Friends forum. I sat down on the toilet and held it under me until I felt warm urine overflowing from the top. Once I’d carefully submerged the test in the container, I closed my eyes, visualising the word ‘pregnant’ in my mind, hoping it might somehow instruct the test to comply. Moments later, when I found myself chanting and rubbing my womb, unwittingly re-enacting a hypno-spiritual video I’d seen on YouTube, I realised that I was in dire need of distraction. Instinctively, I went to call Nick, but then I remembered he had an important breakfast meeting, so instead I called Matthew.
He answered on the first ring.
‘What?’ he asked.
I could hear a child screaming in the background so I raised my voice.
‘The two-minute wait,’ I said.
I heard more wailing and then a noise that sounded like something choking. Matthew issued a reprimand and then came back on the line.
‘OK, Ellie,’ he said, retaining the disciplinarian tone for me too. ‘Move away from the vision board. That photo of you and Nick cradling a Photoshopped baby isn’t helping anyone.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ I said. ‘I was chanting.’
Matthew laughed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘two minutes is but a mere blip on the timeline of life. I’ve got another seventeen years to get through until these two are off my hands.’
I let out a deep sigh and flopped down onto my bed. ‘It’s not just the two minutes,’ I said. ‘It’s all that came before it too. Surely you understand that?’
Matthew laughed again. ‘Ah, but I do, my sweet.’ He paused for a moment to intercept a further misdemeanour then continued. ‘I remember precisely what preceded this current bout of neurosis.’ He took a deep breath and then exhaled. ‘This all began long before you started fretting about your inability to breed.’
I’d been hoping for distraction not ego annihilation. ‘What did?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, in a manner that implied he was drumming his fingers on the table. ‘Let’s consider Eleanor Rigby’s life journey so far, shall we? What were you doing before this all-consuming quest for conception?’
‘I don’t know, working?’
He sighed. ‘Ellie, you spent five years planning your wedding.’
I went to speak but Matthew continued. ‘Prior to that you spent four years aggressively soliciting a proposal from Nick. Before that you engineered a career that enabled you to personally interview thousands of eligible men.’
‘And women,’ I said, ‘as a matchmaker. I was trying to help people.’
He chuckled. ‘This behaviour, although disturbing enough in isolation, was preceded by many other alarming antics: a shambolic engagement, two disastrous cohabitations, fours years cyberstalking Hugh Jackman, a stretch hyper-parenting a pet rat and six years fanatically coddling two Cabbage Patch dolls.’ He paused and took a deep breath. ‘Ellie, you’ve been looking for love since the day you were born.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I said, pulling myself up from the bed. ‘And FYI, Bungle was a guinea pig. Not a rat.’
Matthew must’ve handed the phone over to his toddler, because all I could hear was the choking sound, then wailing, then manic laughter, then some salivary noises, then more wailing then Matthew coming back on the line.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That’s what your life will sound like if you get what you wish for.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘It can’t be all bad.’
‘It’s not all bad,’ he replied, ‘but it won’t make you happy. Just like marriage won’t make you happy. And kids certainly won’t make your marriage happy.’ He paused for a moment, seemingly to wipe a child’s orifice, then continued. ‘If you kept abreast of the latest research, as you should, you would know that a recent study showed a couple’s happiness decreases proportionately with the birth of each child.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Who conducted that study?’ I said. ‘Was it you, interviewing yourself?’
He laughed. ‘We’re conditioned to think we need to have children in order to be content, when in fact, if we bother to look at the evidence, the opposite is true.’ He let out a deep sigh. ‘Why else do you think Lucy went back to work and left me looking after the little buggers?’
I giggled. ‘You love it really.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I really don’t. I love them, of course, but I don’t especially enjoy sacrificing my every human right in the name of positive parenting.’ He moved away from the phone to confiscate some crayons then continued. ‘Freud said that our need to procreate is driven by a fear of death.’ He went on to adopt a lady therapist voice. ‘Do you fear death, Eleanor Rigby?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘The only one who should fear death is you, if you don’t shut up.’
He was still laughing when I hung up.
I checked the timer on my phone. Twenty seconds to go.
I flopped down on the bed again, feeling the weight of my body sink into the mattress. Nick said he would love me no matter what.
Would he really though? I wondered. Even if I could never give him the sandy-haired children he’d always wanted? The son he could hoist up onto his shoulders and teach what it means to be a man, or the little girl with pigtails reaching for his hand, eyes wide with adoration. What if it was just us? For the rest of our lives. Our union having no greater purpose than to provide comfort to each other in old age. We’d play bridge, grow vegetables and potter around the house. And then we’d die.
Ten seconds to go.
I burst back into the bathroom. Before I reached for the test, I stopped and looked up at the ceiling, retracting my earlier complaint to the Almighty and substituting it with a pledge to reinstate my monthly charitable donations.
I snatched the test from the pot and stared at the screen on the side. The words registered straight away.
Not pregnant.
I looked again, just in case I was hallucinating the ‘Not’. I shook it and then held it up to the light. I knew there was nothing I could do to change it. I threw it in the bin along with the backup test and then went to get ready for work.
I nudged the front door closed with my shoulder to force the lock into place. A flake of black paint fell onto the front path.
I turned to see Victoria, who was bouncing on the spot, clad head-to-toe in Lycra, ponytail swinging like a metronome.
‘Morning, Ellie,’ she said.
‘Morning,’ I mumbled, pulling my handbag onto my shoulder. I’d hoped I would be able to sneak out before she’d emerged from her five-thousand-square-foot double-fronted mansion for her morning showy-offy jog.
She continued to bounce but at the same time cocked her head. ‘You didn’t reply to my text.’
I sighed. Victoria had been charting my IVF process with the precision of a government agent. This, I suspected, was precisely the reason she’d been lurking by her front door since 7 a.m., jog-ready, to jump out and catch me on my way to work.
I glared at her. A glare that I hoped would say: Do you think my face would look like this if I’d just discovered I was incubating a much-longed-for half-me-half-Nick bundle of cells? No, Victoria. Instead of expressing elation, relief and the warm glow of raised hCG, this face is more befitting an exhausted and dejected woman who has endured two years of invasive medical interventions comprising, yet not exclusive to, double-dose vaginal suppositories, self-administered stomach injections, daily internal scans performed with a dildo ultrasound