Let Down Your Hair (17 page)

I stepped off the bus, and crammed the Styrofoam container from my breakfast in a bin. Student Administration was about ten minutes’ walk from the bus stop. I got there in four minutes and took the stairs three at a time to IT.

The barriers set up to make students line up were empty, and only one of the three counters was attended. The soft-bodied man in headphones behind it was transfixed by the dragon on his screen. He wore a T-shirt printed with a cartoon character and a name tag that read “Alan”.

“Um, hi,” said Alan, hastily restoring the IT home page and plucking the headphone from one ear. “Can I …” The words
help you?
died in his mouth. His eyes skated over me, furtive and shifty, as if I’d caught him doing something wrong.

“Hi,” I said. “I haven’t been able to access my email.”

Alan looked me up and down again, lips still parted, headphone dangling like a round white spider. My shoulders hunched instinctively to shield me from contempt, but his gaze came to rest on my top. Only then did I recognize the distraction on his face: Alan wasn’t sneering, he was leering.

I folded my arms over my breasts, feeling more uncomfortable than I had at the studio, where I’d known I’d be on display. “Um, don’t you need my student number?”

Alan straightened and ran a hand over his head. “Um, yeah. Sorry. What was it again?”

I recited the number, thinking of Emmeline, who’d always been beautiful. Her coy smiles, her perfect grooming, the way she smoothed her hair. The preening of someone who knows that a beautiful woman is always on display.

“Your candidature’s been suspended.”

My thoughts derailed. “
Suspended?
”

“That’s what it says.” His eyes slid down to my legs. “Have you taken leave from your degree?”

“No,” I said, tightening my arms around me. “I only started a few months ago.” As you would see on your screen, if you stopped staring at my breasts.

Say it out loud, Sage
, snarled my inner Andrea, springing back to life.
You’re not his private peep show. Humiliate him. Say it. SAY IT
.

“How about misconduct?” His eyes darted up again, and then dodged away from my thunderous face. “I had one guy who couldn’t log in because his department had suspended him for plagiarism.”

Misconduct? A new thought landed in my head like a lighted match. My department. Andrea’s department. Andrea’s office, hacked and vandalized by Ryan and me.
Had Andrea suspended me?

I ducked under the barricade, grabbed the internal phone and dialed Andrea’s office. “You’ve reached Professor Andrea Rampion, Head of Women’s Studies.” Her sharp, resentful voice buzzed through me like a drill. “I’m away on a conference until the
fifth. If your query is urgent—”

I hung up, pelted downstairs to the payphone in the lobby and rang her home number. Another answering machine. I rang Ryan, and got his voicemail yet again. My head was spinning and my breasts were aching, as if Alan’s stare had hit them like a hammer. I staggered to a squashy vinyl couch and sat.

The dizziness dwindled into a little slug of sickness, lodged where my throat met my gut. Ryan had been nagging me to get my own cell phone, but I’d been too scared of how Andrea might react. All my life, doing things and not doing things out of fear of Andrea. And now my scholarship payments would stop, my academic career was collapsing, and Ryan was gone, and I didn’t know where to look for him. Or whether he wanted to be found.

I wanted to go to his place, but the thought of him being gone and facing Shell again made me queasy. Instead, I clutched my stomach and shuffled out the gates to catch a bus back to the hotel.

Emmeline had given me a card for the front door. I swiped it through the reader and half-fell into the penthouse.

My mother came rushing over, eyes bright. “Hi babe, I’ve been looking at … my
God
, are you OK? You look awful!”

She half-carried me to the bathroom, and I hung retching over the toilet while she fetched me a glass of water. “Drink this. Did you eat breakfast?”

“I bought some from the cafe on the corner.” I took the glass and sipped it gratefully. “Maybe the eggs were off. Or the bacon.”

“It’s not just today, though, is it? You’ve been sick a few times.” She took back the glass, her face troubled. “Babe, can I ask you something? It was a big, fried breakfast, wasn’t it?”

