Klara Kukilova (Unsplash)
Pregnant
“What did she mean she could be pregnant?” I muttered to myself as I climbed the stairs back to my room, each step heavier than the last.
No one had ever been pregnant for me. At least not to my knowledge. In Nigeria, I once dated a girl who said that if she ever fell pregnant, she would never tell me and would abort it without a word.
“Why would you do that?” I asked her.
“Because I don’t want you to convince me to keep it. I am yet to do my PhD.”
For a long time, I had privately nursed the fear that the bilateral inguinal hernia surgeries I had as a child might have damaged my reproductive tract. Although rare, I worried that the vas deferens could have been nicked. Natasha’s pregnancy put that particular ghost to rest.
I was furious with myself. How does something like this surface at this point in your life?
I began to doubt whether she had actually taken the morning-after pill either time.
I texted her as soon as I got into my room.
[17/04/2022, 20:05:14] Can you call your GP for a blood test tomorrow?
[17/04/2022, 20:15:14] I don’t think it’ll stay, tbh. I have had three miscarriages in the past and I feel like it’s one of them again. My body doesn’t feel gravid.
[17/04/2022, 20:16:41] Madam, please call your GP tomorrow morning and do a blood test. Your ability to use a medical term isn’t convincing me.
The following morning, Natasha texted to say she had booked a blood test for later that day and would like us to meet at lunchtime.
I met her at the hospital restaurant. I made for a table near where we had sat a few weeks earlier, but she led me through the corridor where we had seen each other for the second time, towards the back. It was drizzling, so we turned back and settled on a bench at the far end of the restaurant.
Her eyes were threatening to spill over, her laugh lines latent.
“I want you to be honest with me,” she said, staring at the name tag above my right breast pocket.
“Should the test come back positive, what would you like?”
I exhaled, held her gaze and asked, “You want to hear the truth?”
“Yes.”
“I would like you to get rid of it. But the final decision is yours.”
“Thanks for your honesty.”
She sniffled.
I kept my eyes on her forlorn face, watching the tears begin to escape. I feared she would start crying out loud and draw attention to us, so I reached out to take her from the restaurant, but she sat perfectly still, and the tears continued to run down her face, quietly, noiselessly.
Natasha’s pregnancy cast a curtain of confusion over everything. It was as if my pace at work, my conversations with colleagues, my interactions with patients, all of it suddenly slowed. I cancelled an extra twilight shift I had booked for the money. Food tasted bland. My participation in the study group that night was poor.
The next day, Natasha texted.
[18/04/2022, 19:04:24] I have checked my patient access on the NHS app and the HCG level is 4000. What does that mean?
[18/04/2022, 19:04:59] It means you’re very pregnant.
[18/04/2022, 19:05:12] What should I do next?
[18/04/2022, 19:05:58] Going by what we discussed yesterday, I’d say call your GP tomorrow to arrange a termination. You could call MSI too. But the final decision rests with you.
[18/04/2022, 19:06:06] What if I do not want to terminate it?
[18/04/2022, 19:06:57] Like I said, you have the final say.
[18/04/2022, 19:07:36] Will you be around if I choose to keep it?
[18/04/2022, 19:08:01] We are not in a relationship. We don’t know each other that well, and I am not ready to be a father. But I will co-parent if that’s what you want.
[18/04/2022, 19:08:56] Then you shouldn’t have come inside me all those times.
[18/04/2022, 19:09:19] What?
[18/04/2022, 19:10:48] I never came inside you without your consent. You were always confident you wouldn’t get pregnant. What the hell are you talking about?
[18/04/2022, 19:11:21] Well, it’s not like you always asked.
I switched off my phone and went to bed.
The next day was a Friday. I wasn’t due at work, being on call over the weekend. I woke up disoriented, gathered myself, then felt the weight of it all again before reaching for my phone. Natasha had messaged to say she’d tried her GP without success, then called MSI, who said they needed an ultrasound scan before proceeding with the termination. The only problem was that they had no slot for another week.
