I Heart Christmas (26 page)

‘I’m not really surprised that you’re surprised. I haven’t really been top of your agenda lately, have I?’ He kicked the leg of the bed and the whole thing wobbled. Really, Ikea did need to reinforce their furniture better. We couldn’t possibly have been the first couple to go at it on a Saturday afternoon inside these four walls.

‘You’re always top of my agenda, the whole Christmas thing was about putting you at the top of my agenda,’ I said, immediately feeling horribly guilty. ‘OK, so yes, there’s a chance I haven’t been able to give the move as much attention as I would have liked but it has been a busy couple of bloody weeks. And you did sort of surprise me with it.’

‘It’s not just the move.’ He looked like he was ready to explode. ‘It’s everything, Angela. I’m never your priority.’

‘Can we not talk about this now?’ Aside from my inherent fear of ‘making a scene’, I really wanted a time-out. I needed two minutes to work out what to say – my brain still wasn’t firing on all cylinders, if it was firing at all. ‘Can we do this at home?’

‘No, we can’t,’ Alex replied. He did not share my fear of public embarrassment. He was a musician after all. ‘I’m sick of waiting to talk about everything on your schedule. I’m sick of waiting for you to get home from work. I’m sick of waiting for you to finish up with Jenny. I’m sick of waiting for you to decide when you want to start being a grown-up.’

I felt my feet getting stompy. Fine. If we were going to do it, we were going to do it.

‘What are you talking about?’ I shouted at him. ‘You’re the one who sods off on tour. You’re the one who vanishes into his studio for days on end. You’re the one who doesn’t know what bloody day it is.’

‘That happened one time,’ he thundered. ‘And I had been working non-stop for three days.’

‘But you’re sick of waiting for me to come home from work?’ I was more upset than angry but I didn’t know how to tell him. So, obviously, I attacked. ‘And you’re the one accusing me of not being a grown-up? Tell me, what grown-up thing is it that I’m not doing?’

‘Maybe not getting wasted the night before we move?’ Alex was out and out yelling and every time he shouted, I could feel my temper rising higher and higher. Who knew I could be this angry and this hungover at the same time? ‘Maybe enabling your friend’s dumbass runaway behaviour? Maybe a bunch of other things?’

‘Whatever it is, just say it,’ I snapped, jumping up off the bed until we were face to face, on either side of the world’s shittest cot. ‘For fuck’s sake, Alex, just say it.’

He stared down at me, his breathing hard and heavy, two red spots glowing in his pale cheeks. I had never, ever been scared of him before but I literally had no idea what he was going to do. And so, of course, he did the last thing I imagined he would.

‘I want to have a baby,’ he said, covering my hands with his own.

It was a good job the bed was right behind me because that cot was not strong enough to hold me up. I pulled my hands away and sank backwards, waiting to catch my breath. Alex stayed exactly where he was, his eyes still wild. I could almost hear his heart pounding over the tinny music playing over the loudspeakers. How had we got into this?

‘And you thought the best way to go about that was to start screaming at me in Ikea?’ I asked. ‘Really?’

‘No, I thought the best way would be to marry you,’ he said, still not moving. ‘And love you and be happy and wait and that it would just happen. But it didn’t and you won’t even talk to me about it. So then I figured maybe I’d buy us an apartment that would feel like a home but you didn’t even seem to notice that had happened. So tell me, Angela, what am I supposed to do now?’

I closed my eyes to stop the tears from falling and shook my head very, very gently, breathing out.

‘What if I don’t want to have a baby?’ I formed the words very carefully, smoothing out the telltale bumps in my voice.

‘Now?’ he asked. ‘Or ever?’

I still hadn’t been to see Dr Laura, I didn’t know what she was going to tell me, but there, in that moment, it didn’t matter what she was going to say. All that mattered was what Alex would say. If there was no baby, if there was never a baby, would I be enough?

I couldn’t say anything so I just shrugged, forcing myself to open my eyes and look up at him through heavy wet lashes. All the fight was gone from him. He looked so sad. Without warning, he shoved the cot away from him, sending it crashing into the bed, and stormed off out of the bedroom, striding across the showroom floor. As I watched him go, I noticed everyone around us was frozen like waxworks, eyes trained on the show, until the second he passed by them and they suddenly snapped back to life. No one made eye contact with me – it seemed they had all taken a keen interest in the contents of their own giant yellow shopping bags. Abandoning my haul, I shuffled off the edge of the bed, climbed over the broken cot and headed straight for the outside world. Ikea really did terrible things to people.

