You, dear readers, are the most sensitive and literate people I know. I need your help devising a neologism. I would like a word for the feeling that you get when you are watching the television and see that tomorrow night there will be an “undercover expose” centred on hideously expensive private IVF clinic that your wife has persuaded you to attend.
No word I presently know seems to quite cover it.
The night before the test I was too agitated to go straight to bed. Instead IÂ sat at my desk working until the desklamp dried out my eyes and made sleep inevitable. I padded to the bathroom past the open bedroom door. I could see P motionless in the darkness lost in sleep. Next to her on the bed, his eyes shining with reflected lamplight, was our cat keeping his watch.
P was awake by 6 and I felt her slip from the bed. I lay still listening as she performed the test and then quietly climbed back into bed. She pressed herself into me and I put my arms around her. Wouldn’t she wake me if it was positive? Wouldn’t she be crying if it is was negative? I was too afraid to own up to being awake; too scared to ask the question. It was better to lie unmoving in an emotional quantum superposition letting everything remain possible and fending off reality.
I felt P sob. At first she was silent, her body moving in tiny spasms of misery. Then, like a sandcastle melting in the low surf, her tears washed through and we fell out of the realm of possibility and into unyielding metallic certainty of the real world.
I spoke to comfort her. She turned and looked into my eyes and said she was sorry as if it were somehow all her fault as if her depair sadness and longing were somehow not enough with out guilt to keep them company. I told her that I was sorry too but that I wanted her to know that however much I might want a baby she had made my life complete: I knew with her I would be happy whatever life had in store for us.
Inside I felt nothing. Not even a numbness – just nothing at all. I convinced myself that what this meant was that after so many attempts I had become enured. Perhaps despite having made the beginner’s error of allowing myself hope, I would cope better this time around.
I had the busiest imaginable day of work ahead of me so I steeled myself, dressed, ate breakfast and set off; a hollow man, my soulless shoes clacking out my non-existence on the rain-soaked pavement. On the train something strange began to happen. As I read newspaper articles, tears sprang into my eyes. I folded the paper, put on my ipod and squeezed my eyes shut wishing the world away determined to keep things together. At Blackfriars, I bumped through the crowd and walked as fast I could, desperate to get to my office. Once through the office door, I dropped my bag and sat at my desk. I was the first in to work and I was momentarily grateful for the solitude. I felt out of control as if from somewhere deep inside of me feelings were leaking like a flow of blood from a wound I couldn’t find. I put my hands over my eyes and began to cry. I heard the door to my office begin to open and sat up abruptly. A colleague had come to ask me a legal question. I sat tight-lipped as he set out the facts and answered as best I could. As he turned to go he asked me how the IVF treatment was going and I could feel the tears coming on again. I had to get out of the room but he was stood in the door. I got up and walked towards him mumbling that it had not worked. As I reached him he put a hand up to touch me, then half withdrew it and then laid it lightly on my shoulder and said “sorry”. That word, meant as a comfort, hurt. I moved as quickly as I could to the lavatory, found a cubicle and sat shoulders shaking with tears on my cheeks and a hole in my heart.
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