I told her to search for a private scan clinic in Mortimer or Reading and sent her £100.
[19/04/2022, 07:15:25] Why should I be the one to search for it?
I sighed. I wasn’t going to let this degenerate.
[19/04/2022, 19:15:55] I will search for one and you can have it done over the weekend. Is that OK?
“What have you gotten yourself into, Leonard Ebele Obaigbena?” I asked myself as though another me were in the room.
The other me replied with contempt: “When you dey cum inside the girl like tap wey the washer don spoil, you know sabi?”
I found a clinic for the scan, but they had no opening on Saturday. The earliest appointment was Monday. Natasha said she would take the day off and asked if I would come with her.
I had planned to use that Monday for intensive studying, it being a rest day after the weekend call, but I didn’t want the friction. I said I’d come.
The weekend call came and went in its usual manner: far more patients than doctors could manage; bleeps going off without pause; one person functioning simultaneously as doctor, phlebotomist and pharmacist. On call, you oversee patients across the entire medical ward, anything from 50 to 250, depending on need and on whether there was a second SHO clerking patients from the ED into the AAU or FY1s and FY2s covering ward jobs.
On Monday morning, I managed a mock before setting off to Mortimer. I scored 61%. Too late to withdraw from the exam without forfeiting half the £500 fee, I resolved to sit it for the experience.
Natasha was waiting in her car when I arrived. She was wearing a white blouse and a flowing floral maxi skirt. She kissed me on the cheek and started the engine.
Country
The countryside is one of the most beautiful things about England. I had felt this way since I first encountered it on a bus trip from London to Manchester to sit the PLAB 2 exam, after three weeks of coaching at a preparatory centre. That was in 2017. The Megabus moved fast, but my perch on the upper deck allowed me to take in the British pastoral. After that exam, I returned to Nigeria, but the view stayed with me.
A year later, I got a job and flew back. I subscribed to Woodwise to learn more about English nature, and sometimes I took bus trips for the sole purpose of admiring the landscapes. It became clear to me why Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy spent so much time describing the English countryside in their books, although I felt Kazuo Ishiguro was the writer who had captured it best.
For a boy brought up in a concrete contraption like Lagos, I had seen very little of nature growing up. My first proper encounter with it was in Edo State, during the compulsory National Youth Service. In England, the tamed and well-tended countryside titillated me so much that I didn’t care if that was where all my taxes went. Beautiful whatever time of year, even blanketed in January snow for a few days.
The view en route to Eastleigh from Mortimer was picturesque, and the path and plains were a palliative over the course of our emotionally fraught ride.
When we arrived at the private facility, a calm receptionist ushered us into the waiting area. The sonographer, a robust Indian woman with a narrow face and dull eyes, asked if I wanted to come into the scan room. I declined.
Natasha found me outside when she was done. I had grown too restless to remain seated and needed air. She handed me the report: it could not confirm the presence of a foetal pole and advised a repeat scan in one week.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked, standing in front of her car door.
“We can wait a week or rely on the blood test and carry on. But either way, inform MSI.”
She opened the door. I got in after her.
“I still don’t feel heavy with child, Leo. I think I will just wait and see. It will get rid of itself like all the miscarriages I have had before.”
“It’s not a child, it’s a foetus. If you think that’s best, then go ahead.”
“Why are you so passive-aggressive?” Natasha asked, dropping her car key on her lap.
“How am I being passive-aggressive?”
“You are acting like I am the one making the decision to have the abortion, when you are the one that doesn’t want the pregnancy.”
I kept quiet. This was not an argument I could win. Natasha started the car.
“But why do you always do this thing, Leo?”
“What thing?”
“This thing where you evade. We are in this together and you won’t give a straight answer.”
“Because I don’t want to be said to have forced you into a termination.”
“Well, you can’t force me into having an abortion. I will keep the pregnancy if I want to. Foetus or not.”
“Of course you will. Your will is your will.”
