Page 5 of Such a Good Couple
As she’d said to Rachel, it should feel like they were in this together, but in the last six months their relationship had felt unnervingly unpredictable, as though the emotional space between them was shrinking and contracting at different times. They had moments of closeness and moments when there was something hard to name in Conor’s eyes when he looked at her. This invariably sparked panic in Annie. What was he thinking and why couldn’t she face asking him this straight out?
Annie’d read the whole internet on the matter: Trying to conceive, or TTC as the forums called it, was hard on a couple:Your DH[meaning ‘darling husband’, vom]was experiencing his own set of anxieties. There was a lot of pressure on the men to perform. Despite being partners on the road, a distance could open up between you both on your quest for a LO[‘little one’, gag].
They’d reached the security queue now, and seeing that things were moving at an efficient clip, Conor reached back and took her hand, pulling her to him. ‘Sorry, sorry. I know I’m a dickin airports.’ He kissed the top of her head, immediately causing her blonde hair to cling to the velcro of his stubble.
‘You are a complete lunatic in airports.’ Annie smoothed her shoulder-length bob back behind her ears. ‘You’re like a velociraptor on cocaine.’
He grinned, shaking his head. ‘I dunno why, but I get this uncontrollable impulse to get ahead of everyone, beat them to the bag drop, beat them to the queue … Also, like I said,’ he widened his eyes meaningfully, ‘we need to outrun Clara and Ollie. We don’t need their bullshit.’ He winced.
‘You better get used to it.’ Annie giggled. ‘We’ve got two weeks of it.’
Conor looked around furtively. ‘Look, I love them but I don’t want it to start a second sooner than it has to.’
‘Stop! They’re our best friends, practically family.’ She mussed his dark brown hair that he kept short and no-nonsense and felt the welcome release of relief that they seemed to be acting normal with one another again. She tried not to think about the fact that you shouldn’t beactingnormal with your other half, you should justbenormal with your other half.
‘You know what they’re like.’ Conor nudged forward in the line, practically breathing on the neck of the teenager in front of him. ‘If they’d got to us before security we’d have been given a child each to field. Their shite would be everywhere, they’d be holding up the whole queue. They’rethosepeople.’
‘They are,’ Annie agreed. ‘It’s part of their charm.’
‘Is it?’ Conor was checking their boarding cards on his phone and opening their passports as they shuffled on.
In university, Annie, Clara, Ollie and Maggie had all been in the same year, though Annie was slightly younger, having skipped transition year in school. They had all studied different subjects. Annie’d done art history, Clara had a very random degree in zoology and Ollie scraped a degree in business whileMaggie was in the drama department. Fionn and Conor had been two years ahead of them, and when Maggie and Fionn got together through their drama department productions, the twenty-year-old Annie had fallen hard for Fionn’s friend, Conor. He was serious but had a dry sense of humour. At twenty-three, he’d seemed impossibly grown up and together – an opinion Annie had formed based purely on the fact that he had a George Foreman grill in his flat and owned a spare set of sheets. What boy – no! – whatmanthought of such things? Even though they’d been together ever since, he wasn’t, as the forums said, her ‘darling husband’. While the others had gotten married in their mid-twenties, in the same summer, no less, she and Conor had felt no great need.
From drunken red wine nights with them, Annie knew that Maggie and Clara were convinced that Annie was upset about this. She genuinely wasn’t. Her own parents, Liam and Shiv, had also not been married and that worked out grand, insofar as when they split up they didn’t have any major bureaucratic headaches. He just moved to the shed down the bottom of the garden and came up most nights for dinner with Annie, her mum and her three sisters. It would probably have seemed like a more unusual setup if they hadn’t lived in west Cork, where everyone had some kind of story and there was a distinctly bohemian vibe. Annie didn’t feel much different from her friends in school; a few of them were the kids of divorced homes and several never evensawtheir dads. At least Liam was just at the bottom of the garden doing his whittling (yes, really – he sold hand-whittled fairy doors to tourists at the local markets.Verywest Cork). With their daughters now mostly gone, Liam and Shiv no longer shared a meal all that often but every Sunday night they watched a movie together. Annie thought it was nice, though she didn’t quite understand it. But she knew other people’s relationships were a foreign country – you could neverfully know them.
Just then, Annie felt a not entirely friendly poke from the woman behind her and the airport around her swam back into focus. She shuffled forward, following Conor as he approached a man in a high-vis vest checking boarding cards and passports.
No doubt the focus of the Red Wine Chats in Provincetown would at some point turn to her lack of wedding, they always did. That’s something that she both did and didn’t love about being with the friends she’d had for more of her life than not. They had a tendency to circle around the same subjects over and over. Sometimes the subjects were fun, like the time in their twenties when all six of them had been excruciatingly hungover during a surf lesson in County Clare and Ollie had fully fallen asleep on his board, which had then washed ashore, violently taking out a group of small children in the process. Of course, sometimes the subjects were tiresome, such as the weddingless Conor and Annie. Thank God they had just about enough tact to not mention the other thing Conor and Annie didn’t have.