‘I just wanted to have a nice Christmas,’ I shouted as he left. ‘Is that too much to ask?’

My phone vibrated in the bottom of my handbag as I reached the entrance. Waiting for someone to activate the automatic door from the outside, I ran out into the cold, happy to feel air that didn’t come through an air-conditioning system. It was freezing but it was sunny and I turned my face up to the sky, trying to soak in some vitamin D and convince myself that the world was still turning. With a deep breath and a brave face, I pulled my phone out, expecting to see Alex’s name in big white letters. Instead it was Louisa. Blindly, I pressed the green answer button and praised her psychic abilities.

‘What do you mean you’ve dropped the tiniest of bollocks?’ she demanded. ‘What have you done now?’

‘How did you know?’ I asked, clearing my throat and ignoring a man holding three hot dogs. Three. At once. Bastard.

‘Because you sent me a text saying that you had dropped the tiniest of bollocks?’ she said, the line crackly with a wind that wasn’t present in Red Hook, Brooklyn. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Ohhhh.’ I really was outdoing myself today. ‘Yeah. That. Um, it’s probably nothing but I might have accidentally told my mum that you’re here. But she promised she wouldn’t say anything. Sort of.’

‘You did what?’

Louisa didn’t sound that pleased.

‘It just came out,’ I offered, my row with Alex still whirling around my head. All I could think was that I needed to stand under a shower for a really long time. ‘Listen, can I come over? I’ll fix it, I promise.’

‘Shouldn’t you be doing house-moving things?’ she asked with a resigned sigh. ‘Because I think you’ve probably done enough already.’

‘She wants to come over? Tell her to come over!’ I heard Jenny shout to Louisa. ‘He’s gonna be here soon. Tell her to bring Alex.’

‘Who’s going to be there soon?’ I asked, twisting my wedding and engagement rings with my thumb at the sound of his name. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing that’s going to make your day any better,’ Louisa replied.

‘I don’t think anything could make it any worse,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’

Hanging up, I stared at my phone for just a second and then turned towards the car park, squinting to see our van. It was still there, Alex must still be inside. Leaving it any longer would just make things more difficult, I decided, and so I took it upon myself to be the bigger person and dialled his number. My heart thudded against my ribs when the call connected but with each unanswered ring it fell a little, until I was sure I felt it hit the bottom of my stomach when my call finally went through to his never-checked voicemail. If I learned one thing about Alex in the time that we’d been together, it was that when he was seriously upset, he needed to be left alone. Of course, for the most part I’d learned this through the process of other people upsetting him. Knowing I was the reason for the look on his face when he had walked off was almost too much to bear. Maybe if I gave him a while to cool off, took myself to Jenny’s while he calmed down, we could talk properly in a while. When I’d had a lot of caffeine and a shower and time to think about how to explain everything I hadn’t had a chance to explain in the past seven days.

‘You win this round, Ikea,’ I said, staring up at the giant yellow and blue sign. ‘You can stick your hot dogs up your arse.’

The man beside me looked up sharply, half a hot dog sticking out of his mouth. I frowned and hung up the phone.

‘Oh, not you.’ I stood up and waved at a waiting taxi. ‘Please enjoy your lunch.’

But it didn’t look like he was much in the mood for hot dogs anymore.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Even though I knew the right thing to do was to leave Alex alone, every second of the cab ride to Jenny’s was torture. I stared at my phone screen, refreshed my email every minute and started writing about fifteen different texts but it was all for nothing. Soon an hour had passed without a word and I had a horribly familiar feeling. We’d only ever had one row this bad, two years ago, almost to the day, and somehow that time we’d ended up getting engaged. Of course, it wasn’t because we were both so mature and openly communicative that we were able to sort ourselves out. Oh no. Our friends had more or less knocked our heads together until we saw sense and it was with an incredibly forced sense of optimism that I arrived at my old Manhattan apartment, hoping against hope that they would be able to do the same thing again.

‘Sorry it took so long. The bridge was a nightmare.’ I let myself in without knocking and shrugged off my coat. ‘I need coffee so badly. I really, really need to talk to you.’

‘Hello, sunshine. You look like shite.’