We drove out of the facility and joined the M3 after a few turns.
I was quiet for most of the journey. The English countryside continued to stun me. As we passed Twyford, Winchester and Micheldever, I fell asleep under the spell of its beauty.
By the time I woke, we were back at Mortimer. Natasha offered to drop me home.
When we pulled up outside my place, her phone rang.
“It’s MSI,” she said before answering.
She covered the phone and whispered, “They have an opening for a scan tomorrow evening. Should I take it?”
“Yes. Go. These things can be operator-dependent. They may pick up a foetal pole tomorrow.”
She confirmed with the MSI person on the phone and hung up.
“Luckily it’s in the evening, so I will be done from work before going. I would have asked if Bobby could stay at yours while I go. I wouldn’t want to take him somewhere like that.”
“My place?”
“Never mind. I’ll take him to Neil’s on the way.”
“It’s all right. Everything will work out.”
I made to leave and Natasha held my hand.
“I am sorry for the grief I have given you these past few days. We have both been careless, I know. I have just been stressed and all. If I get rid of this, promise me that if we work out and I get pregnant again, you won’t ask me to abort it.”
“All right. Let me know what the scan says tomorrow.”
I kissed her on the cheek and got out of the car.
New Key
There are four broad possibilities after one catches COVID: you shake it off within days or weeks; the illness lingers for four to twelve weeks before your body expels it; it stays long enough to cause lasting damage; or you die.
The third possibility is how I felt about Natasha in the weeks after the abortion.
She had met men she opened up to who walked away quickly. She had also met those who, lured by lust, lingered a little before manufacturing an excuse or speaking bluntly about her having “too much baggage”—as a Pakistani healthcare assistant she used to screw during night shifts in nooks and crannies at Overton Hospital had said to her, just after she terminated a pregnancy for him.
And then there was me. I had succumbed to the power of her pussy, pitied her after the abortion and feared she wouldn’t handle a breakup well if I initiated one now. Long COVID was in the air. Long Natasha was in my spirit. Fucking almost daily had led us into something that resembled a relationship.
Twelve days after the abortion, Natasha and I went to Newquay. It was the second weekend of May, and she had booked the hotel and spa with my permission. I had sat my AKT exam in the last week of April.
We set out on a Saturday morning, a day after an SDC concert at the Clapham Grand in London, which I told her about on the drive down. My favourite performer of the night was the comic rapper Ajebutter22. I tried to explain the brilliance of my favourite line of his, but it was too layered to parse on the road, so I chose a second favourite instead: “O ni Postinor by her bedside, bi alejo, o ni pe ’Come/Cum inside’.” She understood after I broke it down, though it took patience on both sides.
I told her that SDC were among the first Nigerian artists to feature dark-skinned girls with natural hair in their music videos, which had earned them a following among young, woke audiences.
I was mildly surprised that SDC, a somewhat niche rap duo in Nigeria, could pull a crowd of around a thousand people in London, each paying £40. But when I thought about it properly, it made sense. The two rappers came from elite Nigerian families with elite grandparents, people who had benefitted from the privileges that wealth and education had conferred throughout Nigeria’s history. They had been schooled in expensive private institutions with alumni scattered across the diaspora. Even the friend I attended with, a petite girl with dreamy eyes, a perky behind and skin the shade of ewa oloyin, was a product of Corona, one of Nigeria’s most prestigious private schools, one that admitted by recommendation rather than entrance exam and had produced everyone from a former vice president to Burna Boy. SDC’s audience was, of course, littered all over the diaspora.
Natasha drove us to the spa. “The hotel is only five minutes away,” she announced as she found a parking spot.
The masseuses were Thai, and the treatment room, which faced the ocean, smelled of aromatic oils. My masseuse put me to sleep. Afterwards, Natasha and I spent time in the steam room and infrared pods. We soaked up so much heat we might as well have been in Cairo in June.
