Not What They Were Expecting

4

‘Are you keeping it?’ was the first thing Margaret had said.

‘Of course! I mean, not that there’d be anything wrong with taking charge of your reproductive, um, destiny, but yes, we’re keeping it,’ said Rebecca.

‘No, Mum, we came all this way just to share with you the joy of a woman’s right to choose,’ James grumbled to himself, drawing a glare from Rebecca.

‘You know the assumption of joy is one of the main tools of guilt and shame rolled out by the religious fanatics to foist unwanted pregnancies on women,’ said Margaret.

‘And we all know how inconvenient they are,’ muttered James.

‘But if you’re embracing the opportunity that’s wonderful news,’ Margaret said, smiling broadly at the couple, before swooping in for hugs. Before she knew it, Rebecca was engulfed in a mass of grey-flecked curly hair that smelled sweetly of tangerines.

‘It’s one of the most amazing experiences you can go through as a woman,’ Margaret said, surprising Rebecca again by stroking her cheek. ‘Ben, give your son and his partner a kiss. You’re standing there like a dummy – just like your father did when he first saw me seven months pregnant.’

‘Of course… Congratulations,’ said Ben shuffling forward happily from his spot looking out the front window. ‘Fantastic! Surprising. Inconceivable, almost, I suppose.’

A kiss on the lips for the couple, and he stood there nodding and smiling, trying to think of something more to add. ‘Drinks! I should get everyone drinks. Wine OK for everyone? It’s not a bad one, for an Ecuadorean.’

‘Just a water for me please,’ smiled Rebecca.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Ben, patting Rebecca on the arm as he headed for the kitchen. James looked at her with a raised eyebrow and shake of the head as his dad went out.

‘So it will be a natural birth? At your home?’ Margaret asked.

‘Well we haven’t thought that far ahe—’

‘Yes Mother, of course we’re going to be doing things naturally,’ interrupted James. ‘We’re not the Beckhams.’

‘The who?’

James muttered something to himself under his breath that even Rebecca standing next to him couldn’t quite pick up.

‘An association footballer of some renown and his wife, a former singer of popular youth dance tunes, your honour. Widely reputed to be too posh to push,’ he told his mother.

‘I know who the Beckhams are, James, I couldn’t catch it because my hearing’s down because I was next to a police loud hailer for three hours when we were kettled last week. The boys at the youth project talk about him all the time,’ Margaret said. ‘The body art seems to be the most interesting thing about him. His wife seems to be a principal cause of eating disorders for a generation so I don’t think she’d have the strength to survive a natural delivery. Now let’s go and find Ben in the kitchen. The Mongolian stew should be about ready, we saw it being prepared in this fascinating documentary on the collapse of Chinese-Soviet ideology, you really should see it…’

Stepping out into the garden after lunch, James saw his dad, loitering between a broken toilet cistern and a rusted, wheel-less bicycle and smoking a cigarette. When James had been growing up his parents had both smoked like French philosophy students. Margaret had always been passionate in her defence of smokers’ rights and against their stigmatisation, which she attributed to drugs companies and governments collaborating to create a culture of fear which they used to bolster their power and make money. Then about ten years ago she quit after a health scare, and the evidence on passive smoking suddenly became quite compelling. Any doubts became cheap diversionary tactics of Big Tobacco, and James’s dad now had to smoke in the garden. Fortunately the carcinogens in smoke were only conclusively proven to be present in tobacco fumes, and so Margaret didn’t have to join Ben outside when they were connecting to global folk traditions with a dope digestif after their dinner.