Page 31 of The Life We Almost Had

‘One thing. I asked you for one thing,’ I said, trying to hold back the tears that had gathered. We both knew I wasn’t talking about the shopping and I knew I should stop goading him but my hormones were all over the place, my period was due, and I couldn’t help myself. I shouldn’t have looked at our baby things. Again I wondered whether we should try IVF but I was so scared that it wouldn’t work and equally scared that it would. Often I tried to recapture the feeling I used to have whenever I had looked at Adam in those early, heady days, but the boy from the bar had slipped through my fingers and in his place was this helpless man standing before me who looked so tired.

‘Anna, it’s not my fault…’

‘It never is, Adam.’

‘Noteverythingis.’ His eyes met mine. ‘But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to make you happy.’

‘Well then, you should leave.Thatwould make me happy.’ I wiped my hand across the back of my mouth. The spiteful words I’d spoken in shame had left a bitter taste as they spewed from my lips. ‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

I stepped into his open arms. This was the way it went. We fought and then we made up. It was exhausting.

‘If we can’t have tea, wine? Thursday is the new Friday.’ Adam pulled a bottle of Malbec from the rack while I fetched two glasses from the cupboard. We didn’t drink when we’d first tried to conceive. As time marched on, it became ‘just the odd one’; by two years it was weekends only. But weekends stretched from Friday lunchtime to Sunday night and soon after that it was why not take the edge off? Adam uncorked the bottle while I pushed a stopper back into all the things I wanted to say. It didn’t feel like the right time.

It never did.

My nan had a yellow sofa once, her and Grandad had saved for almost a year to buy it when they had first got married. It became battered from years of family life. The springs poking through the sagging cushions. The arms worn and faded. After she had lost Grandad, Mum had worried about her living alone. ‘On top of everything else that’s wrong with that sofa, it’s a fire hazard. You must get a modern one made of non-flammable material,’ Mum had insisted. Nan did buy a ‘three-piece suite’, as she had called it, but was scared of spoiling it. She refused to take off the protective covering. When I visited, I perched on the edge of my seat, afraid of splitting the plastic open. Afraid of ruining what was underneath. That was how I constantly felt now, sitting lightly on the lie that was our marriage, muscles tense, smile static. Terrified that I would press down too hard and the truth would burst out. We hadn’t been able to have a baby and it didn’t matter how many times we said we were enough for each other; I didn’t think that we were.

Not anymore.

Chapter Seventeen

Adam

My first glass of Malbec lasted about three seconds. I poured another. If I was drinking, I couldn’t snap back. I just couldn’t face another row.

Nothing I did was good enough anymore. I should have known when Anna had scrawled pink wafer biscuits on the list that morning that it was her time of the month. That I needed to tiptoe around her more than I usually did.

Five years. Five years we’ve been trying to conceive.

When do you say enough? Let’s take a break and just beusfor a bit.

It broke my heart that I couldn’t give Anna what she wanted and yeah, I saw through her barbed ‘I only asked you for one thing’ comment. We both knew she wasn’t talking about the shopping. Despite the endometriosis, I felt entirely responsible, like I was less of a man. Rationally I knew that with someone else, someone different, I might have the chance of a family but I’d never once thought about leaving Anna. ‘You should leave.Thatwould make me happy,’ she had said, but I knew she didn’t mean it. I hoped she didn’t mean it. I think she felt the guilt as much as me.Feeling less of a woman, but she wasallwoman. This I was reminded of each time the app on her phone beeped to tell her she was ovulating and we pounded up the stairs to bed while I tried to prepare myself mentally: ten minutes to curtain call.

We had visited a clinic to check the quality of my sperm. They had handed me a plastic pot and directed me to a room full of porn but it had been Anna I had thought about. Barefoot at our wedding reception. Crown of flowers. Laughing riotously at something Nell had said.

I missed Nell.

Josh did too. ‘Couldn’t we start hanging out again?’ he had asked.

‘Josh! Nell is married now. Time to move on, mate.’

‘Giving up is not an option,’ he had said.

Had Anna given up too soon on their friendship? I wished Nell were here to help Anna through this. I thought she would be if Anna was honest with her, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t be, and in shutting Nell out, a chasm had opened between us all. Nell and Chris’s social circle widening to include other parents, and our social circle ever decreasing.

Would Anna be happier without me? Could she conceive with someone else’s sperm? Could she have a baby without IVF? Maybe we just weren’t compatible in that way. It filled me with self-loathing that I could be the cause of her unhappiness. That I was walking under a ladder, black cat crossing my path – all kinds of bad luck. If I was being entirely honest, the resentment wasn’t only one-way: I had given up a lot for her. My plans to travel the world. The new job I was offered. My friends when I had left my village. Sometimes I imagined standing at the airport six years before. Anna on one side, and all my hopes and dreams on the other.Would I give it all up again? No matter how much we bickered, the days, sometimes weeks that passed without any meaningful conversation, I knew that I would. Our time together wasn’t all bad, it was just that the bad times were pretty fucking terrible, but every now and then I’d glimpse the Anna of old. Last weekend, for instance, we had been to the engagement party of a guy I worked with and in the back room of the pub was a pool table.

‘You up for it?’ I had asked her. It had been about two years since we had played.

‘Bring it on.’ She had kicked off her heels and hitched up her tight black dress and thrashed me three times in a row. Afterwards, we had danced to S Club 7, both reaching for the stars and had staggered home at 2 a.m. clutching a white plastic bag bursting with kebab and chips. We had sat cross-legged on the lounge floor, picking meat out of the pitta.

‘We couldn’t do this if we had kids,’ I had drunkenly said. Had stupidly said. I hadn’t meant it the way it sounded and the mood was ruined, but for those precious few hours before I stuck my foot firmly in my mouth, we had laughed. Properly laughed.

‘Are you hungry?’ Anna asked now but I was one step ahead of her, guessing that the salmon on the shopping list was meant to be our dinner.

‘Sweet and sour chicken?’ I waved the menu in front of me, a white flag of sorts.

She placed a hand on her stomach. ‘I don’t know if I fancy Chinese tonight.’ She often felt bloated when her period was due. She was wearing her time-of-the-month pyjamas. All baggy and worn. I didn’t like to ask her if she had started yet. Didn’t fancy getting my head bitten off again.

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