The Hungover Games

by Sophie Heawood

I’ll just say it. I’ll just ask. ‘Okay, I do have a question,’ I said. She beamed, brightly. Expectantly. ‘Yes. So, is it …’ I continued, ‘… is it safe to use a vibrator?’ She spluttered. The actual medical doctor literally, honestly, spluttered, and if I never knew exactly what spluttering was before, I knew now. And her spluttering set off my automatic response to fill awkward pockets of air with the sound of my own voice, so I heard myself saying, ‘Because what it is is, the thing is that the father, the baby’s father, he’s not in town at the moment, in fact, he’s not in the country. In fact, he’s not even on this continent.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well that does make it difficult,’ she nodded, gathering herself. ‘I mean, I think what my clients do,’ she said, slotting her voice back into its authoritative doctor tone, ‘is, when they’re pregnant, is, they just use their vibrator on the front part.’ Suddenly, there was nothing to worry about any more. I mean, I was probably going to have to give up my job as an entertainment journalist, given that it involved going on tour with bands and attending evening film previews and interviewing actors and directors who constantly changed our agreed times. The baby was going to mess up all of that, and I had no idea how I’d keep my work visa or be able to stay in America, let alone look after a newborn. But now that I knew you could work as a qualified obstetrician-gynaecologist, charging hundreds of dollars to share twenty minutes of y...

Even when she sang and danced her way around the men, her head barely seemed to move, her eyes barely registering the interruption to her distant gaze. She was alluring. She was a cat. She was the cream. She was the stillness that they had to move towards.

Years later, the lanky footballer Peter Crouch, when asked what he would have been if not a footballer, memorably replied, ‘A virgin.’ I interviewed his wife Abby Clancy some time after and mentioned that line. ‘He still is,’ she replied crisply, ‘our daughter’s adopted.’

The loneliness of the long-distance runner has nothing on the loneliness of the single person in an antenatal class.

In any family where one child is the straight one and another child is the rebel, it is always the straight, well-behaved one who gets away furthest. They may not get away first, but they get away furthest, whereas the rebels always come home to roost. Rebels borrow money. Rebels borrow help. Rebels borrow love. The quietly organised person, meanwhile, with their boring spreadsheets and boring accountability, buys a flat and gets on with their life; childhood completed. It’s the prodigal one, who has fled the coop, who always returns. Asking if they can have a bit more of their childhood, because they didn’t finish in time.

I’m not raising her to think she’s the one in a million that can make a difference – that way madness lies. All this propaganda going out to kids today that they matter! I want her to know that she doesn’t matter at all and that none of this is real. I want her to revel in the freedom of being born an unplanned human being. Nobody painted a nursery for her, nobody set aside a college fund or organised the person they wanted her to become. All this stuff about working hard so you can be the best and stand out from the rest – I think it might be capitalism’s cleverest trick of all. Teaching you to think that this is how you count.