The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Read online

  The discovery wasn’t the kind of romantic one you get in black-and-white movies. I had been touring France on the back of a motorcycle with my husband when I started to feel a bit unwell.

  Now, a word of advice: if you’re feeling sick, don’t do it at eighty miles an hour, leather pants on one end, crash helmet on the other, in a country where they eat snails because they can.

  We arrive back home, and my husband decides he wants some take-out food. I have this bizarre thing where I want to do a pregnancy test. It’s positive.

  So my husband arrives back with his little brown paper bag to be greeted with the immortal phrase, “Put your curry down, sweetheart, there’s something really big I have to tell you!”

  I’ve heard it said that you feel most like a woman when you’re pregnant. It’s complete rubbish. It’s not so. I felt most like a beached whale. It’s a completely bizarre thing, because you suddenly find yourself entirely responsible for this other person. And this other person has only got you, and so even though the two of you are together twenty-four hours a day, it’s not like you can just go to a bar and have a discussion about it.

  Before I got pregnant, my greatest fear about getting run down by a car was that I wouldn’t be wearing matching underwear. After I got pregnant, the whole idea of getting run over by a car took on a whole different meaning. Never mind the eating for two, it’s the thinking for two that wears you out, you know?

  There was a lot of difficulty around my pregnancy, because thirty-seven is considered quite an old age to be having your first child, so anybody here who’s thirty-six and thinking about becoming a parent, get your skates on. In fact, in the medical profession they define it as “clinical geriatric,” and I am not even joking.

  So almost as soon as everybody agreed that I was in the family way, they decided that I should have an amniocentesis. An amniocentesis is an invasive test where they put a needle through the mother’s belly and into the amniotic fluid, and it can tell you whether the baby has Down syndrome or not. But there’s also a 1-percent risk that it will cause damage to the fetus or the fetus will miscarry.

  Now, I’m totally not against risk; I think it’s a matter of choice, and I like risk, and I am completely and utterly pro-choice.

  But there was no way that I figured they were going to do it. It wasn’t the baby’s fault I was thirty-seven. That was entirely on me. That was my decision.

  So I was like, No. But every appointment it would come up about the amniocentesis, and initially I would deal with it that way you do when you don’t want to have coffee with someone.

  When you go, “Oh, damn, the amniocentesis—we will, we’ll do it. I can’t do it this week, though. Maybe next week? Oh, no, my mother’s coming. No, I can’t do that.”

  But as they became more insistent about it, I kind of felt like I had to, too.

  So I was like, “You know, can this test tell me whether this child will be a jerk? Can your test tell me whether this kid is going to be one of those really screamy ones that annoys the hell out of everybody on airplanes? Can your test tell me whether this small, tiny, growing human being will mature into a fully grown adult who has some horrific affinity with Peruvian pan-flute music? Because I’m worried about Down syndrome, hands up, but I’m pregnant, and I’m worried about a lot of things. So thanks very much and everything, but no.”

  Then came the twenty-week scan.

  We were told we were having a boy. Woo-hoo! Then the lady scanning the baby said that my son had statistically a very large head.

  I looked across at my husband for the first time, I swear, noticing his statistically large head. I silently cursed love for being blind.

  She told me I was thirty-seven. I knew that.

  Then, scanning the baby’s head, she said there were choroid plexus cysts all down one side of the baby’s brain.

  Okay. That wasn’t something I was expecting.

  We were told that everything was going to be “fine,” in that way where you just know it’s not, and we had to wait for a specialist.

  The specialist we went to see told us we were having a boy. We knew that.

  She told me I was thirty-seven. I know. She said the baby had a statistically large head.

  Then she said that the choroid plexus cysts were a problem.

  We’d kind of guessed that.

  And then, scanning the baby again, she said that there was a vessel missing on the umbilical cord.

  She said we needed to do the test. But because I had waited so long, they didn’t want to do an amnio, they wanted to do something called a cordio, which is pretty much the same brand as an amnio. They insert a big needle into the womb, and they take a little bit of the umbilical cord, and that can tell them what’s going on with the baby. Now, this is an umbilical cord that they have just told me isn’t fully functioning.

  We didn’t even need a discussion for the decision.

  I was like, “Okay, the Down syndrome thing, it’s not exactly what we’d planned, and I know it’s going to be difficult, probably—for us and for him and in ways that I don’t even know yet. But actually, personally, I think there are worse things than having Down syndrome, you know?

  “I mean, having Down syndrome doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, does it?”

  So I said no.

  But that’s when they told me that Down syndrome was off the table and what we were talking about now was Edwards, a syndrome that means the baby will likely die, either in the womb or within the first year of life.