I stopped in the living room doorway, blinked twice and felt my forehead fold into a frown.

‘James,’ I said, both as a ‘hello’ and a ‘what the hell are you doing here?’

‘Angela,’ he grinned.

James and Jenny weren’t close. In fact, they barely knew each other. We’d hung out a few times and they’d chatted a little at my wedding but as far as I was aware, they weren’t exactly brunch buddies. So what was he doing perched on her windowsill drinking a cup of tea?

‘There’s coffee in the pot.’ Jenny, all bright eyes and bushy ponytail, sat on the armchair closest to James, positively vibrating with excitement. She had never been very good at keeping her mouth shut and she clearly had something she wanted to say. ‘Come sit down.’

‘Where’s Lou?’ I asked, backing slowly towards the kitchen counter, pulling my favourite mug out of the cupboard and filling it to the brim, only leaving room for enough sugar to put me in a diabetic coma.

‘I’m in here,’ she shouted from what used to be my bedroom. ‘I’m just putting Grace down for her nap. Can you please tell me exactly what you said to your mother?’

‘As soon as someone tells me exactly what’s going on here.’ I leaned down to the too-full mug to slurp my coffee before I even tried to pick it up. ‘James?’

‘Uh, didn’t you say you really needed to talk?’ Jenny replied before he could. ‘And yeah, how come you look like you slept in the park last night?’

‘Long story short,’ I began. I could still feel my brows knitting together. Hopefully Sadie had bought me Botox vouchers for Christmas. Again. ‘Work Christmas party last night, Jesse hit on me in the cab home, I got hammered, we had to move this morning and me and Alex just had a screaming row about having a baby in Ikea.’

‘Alex wanted to have a baby in Ikea?’ James placed his own coffee mug on the windowsill beside his huge thigh, only to have said thigh slapped by Jenny. ‘Utter filth.’

‘Bad boy,’ she scolded. ‘You know what she means.’

‘And how does that play into you telling your mother that I’m in New York?’ Louisa emerged from the bedroom, hands on hips, long blonde hair curling around her shoulders. I noticed the dark circles that had been so prominent when she arrived on my doorstep were all but gone and her cheeks were glowing and pink. In fact, she just looked great in general. They all did. I felt like I’d arrived on the set of a makeover show, two hours too late. They were the ‘after’ shot, I was the ‘before’. Or more like the ‘never would be’.

‘She called me and I wasn’t thinking straight and she caught me off guard and she isn’t going to say anything.’ I shook my head, careful not to shake my coffee. ‘I’m sorry. It was a massive cock-up.’

‘Yes, it was.’ Lou didn’t move. ‘I can’t believe you’ve put me in this position.’

‘It’s not like I was planning on it,’ I replied, really quite keen to find out what was going on with the odd couple over by the window. ‘And being brutally honest, I wasn’t the one who put you on the plane. You really do have to call him.’

‘She doesn’t have to do anything,’ Jenny interrupted, her hand still on James’s knee and now safely covered by one of his own. ‘We’ve told her she can stay as long as she likes.’

‘We?’ I turned back to stare at the lovebirds. If I didn’t know better … ‘What is going on? Have you hit your head or something? You do know you’re gay, yeah? And that she’s a girl?’

‘Oh, Angie.’ Jenny stood up and clasped James’s fingers through her own. ‘Of course he knows I’m a girl. How else would I have his baby?’

Right. Of course. Made perfect sense.

‘Have I actually gone mad?’ I asked everyone in the room. ‘I mean, seriously, have I lost it? Because if not, it would seem that everyone else alive has and that just seems quite unlikely.’

‘I told you I wanted to start a family.’ James looked far too relaxed for someone who had just dropped a baby bomb. ‘And when you said Jenny wanted to have a baby, it all made sense. So I called her after the party, we went for lunch yesterday and I made a proposal.’

‘You’re getting married?’ I squeaked. ‘Because that worked out so well for Tom Cruise?’

‘Not that kind of proposal,’ he tutted. ‘A co-parenting proposal. And Jenny said yes.’

‘Is Tom Cruise gay?’ Louisa asked from across the room. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Of course he isn’t,’ James said with a theatrical wink. ‘What planet have you been living on?’

‘Isn’t it perfect, Angie?’ Jenny gushed, her excitement spilling over into a little hop. ‘James is going to move into the city so he can be involved right through the pregnancy.’