1 | Taste
If grief has a taste, then it tastes like the memory of the chips that we ate by the sea when we talked about baby names, back when the future was still family-sized. Greedily, we reached fingers into the bag for chips still piping hot, opening our mouths mid-chew, allowing the sea air to mingle with steaming potato.
‘What if we have a boy?’ K said.
The boats in the harbor clinked in the breeze.
‘Cillian?’ I suggested.
‘Is that just because you fancy that Cillian Murphy fella?’
‘No! It’s a nice name!’
‘It depends where we’ll be living though. People will be forever pronouncing it ‘Sill-y-an’ if we stay in the UK’.
We passed a man on a low stool playing the accordion, a flat cap covering his weathered face. His instrument sat on his knee, sharing space with his belly. The jaunty tune carried up the pier.
‘What have you got then?’ I countered, as I reached my hand into the paper bag, soggy with vinegar. They are my favorite when they are soused in vinegar; I took two.
‘Maximillianus?’ K said, stretching out the vowels to breaking point. I threw one of the chips at him.
2 | Smell
Scent became the enemy. In a frenzy, I attacked the bathroom cabinet, grabbing bottles at random. I stared unseeing at the ingredients list. I didn’t even know what words I was looking out for. Why did no one tell me about phthalates before? The article said any fragranced cosmetics, which, even with my nose alone, I could tell pretty much encompassed everything in the bathroom. Because phthalates, the chemicals used in fragranced cosmetics, are endocrine disruptors, they interfere with hormonal systems and some research links them to fertility issues. Also, the blastocyst doesn’t like it apparently. This five-day old ball of cells, waiting for us in the deep freeze of the clinic, was already a microscopic fusspot.
I haven’t even had the embryo transferred yet and already I am doing this all wrong. I tried to push this thought down, deep down. I didn’t know what was rational, what was irrational, after years of trying and failing, of tests and scans, of hormones and pills. I just knew that I needed not to feel that I had fucked it up before we had even begun.
My nose started to run, a tell-tale sign that tears were imminent. I swiped at it roughly with my rubber-gloved hand. Just focus on the task, focus on the here and now, I told myself.
Swollen from the daily progesterone injections, I climbed heavily into the bath to get at the bottles stacked in the corner: conditioner, shampoo, shaving foam. I scanned the labels: Fresh Mint, Zesty Lemon, Gingerly — Christ, did nothing smell like itself? I threw bottle after bottle into the Tesco Bag for Life, trying to exorcise my panic as much as any scent.
I was left with one single bar of soap, worn down to a hard sliver, greying cracks in the middle. I held it to my noise – no discernible smell – it could stay.
The bag was bursting at the seams as I emerged from the bathroom. A smell remained, but it was my own sharp tang, high from fear, fermenting in my armpits.
3 | Sight
Sometimes it’s hard to trust what you can’t see. It seems like a terrible design flaw of the human body, not to be able to see if life continues within. Although the pregnancy test had been positive, how could I trust that baby was still alive in there in the early days, when life is precarious. After so many ‘No’s, it was hard to believe in a Yes. I forbade myself, firmly and repeatedly, not to get excited. I promised myself that I wouldn’t buy a baby book until the first scan. Seeing is believing and all that.
A complete waste of time — of course I bought the baby book. It told me what size baby was with each advancing week, what was happening in the secret darkness of my womb. I lurched from the thrill of carrying a growing baby around inside me, to the gnawing terror that he or she might not still be in there.
I monitored myself for any clues, anything that could be a sign. Never had I longed more for nausea.
‘I don’t feel nauseous’, I told my friend, panicking.
‘That’s ok, it’s not obligatory you know. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones.’
I was still taking the hormones so it was hard to separate pregnancy from pill. Bloating, teariness, tender breasts…they could be signs of either.
‘Do you think baby is still hanging on in there?’ I asked K, not for the first time.