  We’d had so many scans, and I’d seen my son. I’d seen his heart, seen the inside of his eyes. I’d seen his hands and his feet, and in fact, during one of the scans, he’d held his hand out to the front of my body as if to say, Will you go away? I’m busy. Do not disturb.

  I’d felt my son move inside my body. What did it matter whether he had a disorder or not?

  And if he was going to die, well, we’re all going to die, right?

  So we should meet first.

  He was my son, and he needed me. He was depending on me to make the right decision.

  So I said no.

  We had no choice but to change hospitals after they offered me a termination at twenty-five weeks. It became really clear that they wanted to win a battle, and I just wanted to see my boy.

  At precisely thirty-five weeks and five days, my son decided it was time to be born. My husband drove us to the hospital in our car, neither of us talking about what lay ahead.

  The conversation was made up of the same four phrases:

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You do know I love you?”

  “Yeah.”

  The birth process was the true definition of laborious. My husband waited and gave me water and held my hand, and the midwives were brilliant. They were really patient and reassuring. It would be okay, they said, everything was really early, but it would be okay.

  I have no idea how long labor lasted, but eventually, after one final push, my son appeared—shot out, in fact, doing a kind of hand-brake turn on the table as he did so. He was purple in color, and my husband cut the cord. But whereas before there had been noise and bustle and shouting, suddenly there was silence.

  It was like the whole world had gone underwater.

  The door burst open, and people in white coats came in. They bundled my son over onto a metal table, where they hurriedly tried to resuscitate him.

  I had failed my son. He was depending on me, and I had failed him, and the whole world was underwater.

  Then suddenly he choked, gagged, coughed up something, and started to breathe. The people in the white coats wandered off, and with my husband standing next to me, they handed me my son.

  He. Was. Perfect.

  “Fine,” they said. “He’s absolutely fine.”

  My son looked up at me. He was curious. He was amaz
ing.

  I was so, so very tired.

  He looked up at me as if to say, Ooh, that was all a bit of a trial. So very sleepy.

  “I am so glad you’re here,” I said.

  My son is ten years old now, and he’s still perfect (some of the time).

  And, like his father, he still has a statistically large head.

  I haven’t seen my Bosnian friend for such a long time, but I often wonder how he’s getting on in his self-imposed exile.

  I called my son Fergus. In Irish it means “the right choice,” but it has a different meaning in Scottish. It means “courage,” too.

  * * *

  Scottish writer-performer LYNN FERGUSON is a self-confessed mongrel of the arts. After gaining her bachelor’s degree from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Lynn performed in all manner of places, from hosting her own stand-up comedy club in London to playing generally slightly psychopathic characters on TV to winning the lead in Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan at the Royal National Theatre, picking up several Edinburgh Fringe Festival awards along the way. As a writer she’s constructed dramas, the odd documentary, and three series of her own sitcom for the BBC. Moving to LA in 2008, with her husband and two sons, Fergus and Lachlan, she was a staff writer on The Late Late Show and a script consultant with Pixar before setting up her own company, YouTellYours.com, coaching people from all walks of life in story and narrative. Though this makes her sound mighty impressive, Lynn is content in the knowledge that it’s likely she will always be best known as the voice of a plasticine chicken (Mac) in the movie Chicken Run.

  This story was told on September 6, 2013, at Town Hall in New York City. The theme of the evening was You Are Here: Stories of Rights and Lefts. Director: Catherine Burns.

  There is a very special place in heaven for those who grow up gay in a small, backwoods town. Myself, I grew up extremely gay outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you’ve never been, it’s pretty much the Manhattan of West Virginia, so things weren’t super-duper easy for me growing up.

  I remember I was about twelve years old, and my huge, poor family—my six brothers and sisters, my mom, and me—were all sitting down to dinner, and my sister said something about a Melissa Etheridge song, because it was the nineties and that’s what people talked about at dinner back then.

  My mother turned to her, and she just snapped. She got so ugly.

  She said, “I wouldn’t listen to her music. She’s a dyke. She’s better off dead, so do not bring her music into this house.”

  And my emotional growth is stunted by five seconds of dialogue from the one person in the world who is supposed to love me unconditionally, no matter what. I’m a child, and by the transitive property my own mother had just said that I was better off dead. It made me hate myself, which made it really easy for other people to hate me.

  I would sit alone in my room at night and cry to myself, thinking, Is this what my whole life is going to be like, just sitting here, never connecting with anyone, while the world outside rages on and laughs and has fun without me?

  I was worth less than nothing.

  But when I was fourteen years old, I had a deeply meaningful experience, something so real, so raw, almost divine, that I knew it was going to shape who I was to become for the rest of my life.

  I saw the Spice Girls on MTV.

