‘The boys can swim! Yesss!’
This is yet more evidence of Johnny’s niceness. Initial tests showed that, in fact, he had an embarrassment of riches in the swimmers’ department. They were all Olympian-grade, bound for the podium, able to swim sensibly in the right direction, plus there was a shitload of the buggers. The unspecified problem appeared to lie with me, but even so, Johnny has been happy to assume responsibility.
He is such an unbearable dude cliché, being proud ofhis working nutsack, holding the test as proof of his man-virility, yet in that moment a part of me loves him for it.
And I tell him so. ‘I love you for knocking me up, so I do.’
He laughs softly to himself. ‘Oh man, this is going to be so great.’
And then, as though he’s reading my mind, he adds, ‘You down at the Spence, with the Baby Bjorn, the Bugaboo, all of it…’
‘Ugh, as if.’ The unbidden smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. ‘They probably don’t want to be friends with anyone new anyway, that shower.’
I hate that despite my many protestations to the contrary, he knows that deep down I want that, to join their gang.
‘How do you even know what a Bugaboo is? That weirds me out a bit, if I’m honest,’ I tell him.
‘I’ve been doing my homework,’ he says, almost to himself. He stares down at the test’s two lines. I can tell he’s half afraid they might go away under his eyes.
‘You’ll never guess what. They have this machine for getting rid of the dirty nappies. A genie,’ he tells me.
‘Why didn’t you say so? I’d have done this baby thing years ago if I’d known that.’ We can make this joke now.
A few days later, Johnny reveals that he has already come up with a list of names for the child we’ve already referred to as ‘Ricey’ (owing to its long-grain size) and ‘November 2010’ (due date).
‘I’m doing the baking around here,’ I remind him. ‘I will therefore also be doing any naming.’
He still wants to show me the list. Amazingly, it hasn’t been laminated, although near enough.
‘What about Ciel?’ he offers.
‘Ciel,’ I reply distastefully.
‘Yeah. French for heaven.’
‘What about… Blythe,’ I attempt.
‘As inBlithe Spirit?’
‘Just, I know someone cool with that name.’
‘Hard, hard pass. What even is that?’
‘Maximilian?’
‘“Maximilian, come in for your dinner,”’ I yell in my broadest Northside Dublin accent. ‘Be serious for a second.’
Then: ‘Djuna?’ I offer. ‘After Djuna Barnes?’ Our names are becoming more bougie-slash-wanky by the second. He looks horrified, although I know he loves this game. He’s wanted to play it for a very long time.
‘Djuna.’ He tastes it in his mouth. ‘We’ve gone way too Hackney on this one.’
In the end, we decide on Jonah for a boy, Luna for a girl. The names make it all too real. Something that is at once thrilling and terrifying.
‘Why are you moving so slowly around the house?’ Johnny asks a few days later while we are making dinner. I can’t bear to tell him that I’m afraid to move; how much I fret that the one bit of kinetic energy I am forced to use to get from A to B could be enough to unseat this baby from my womb and unspool this whole dream of ours.
‘What pregnancy symptoms do you have?’ he asks. I tell him there are none. Apart from the occasional slosh of low-level anxiety, my body pretty much feels like business as usual.
At eight weeks and five days, we pay for a private ultrasound. Johnny and I hold hands in the waiting room of the clinic, giddy with gladness.
