With Or Without You

Red Dress Ink

"This isn't working, is it?"

For one mad moment I thought Jake was talking about the toaster. It had been on the blink for a while. But then so had we.

Two perfect golden-brown slices of wholemeal toast pop up with a cheerful ping and my heart sags a little.

I glance up from my own bowl of dubiously named 'luxury' muesli and try to look as if every dry, claggy, unluxurious spoonful isn't choking me.

Jake grabs his toast,wincing as it burns his fingers.He tosses it onto a plate before he returns my gaze. "You know what I'm talking about, Lyssa."

Yes. I do. Our fourth and most gruelling attempt at IVF has just ended in a watery red blob in the toilet bowl and misery. My misery. Our misery. I give up with my spoon. "Of course I do." I'm trying not to cry and I guess I should go over to comfort him,but I haven't got enough emotional energy for myself let alone any to spare. I force a rigid smile. "But we can try again."

Jake hasn't made any attempt to butter his toast and it must be getting cold. In a pan on the cooker, two eggs are knocking around in our only All-Clad pan,the bubbling water tossing them to and fro.My boyfriend,or whatever we're supposed to call them these days, sounds irritable. "Not the IVF."

I mentally trawl through a list of all our other domestic appliances that might be dodgy.

"Us," he says starkly. "Us. We're not working."

I nearly laugh. I was just wondering if he meant the fridge — which frosts up far too quickly for my liking. I'm sure it never used to — but then you really never pay that much attention to your fridge, do you? Or your partner in life, it seems. And then I realise that Jake is deadly serious. The skin round his eyes is more drawn than I've ever seen it before and his mouth is pulled down at the corners.

"It's a difficult time for us," I say calmly when I really want to scream,You're not the one that's bleeding here, Jake! Instead, I turn to him and quietly say,'All couples have them. We'll get through it."

Jake comes and sits down. He takes my hand and turns it over, examining it as if he's never seen it before. "And what if I don't want to get through it? What if I've suddenly woken up to the fact that there's more to life than getting through it?"

I open my mouth to answer with some platitude about how life can't always be a bed of roses, but he rushes on before I can speak. "What if I don't want a baby? What if I don't want to spend any more time alone in cold cubicles with crumpled wank mags?"

My eyes widen. I thought that was the bit he liked best. Sometimes he specifically chose his own porny material to take with him. "What if I don't want our sex life littered with charts and thermometers and injections?"

"I?"

"When did we last go wild and have a purely recreational shag?"

"I?"

"When?" he says with the triumphant note of the just in his voice.

"What are you saying? I don't mark notches on the headboard, like some old Lothario." I do, however, mark notches on my heart after every failed coupling. Failed in the sense that it didn't produce a pink, bouncing baby at the end of it. "I thought you enjoyed our sex life."

"Then you are truly delusional," Jake says.

I'm stunned. I had hoped that in the face of another disappointment, another thwarted dream, he'd take me in his arms, shush my tears — even though that isn't politically correct these days — and tell me that it would all be fine, we would find another wad of our hard-earned cash to blow on hormones for Jake to inject into my bum, and that next time Sammy Sperm would get it together with Esme Egg and we would no longer be the complete failures we are with our inability to succeed in the most basic of human tasks.

How difficult can it be to make a baby? These days our teenagers are popping them out all the time. Britain has the highest rate of child mothers in Europe. Aren't a mobile phone and a baby at the top of the 'must have' list for every schoolgirl? Go anywhere near Miss Sixty in any high street, on any Saturday and it's like a teen mums' convention. Okay, so I'm a little past the acne stage, but at thirty-four it does seem a bit unfair that all my eggs, like the ones in Jake's unattended saucepan, appear to be turning hard-boiled.

"I need space," Jake says into my self-pity. "You're not an astronaut," I say. "You don't need space." Jake looks unconvinced, whereas I remain resolute. Only astronauts and Sigourney Weaver need space to function in. The rest of mankind have to operate in confined quarters — offices, homes, relationships — that's what it's all about. No man is an island.And no man whose sperm has been called'sluggish' has a right to lay all this at my feet.

"I need time to myself," he continues.

This is a man who every weekend plays some sort of sport — football and cricket in the appropriate seasons, golf and squash when he can fit them in.This is a man who I think has plenty of time to himself, and before we used to argue about our lack of babies, we used to argue about how much time he had to himself. I wonder why all this is going round in my head, but none of it is coming out of my mouth.

Jake takes a deep breath. He puts my hand down. Right into some milk I hadn't realised I'd spilled on the kitchen table. "I think we should have a trial separation," he says. "For a few days.A few weeks."

"Have you met someone else?"

"No." He looks at me as if I'm insane to even entertain the thought. "This isn't about anyone else. It's about me — and you.And your obsession."

"Wanting a baby is not an obsession. It's a?"

Jake waits. "?a preoccupation. "That sometimes borders on slightly obsessive.Very slightly. "I just want a baby.Is that too much to ask?"

Jake stands up. Patently, it is. "I've packed a few things. I'm going to Pip's place for a couple of days. I need to get my head round this. I need to decide what I want."

"And what I want doesn't come into it anymore?"

Jake looks very tired of me.'suppose we can never have a baby, Lyssa? What then? How long would it be until you stopped hoping that one day modern science will no longer be baffled by our inability to conceive?"

"I don't know." I shrug lightly. "Three weeks? Four?'This fails to add levity to our desperate situation.

"I'll phone you tonight," Jake says. "To make sure you're all right."

I won't be all right, I want to say. I'm not all right now. I may never be all right again. "You can't just go."

"I'll phone you."

Excerpted from With Or Without Youby Carole Matthews Copyright © 2005 by Carole Matthews. Excerpted by permission.
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