The Hungover Games

1

In which I accidentally get pregnant

It had all happened by accident. I hadn’t meant to have a baby at all. I hadn’t meant not to have a baby either, by which I mean I always thought I’d have children one day. It’s just that I always thought those children would grow up with me and their yet-to-materialise father in a lovely farmhouse, hugged by the hills, with an Aga and a dog and storybooks and trees and long invigorating walks through the fields in loving drizzle. This was not how I had grown up in Yorkshire but it wasn’t a million miles from it, either. Several hundred thousand, at a push. It was an idealised version of home, and it lived somewhere vaguely in my future as an unspecified certainty.

Exactly how I thought La Vida Farmhouse was going to appear when I was, in fact, living in a one-bedroom rented apartment in West Hollywood isn’t clear. My apartment was just beside the Sunset Strip part of Sunset Boulevard, which is a road that runs for several miles from the Pacific Ocean to the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles. The Strip was the glamorously cheesy bit, full of glitzy hotels and rooftop pools and famous people and palm trees, and it was a place that encouraged in me a relationship with reality that could at best be described as negligible. When I wasn’t there on the West Side, I was over on the scruffier East Side where most of my friends lived, and on both sides there were parties. Some of them were thrown by my friends, who were lovely people and almost entirely real, and some of them were thrown by the film industry, for people who were paid to pretend to be other people, who were then required to turn up and look like themselves in the photos, which involved a similar amount of pretending. Meanwhile, I felt a strong urge to be honest everywhere and about everything, which is probably why I drank.

I was working as a journalist, interviewing Hollywood celebrities for British newspapers and magazines back home. I had been doing a similar sort of entertainment journalism back in London for several years and now I was here on an American work visa to do it in the heart of the action, the HQ of celebrity itself. It had taken me a good year to ingratiate myself into the Hollywood machine, governed as it was by the sort of publicists who would probably hate me in real life, so it was fortunate that this wasn’t real life. I had kissed enough arse and filled enough newspaper pages with writing that was sharp enough to impress but not so sharp as to be offensive. This put me on the right invitation mailing lists, allowed me into preview screenings, and gave me one-on-one access to the preened and the perfected and the shining to try to get them to say things into my Dictaphone that would reveal them to be unravelled and rotten and broken, so that normal people could read about them in the papers and gasp. That was the job. That is still my job today.

One day, my friend Lily had asked me to accompany her across the border to a luxury wellness ranch in Mexico where she would be giving life-coaching lessons, telling lots of rich Californians that all they had to do was follow their dreams and the universe would make those dreams come true (because the universe was structurally biased towards supporting rich white people and their unspoken belief in American exceptionalism–all right, so I can’t guarantee that she said these exact words out loud). Lily was a rock in my life, which might seem unlikely, given that she based her life around New Age passions that certain others might describe as ‘floaty’, ‘wafting’ or ‘woo woo’, and given that the only rocks she was interested in were her collection of crystals. These heavy, sharp objects had begun to annoy her downstairs neighbour after she started taking them to bed with her every night, and they rolled off her sleeping body, landing on the hardwood floors with a resounding clunk. This is how you irritate the people in your apartment building in Los Angeles: either with the sound of your crystals going bonk in the night, or your chihuahua yapping incessantly because it isn’t getting as much skin-to-skin contact with you as the psychic vet recommended. Or because you’ve blocked the waste disposal unit after coming home drunk and trying to juice an In-N-Out burger.

Even crystals are not always rocklike in their loyalty: another comrade of Lily’s once buried a load of the spiky little buggers in the ground outside her apartment building because she had become convinced they were actively conspiring against her, such was the run of bad luck she’d had since the man in the Purple Moonlight shop in Venice Beach sold them to her. She later dug them up again though, after she went back to the shop to complain that he’d sold her an evil bunch, and he had explained that they weren’t taunting her but were, in fact, crying out with a message that her life simply needed to hear. When she recounted this story to me and Lily and I said wow, what an amazing way to get out of giving you a refund, she just stared. So yeah, I wasn’t always on the same page as Lily’s gang of human moonbeams, but Lil is simultaneously the most loyal, loving, warm, witty human being I’ve ever met, and our friendship worked. She doesn’t ever need a drink, and has never taken a drug because her mind is full of birds floating away already. Speaking of birds, she likes to remind me that all pigeons, all around the world, are called Reg. Apparently, there’s a pigeon organisation that has sorted it. Curiously, this has turned out to be true–cast a glance at the next pigeon face you come across and you’ll see it. All pigeons are called Reg, and there’s not a damn thing any one of us can do about it.