Confusion knotted my brows. “Well, yes, but what—”

“Oh,
babe,
” she said, a pained, understanding note in her voice. “Listen, I want to you trust me, OK? You look
beautiful
. You’re naturally
very slim
. You don’t need to do this to yourself.”

I closed the toilet and sank on to the lid, completely baffled. “Do what to myself? Eat a big fried breakfast?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. When I was modeling, everyone went there at least once. All that living off coffee and salad: of course you sometimes crack and eat a cheesecake. But seriously, this isn’t the way to fix it. It wrecks your teeth, for one thing.”

Oh God, she thought I was bulimic
. “Em, I’m not making myself throw up on purpose. Really I’m not.”

She gave me a sceptical smile. “Look, babe, how about I make you an appointment with the hotel doctor? He’s on the third floor, and he really knows his stuff.”

Too weak to object, I nodded, and she made an appointment for the following morning.

Dr. Clarke was in his fifties, with gingery brows that disappeared behind his rectangular glasses when he frowned. As he led me to his office I lagged behind, eyeing him as if he were an unpredictable dog. I’d never been treated by a male doctor before.

He installed himself behind the desk. “Take a seat,” he said, opening a new patient file.

I sat in the seat closest to the door. Before Ryan, I’d been invisible or contemptible to men. Now everyone stared like I was walking in a spotlight. If I put on my old clothes and glasses again, I might be able to escape it. But now I’d had a taste of being attractive, being
acceptable
, I didn’t think I could bring myself to go back.

“So,” said Dr. Clarke, “what can I do for you today?”

I shifted uneasily under his tired, pouchy eyes, remembering Alan, and Dirk, and the men in the streets.
This man is a doctor
, I reminded myself. Not that that guaranteed anything. Andrea led a class action against a male doctor accused of harassing female patients. His favorite trick was telling them they needed a breast inspection, to give him an excuse to feel them up.

“Just a check-up,” I said. “I’ve been having bouts of vomiting and dizziness, so I thought I’d make sure nothing’s wrong.”

Dr. Clarke made a note on his file. I settled back, perversely reassured by his dourness. He seemed too jaded to ogle anyone. “So how long have you been having these bouts?”

“A few days.” I hadn’t actually vomited until the Greek restaurant, but my stomach had felt on edge before that. It hadn’t been quite right since Andrea had revealed that she knew about Ryan.

Dr. Clarke made another note. There was a drug company logo on the side of his pen. “Been eating anything suspect? Something refrozen, or left out of the fridge?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Health otherwise good?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm.” His brows knotted and sank from sight. “How do your breasts feel?”

My arms locked round my body, like armor. “My
breasts?
” I said, my voice shrill. Did he mean how my breasts felt, or how they …
felt?

“Yes,” said Dr. Clarke, as if he were referring to my earlobes. “Any swelling or soreness?”

Soreness? Was this his way of bringing up my breasts and making it sound medical? My arms tightened, and then hastily loosened, because my breasts
were
sore. And had been for a few days now. “A bit. I’ve just started wearing underwire bras, though, so it’s probably that.”

Did I just describe my
underwear
to this man? My cheeks flamed. Perhaps this was his trick. Raising the topic of breasts with young female patients, getting them to talk about their bras. And I’d fallen for it. I wasn’t falling for any more, though. Any more inappropriate questions, and I’d report him to the Medical Ombudsman.

Dr. Clarke opened a drawer in his desk. “Ms. Rampion,” he said, extracting a small box, “have you had unprotected intercourse in the last couple of months?”

I shoved back my chair and stood up. “Excuse me,” I said, blazing with righteous anger, “I’m consulting you about nausea and dizziness. My sex life is none of your business. If you—”

Dr. Clarke tossed the box onto his desk.
Matrisure
, it read.
Your reliable early stage pregnancy test
. The rest of my sentence withered. My mouth fell open and my head started hammering, as if my heart was trying to break into my skull.

