Page 86 of One Night With You

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ I hiss at him as I mop his brow with a pretend damp flannel. ‘Can you stop making this worse than it already is?’ I’m so embarrassed that I’m hissing.

What we’re actually at, in lieu of my going with Millie to her class, is a very specialist sort of NCT for couples using a surrogate – it’s mostly same sex couples, but there’s a few hetero couples too, all of whom have assembled to feel part of a more traditional journey despite the fact that nobody in the room is pregnant themselves. There’s weak tea that tastes like it hasn’t so much been made from a boiling kettle so much as tepid bath water, and biscuits that,when I reached out to pick one up, Jackson batted out my hand.

‘Absolutely not,’ he muttered to me. ‘I could help you with the clam, but who knows what you’ll catch from a limp rich tea on an unwashed community centre plate.’

I dropped the biscuit in question, watching it later get picked up by a squat man with a teardrop tattoo on his left cheek, here with his partner Rochelle, a trapeze artist who genuinely once ran away and joined the circus. If Millie wanted to avoid Sunday night drama by disinviting me to her events, I’ve managed to rustle up my own Netflix comedy special.

‘In this moment,’ says Derek, the balding yet strangely virile-seeming chap running the event, ‘hormones run wild, like horses dancing in a forest’s stream, dazzling in delight and causing all sorts of sensations. Your job is to be the calm farmhand, here with food offered on an outstretched hand, fully prepared to be bitten.’

I do not get the metaphorat all, and as he clocks me and my confused face he adds: ‘Which is to say, if the person giving birth wants to scream blue murder at you, it’s your job to take it on the chin and await further instruction. You are a cool, calm leader, here to remain steadfast in the face of the arrival of new life. When the aliens come you do not scream, you do not yell, for they come in peace. Same with babies.’

‘Okay,’ Jackson whispers over his shoulder to me. ‘He’s even losing me, now. Did you shag E.T.?’

‘Breathe,’ intones Derek, taking up his place behind Velma, his wife and partner in running the class, who is currently on all fours and executing variations of a cat-cow yoga pose, occasionally issuing low, guttural moans. Apparently it’s rarefor women to give birth on their backs like they do on TV, and it’s our job as birth partners to support any position that feels comfortable, even if that means taking the weight-bearing load of a squat, or seeing the whole shop window from behind as they roll on an exercise ball. I don’t even know if I’m going to be in the room when all the action happens – Millie hasn’t decided yet.

Velma starts to howl, then, moving to lie on her back with her legs in the air, gently rocking from side to side on her spine.

‘Ow-owo-owwwwww!’ Jackson mimics, and I hold the ‘cold compress flannel’ (it’s actually just a bit of paper towel as we play make-believe) over his mouth and say, ‘Don’t even think about it, pal.’

He pulls it down.

‘The way I see it,’ he tells me, ‘is that you can either surrender to this madness and get fully involved, or keep acting like there’s a stick in your arse and end up giving yourself a stress nosebleed.’

I know he’s right. He’s very good at reminding me that life is ludicrous, so one may as well get involved.

‘Ow-ow-owwwwww!’ I howl, and Derek looks across the room in surprise and I think I’m going to get told off for taking the piss, but his face bursts into a smile.

‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Yes! Try that – what our glorious friend Nic is doing. Howl to the moon, embody the energy of your warrior, embrace the chaos!’ he instructs, and before I know it everyone is squealing in the highest notes of their register, and it feels pretty damned cathartic.

‘That was good,’ says Jackson after, as we wander through town and to the pub. It’s a cliché, two blokes worried about the future getting a pint after a particularly traumatisingunveiling of the self and its vulnerabilities, but one we’re happy to roll with. ‘It was helpful, I reckon, in that way that nothing that happens at the actual birth can be as bonkers as what you’ve just weathered.’

‘I knew you were hamming it up to make me uncomfortable!’ I say, and he breaks into a mischievous smile and shrugs.

‘Gotta find the bright side, haven’t you?’ he says. ‘And I will say, mate, you were a trouper in there. You’re being a trouper about all of it.’

The thing about life after formal education is that nobody gives you an appraisal on how you do life – after school there’s no marks out of ten or grades on a scale of A to Ungraded that let you know you’re doing it right. And I’ve been so pent up and stressed, what I’ve needed is somebody to say:Hey, this is a shock, and not ideal, but you’re doing it well anyway.

‘Thanks,’ I say, swilling my drink in my glass. ‘That means a lot, to be honest.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘You should be able to recognise that I mean it because it’s true. That’s very emotionally healthy.’

He says that in a doctor-to-his-patient-on-the-fainting-couch sort of a way, so we’re both clear he’s being both genuine, and tongue-in-cheek about how he’s done it.

‘Don’t,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘I got one of those Timehop alerts the other day? It’s a photo of a bunch of us at a wedding a year ago, and I’m so thin. I just look miserable, even though I’m smiling. And Iwas: I had anxiety, mood swings, loss of appetite – all because I knew I wasn’t happy. Anyway, my point is … well, I don’t know what my point is.’

‘This isn’t a full-circle moment, you know,’ Jackson says softly. ‘You don’t have to go back to being that guy again justbecause you’re physically back there. There’s the freedom of commitment, too, innit? I admire you.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I say. ‘How is there freedom in commitment? They’re literally opposites.’

‘Au contraire,’ says Jackson. ‘That’s the lie we’re told. But actually, holding ourselves back from commitment is the true constriction. When we fully invest ourselves in something, we are free to bloom, unrestricted, and so there’s a beautiful sovereignty to it when we decide to go all in.’

I look at him.

‘Bloody hell,’ I say. ‘Did you just make that up? That’s brilliant. It’s so true!’

‘The girls got me a subscription to a psychology magazine a few birthdays ago. I’ve learnt a few things.’

‘I’ll say,’ I agree. ‘The freedom of commitment.’

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