We were zonked when we got to the hotel—Natasha from the long drive, I from the concert the night before. We were nonetheless horny as newlyweds. We drank the room’s complimentary wine and had sex, unhurried and warm, the sea air drifting through the gap in the window. We fell asleep still clothed.
It was already 5pm when we woke.
“I am hungry,” we both said at once.
I laughed at the synchrony and went into the shower. Natasha changed into a red velvet dress that exposed her neckline and fell to her mid-shin. The cross pendant on her gold chain settled perfectly in her Plender’s gap, and her face was dusted with brown powder. We settled on a Turkish restaurant she had found on her phone, while I searched for a local taxi number. I wanted to give her a break from driving.
The FA Cup final was showing on the restaurant’s muted TV. Trent Alexander-Arnold and Luiz Díaz were running riot for Liverpool against Chelsea. I didn’t support either side and wasn’t invested in the game, though I liked Sadio Mané.
“Have I told you about the time I met Mané?” I asked Natasha.
“Who is that?”
“The black guy in number 10 for Liverpool.”
“Really? No.”
“It was at a private hospital in London. He came in for hand surgery and I had to take some details from him beforehand. It was a few weeks after he dribbled Neymar near the goal line in a Champions League game. I was so starstruck I mentioned it to him. He smiled and squeezed my shoulder when we were done.”
“How did you feel?”
“Caged, somewhat.”
“Why?”
“His bouncers were two huge, mean-looking white men in black business suits. They looked ready to whisk me away if I trespassed.”
Natasha laughed one of her characteristic laughs, the kind that refolded her face into wrinkled dough.
“I met a lot of famous athletes there, footballers’ wives who came in for lip fillers, Botox and PRP injections. It was an experience.”
Our food arrived and Natasha descended on her kebab like an uninvited guest devouring burial rice at a Benin City obito. The headlights of passing cars played across her face.
“Why do you lot always refer to the clubs you support as ’our’? It’s not like you have shares in them, and the players don’t know you exist.”
I laughed.
“Bold of you to assume they don’t. Anyway, it gives us a sense of ownership. Our emotions are always at stake.”
“That’s why men can’t remember their children’s birthdays but know who scored a goal in 1936.”
“My father knows both,” I said without thinking.
I feared I had struck a nerve. But she seemed unbothered. Perhaps she didn’t want to spoil the evening.
We stayed in the restaurant until the final whistle, then took a walk around Newquay, shooting the breeze. Natasha apologised for disrupting the final weeks of my exam preparation with what she called “strange and volatile behaviour,” saying that if I didn’t pass, she would hold herself accountable. She acknowledged that her indecision about the termination had made me restless.
I told her that the kvetching had distracted me, but that my real anger was the prospect of forking out another £500 for an exam I could have passed first time. Worse, the trust offered no refund or discount. It made no sense that an exam I needed to advance my career, and which would directly improve my service to the NHS, wasn’t funded by the trust the way my friends in accountancy and IT had their professional exams paid for by their employers. It felt like a shakedown.
We walked to the beach hand in hand and found most people already leaving, so we spent only about an hour on the shore. The air was cool.
Back at the hotel, Natasha suggested we sit at the open-air bar. She was drawn to the colourful tents housing private tables. Inside each tent, revolving ring lights of different colours reflected off semi-transparent walls, so that those passing outside could not make out the faces within. The tents reminded me of a date I once went on with a cherubic, slow-moving Yoruba girl with surplus hips, at the Coppa Club overlooking the Thames.
Natasha ordered a daiquiri. I had a long island. It felt like sitting inside an experimental cool-physics lab that doubled as a soundless mini discotheque. Just after our orders were taken, Natasha asked if I would go with her to a Jeremih concert in July.
“Where is it?”
“Manchester and Birmingham.”
“Nah,” I said. “I am not going that far for someone whose songs I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’ll be fun.”
“All right, I’ll check my rota when we’re back.”
“Do you know what I was doing last July?” I asked.
“No.”
“Nepal.”
“Really? What took you there?”