He opened the box and handed me a flat white tube with a cap on one end, like a pen lid. “There’s a toilet next to the waiting room. Take off the lid, pee on the tab and bring it back.”

The hammering grew louder, and the room began to mist over. “But … but I get the nausea around the middle of the day,” I said, my voice shaky and high-pitched. “And in the evening, sometimes.”

“Morning sickness is a colloquial term. The nausea can happen at any time of day. Or all day.”

He dropped the tube and instructions into my cringing hand, and I slunk out, holding them at arm’s length, as if they might infect me. When I crept back into the office, Dr. Clarke placed the test in a plastic tray. A minute or two passed before I could bring myself to look.

The first pink line that meant the test was working was already showing in the clear plastic window on the side. And beside it, in the spot marked
Pregnant
, a second line was forming, pale but unmistakable.

“So,” said Dr. Clarke, his mouth forming a vindicated line. “When was your last period?”

My numb mouth took two or three attempts to form an answer. “I … I don’t know.”

“Then we’d better get an estimate of when you conceived. Hop up.”

He strode to the corner and pulled back a curtain to reveal a narrow stretcher bed. A no-frills version of the bed at the beauty salon, when the worst I had to fear down there was wax.

“I doubt that you’re more than eight weeks pregnant, so you may need an internal ultrasound, which I can’t do here.”

I tottered over and climbed up. “Internal?”

He snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Vaginal.”

My knees slammed together. Shivery with dread, I watched as he opened a tiny fridge, took out a tube, and switched on the screen mounted in the corner. His fingers looked like knobbly white grubs beneath the latex.

Dr. Clarke yanked back my top as if it were a curtain, and squeezed a worm of cold blue gel below my navel. Ignoring the way I cringed from his hands, he smeared the gel across my skin and picked up a plastic device that looked like a hand-held supermarket scanner. I expected him to glide it over my skin, but he gouged as if the scanner was an ice-cream scoop, so deep in my flesh that it hurt. Then I looked at the screen, and pain gave way to wonder.

The mist drained away, leaving a hyper-real sharpness, like a film had been peeled off my eyes. I’d imagined just-conceived babies as shapeless flesh jellybeans, but my child was already recognizably human, its outsize head bent in prayer on lizard-leg arms. The image was black and white, but translucent, allowing me to see through the rib cage to the tiny, pulsing dimple of its heart.

I felt a flutter inside, as though something warm had taken wing. “How pregnant am I?”

Dr. Clarke zoomed in, took some measurements, dug in the scanner a bit further, and then withdrew it. The image skidded to one side and vanished.

“About seven weeks.” His ginger brows knotted. “Let me look again. I thought I saw something.”

Something?
I held my breath, already afraid something was wrong with my child. He gouged in the scanner and the praying foetus reappeared, tiny legs wiggling like the limbs of a frog.

“Is she … he … all right?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Too early to say,” he said. “But it’s late enough to say something else. You see that bump on the left side of the screen?”

“Yes.” It was a gray lobe, smaller than the baby’s head.

“Watch.”

He inched the scanner across my stomach and the lobe became a curve, attached to a tiny back knobbled with vertebrae. Just inside the vertebrae was another pulsing dimple, slightly out of sync with the heart of its twin.

I arrived at Ryan’s house three-quarters of an hour later. When no one answered the door, I sat on the doorstep and opened my bag of pregnancy pamphlets. The initial shock had dwindled into the unnatural calm in the eye of a storm. Sometime soon the tornado of
pregnant with TWINS
was going to hit again, but while the calm lasted I might as well prepare myself.

Twenty minutes later, Shell’s ancient orange Ford rumbled around the corner and double-parked across the road. A man got out of the passenger side, not Shell’s boyfriend, Tom, but a stranger of maybe twenty, with skin-tight jeans and asymmetrical hair.

