The last hurdle with O’Neill, I thought to myself, as I waited outside the clinic for Gareth, was the questioning that would inevitably take place, and I reassured myself by remembering that I had crushed it when they’d interviewed me about Macleod.
‘I don’t believe this woman has a violent bone in her body,’ the inspector had said about me. Whoops, if only she knew what I had just done before my appointment.
Yet, over the past few days, I had not been able to shake the unsettling feeling that Gareth was not telling me everything. Our usual sixty-second updates on each other’s day had become shorter, blunter and more abrupt on his end. Was he keeping something from me, or was I just projecting?
I decided to compartmentalise and visit that troubling train of thought later as Gareth rocked up at the clinic with only a few seconds to spare. He jolted out of his car and gave me a quick peck on the cheek as we hurried inside, blurted our names to the receptionist, and then sat down in the most Godforsaken of all places: waiting rooms.
Among those waiting with us were a small toddler and, presumably, her mum. Not yet fully dexterous, she was playingwith one of those wooden bead maze things, trying to push the small, chunky multi-coloured hoops along the track. She realised I was watching her, and her small, innocent face looked up to me. I gave as warm a smile as I could muster under the circumstances, leaning forward a little, but then she just began to splutter-cry and darted away to the safety of her mum. I guessed my maternal instincts still needed some work.
Her mum began to turn around to see what monster had made her baby sob and snot, so, trying to avoid her gaze, I reached out for a magazine to hide behind and then remembered where I was and what kind of tests they did, and decided to maybe hold off in picking up the latest housekeeping edition. I could see that Gareth was thinking the same thing as he motioned to me that he had a bottle of alcohol gel in his coat pocket. The man had come prepared.
‘Do you think, like, they’ll ask me to do it today?’ he whispered in my ear.
‘What, have a wank?’ I let slip, speaking way too loudly. A few of the other people in the waiting room quickly twisted their heads to give me a passive–aggressive side-eye.
‘Whoops,’ I said, skulking deeper into my chair as Gareth gave a light slap of discipline on my arm, trying to control his own laughter.
‘So, you know, I knew someone who had a girlfriend who worked at one of these places. Said the official name of the room where you tug yourself off is the sample room, but they all call them the wank rooms.’
‘Ewww,’ I groaned. It was my turn to give him a soft slap as he quietly tried to smirk to himself, only to realise that he may have to venture into the wank rooms himself in only a few minutes.
‘He told me that they want to make it look as close to a bedroom as possible,’ Gareth continued.
‘What, like some kind of Pavlovian trick?’
‘Isn’t that a dessert?’ Gareth said, tilting his head slightly.
I scoffed. Gareth, for someone so finely tuned into the way people worked, lacked so much general knowledge.
‘Anyway, that place must just be filthy,’ he murmured to me. ‘Think of how many babies have started their journey right there in that room.’
I couldn’t tell if Gareth was just bored or if he was trying to be his remarkably goofy self to make me feel less anxious about everything. But I also knew that whatever his motivation, this was his personal challenge: to try and gross me out. I wasn’t having it. I was un-gross-outable.
‘So, they stick up a poster of Pamela Anderson, secret stash ofNutsmagazine, and maybe a race-car bed to really nail the message home?’ I asked.
‘Who readsNutsany more, Grandma?’
The mum whose child I had made cry rotated her head slowly, looked us both dead in the eyes, and then changed her gaze to look directly at me as if to say,Please, control your man.
‘Sorry,’ Gareth grunted, even though the mum was still glaring the sharpest of daggers at me. He didn’t wait a moment to let the embarrassment subside before turning to whisper to me, like a schoolboy at the back of the class that just couldn’t help himself, ‘So, what kind of porn do you think they’ll have in there?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gareth, will you shut up!’ I snarled at him playfully.
‘Mr and Mrs Donoghue?’ the nurse said, and I could hear the sounds of collective relief from the rest of the room when we stood up to be escorted to the doctor.
We were led through a sterile corridor and into a generic hospital room. The only change they had made was that it had been furnished with a few stock photos of happy families hungup on the walls, which I figured would be salt in the wound if someone left the appointment unhappy.
Dr Patel joined us a few minutes later, and we had polite preliminary discussions. He listened intently as we told him about the many trials and tribulations we had encountered in trying to get pregnant. He did his best to reassure us, but I couldn’t help but feel like he said these things to everyone. This was just him reciting lines he had been performing his whole career.
‘This happens to a lot of couples.’
Well, duh.
‘You’re doing the right thing by being here.’
Well, of course. We didn’t think worshipping an emu god would be the next logical step.
‘There are a lot of solutions to the problems couples face while trying to conceive.’
