“Perhaps,” the woman says. “But it’s not a hundred years ago, love.”
Absently, Ari pulls the queen of spades playing card from her pocket. She keeps it with her at all times and likes to run her thumb over it when worried, or sad, or missing Tom. As a result, it’s fraying at the edges from overuse.
She’s always missing Tom.
“The father of the baby gave me this,” she tells the woman, holding the queen of spades up to the light. “A token. A hundred years ago, I would have left it with the baby here. The most important thing I own.”
“You’re a melancholy thing, aren’t you?” the lady remarks, giving Ari a gentle smile. “I told you, it isn’t a hundred years ago now. We have social services these days, love. Social housing and medical care. You and your baby will be fine. Start claiming the right benefits. Right away.”
“Even with benefits, I’ll need a job,” Ari says, her voice dull. “Babies are expensive. And who in their right mind will hire a pregnant twenty-year-old? Nobody, that’s who, and—”
At that, the lady leans forward. “Are you really all alone?”
Ari shakes her head. “I have an older brother.”
The woman thinks for a moment. “Have you told him about the baby yet?”
“No.”
The woman smiles. “Tell him about it.”
Ari opens her mouth to speak, before closing it quickly.
Sebastian isn’t an idiot. When she’d arrived home from her gap year four months early, looking thin, pale and weary, he’d immediately sat her in his living room, handed her a cup of tea, and told her to tell him everything.
“Start with his name,” Sebastian ordered her, “and go from there.”
She hadn’t told him everything though. Hadn’t told him about the baby. Telling him would have made it too real.
“I don’t know,” she says to the woman now. “I don’t know what I want to do. If my boyfriend was here...”
The woman gives her a kind smile. “I know. But he isn’t here, love. So, it’s up to you.”
* * *
It’s Luis who finds Ari a job as a night cleaner at one of his wedding studios.
“With your art background, you’re overqualified for the role,” he tells her regretfully. “But it’s quiet and will keep you going until a plum role in art or design comes your way. You’re still sending your CV out, right?”
Luis and Sebastian still think of her as a kid looking for her big break in life, she realises, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell them that she’s all but given up on her dreams of a career in art. Mentally she’s boxed them up and stored them away, with a label attached that reads ‘Never going to happen now’. Dreams, Ari thinks bitterly, are for idealistic young people. Dreaming isn’t for those who’ll soon have another mouth to feed.
“I don’t mind at all,” Ari tells Luis, running a finger along the pristine white bags along one of the walls. “I’ve given up on art anyway, I think.”
She’s not telling lies. Ari really doesn’t mind the studio at all, and she hasn’t had an urge to paint since Tom left. Surprisingly, she finds cleaning numbingly therapeutic. She likes losing herself in the wiping away of dirt and dust and invisible regrets. She likes the immaculate studio, with its plush white carpets, oak flooring and the rows upon rows of white fabrics, kept in a cool workroom at the back. At 9p.m., when all the sewists and fitters and consultants leave, Ari finds a strange sort of calm in the studio, armed with her dusters and scrubbing brushes and vacuum cleaners. She doesn’t think ofTom while cleaning. It’s only when she stops, when she has time to think and grieve and feel sorry for herself, that she ever thinks of him. The longing for him is so strong it’s almost painful, and she has to breathe deep in those moments. Breathe deep and push him from her mind. She hasn’t got the luxury of missing him, she reminds herself. She has a baby to support soon. A child to consider.
She takes another job at a temp agency, because she’s desperate and pregnant and will do anything to keep food in her belly, a roof over her head and Tom from her mind. She finds herself working an endless circuit of desks as an office receptionist, answering phones and taking mail, glad at least to be sitting and off her feet, finding a cold sort of comfort in the utterly dull and entirely repetitive work sent to her. The other receptionists notice her growing belly with wide smiles, enthusiastically asking her about her baby and the father and Ari always smiles back but says little.
“Is it a girl or boy?” asks Ehlii, one of the other temp workers, but Ari only shrugs.
She doesn’t like to talk about the baby. She doesn’t like to think about the baby. Thinking about the baby means thinking about Tom, and that only leads to sadness and longing and the feel of a playing card against her fingers, as she worries the queen of spades against her skin. She’s detached from her pregnancy and detached from her baby and avoiding her brother, and sometimes, late at night in her miserable bedsit, she pushes down on the growing bump of her belly and wonder how she got here, and what the hell she’s doing with her life.
It’s easier not to think about the baby, really. Easier to keep the baby from her mind.
She goes to her twenty-week scan alone. The radiographer looks tired, taking measurements and making notes, and whenhe turns to her and asks her boredly if she wants to know the gender, Ari looks just as bored back, shrugging her shoulders.
“Sure,” she says, “why not?”
“A girl,” he says, pointing to an image on the screen of which Ari can make little sense. “You’re having a daughter.”