Shell wound down the window, and he stooped to take something from her, his angled hair sliding into his eyes. He wore heavy-framed glasses not dissimilar to mine, but with a self-conscious irony that made them what Emmeline called
statement geek chic glasses
.

“… but whenever, OK? Any time from tonight,” Shell was saying.

The man adjusted his hair with a long, pale hand. “Yah, sure thing.” His voice was self-conscious, too, as if he were acting a part and wasn’t sure of his lines. “I’ll call when I decide, yeah? Later.”

The orange Ford rumbled away and the man opened the gate. I shoved
How having a baby can affect your relationship
back in the bag, and struggled to my feet with a tentative smile. “Uh, hi.”

“Hi,” said the man, giving me a once-over. Then a slower twice-over. “Um, can I help you with anything? Because, like, I’m here to see the house, so …”

“I’m waiting for Ryan. You don’t know when he might be back, do you?”

“No, I don’t, sorry,” he said, not sounding terribly sorry.

I gripped my bag of brochures, containing my panic. “Is it OK if I wait inside for him? I’ve been trying to find him since Saturday, and it’s really, really urgent.”

“Um, sorry,” said the young man, pushing at his hair again, “but I can’t just let you in. It’s not my house, and like, I don’t actually
know
you, so …”

“Shell knows me,” I said quickly. “I’m Sage. Ryan’s girlfriend.”
Or at least, I was the last time I saw him
.

“Sorry.” He gave me a tight, unyielding smile. “Could you let me pass, please?”

For a brief, gritted moment, I wouldn’t budge.
No, I couldn
’
t
.
Hand over the keys, or I
’
ll bash you unconscious with this bag of pregnancy brochures.
But he’d call the police, and being charged with assault would hardly improve my situation. What I needed was Ryan. And Shell wouldn’t need to lend this annoying man her keys if she expected Ryan to be home. Maybe he was spending the week at his mother’s. Or maybe he was avoiding this house, hoping his ex with the crazed feminist grandmother would give up and go away. His hairy, frumpy, stalking ex, now pregnant with twins.
Pregnant with TWINS
.

I stepped aside, and the young man unlocked the door. The lock went
clack
behind him and I deflated like a collapsed balloon. Suddenly exhausted, I stumbled out the gate, the whisper of insecurity swelling into a roar.

The elevator doors trapped me in a glowing, mirrored womb. As the golden coin climbed the wall I sank to the floor, composing a voicemail message in my head.
Hi Ryan, it’s me. Are you getting these messages? I just saw a doctor, and he … there’s something really important I want to … we’ve got a serious … a serious …

The doors opened. I stuck one foot out to stop them closing and cradled my head against the wall. The elevator in the neighboring shaft rose and fell away, over and over like waves on a beach. After a long time, I got up and stepped out into the foyer, and my elevator descended with an electronic hum. I swiped Emmeline’s spare card through the reader, opened the penthouse door, and limped down the hall.

“Babe!” cried Emmeline, leaping up from one of the leather couches. “Guess who called?”

Fireworks of relief burst inside me. “
Ryan!
When?”

Her face fell, taking my still-queasy stomach with it. “Oh babe, I’m so sorry. It wasn’t Ryan. But it
was
someone exciting. It was Peter. From La Carina. He wants to hire you for this Friday’s Birds of Paradise shoot!”

“Great!” I said, trying to sound excited instead of shattered.

“He wants long hair, so I’ve made an appointment tomorrow with my stylist for a full head of hair extensions. It’s her afternoon off, but I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. You’re going to be a La Carina model!” She ran forward to hug me, and I whipped the bag of brochures behind my back.

“So what did the doctor say?” she added.

My whole body went cold. I had to tell her. I had to tell her. “He, uh … he asked me some questions about the nausea, and he, uh …”

“Did he run any tests?”

The handles of the plastic bag burned my hand. “Uh, yes, he ran … one.”

“And?”

“And he said that I’m … I’m …” I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t. “… that my health is fine.”