I have been trying to write this entry for days. Morgan, like the witch you are named for, you have the gift of working transformations. Thank you for being so outraged. Thank you for being so understanding. Thank you for being so very on my side.
“But you could come back to Switzerland,” Krista is saying. It is Sunday morning, the day already muggy outside, and we are messing about idly before breakfast. Krista is one of my closest European friends; I am godmother to her third son. I could bat the question away, of course, but she’s genuinely interested; she really wants to know what I’m planning and where I’m going. She’s a friend: she doesn’t deserve a lie by omission.
So I tell her: I’m about (or very nearly about) to start an IVF cycle.
The change in her is instant. At once, I see that a face as black as thunder is not just a simile: somehow she actually darkens; her body, sprawled contentedly on the floor, draws in and condenses, and she rises to her knees. And then it starts, and I feel it like thunder, like the kind of hail that will smack on the roof and bounce.
“You’re not well enough.”
“I’ve seen you for a few days,” she says. Somewhere, we have lost the logic. “A child is forever.”
“You have no idea of the exhaustion. You have no idea.”
“My sister has two kids,” I say;” I’ve watched her; I’ve seen what she’s gone through –
“No, you haven’t seen it,” she says. “You haven’t seen it, or you'd know you couldn’t do it.” (I know, a priori, that you couldn’t manage, so it follows that whatever you’ve seen, whatever conclusions you’ve reached, are irrelevant.)
I have argued with Krista plenty of times, have had her cross with me more than once, but I have never experienced this, not this judgment and fury, with its unrelenting, lashing quality
“There are also the interests of the child to consider,” Ole says, in his measured way; in sync, Krista flings at me, “Haven’t you thought about the child? I’m telling you this because I am your friend. Don’t you know how it damages a child when its mother can’t cope? (How irresponsible you are to be thinking of giving a child a mother like you.)
“And what about passing the illness on to the child?”
This provokes me. “Look, I wouldn’t have wanted to be aborted,” I say sharply, because this stings. (Isn’t it better not to be than to be like you?)
Suddenly, she is hurling everything at me. “Forget about finding intellectual stimulation,” she says. “You’ll have to go back to the provinces; you’ll have to –“ (I am very sure about how you will have to live your life.)
“If you do try it, you can - I can’t do much from Europe, but you can ring me up,” she says widerwillig, against her will. This whole time, we have been speaking German, but now she breaks into English: “Mach’s, wenn du’s musst, but –“ and now her voice is heavy, and her accent strong “– without my blessing.”
We could be re-enacting a story from the Brothers Grimm: I have stumbled across the tripwire to a spell, and nothing any of the three of us does manages to sweep the cobwebs off the day.
Later, when the two of them meet a friend for lunch, I say I will walk from Matakana Winery, where they are beginning a sculpture trail, to Snells Beach. It is over eight kilometres, a two-hour, undulating walk in the noonday sun; when I arrive at last, and collapse into a cafe for lunch and wine, I am completely zonked. Later, they and their friend pick me up, and we head back to the winery. Daunted by the small talk that I know will follow if I go in with them, and sleepy from the wine and the hike over the headlands, I say that I will wait in the car, and doze.
Instantly, Krista whips round. “And how are you going to manage that with a child?” she asks acidly.
“I won’t go for a two-hour walk in the blazing sun,” I say.
But the fabric between us is well and truly torn. The easy joking that has always characterised us, the shuttle of wordplay and laughter and the weft of deep conversation, of what we really think, is gone. In its place is silence, and a kind of closed hostility.
