The Difference Between Wanting and Having

Of course, we don't always know what we want. We have been trained, since birth, for disappointment. We start off as babies, when we cry we get fed or changed or cuddled. We are not denied much. But as we grow older discipline is enforced. We are taught that we cannot have everything. When we're crawling or toddling our parents, for some godforsaken reason, think it is their duty to refuse us. We become frustrated. Invariably this leads to punishment.

Sometimes our punishment is our own distress, at other times mother removes herself, occasionally we are humiliated, in the worse possible scenario we are abused. From such situations we cannot escape, a small child never can. We do not have the words to describe it to ourselves. The people we depend on compromise our safety. Now, we can either think 'I am being unjustly punished by a bad parent', or we can create a fantasy 'I am being justly punished by a good parent'. Essentially, we sacrifice our self worth in order to create the illusion of security.

Matt finished his degree, and got a first. We decided to move to Brighton. Having spent five years living in a shit hole in Birmingham/the Black Country we needed to be somewhere clean and safe. Plus, this is where his family live. Mine were useless. Worse than useless.

Choosing a house was fun. It was very big shopping. I did not know Brighton at all. Everything was cream, or duck-egg blue, or a gentle shade of lemon. Maybe it was the sea and the beach, all those old Regency buildings, the fact that everything moved in sonambulistic leisure. I felt the place would suit me. A new start.

It was a bit of a disaster. We thought we could do the house up, but it was beyond us. Every time we peeled back a bit of something, we found more problems. Life is like that. Papering over the cracks was an all too apparent problem in our home.

A friend, Bags, moved with us. He was terribly depressed. I could not leave him on his own and start afresh. It seemed cruel. 'Goodbye, thanks for the memories, deal with your own neuroses'. You do not do that to a friend.

That first winter we had no heating. Despite the fact there was an open fire in one of the bedrooms, we did not light it. I do not know why. We hurried to install another fire in the lounge. We did not have the requisite skills. We plastered it in using our bare hands. I was surprised when my skin blistered. Something to do with lime I believe.

The dog could not settle. He was accustomed to running around in a pack on a council estate. He hated wearing his lead. He sat down on the pavement and I tried to drag him down the street. At home he hid under the table. It is true what they say, you know, you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Eventually he moved out to live with someone else. She loved him a lot.

I found a job pretty much straight away. I had qualifications and experience. Matt did shift work at a residential home for people with mental health difficulties, and studied for his MA. We barely saw each other. He took care of the kids while I was at work, and I took care of the kids while he was at work.

Rosa started school. She was only four. She looked ridiculous in her uniform. Why does anyone want to put children in grey? Like the dog, she did not settle. I noticed that she began to wring her hands and bite her nails. I went to see the teacher. She told me Rosa was disruptive. “How do you mean?” I said.
“Well, for example, when I told her to sit on the carpet today she asked why,” I waited for the teacher to carry on, but she did not. We pulled Rosa out of state education and sent her to a Steiner school. She was much happier there.

Jordan continued to be in and out of hospital. We had been looking forward to our first Christmas in Brighton, surrounded by family. We went to the children's service. I love carols. “In the bleak mid winter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” Halfway through Jordan keeled over. I ran from the church, carrying him in my arms, cursing God to hell. It was Christmas eve and we were in intensive care. Instead of waking up on Christmas morning, and seeing the children's eyes bulge because of the pile of presents under the tree, I came to, after half an hour's sleep, propped up in a blue, plastic chair.

If God was not dead already, I would kill him myself.

I liked Brighton though. It had something I never realised I missed. An horizon. Growing up in Birmingham was concretey. Reality was grey-brown. The buildings blocked out the sun, no matter which direction you looked in. And they went on ad infinitum, except where there were roads and cars. I went down to the beach. I stared out to sea. There was space, forever and ever space. Matt said that there was an ancient Greek democrat, or philosopher, or something, and he had a stutter. He used to practice his speeches by shouting at the ocean. I did that.

One night I went to meet Matt from work. We only had one bicycle between us. I rode there, all the way along the seafront, and he gave me a backy home. He went too fast. Sometimes I ended up holding on to his jumper so tight that I caught his flesh. We stopped off at a pub, in the arches, under the promenade. It was cold, but I could never get enough of the beach or the sea. He found that funny.

Thing is, if you can look past the buildings, to somewhere else, an empty place, you can find a piece of your head that feels like that, or maybe it makes that feeling. My favourite words in the whole world are einsturzende neubaten. I think they mean new buildings falling down. It does not matter. It is how they feel.

