Jill darts out of the kitchen. She spends several hours a day wrangling hyperemesis gravidarum in the office toilets and the rest of her time playing phone tag with the primary school principal, strategising about her eldest, Raphie.He’s named for the Renaissance painter, she’d told me on my first day here in case I was confused, perhaps, that she might have named him after the Ninja Turtle. Raphie was free-range-parented until he sent Jill into a spiralling meltdown, so now he’s enrolled at an exorbitantly priced Montessori school from which, on a particularly bad day last week, he managed to escape.
I flick on the kettle and read the rest of the client’s message.
I’m sure it’s just an oversight, but grateful if you could follow up.
Please note, I’ll be on a three-month work trip from tomorrow with patchy internet access.
Best,
Fraser Miller
Three months? What does he do?
My mistake with Jill was divulging my secret: I don’t want kids. Now she’s acting like my admission was some sort of stealthattack and has launched a relentless multi-level-marketing-like sales pitch for motherhood.
‘You say you don’t want themnow,’ she chirped yesterday. ‘But you will! You’re still in your twenties.’
‘Thirty-four,’ I’d clarified.
‘Fertility drops off a cliff at thirty-five, Audrey …’
Not if I push it off first, Jill.
The water boils and I pour it into my Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug and let the tea brew while I heat my lunch and respond to the email.
Dear Fraser,
Thank you for your message. I’ll check this and get straight back to you. I hope you’re travelling somewhere warm.
Best,
Audrey Sullivan
I’m nothing if not an ironic mix of overqualified and administratively incompetent. Perhaps ‘qualified for a different job’ is a better description, although I don’t want to think too hard about the pieces of paper that I technically do and don’t hold or the whole thing will bring on heart palpitations again.
With the response sent, I lean against the bench and shut my eyes. I’ve been trying to incorporate micro-meditations into my day, even though I am not that sort of person and the entire staff is foiling it. I’m half a nostril through a cycle of alternate-nostril breathing when another colleague, Brenda, materialises and starts ferreting for a tea bag and rattling through spoons just as Jill returns from her efficient performance in the bathroom and kicks off as if she’d never left. The allday sickness detracts from her campaign, so she tries toconceal it from me, which is a good thing as I’m a sympathetic vomiter.
Spotting an accomplice, she sidles up to Tea-Bag Brenda and, in a holier-than-thou whisper—as if she’s just discovered some scandalous piece of office gossip, like why the senior accountant left so abruptly (mutinous affair with the executive assistant) or who leaves the microwave in such a state (Derek)—she says, ‘Audrey will regret this childless-by-choice malarkey, don’t you agree?’
They glare at me so intensely that I’m forced to appraise myself in their wake: tailored black pants, ordinary white business shirt, flyaway brown hair in a loose ponytail. It’s not high fashion, or any fashion really, but I’m sent to the dusty basement several times a week to retrieve archival boxes full of legal documents, so—
‘Is it just that you haven’t met the right man?’ Jill argues, through her heteronormative lens.
‘The rightperson,’ I suggest, but her face is blank.
I can’t pick this battle now. I’m freshly panicked about the fact that my friends melt at the sight of a baby while my insidestwist. ‘Would you like to hold her?’ mothers ask, forcing the bundle into my arms, where it assimilates with my anxiety and starts screaming. I don’t know how to operate babies. I don’t want to know!
Just as I’m willing the microwave to ding or my phone to illuminate with a legitimate, work-related matter that I must excuse myself to attend to instantly—paper jam, sticky-note shortage, demise of another tropical fish in the office aquarium—I seem to manifest Fraser’s reply, which I scrutinise as if my life depends on it.
Antarctica. Currently minus 57 degrees Celsius …
So, about as frosty as this office.
‘I blame the hormones in chicken,’ Jill declares, cradling her bump. Brenda, dunking her tea bag and staring into space, is probably rehashing her curriculum vitae or imagining herself on some beach in the Maldives, as I often do.
It’s actually climate change, I want to argue. It’s that I’m terrified of bringing a child into a future this bleak. I see myself abandoning the poor thing when I’m eighty.Over to you, kid. Apologies for Armageddon …
But I can’t say that. Jill will accuse me of traumatising her unborn twins. Instead, I nod, as if I’m seriously pondering the Hormonal-Chicken hypothesis and type to Fraser—a man I have never met:
