Maybe I did something bad, but I’m not a goddamn monster, she mused. I can’t feel shitty about this every day for the rest of my life. Sam thinks I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t but it’s not true. I was completely myself with him, maybe more than I’ve ever been with anyone else, even Liv.
She saw a chalkboard proclaiming ‘Carvery All Day’ outside O’Hara’s pub and veered through the doors practically on autopilot.
This was how pregnancy cravings worked, it seemed. The pregnant appetite was powerfully suggestible. In this moment everything else in the entire world seemed disgusting. Right now, all she wanted was some cooked-to-fuck meat, powdered gravy and a bowl of potatoes.
Once the meal arrived, she took a grinning selfie. She looked cute, the carvery looked almost aggressively unattractive – it’s not the most photogenic genre of food, she observed. She sent it to her thread with Sam and followed up with a message:
TFW the foetus who is possessing your uterus won’t stand for anything but a completely disgusting but oddly iconic meal #carveryvirgin
It was time to stop apologising and instead try to remind him of who she was and why they had worked so well together in the first place.
Chapter 19
‘Can I ask again, what is the fucking point of this?’ Liv was grappling with the stencil Ali had carefully made the night before after getting back from solo carvery.
‘I want to him to remember why he ever liked me in the first place.’ Ali shifted around on the living room carpet so that Liv could get better purchase on the bump.
‘This seems like a weird way to do that?’ Liv observed, pressing the card to lie flat on the belly and trying to position the black marker to draw on Ali’s taut skin.
‘It’s a gesture, Liv.’ Ali didn’t need any unsolicited editorial feedback from Liv at this late stage. She’d been awake most of the night trying to come up with something and this flimsy scheme was what she’d arrived at at 3 a.m. after watching countless YouTube roundups of favourite romcom moments of all time and best romantic gestures ever.
‘Well, I suppose it’s less creepy than some of the shite men are going on with in movies.’ Liv shook her head ruefully.
‘Yeah, what is with that?’ Ali giggled. ‘I mean, the cue cards in Love Actually? Though Sam would probably love something like that. He has a misguided grá for that film.’ She was feeling flickers of optimisim since he had sent her a Parks and Recreation GIF in reply to her message about the carvery. Sure, it wasn’t words exactly but a GIF was promising.
‘Can you just lie still,’ Liv muttered. ‘What if the midwife sees this and is familiar with the Law & Order canon? She might think you two are totally fucked up and pre-emptively confiscate this foetus.’
‘Look, you’re nearly finished the first line. We’re going with it,’ Ali barked. ‘I have zero other ideas so this’ll have to do.’
Once Liv had finished, Ali went to survey her lettering work in the mirror. She’d done a very good job – it was perfect. She pulled her dress back down, snapped a quick #OOTD and grabbed her bag. She was getting the bus so she could catch up on emails. Now that she was back in the Insta fold, there was a pile of messages from various PRs, who were apparently interested in having her tout their products again. She was polite in her responses. She’d be using her Insta very selectively from now on. She wanted to be herself. No more ‘aligning with brands’ and other wankery. She’d chat to her followers – she needed to keep up a level of interest in her ahead of My So-Called Best Life – and she’d do the well-paid prestige stuff like W Y N D to add to the baby fund, but beyond that ‘no, thanks’.
Once she was settled on the upper deck, she uploaded her outfit pic to Stories. She’d gone with a stretchy navy polka-dot dress that looked cute and retro, plus it showed off ‘the milkers’, as Liv had taken to calling her new pregnancy mega boobs, with some neon trainers and a denim jacket. She’d taken care with her make-up, but it was a fair bit more toned down, her love affair with contouring having waned slightly. She’d barely bothered with her tan in the last few months, but now that she was doing a bit more on the ’gram it actually gave her a bit of impetus to make an effort with her appearance again. She considered the caption for the outfit of the day.
TFW your outfit needs to say ‘Yes, I was a lying psycho but also I love the hell out of you – please forgive me?’
She nervously swiped to try a couple of filters before settling on the unedited image. She considered the consequences of sharing it. Would Sam see? Would he be mad? Madder than he already was?
She stared out the window at town rushing by and tried to imagine his reaction, then she caught herself.
No, Ali! You can’t be changing the way you act to appease him. She thought back to Mini walking in on her and Liv watching Grease when they were thirteen.
‘Turn that shite off.’ She’d been withering and Ali was mortified.
‘My mum is such a snob,’ she’d told Liv by way of explanation at the time and later she’d whinged at Mini over dinner.
‘Why’d you always go out of your way to embarrass me? It was just a stupid film. Everyone in school loves it.’
‘It is a stupid film,’ Mini agreed. ‘Watch it if you want but the message is bullshit. Remember Sandy wearing different clothes and changing herself to be with Danny, Alessandra. It’s never a good idea. Always remember that. Oh, and leather is very unforgiving.’
Ali leaned her head against the window, smiling at the memory. Miles had chimed in at that point.
‘Remember, I had leather pants in eighty-three? One of the most uncomfortable years of my life. Ever heard of trench foot? The soldiers in World War I got it from never, ever having dry feet. Well, those leather pants gave me trench crotch. It was a moist hell of my own making.’ He had sighed, shaking his head regretfully before they all shouted him down.
Trench crotch! She shuddered at the memory and then smiled weakly to herself. So unfair that Miles and his idiosyncratic wit was no more. He would never gross her out or make her laugh again. Sure, he hadn’t really said much in his last years but, as time crawled by in this new world that didn’t contain her sweet, funny dad, she’d found that she remembered more and more of the real Miles.
Even after he had become vague and vacant from the illness, she’d occasionally get glimpses of the real Miles. She remembered a late autumn afternoon in Ailesend when the nurse had presented him with his various pills and he had looked up with a flash of the trademark glint in his eye and said, ‘Yum! The red ones are my favourite!’
Ali turned back to the phone and hit Share on her pic. She was sorry. But she wouldn’t be spending the rest of her life apologising and pretending to be something she wasn’t. Life, after all, was finite and if Sam wasn’t going to come around, then so be it.
She strolled from the bus stop on O’Connell Street to the Rotunda and practised her opening gambit.
‘Hey, you might remember me from such public debacles as the doomed family dinner with the Khans or the great foetus fakery of 2019?’
Hmmm, maybe too glib, even for me. She sighed as the sliding doors into reception eased open for her. She hurried to the lift and made her way to the second-floor neonatal assessment unit. Seeing the sign directing her to the small waiting room set off a whoosh of anxiety. With all her Sam angst, she’d virtually forgotten that this was the ‘big scan’. Lil Pea felt chipper enough in there, bopping around when she lay down at night, but a sudden hollow feeling in her stomach reminded her how much was unknown in this baby-making business.