The doctor said she thought I might have cysts on my ovaries, and sent me for a scan. I lay on the narrow bed, green paper towel rumpling under my bottom and shoulder blades. The radiographer lubricated my belly and moved the mouse backwards and forwards. He stopped. I thought it must be something really a bad, like a tumour. He left the room. He came back five minutes later. “Are you married?”
“Oh god, is it really bad news? Does my husband need to be here with me?”
“It could be good news.”
'How can having a tumour be good news', I wondered.
“You're seven weeks pregnant.”

I watched the grainy blob appear on the screen. He pointed out where the head was. I stared in utter disbelief. “How the hell did that happen,” I blurted out. He laughed.

I walked back home along the beach, stopping off at an Italian ice-cream cafe. Why is pistachio ice cream always green? Matt had been working night shifts and was in bed. I woke him up. “We're having a baby.” He kissed me and fell straight back to sleep. I went downstairs and told Bags. He seemed to think it was great news. Two hours later Matt staggered into the lounge.
“I had the strangest dream,” he said, “It felt so real. Weird.” Bags was pissing himself. Matt's eyes flicked from side to side. I could almost see his brain working. “Are you pregnant,” he said guardedly. I was surprised how small my voice sounded when I said yes.

The next month I started bleeding. I was at work. I went to the toilet. There was blood everywhere. In a blind panic I got someone to drive me to accident and emergency. The doctors seemed quite matter of fact. “Spontaneous miscarriage, quite common.”
“Have I lost the baby?”
“Maybe, maybe not, time will tell.”
I lay very still. I thought if I did not move then it might be able to reattach itself somehow. Matt was at college. I was on my own. I worried because I had not known whether I was happy or not. Maybe I had accidentally wished the baby away I desperately searched around in my head for a name. I wanted to say goodbye. I needed to identify it as a person. You cannot be a person without a name. I called her Aphrodite.

Matt arrived. Crying happened to me. He insisted on seeing the doctor. It was 6.00pm on a Friday, I thought maybe the doctors had all gone to the pub. There did not seem to be many of them on the ward. One rolled along and said I could have a scan on Monday and that would confirm things. If the baby was dead then there was a procedure. I did not want to wait over the weekend. I did not want to carry half a dead baby around inside me. I explained this calmly. The doctor was annoyed. Although a radiographer was on duty, he was busy somewhere else. I did not care. He could be busy with me.

We held hands as the mouse ran over my belly. They found a heartbeat, but said the foetus had been compromised. I asked what I could do. “Nothing,” was the blank answer. Matt took me home and put me to bed. We had sex. I thought she might as well come out the same way as she went in.

The bleeding stopped. She must have decided to stay. I spent the next eight months trying to ignore what had happened.

The other children were fine. Matt continued with his MA “An Introduction to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics”. I had no idea what he was on about. He disappeared under a mountain of books. My job changed. I went from wills, trusts and probate to personal injury. I preferred it working in a secretarial pool. The other girls made life interesting.

Bernice was approximately 60 and had the longest fingernails I have ever seen. She was involved in this stale relationship with a married man. She always wore brown. Her hair had an inordinate amount of volume. Pauline was blonde. Married to a scaffolder and with four boys at home, she was a bit rough and ready. I was never terribly sure what she was ready for. Jeanette was a timid woman, mousy hair, mousy movements. Her body shook all the time with nervous energy. She was very thin. Her husband was one a gangster, a proper one, with a sawn off shotgun. Our main boss was a man called Trevor. He could be a bit of a moody bastard, but mostly he was fair and functional.

We used to go to the pub at lunchtime. I could never remember the name of it, and so it became known as “The Golden Shower”, instead of “The Golden Lion”. I was unaware what a golden shower was. Dirty things slip into your head without you noticing.

I felt safe, but bored. Tiredness overtook me most nights. The children swirled around me, along with the housework and general terms of life. I did not have any real purpose. I cleaned. I cooked. I screwed. Occasionally we went out. Television was my real refuge. I lived my life vicariously through soap opera characters. I remembered staying with my sister, in her first house when she left home, I must have been about 10. We used to cuddle up in her bed, on a Friday night, in our socks with hot water bottles. She liked my little body. I kept her warm. We squinted at her small, black and white television. American people moved about on the screen. “Soap” was something new then. Canned laughter rattled out of the mono speaker. We both thought it was funny. I do not think I knew why. I just liked to be next to her when she laughed. Something about her then went into me and made me happy.

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