“A medical outreach. The ObGyn department organises a yearly trip to resource-poor countries; they do training, provide healthcare, build capacity. They asked if I wanted to join when I started the rotation in February last year, and I said yes.”
“What was it like?”
“An eye-opener, honestly. It reminded me of practising medicine in rural Nigeria during national youth service—you couldn’t find a simple nebuliser. This tent we’re in actually reminds me of the ones we stayed in when we visited a hard-to-reach community.”
“Were you scared?”
“Not really. More surprised than scared.”
Natasha smirked.
“I am a city boy, a Lagos boy,” I said. “I didn’t encounter a hut or mud house until my mid-twenties, during rural medicine postings in medical school. I kept fearing a snake or scorpion would creep in. But aside from that, it was worthwhile. We taught midwives and traditional birth attendants how to manage complex vaginal deliveries. It makes you think hard about health inequalities. In the UK, women can request epidurals for labour. Over there, morphine wasn’t even available for women in pain from gynaecological cancers.”
“That must have hit you hard.”
“It did. These women were still going about their days in chronic pain. Where here they would have been designated palliative with proper end-of-life plans, there they endured for months, sometimes years, numbing the mental, emotional and psychological weight of it all with spirituality. It’s a lot to sit with.”
We finished our drinks and went upstairs, where we had sex like agitated lizards. Natasha, face down under the weight of my slender frame and semi-rotund belly, buried her face in the pillow to muffle herself. My lower back ached as I moved in and out of her. With my belly against her back, we were skydiver and passenger, soaring through the combined sky of our eroticism.
We woke past 10am, complimentary breakfast missed. Natasha had been looking forward to it. We had barely two hours before checkout. We bathed, packed and headed down to reception, leaving the car at the hotel and walking to the beach. We hadn’t properly explored it.
Newquay was different from the only other British beach I had visited, in Sidmouth, though I hadn’t really counted that one. The sand here was golden, the waves stronger. The water smelled of sea salt like Bar Beach and Lekki Beach from my Lagos childhood, though those had rougher waves and coarser sand.
Misled by the cool air of the evening before, I had come out in a T-shirt and shorts. The chill set in quickly. I asked Natasha if we could go back to the car so I could grab my jacket and change into jeans. She laughed. She couldn’t believe I couldn’t handle the weather.
“I am a black West African man, please,” I protested. “The water isn’t even warm.”
We returned from the car to find a group of travelling calypso dancers entertaining beachgoers, coaxing people into the circle and showing them how to move their waists and feet to the music, while onlookers clapped. A plump, round-faced white woman in a green sleeveless Holland wax dress was swept in by the lead dancer, and as she whirled around she implored me to film her.
When she was done, she asked for my number to send the video on WhatsApp. Natasha cut in, asking the woman for her number instead, then told me to send the video to her so she could pass it on. The woman looked taken aback but cooperated. I avoided her eyes. The whole thing was awkward.
“What was that for?” I asked once the woman had gone.
“I could see through her, Leo. She wants some of your Caesar.”
“You’re mad. That’s ridiculous.”
“A girl’s got to protect what’s hers.”
She walked towards the food section of the beach.
“Let me pay for this,” she said after we ordered.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. It’s not fair that you’ve been paying for everything since yesterday.”
“I’m not complaining.”
When the attendant pointed us to the card machine, Natasha reached out and tapped first.
We ate our burgers in silence, then made for the shore.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to come to the Jeremih concert with you,” I said, bending to pick up a seashell.
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“Is it because of what I did?”
“No, Natasha. I’m just not interested. And I don’t know his songs.”
We stood looking out to sea without speaking, until I broke the silence.
A shapely blonde woman in a yellow swimming costume was chasing two squealing tweens further into the water. On the distant horizon, a burst of blue sky was attempting to kiss the sea below.
“I think we should head back. I have work tomorrow.”
“OK,” she said.
As we left the beach and joined the main road, a group of surfers passed, deep in conversation. One of them caught my side with the tip of his board. Stung by Natasha’s earlier behaviour, I said nothing.
