I can’t believe-I just can’t believe, although I wish I could-that what we are about to do is just another kind of contraception. That what we are going to do is no different from buying a packet of Gossamer Wings condoms. This is not contraception. It’s too late for all that.

We have brought a life into being that nobody wants. Olga doesn’t want it. I try to want it, I really do. I try to want our baby, but it is too much for me when I contemplate bringing up the baby by myself.

I see myself feeding the baby its bottle, taking it for a walk in the park, giving it a go on the swings. Is that what you do with babies? Or does that come a bit later? The truth is I would not know where to start. Bring up a child? I can hardly look after myself.

We have an appointment at the clinic. Olga has to talk to a doctor to explain why this baby’s existence is impossible. It doesn’t take long. What was I expecting? Tears, anger, emotional pleas on behalf of the unborn baby? I would have liked some of that. I would have liked to have heard someone standing up for the baby. I would have appreciated hearing someone say-don’t do it. Don’t get rid of this baby.

But the forms are signed, a bill is presented and I put it on my credit card. It’s that casual, that cruel, that simple.

Killing your unborn baby?

That’ll do nicely, sir.

I know it’s the only way. Isn’t it? Don’t I? But it still feels like we are stealing something from someone. Stealing a life. I try to support Olga at this difficult and painful time, I really do. I assure her that everything is going to be all right, yet it’s suddenly as if we have never met.

Maybe she feels it too. Maybe she also believes that we are stealing something sacred. Or perhaps she is just sick of the sight of me. That’s another possibility. I know we have to do this thing because our fragile little relationship was already collapsing by the time we made the baby. I can see that. I don’t for a moment think Olga wants to spend her life with me. To be honest, I don’t think she wants to spend an evening with me. I think she would be happy to never see my face again.

It would never have worked out between us.

The baby should thank us.

Yeah, sure.

Josh once told me, “No relationship can survive an abortion.” The line was delivered with such world-weary certainty, such manly conviction, that I thought it must surely be true. He had got a girl into trouble-on this subject, I always find myself reverting to my mother’s vocabulary-in Singapore on some drunken rugby tour.

She was a lawyer, BBC-British-born Chinese-expensively educated, very well spoken, which always got his attention, and Josh was keen. But when he told me about it over Tsingtao at the top of the Mandarin Hotel, he said that there was no real future for them after the termination. “Something about this thing messes with nature,” he said, “just messes it all up forever,” and I thought how much older and wiser he seemed than me.