Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [27]
She was bubbly and fun, exactly what I was looking for, because I’d been looking for nothing at all. The sex was good, so good it was practically all we did. It wasn’t inevitable that she’d wind up pregnant but she did, nearly five months later. All the morning-after pill did was make her sick, although not nearly as sick as the news that it hadn’t worked. She told me the night before I was due to go on holiday with the lads. I didn’t enjoy the holiday much, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed being at home much more. I was gone three months too, which didn’t help, but that’s a whole different story.
We argued about abortion but kept flipping sides. I was more practical in the morning, when she was going through a nurturing phase. That changed in the evening, when maudlin self-pity kicked in after she’d had a few defiant pints, a guilty cigarette. She told me it was none of my business anyway, it was a woman’s right to choose. I asked her if she thought the baby might be a girl, who would grow up to be a woman, with the right to choose. One evening I arrived at her flat to find her sobbing. She eventually gulped it out, she’d once helped a friend get to Liverpool and that no matter what her nightmares were about the soundtrack was always the wailing of babies.
I was more chilled at night. Mellow after a couple of joints, thinking about playing Mozart to her belly, how I’d be able to teach him Pele’s body-swerve. In the morning I’d wake up in a cold sweat, unable to breathe, the weight of the day, and the rest of my days, a slab on my chest.
One morning I woke to find her sitting on a chair, holding an unlit cigarette, watching me. She told me she was having the baby, that it would be a boy, and that his name would be Ben. I liked the name.
I asked her to marry me. I thought it was the right thing to do.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, Harry. The only good reason for getting married is that you don’t have to go home for Christmas dinner.”
It was a difficult pregnancy. The night we finally told her parents, three months down the line, I had my own parentage questioned. Maura cried and Brendan threatened me with physical force before chucking me out of the house. Denise moved into my poky bed-sit, so I couldn’t breathe out all the way anymore, and we started making plans, none of them together. Her hormones ran riot and she developed cravings for garlic bread, mint ice cream. Her weight shot up by nearly two stone, not counting the burgeoning Ben. She became addicted to talk shows, toy advertisements. I tried to ignore the macabre cabaret in my head, the rhythm section distorted by a feedback screech of panic.
Dutchie offered me a couple of nights working behind the bar. I took them, as much to get out of the flat as for the extra money. Once I had a few quid stashed we moved out to Duncashlin, opposite the big American medical supply complex, a once-plush estate that had been allowed run to seed. The rent was cheap because the back walls were damp but it had two bedrooms. Once we moved in Denise spent all her free time converting one of the bedrooms into a nursery.
I worked back a lot on the job, weekends too, and not only because Denise and I were arguing over the remote control, matt or emulsion, Nescafé or Bewley’s. Eventually she started sleeping in the nursery, complaining that I wasn’t taking her need for extra space in bed into consideration. I knew my elbows weren’t the problem but I didn’t mind. I’d been thinking of sleeping in the nursery myself but I can’t stand the smell of new paint.
In total, before and after Ben was born, we went without sex for just over fourteen months. It took Denise a fortnight to tell me sex was the only thing we had in common.
Ben was born on a Tuesday, three days late, seven pounds three ounces. Once the formalities had been observed, Gonzo took me out on the kind of tear that could have toppled an ancient civilisation. We ended up back in Dutchie’s, yet another