Page 4 of I Know How This Ends
The nurse frowns. “And this must be—”
“The third member of our exotic throuple,” Jules says chirpily, from where she’s holding Eve’s hand. “We don’t like her as
much, but every couple needs a third, slightly taken-for-granted partner who can do the domestic chores and organize holidays.”
I laugh and an extremely dozy Eve looks alarmed.
“That’s not true, but if we were a throuple, we’d be lucky to have Maggie. We love you, Mags. You’re the winds beneath our toes. I really need to pee. I think my bladder is going to
pop like a pigeon.”
Jules squeezes her hand. “Spaced-out numpty.”
“We’re all just friends,” I explain as I take my place on the other side of Eve and grab her hand too. This particular procedure
isn’t supposed to hurt, but Eve is generally terrified of anything medical, which makes this an even more impressive journey
to go on. “Since primary school. No sex going on here.”
“You can say that again,” Eve giggles. “That’s why I’m using a donor.”
We explained all this the first time, obviously—the escalating endometriosis, the ticking biological clock that is deafening
Eve and so on—but after five failed procedures, Eve consulted her tarot cards or whatever and decided it was “bad luck” to
return to the same clinic, so we switched it up to encourage her, even though that’s not really how any of this works.
“Great,” the embryologist says with a slightly strained air of practiced patience. “We don’t normally allow this many people
in the room, but we’ll make an exception this once.”
“Once is all we’ll need,” Jules states staunchly. “Just one more.”
Eve nods emphatically, legs akimbo.
These two women are the reason I’m not still curled up in a ball on an Exeter floor, screaming incoherently into some tiles.
They were the little girls who took me under their sparkly, elasticated wings when I emigrated from Australia to England as
a child, then became the teenagers who drank Archers with me for the first time, puked in a garden bush with me for the first
time and avoided peaches together for the first time (ongoing). We have grown together like three sunflowers in one pot, each
going on our own separate journey—independently reaching for the sun—yet permanently joined together, roots entwined.
There is nothing I would not do for these women.
Other than get to the most important date in Eve’s calendar on time, obviously.
I squeeze her small, pale hand as the sonographer scans her stomach and her pixelated gray internal organs shift on screen
like outer space. She’s watching it with wide, anxious green eyes, and I feel another burst of tenderness for her. It’s almost
painful, my love for Eve. Like pressing a nearly healed bruise. Of the three of us, she has always been the kindest, the most
positive, the most instantly lovable. I just want to reach across and grab the speculum, somehow take control of the uncontrollable
for her.
“Got to say,” Jules says, watching the screen too, “I’ve seen better movies. Two stars, extremely low quality, would not recommend.”
But her dark eyes are slightly wet and her gravelly voice is too tight, like a pair of double-knotted shoelaces. The tight
black curls around her face are frizzing slightly, which means she didn’t sleep well last night either. We smile faintly at
each other: the two of us sharing humor as deflection, always.
“Right,” the nurse says gently as she hands the embryologist what looks, frankly, like some kind of worm that lives deep under the desert.
“This is the catheter which contains your fertilized egg suspended in liquid, Eve. We’re going to slowly in sert this into the thickest part of the lining of your uterus, then we’ll inject it in. It shouldn’t hurt.”
Eve’s eyes get bigger—she’s a tarsier, hanging on to a branch—and she nods.
“Happy swimming, little one,” she whispers, and Jules and I glance at each other. Nothing is going to be “swimming” anywhere,
as far as we’re aware, but we’ll let her hold on to this sweet image if it helps. In Eve’s valium-befuddled mind, I suspect
it’s also wearing armbands and a little inflatable vest.
In sensitive silence, they inject my best friend, and there’s a flash on screen.
“Finally,” Jules says. “A bit of action.”
“That’s an air bubble,” the embryologist explains patiently. “So we know that the egg is where it needs to be.”
“Somebody gave it a snorkel,” I whisper, and Jules snorts lightly.
“All done.” Instruments that always seem too large—like kitchen utensils—get removed and Eve is cleaned up. “You just have
to rest for five minutes, and then you can be on your way. Remember to keep taking your drugs. That’s super important.”
The team exits the room, leaving us to find Eve’s errant knickers.
“He meant me, right?” Jules says as she picks up an abandoned floral shirt, socks and a patterned scarf from a heap on the
floor. “As if I’d forget.”
Then she picks up a pair of giant, graying, frayed knickers.
“Fuck me,” she adds, throwing them at Eve. “I think we’ve just answered the question of why you need a sperm donor.”
Eve giggles again as she tries to get dressed in a horizontal position.
“Speaking of sperm donors, aka male humans,” Jules adds as a doped-up Eve puts her leg through the wrong jeans hole. “How’s
the epic experiment in date-a collection going, Margot? What was Number Fifteen like?”
“Very handsome,” I say, taking the jeans away from Eve, turning them the right way round and handing them back. “And married. With kids.”
“Ew.” Jules screws up her nose. “If Sim ever divorces me, I shall get me to a nunnery.”
Jules and Simran have been married for eight years now—a relationship that continues to amaze me simply by being so painless.
“Lots of single women there,” Eve says hopefully. “Good idea.”
“Maybe Maggie should spend less time on the internet,” Jules points out for the sixteenth time this month. “Then she might
actually meet a man in real life.”
“I do meet men in real life,” I say lightly. “It’s not my fault that the postman and the food delivery guy aren’t impressed
by my food-stained tracksuit.”
Eve stands up with a tentative deer wobble and we all laugh.
Then the three of us pause for a minute of awed silence, trying to process the enormity of what has just happened. Again.
It’s not pencil cases and sparkly wings and Archers anymore. A whole life may have just started.
Please, please let it finally start.
“Seriously.” Eve holds out her hands, her pupils the size of doorknobs. “What would I do without you guys?”
“Wear your jeans backward and your knickers on your head.” I bend down slightly and push her wavy blonde fringe aside so I
can kiss her shiny forehead. “Not for the first time.”
We all smile at each other—briefly nine years old again, with plaits and sticker-covered backpacks and hopes of love letters
and magic—and for just a moment I see Jules glance to the left of her, where a fourth member of our group used to be.
And I wonder, briefly, what Lily does without us.
Because, of all the raindrops I have watched fall over the years—of all the clouds I could read from a mile away and protect
myself from if necessary—that was one storm I never saw coming.