‘Let me talk to her,’ he said. ‘Baby, are you still in there?’ He squinted an eye into my belly button, as if it was a porthole. ‘Oh yeah, she’s still there.’ I wanted to believe him but I knew that we were as much in the dark as baby.
4 | Touch
Moving to the window, I fiddled with my ID badge, pretending it had come loose from its holder. I should have been more careful. Up until that point, I was in work mode, armor on after a round of unsuccessful fertility treatment, going about my day. I was on the wards to assess the mother of a sick baby. The children’s ward was particularly boisterous that day. Two boys raced each other on the corridor against a soundtrack of the lusty cries of a toddler in full melt-down. In room six, it was just me, the mother, and her baby boy. He had a feeding tube coming out of his nose, snaking down underneath his sleep suit. A kiddie plaster with a balloon pattern held the tube in place. I watched the mother casually, trying to observe any parent-child interactions. She seemed distracted, fiddling with the paraphernalia on the table. I tried to focus the attention on her son, leaning in to the cot to say hello.
This is when the danger occurred; I bent down to free the stuffed toy that had become caught in the bars of the cot when he clasped my finger. Four tiny fingers and one perfect opposable thumb held on to my index finger; he kicked his legs out, delighted. The insistent grip of his hand on mine made a mockery of my defenses. Tears threatened attack at the back of my eyes, and I gently took my finger back and turned away. I had come undone.
5 | Hearing
K is the kind of person who believes that people who listen to the curated playlists on Spotify are dead inside. He’s a music geek: listening to it, reading about it, playing it.
I love a curated playlist. I play them in the background to dinner (Dinner Party Acoustic Mix) and while reading or writing (Music for Concentrating). Spa Sounds Instrumental is the playlist to my mornings; it tricks me into a fancier start to my day.
K knows all the lyrics to the songs he likes and plenty of those he doesn’t. K doesn’t just sing along to music, he knows every pause, every lilt, every intonation. If I know a full line of a song, I am doing well. I don’t see not knowing the words as a barrier to singing along. I hum over the parts I really don’t know and make a stab at the rest. It drives him mad.
It made sense, then, that K got to choose the music for our first dance on our wedding day. It was a responsibility he took very seriously. He pondered it for days. Finally, he came to me about his choice.
‘Do you know the Flaming Lips?’ he asked.
‘Mmm, heard of them’ I said, not that this meant anything.
He sang a few lines.
‘Wow, so it’s a crowd pleaser then?’ I interrupted. ‘We’re all going to die’.
‘No! It’s about accepting life is short and making the most of the time we have. Listen’ he said, as he scrolled through his phone and pressed play, nodding his head to the beat as the song began, ‘it starts upbeat…those drums? It’s straight out of the traps’.
The music swirled around us and it was, admittedly, beautiful.
‘Do you hear that key change?’ (I hadn’t). ‘It’s caught between happy and sad, then it’s almost choral here… and then back into minor chords’.
I considered telling him that I wasn’t confident I could tell the difference between the major and the minor chords, but he had already moved on.
‘We could have everyone on the dance floor for the whole thing, it’s about everyone we love… what do you think?’
I didn’t know what to say. It’s not that I didn’t like the message, but it was not exactly the obvious choice. I mean, I wasn’t after The Way You Look Tonight, but…
And then I looked at his face, and it was so happy that I couldn’t say no. For K, the glass of life is always half-full, so of course he liked the message: Stop waiting for your life to happen, it’s happening, this is it.
I listen to it now, six years and many unsuccessful rounds of fertility treatment later. I listen to it again and again. I want to hear what he hears.
Sue Hann is based in London. Her work was long-listed for the Spread the Word Life Writing Prize 2020. She won the Diana Woods Memorial Award in 2020. Her writing has been published in journals such as Popshot Quarterly, Longleaf Review, Multiplicity Magazine, and Brevity blog. @SYwrites.