So on this ranch in Mexico, all the rich Californians would receive massages from local beauticians, and talk about spirituality and vibes and the universe and say Namaste at the end of all their sentences. Then they would go back to San Diego and Brentwood and Marin County and carry on refurbishing their beautiful houses with the help of Mexican labourers who weren’t allowed to use their indoor toilets but instead had to piss in plastic Portaloos because Namaste didn’t extend to welcoming the urine of migrant construction workers.

I couldn’t afford this retreat, being someone who caught the bus everywhere while living in LA, along with the construction workers. I might have worked among the glamorous but I only earned a few hundred dollars here and there, and was bad at paying bills on time and avoiding fines. I spent all my earnings on bills and fines. In fact, my greatest freelance achievement was the invention of a contemporary dance move that I employed when I needed to stare at the cash machine for long enough to type in the important numbers, but swiftly enough to turn away in a dramatic flourish the moment it flashed up the exact state of my overdraft. But Lily was allowed to bring a partner to the ranch for free, and someone had offered to drive us there in their car, so off we went.

At the ranch, I attended daily power yoga classes run by a breezy, indefatigable woman who made us all feel invincible. Whenever things hurt, she said to work with the pain, go into the pain, feel the pain. It was just as well she said this because I did indeed feel a lot of pain in her class, and on the drive back across the border to LA, after a week of such classes, I felt so much pain that we had to stop at a Mexican service station to beg the universe to give me hardcore pain-relieving drugs. By the time we got back to my apartment in LA, I was feeling so much pain that I was unable to sit down, unable to stand up, unable even to be. A day after that I was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, which was the place that Paris Hilton and co would end up after paparazzi-induced car crashes, where the Kardashians would give birth, and where Zsa Zsa Gabor would breathe her last before Kanye West arrived having a breakdown. It was, improbably, my local hospital.

It wasn’t clear to anyone, including me, quite where this agony was coming from, or if it had anything to do with the exercise at all. It seemed to be in my back, it seemed to be in my belly, it seemed to be in my pee, nothing was clear. I spent a whole day lying on a gurney and being wheeled around to different tests in different parts of the hospital, and having a cash machine wheeled right up to my face by a credit-cardiologist who said that even though I had given them my health insurance details and paid a deposit on arrival, would I like to pay a little something more, just to top it up, before they billed me?

When they said they were sliding me into the big tube for the MRI scan, I felt waves of claustrophobia wash over me. This was worse than the potholing trip we got sent on at school. A man in a lab coat asked me what sort of music I liked, which was even more confusing, until he handed me some big headphones and explained that the music would be piped into my ears during the scan to help me relax. Phew. So they rolled me into that big white tube, and I lay as still as they had strictly instructed me to, and then a voice boomed into my ears. ‘Do you want to be STRONG?’

It was the big doomy voice of an American movie announcer. Odd. This was not my music. I mean, yes, I wanted to be strong, hence my being in a hospital. ‘Do you want to be ARMY STRONG?’ it continued, which, I’ll admit, after some reflection, didn’t appeal as much. Then, an entire recruitment commercial for the US military followed, and suddenly I could see why the American campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq had been going so badly for so long. They’d been recruiting their soldiers from hospital beds in Beverly Hills! The only wars we’d win would be against the paparazzi, and even then we’d probably lose. Though, to be fair, my twelve-hour day of hospital testing had also included someone shoving a big cold wand up my vagina and rolling it around like Miss Trunchbull with a rounders bat, so I was feeling quite like starting a battle myself.

Finally, as the evening drew in and after my pain had been toured all around the hospital like a bearded lady in a freak show, they told me that there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the MRI scan had revealed the main problem: I had something like a slipped disc; a vertebra that had come loose from my spinal column and wedged itself forwards into my abdomen while I was busy feeling the pain in an exercise class. This sounded like the bad news, but with their Beverly Hills smiles they reassured me it was definitely the good news, as I would not need surgery and it would resolve itself naturally within a week or two if I was sensible and simply became addicted to industrial-strength painkillers instead. Something like that.

The bad news, however, was that while they were poking around up where reality had never been a friend of mine, with Miss Trunchbull’s truncheon, they had discovered some trouble in my ovaries, some trouble with some troubling implications. Oh, I know about that, I said, I was already diagnosed as having polycystic ovary syndrome in my twenties, it’s not that bad, I’ve been told it’s probably fine. Well, it isn’t fine now, they said, it’s much worse, and coupled with your hormone levels and your age and—hang on a minute, I thought, your age? I was only just into my thirties–all right, I was thirty-four–but nobody had ever said your age to me in that tone of voice, suggesting that I had used a lot of my age up already, rather than not had enough of it yet. Regardless, the doctor continued on her merry way, saying that it could still be solved, that I had the best kind of infertility, because I could get fertility treatment for PCOS and still carry a child in my own womb. It was just that I would not be able to conceive naturally.

