We’ve been together for nearly three years. Every time I go it’s the same. James is a romantic. But he wouldn’t be in love with me if I were the sort of person who didn’t go away regularly. And I wouldn’t love him if I stayed. That’s how this works: I get time to myself, and James gets a break from my dark moods before they grow unbearable.
“I’ll make it up to you later,” he says, taking his cup and gently nudging mine.
“A normal night in will be fine. I like our normal nights.”
Just then, a plate smashes beyond the swinging doors, in the kitchen. A crackle of jealousy runs through me as I imagine the waiter sweeping up broken crockery.
James studies me. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
It feels like my bones are being crushed. I nod.
“You get like this every time now,” James says, “right before you leave. I’m worried that your job is putting too much strain on you. I mean, you went to Go Ape the other day. You’re spiralling.” He smiles with his mouth but not his eyes.
James is wrong. My work isn’t stressful—it’s the opposite. I love it. I live for it. The longer I go without it, the more frustrated I get. After an idle week or two, a voice will pipe up. What are you doing with your life, Solvig? Is this it? Do you merely exist to drink Americanos and eat avocados and talk about the weather? Once the voice grows deafening, that’s when the physical pain starts. Sore throats. Migraines. Indigestion. The only cure is to get back to the grindstone.
Unfortunately, legally, I have to take at least a month off between jobs. And even if I could go back sooner, chances are there’d be no work for me. I can go half a year between assignments. Poor weather conditions, seasonal demands, plans changing at the last minute . . . if I didn’t love what I do so much, it’d be my worst nightmare.
Tomorrow I’m flying to Aberdeen. I’ll enter a pressurised chamber on board a ship on the North Sea. This will be my home for a month. Every day, I’ll climb out of a hatch in the chamber into a diving bell and plunge to a depth of around 130 metres. The proper name for my job is saturation diving. Saturation diving is my medicine. Hopefully, once I get back to it, I’ll stop obsessing over the Mars Project.
“I wonder if it’ll rain today,” I say.
The waiter heads out of the kitchen holding our breakfasts: full Cornish for James, waffles with winter berries for me.
James starts to eat. As I glance at his throat, which is one of the only places—save his face—that isn’t tattooed, I see a pulse beneath his skin. I feel the need to touch my own neck, first on one side, then the other. I don’t think I have OCD. That sounds too definite and interesting for what I’ve got. I’ve got a gnawing need for bodily symmetry. I try to ensure both eyelids shut with equal pressure. If I press one knee, I prod the other. When I look at James’s tattoo sleeves, I wish I could pull the peonies on the right arm down a few centimetres, to make them even with the skulls on the left. However, the fact that James is an amputee and is missing his lower left leg has never bothered me.
“Aren’t you hungry?” James asks. His mouth is full of hog’s pudding: pork, oatmeal, pearl barley.
I’d been planning to do a twenty-mile run after this. But when James ordered the full Cornish, I knew I’d offend him if I didn’t order something extravagant. I pick up my knife and fork.
James reaches across the table for my hand. I let him take it, but my fist remains clenched, still holding my cutlery.
“Solvig,” he says. “I wanted today to be special for a reason.” He’s staring at the salt shaker as insistently as if it were my eyes. “I don’t know if it’s the right time to bring this up. You know what I’m like. I find it hard to keep things in.”
He’s so porous, everything cascades out of him.
“Seriously, if you’re not up for it, then say,” he continues. “I was thinking, though, that since we’re so settled now—we’ve got the house and the dog and our careers—that it might be nice, or even . . . amazing . . . to start, well . . .”
My chest tightens.
James squeezes my hand. “Start trying for a baby.”
I focus on the condensation running down the window.
James keeps talking. He talks about how he wants to do some fence repairs in the front garden, about how he’d love to re-create a nursery he’s seen on Pinterest, about how pleased he is that his parents live nearby, and about how fantastic his sourdough is going to taste.
I nod in between mouthfuls of waffle. I nod and eat, nod and eat. I know how lucky I am. I’m so lucky to be here, in my idyllic hometown, with my kind and handsome boyfriend. Everything is perfect between us. We have all the necessary prerequisites to create human life. Why wouldn’t I want to start trying for a family? Why wouldn’t I want that?
•
After James heads to work, I’m desperate to run and run, as far as I can possibly go. Running on a full stomach is a bad idea, so I’m compromising and only doing ten miles.
This baby thing has thrown me into disarray. Certainly, I’ve acknowledged that one day, I might want to grow a child inside my body. But even though I’m the grand old age of thirty-six, I’ve never stopped to think that “one day” might be today. And if it’s not today, then how much time have I got left?
As I run along the seafront, I weigh up the pros and cons. Pros: babies make you feel fulfilled. Cons: babies stop you from feeling fulfilled.
What if there are other things I want to do with my life, big things, things I couldn’t possibly do with children?
I look up at Pendennis Point. Then I slow down, catching my breath. My stomach is in knots. I hurry down some stone steps leading off the pavement. They take me onto the beach. I hurry to the water, then hunch over, bent double, emptying my guts into the sea. A mass of burgundy-coloured winter berries floats, half-digested, on the surface. Flotsam.
I wipe my mouth and lie back on the sand, squinting. The sky is blank. I extend my arms and reach out for it.
4
A hot shower makes everything better. That’s what my dad always says. But as I emerge from the bathroom, wrapped in a fluffy towel, it’s not my dad I’m thinking of—it’s my mum.
She died two months before my third birthday. I don’t remember her. I don’t know if I called her Mum or Mummy or Elaine. I don’t know what her voice sounded like, or what she liked to eat for breakfast. I do know that it was my mum who chose a Scandinavian name for me. She was into hygge long before it was fashionable; said my name reminded her of a bowl of split pea soup. That’s one of the only things she wrote in my baby book. My mum was a genius and didn’t have time for filling in books for babies.
I head into the spare room, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the floorboards. The shelves in here are crammed mostly with James’s stuff: tattoo guns, inks, needles, machine tips. We once had a house party where James gave free tattoos to his friends all night. There are people living all over Cornwall who’ve been forever changed by that party. Like Kensa, who works at the bike shop and has a top hat on his middle finger. Or Polly, who teaches at the university and sports “wanderlust” on her clavicle. I didn’t get a tattoo that night, of course. The permanence frightens me.