Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [149]
‘You must be,’ Ashling lied stoutly.
‘Well, even if I’m not imagining it, I’m pretending I am. I blame that bloody Red Bull,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m never touching it again!’
After she hung up, Marcus kissed Ashling and asked softly, ‘Was I good last night?’
‘Well… no.’ Ashling was surprised. They hadn’t made love when they’d come in.
‘No?’ His voice was sharp with anguish.
Oh Christ! Too late, Ashling realized what he was on about. ‘On stage? I thought you meant in bed. You were fantastic on stage, I told you at the time.’
‘Better than Bicycle Billy, “one of Ireland’s top comedians”?’
‘You know you are.’
‘If I knew it I wouldn’t have to ask.’
‘Better than Billy, better than Ted, better than Mark, better than Jimmy, better than everyone.’ Ashling wanted to go back to sleep.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jimmy’s gag about the football supporters was great, though.’
‘It was OK,’ Ashling said cautiously.
‘How OK?’ Marcus pounced. ‘On a scale of one to ten?’
‘One,’ Ashling yawned. ‘It was crap. Let’s go back to sleep now.’
43
Oliver’s visit had shattered Lisa’s fragile equilibrium. At work her eye was off the ball and her bitchy-remark quota was way down. What made things worse was that he didn’t ring her. She’d hoped that he would, if only just to leave a jokey ‘Thanks for the shag’ message. Especially now that he had her number. But the days passed and hope faded.
On day five the yearning got too bad and she rang him, but it went straight to message service. He was out, she deduced, having a good time, living the life she used to live. Full of irritating desolation, she hung up, too raw to leave a message.
She should have known he wouldn’t get in touch. It was over, they both knew it, and once his mind was made up, it stayed that way. Subdued and distracted, she couldn’t stop dwelling on questions that she should have considered six months, nine months, a year previously. What had happened to her marriage? What went wrong? Like so many relationships, theirs had foundered on the issue of children. But this time there was a twist. He wanted them, she didn’t.
She’d thought she wanted them. There was a spate when absolutely anyone who was anyone was up the duff: various Spice Girls; a plethora of models; several actresses. A bump was as much of a style statement as a pashmina or a Gucci handbag, and pregnancy was hot. She’d even included it in a list – Pregnancy was ‘Hot’ and Precious Stones were ‘Not’.
Shortly after that, the in-thing was to be seen wheeling a tiny little baba in a black jogging buggy – don’t leave home without it. Lisa, her gimlet eye registering the infinitesimal rise and fall of all things trendy, took in these developments.
‘I want a baby,’ she told Oliver.
Oliver wasn’t so keen. He liked their stylish, sociable life, and knew that a baby would put the brakes on it. No more partying until dawn, no more white sofas, no more spontaneous, last-minute trips to Milan. Or Vegas. Or even Brighton. Sleepless nights would no longer be courtesy of high-grade cocaine, but of a screaming child instead. All disposable income would be diverted away from Dolce & Gabbana jeans and reapplied to mountains of disposable nappies.
But Lisa got to work, and slowly she convinced him. Appealing to his macho pride, ‘Don’t you want your genes to be carried on?’
‘No.’
And then one day, lying in bed he said, ‘OK.’
‘OK, what?’
‘OK, we’ll have a baby.’ Before Lisa could exclaim with pleasure he had plucked her foil card of pills from the bedside shelf and ceremoniously flushed them down the loo.
‘No safety net, babes.’
In her fantasies, Lisa was already sporting a delicious coffee-coloured baby on her slender hip. ‘It’s not a doll,’ Fifi pointed out to her. ‘It’s a human being and they’re a lot of hard work.’
‘I know that,’ Lisa had snapped. But she didn’t really.
Then someone at work got pregnant. Arabella, a sharp, slightly dangerous woman, who was as smart as a whip