There are times in your life when a whole lot of words collide with each other, serving not just to dredge up your past, but to dredge up your future too. I was more sensitive about my future than I was about my past; I stored more of myself there. In my life, it was as if I was the captain of a magnificent ship but was somehow, always, at this moment, just this one perpetual moment, in a dinghy buffeted about in the ship’s wake, always about to catch up with myself. Up ahead on the magnificent ship, I was organised and sober and slim and shiny-haired, all of which was always coming soon, like a trailer in the multiplex that ran in my head twenty-four hours a day. Whatever deadline I was currently missing was always the last deadline I was ever going to miss in my whole life ever, because tomorrow was going to be the perfect day, the most perfect day; the first perfect day of the rest of my perfect life. This infertility news was the first thing to finally break through to me that the ship had sailed off without me this time. For good. That I couldn’t keep promising to catch up for ever. Sometimes you miss it and it’s actually, truly gone. I went home, shut the door of my apartment and cried for a week.

Obviously, the slipped disc must have contributed to the weeping but I don’t remember crying about that; I remember crying because it had finally dawned on me that I had been living in a lovely big pink bubble, a dream world, and that it had burst. I had always got away with leaving things till later, not finishing them, running away and then finding a way to get people to help me pick up the pieces. At school I had never done my homework but never truly suffered any consequences; at university I had crashed in late to every class in my multicoloured rainbow jumper and zebra-skin clogs, starting three separate degrees in three separate years; finishing one just by the skin of my teeth–but it was all right in the end. Now, a lifetime of people making allowances for me was over. What an idiot I had been, thinking that I could go back and make a family later, that I could work out how to have a relationship with a nice man later, just because I thought I was supposed to mess everything up a few times first. Love and sex sat at the two ends of my horizon like feuding siblings who refused to meet. I was nowhere near spawning three children in a farmhouse with a nice man because I didn’t know any nice men. What I knew were exciting men, egotistical men, men who ran fast and whom you could sometimes run alongside, as long as you didn’t let out a single whisper of genuine need. I was attracted to men who made me think that love was a competition I could win. And then I’d win the competition and turn around and wonder where the love had gone. Men who were humming along to the bassline all the time that I thought we were singing along to the words.

So I sat there with my big bag of industrial painkillers and cried for a week. Until my friend Mal invited me to meet him near his office for lunch, which was a relief, as it required me to wash and dress and look like someone who hadn’t been raised round the back of some bins by wolves. Plus, the doctors were right: by the end of the week my spine was fine again. It was just my soul that had changed for ever.

Mal was older than me and widely loved, his career as every creative person in LA’s favourite lawyer barely having been dented by the years where he was also his heroin dealer’s favourite customer. Now he was just a tennis-playing drunk, so that was all right. We sat in the cafe outside his office and I told him about this most awful diagnosis that I had had, and Mal, a man so laid-back and unflappable that it never made any sense to me that he had needed to take heroin in the first place, listened. At the end of it, when I had finished explaining that this awful news had made me reconsider my whole life and what a fuck-up I had been and how I’d never have the family I wanted, how I had been on this spiritual quest to reconsider my relationship with the world, with my own personal gravity, my gods, my human limitations, how this felt like a great reckoning with me, a great leveller, a moment to take a deep breath and realise what the universe was trying to tell me, that I didn’t want fertility treatment, I didn’t want chemicals pumped into my body, I wanted a real relationship, a family, and that door had slammed shut! Oh, lords above of everything holy, hear my prayer!

Mal sat and listened. And when my monologue ended, he smiled at my lost little face and said, ‘Sophie.’ And I said ‘Mal’, in that way that you do when you just like to check in with each other’s names, make sure you’re still there.

‘All that the doctors have said to you,’ he continued, holding his fork up, grinning slightly, ‘is that you can only get pregnant on purpose, not by accident. That’s it. That is literally it. Which is, as you would say, brilliant.’

An aeroplane flew above our heads towards the airport. I stared and I stared at the words coming out of Mal’s face. It was like witnessing God take human form.

‘So I think you should celebrate this amazing news,’ he continued, ‘by going out and fucking like it’s the 1970s.’

And that is the story of how I didn’t use a condom the next time I had sex, which would turn out to be, as it happened, the very next day (and not, I should add, with Mal, but with someone else entirely), which turned into the story of how I got pregnant and had a baby and became somebody’s mother for the rest of our lives, the end. Except it’s not the end, is it? Not by a long shot. It never is.