Now through the boarding pass check, Conor absentmindedly took Annie’s hand again and they joined the nearest queue for the metal detectors. Annie rubbed her thumb over the familiar little vein on the back of Conor’s hand and thought about how relationships were so much more than a wedding. It was about the life you built together.
Annie and Conor had a large apartment outside the city in a complex close to the foothills of the Dublin mountains. The view was gorgeous – all of Dublin Bay unspooled before them. On summer evenings Annie and Conor ate on the balcony and watched the small boats in the distance gliding over the water. How calm it all looked at such a remove but, Annie knew, down on the boats there would be shouted directions and ropes whipping in the wind. Sea spray and salt in the air. The squall of life.
All life was like that, Annie thought. Like a painting, observed from afar it made sense and appeared ordered. It was up close that you could see the frenzy of creation in the brush strokes and impatient smudges and sometimes, embedded in the pigment, a rogue bristle from the artist’s brush. Up close the painting throbbed with life.
Since the baby game had begun, Annie had felt like her own life was a painting observed at a distance. There was order: she went to work and made small but satisfying inroads in restoring the artwork in her care. There was colour: she kissed Conor between his shoulder blades as he made coffee in the mornings. There was a life being lived: she bought a new dress. She bought another new dress. She put new flowers in the vase. They ate dinner on the dining table, their image reflected in the sliding glass doors to the balcony.
However, if you observed the scene closer, unlike a painting, there was no thrum of life, no exuberance. Annie had come to realise that being locked into a state of terminal waiting was not compatible with living. You simplycouldn’tlive. You couldn’t rush at life with an open heart when your every day, every hour and every minute were given over to waiting.
And along with the waiting came the calculating. The leaden days were units of time to get through. Her mood, at any given moment, depended on where she was on her cycle. Her best days were in the lead-up to ovulation when possibility shimmered.This could be the month, this could be it. She actually tried to beat back the hope because she was convinced that allowing the hope to swell would only make it harder when, yet again, she felt the familiar clenching in her womb and found blood.
Each month, she had to brace herself against the terrible silent howl of disappointment that wracked her. When the disappointment abated, the fear rose up:It’s never going to happen. And then, at night, the blaming would begin. Cold andunpitying recriminations, mostly of herself but yes, sometimes Conor too.You waited too long, what did you think would happen? Sometimes you can’t wait for every single duck to be in a row. There’s no perfect time when you magically become ready to have children.
At last they reached the top of the queue and Annie was happy to turn away from these roiling thoughts.FFS, it’s holiday time, Annie!
Conor leaned down to take her cabin bag and hike it up on the rollers leading into the large X-ray machine. Balancing on the side of the conveyor belt, Annie pulled off her thick-soled lace-up boots and turfed them into a tray along with the washed-out vintage denim jacket she was wearing over her dark floral tea dress. That morning Conor had joked about her commitment to the bit: ‘Summer must be so hard for goths! You can’t relax the rules even for a six-hour flight!’ His flying attire was an extremely practical grey tracksuit and trainers.
‘I’d lose my goth credentials,’ she’d explained matter-of-factly and had carried on piling her suitcase with mostly black garments in linen and lightweight cotton.
Standing in her socks now, she took in Conor’s broad back and small waist. He was committed to his own bit: working out incessantly. When he wasn’t taking meetings with team leads – he worked for Cobalt, a small start-up that specialised in HR – he was working out. Annie felt a pull of tension in her jaw at the sudden montage of Conor leaving for the gym that began to roll in her head. He wasn’t storming out as such but his swift exits nearly always coincided with talk of the Baby Project.
The first months he’d been excited, just like her, but as the first-year-mark passed, he’d become quieter on the subject. They both had. They edged around the topic. They didn’t talk about the family they were one day going to be the way they had at the beginning. Now Annie took the recommended vitaminsand supplements, tracked her basal body temperature, noted all the information and basically just told him when they’d be having sex. While he didn’t play a proactive role, he had bought her flowers and other gifts every single time she got her period in the last year.
Ahead of her, Conor was now passing through the machine. She needed to stop being hard on him. She knew he worried about her, though he said little, just occasional concerned references to the level of focus she was giving the whole enterprise.But itrequiresfocus, that’s the thing he doesn’t get, she thought as she watched a security man giving Conor a thorough frisk. She inched forward, waiting to be called.
With trying to conceive, details mattered. Take the ovulation tests, for example, you had to make sure you used the first pee of the day as it was most concentrated.
WAIT. Shit, shit, SHIT.Annie pulled back from the mouth of the large body scanner. The fucking pee was in her bag. Her bag that was rolling through the machine this very minute.