In the car, we sat in silence. Then, pulling into a petrol station, Natasha asked, “Will you go to a Ravi B concert in London with me then?”
“Who the hell is that?”
“Why do you say that with disgust on your face?”
I could feel her irritation without turning my head.
“Disgust? There’s no disgust. I asked an innocent question.”
“You know what? Never mind. You are so siditty.”
“What the hell is that?”
“It means you’re a snob.”
“Is that English or Antiguan creole? Where did you pick that up?”
“From Being Mary Jane.”
“The Gabrielle Union series?”
“Yes. Don’t change the subject. You’re a snob. You hate everything that isn’t Nigerian. You complained the beach didn’t have powerful enough waves. You complained you haven’t had Nigerian food in two days. Then when I step in to save you from an old white woman who obviously wants to sleep with you, you complain about that too. For someone who hates everything non-Nigerian, you seemed quite willing to meddle with her.”
I shifted in my seat and adjusted the seatbelt.
“You’re a clown.”
“The real clown,” she said, taking her hands briefly off the wheel to make air quotes, “is ’the African man’ who can’t stand foreign things but is on British soil earning a living.”
“Well,” I said, eyes on the road, “it’s not my fault that my colonisers have become my benefactors.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever makes you happy.”
“Yes, an old white woman would have made you very happy.”
“Of course she would have,” I replied. “Did you not see how much she looks like Jolene in the Dolly Parton song?”
Natasha went quiet and I turned back to the countryside, watching it slide past, until I dozed off.
I woke to a tap on my knee. We were on one of those scenic southern roads where the branches of trees on either side arch overhead and form a canopy, so that driving through feels like passing through a tunnel.
I had the sense Natasha had taken a detour.
“You should be keeping me company so I don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”
“Sorry.”
“Carnival is in August, and limited tickets to Ravi B’s private concert are being released next week. That’s why I asked earlier. I wanted to go with you.”
For one thing, I was not a fan of the Notting Hill Carnival, having attended it before the pandemic with a beautiful Yoruba girl I was enamoured by at the time. I had not enjoyed it. It was unnecessarily loud and rowdy. I wondered about the many women in feathers and sequin costumes who pressed their backsides to your crotch even as you stood with a date, and questioned what the cultural experience was meant to be. It seemed different from what Keke and D1 had shown Nigerians on Prime Time Jamz when I was a boy in Lagos. Notting Hill was a chaotic festival and I had sworn never to return.
“I think it’s because we went on the last day,” I remembered Yetunde saying. “The last day is always like this. If we’d come earlier in the week, you would have enjoyed it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe next year we’ll go on the first day.”
But there was no carnival the following year, because of COVID. And there was no Yetunde. We had broken up after nine months of struggle-love. In the first three months, I had worked hard to convince her to leave her Italian boyfriend of five years, whose parents didn’t support his intention of marrying a black woman and weren’t keen on him moving to London to be with her permanently. The second three months, in hindsight, I can only describe as her using me as a rebound. The final stretch, which should have cemented whatever fragile foundation we had built, was instead the period in which I grew weary, having spent so much time and energy simply persuading her to be with me. By the end of the year, our love had collapsed like a sandcastle at the tide’s edge.
On the second day of January 2020, Yetunde called.
“I have been reflecting since New Year’s Eve. I have no problem continuing to see you. You are brilliant and my parents adore you. My mum has even saved your number as Ebele SIL. But I genuinely fear that if someone who gives me butterflies comes along, I will either cheat on you or leave you. And I think it is unfair to carry on with you when I can already foresee that happening.”
“What is SIL?” I asked.
“Son-in-law.”
“All right,” I said. “God bless you.”
I ended the call, blocked her number and deleted her contact.
James Edeoghon was born in Nigeria and now lives in England where he works as a doctor. He is interested in how desire directs destinies. British Natasha and the Ashewo Doctor is his first novel.
