Читать книгу 21 Miles - Jessica Hepburn - Страница 13

One of the things that is not on my bucket list is seeing my legs in a tabloid newspaper. But I woke up this morning and there they were.

I’d agreed to do the article as publicity for my book. They’d been very specific that I had to wear a dress to the photoshoot. No dark colours. No patterns. Three different people had rung over the course of twenty-four hours to remind me. I’d picked out a red dress I’d bought in an M&S sale a few years ago, one of those great buys that cost twenty quid but in a good light (I like to think) looks like it could be Chanel. When I got to the location of the shoot the photographer looked me up and down.

‘Nice,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid you’re going to have to take those off.’

He pointed at my black tights.

‘What?’ I said, horrified.

‘The paper only does bare legs.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Didn’t they tell you?’

‘No. They told me to wear a dress. Three times. They didn’t mention anything about tights. Once.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No can do, I’m afraid.’

‘But you don’t understand, my legs never come out,’ I said. ‘They haven’t seen sunlight in over a decade.’

‘It will be fine,’ he said, trying to placate me. ‘We’ll airbrush them if they look a bit blotchy.’

To say I was mortified would be an understatement. The whole dress business was sexist enough. The only time something similar had happened to me was when I was doing a temping job in a city law firm during my university summer holidays. At the end of the first day my boss had come up to me and said that I could come back tomorrow as long as I didn’t mind wearing a skirt. If she’d been a man I might have thought it was sexual harassment, but it was just company policy. Even twenty-five years ago it seemed archaic. But this is the new millennium – is there really a national newspaper that will only photograph women in dresses (no black tights)?

I suppose, in a way, I should be pleased. After all, a dress says ‘woman’ in the same way that infertility says ‘failed woman’. In tabloid terms the most ‘womanly’ woman is always a mother. They must still think there’s hope. Otherwise, surely, they would have put me in a black trouser suit. On the double-page spread to the left of my head are the words: ‘Addicted to IVF’. I suppose going through multiple rounds of treatment and having nothing to show for it but a cleaned-out bank account does seem like a pretty extreme habit. I look at the picture, all legs and smoky eyes, and can’t quite believe it’s me. For years I’d kept my struggle to have a baby a secret and now, suddenly, I’ve become the poster girl for infertility. It’s not even as if it’s going to be tomorrow’s chip paper. The article is on the internet, indelible forever.

A few days ago I made a pact with myself that when the article came out I wouldn’t look at the online comments. Nobody should go into that lion’s den. But of course I immediately do. I scroll down and the first comment reads: ‘I want a baby, kinda sums her up.’ I kinda have to agree. I do want a baby. One that I have made with the man that I love and who, with any luck, will inherit the best bits of both of us. I want to introduce them to the world: read them The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. I want to organise birthday parties with pass the parcel and musical bumps. I want to open stockings at Christmas and plan egg hunts at Easter. I want a reason to go to the zoo and make fairy cakes for tea. And on the subject of food, I want to encourage my children to love shellfish and sprouts from a very young age.

Throughout the day I watch in fascinated horror as more and more comments appear and people anonymously press the arrows beside them to indicate whether they agree or disagree. For the first time in my life I have a tiny taste of what it must be like to be a celebrity, shaped by the opinions of people who have never even met you. But overall I come out of the den fairly unscathed; sympathy for my story seems to be strong. The lions are licking my wounds, not eating me.

TV and radio interviews follow. A girl could get used to being picked up in a chauffeur-driven car. But, all things being equal, I’d much rather be singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.

It’s an extraordinary and surreal few weeks. But the most overwhelming thing of all is the messages of advice and support I start to receive from all over the world, from total strangers. They tell me about miracle doctors and recommend clinics in Spain, Greece, India and the Caribbean. They suggest I try alternative treatments I’ve never heard of, such as Qigong, tapping and the Peruvian maca root. In one email someone writes to me about a powerful man of God from Uganda called Brother Ronnie Makabai, who prays for infertile couples and women who are past childbearing age and then they miraculously give birth (the email adds in parenthesis, ‘providing their husbands are still alive’). They share heart-lifting stories involving egg donation and adoption. And about women who have got pregnant in their mid-forties with their own eggs – one woman tells me she is forty-five and has three children under the age of five, all of whom were conceived naturally, and none of them twins. Several people even offer to be a surrogate for me. Above all everyone urges me not to give up hope – that some way, somehow, I can and must become a mother.

The concern and encouragement from so many people who have never even met me but have taken the time and trouble to write is humbling. But at the same time, as more and more messages pour in, I feel myself becoming increasingly anxious. I’d thought I’d already done everything I could to become a mother. I’ve been to nearly a dozen clinics and had every test known to woman and doctor in a bid to work out what’s wrong. Besides multiple rounds of IVF, I’ve tried numerous complementary therapies including acupuncture and Chinese herbs. I’ve even been on an intense therapeutic process to release my ‘inner child’ in the hope that it would help me to conceive. Yet now I’m wondering if I’ve tried hard enough. Maybe I haven’t tried everything. The world still believes I can be a mother, even if I’m not sure I can myself. And nobody, not a single person, writes to me and says: ‘You’re forty-three, go and do something big and have a fulfilling life without children instead.’

–––––

One evening, in the aftermath of the article, I’m in the kitchen making myself a cup of tea. As I wait for the kettle to do its thing I think back over the last few bewildering weeks. I feel like I’m a rope in a tug of war: pulling me from one end is motherhood, the thing I’ve always wanted but had almost given up believing I could have, and on the other end an alternative future doing something big and finding meaning in motherlessness. I feel taut with fear at giving either one of them the advantage.

I open the cupboard to get out a teabag and spot a large bar of Green & Black’s white chocolate that I bought the other day when I was feeling chocolatey, but had then foregone when I got home for a large packet of salt and vinegar Kettle Chips instead. I know the chocolate is unlikely to stand any chance of survival if I open it, but I did weigh myself yesterday and I’d lost two pounds last week so I decide to take the risk. I head into the sitting room with my cup of tea and the chocolate, sit down on the sofa and open my laptop. A new message pops into my inbox:

Hello Jessica

My wife read your article and wanted to know whether she could ask you where you got the red dress that you were wearing. She said it looked really amazing and wondered if she could be cheeky and ask. She doesn’t have an email account so she asked if I’d mail you.

Hope all goes well for you.

Richard

See what I mean – all sorts of nice messages – and at least it’s not another avenue that I need to explore. I don’t need any more avenues; I need a road closure. I stare at the screen, vaguely wondering what sort of woman would not have an email account and ask her husband to write to a stranger about their dress. Still, I don’t want to be rude, so I take a sip of tea and a square of chocolate and hit reply. It’s only then that I notice that my correspondent calls himself Robinson Crusoe and his email address is prefixed ‘desertislanddick’. Thankfully, he didn’t mention my legs.