  When I first saw their debut video, “Wannabe,” my jaw hit the floor in disgust. These five British women, not terribly older than me, were screaming and running around this super-fancy hotel. Were they not at all concerned about people’s opinions of them? I kept watching, and my disgust turned into awe around the time Sporty Spice did that backflip off the buffet.

  I realized this is what I want to do—metaphorically.

  I wanted to have a voice.

  I wanted to be loud and brash and in-your-face and not care what people thought about me.

  I wanted to be Spicy.

  Now, I promise that outside of the Spice Girls I have impeccable taste in music; I’m always about two drinks away from a Joni Mitchell tattoo at any given moment. But I have this theory, as a music person, that if something gets you in your adolescence, no matter how poppy it is, it always holds this little special place in your heart. And if something traumatic happens to you during your fragile adolescence, then that tiny, poppy thing can turn into a huge obsession later on in life, an obsession sometimes so big that every now and then you might have to take a step out of the real world and step into Spice World for a while instead.

  Flash forward to 2007. I’m a big boy now. I’m a grown-ass man, if you will. I got my degree in elementary education. I moved to Philadelphia, and I was working within my field.

  I was doing something called curriculum development, which is just as much fun as it sounds. You basically take all those fun, wonderful, inspiring parts of teaching out of the job, and then you replace them with paperwork and e-mails and meetings-that-definitely-should-have-been-e-mails, but you keep the low pay.

  I was feeling so squashed by the heavy weight of adult life. My boss hated me (and I’m a delight). I was making so little money I couldn’t pay my bills, and I was having a hard time meeting friends in this new, big city.

  Suddenly I’m that teenager all over again, alone in my room, not connecting, while the world rages on without me.

  But one glorious day, I am sitting at my workstation and a colleague comes over to inform me that it was just announced via CNN that the Spice Girls are embarking on a worldwide reunion tour with only eight shows across the globe. Now, the question on everybody’s lips was which of the three American shows was I obviously going to be going to?

  Full disclosure, I’ve always jokingly referred to my savings account as my Spice Girls Reunion Tour Fund, and it became a reality that day when, like a crazy person, I purchased tickets to all three of the American shows.

  So I go to talk to my boss, and I ask for a week off (obviously unpaid), and she gave me a soft no.

  I returned to my desk, and on my computer screen I still have the Spice Girls tour map up. It’s suddenly covered in blue dots and, a split second later, even more blue dots, and it becomes clear that this tour is quickly selling out and then rapidly expanding to meet the demand.

  It looked like one of those time-lapse Ebola-outbreak maps. Like [in a deep, serious, announcer voice], “If we do nothing, in five months’ time the Spice Girls will have infected the entire United States. We will all become victims of girl power.”

  I knew that my boss had told me no. But like some out-of-body experience, my hand, independent of my body, kept clicking Purchase ticket, purchase ticket, purchase ticket, over and over and over again.

  I was like a zombie. But instead of mindlessly, instinctively feasting on human flesh like a zombie would, I was mindlessly, instinctively buying tickets to no less than twenty-two Spice Girls concerts.

  Twenty-two Spice Girls concerts.

  Let that sink in.

  This was every American show they were doing.

  I’m obviously not big on sports references—my nickname in high school was “faggot.” But in a matter of minutes, I just became the equivalent of a Spice Girls season-ticket holder.

  Now I have to talk to my boss again. This is going to go great.

  So I walked in and said, “Hey…uh, remember that week that I needed off? It…uh, it needs to be a little bit more like four to six months off instead.”

  Her no was not as soft this time around. I went back to my seat feeling so defeated and so deflated.

  I thought to myself, David Montgomery, you’re not being very Spicy right now. What would Ginger Spice do?

  Now, for the uninitiated, she left the group at the height of their fame. And in this momentary rush of inspiration, I walked out of my job that day, becoming the first grown man in world history to leave his big-boy job to follow the Spice Girls around.

  I mean,
at this point in my life, I really want to be a teacher. But I really, really wanna zig-a-zig-ah.

  I was now broke as a joke, but goddamn it was I being Spicy.

  The tour began, and I was everywhere—New York, Vegas, LA, Chicago, everywhere. Just for the bragging rights, I had this little YouTube show documenting my experience in Spice World, and it was kind of a hit, making me pretty notorious in the Spice community (which is an actual thing).

  I had people at every show and every airport coming up to me and asking for pictures with me. I had people quoting me.

  I had this tagline at the end of every episode where I’d say, “Remember, it’s a Spice World. We’re just living in it.”

  Strangers are walking up to me saying my stupid words.

  And I mean it’s always nice to meet a fan, but I had this bittersweet encounter with one on the road in New Jersey after a show. This teenage boy, obviously gay, comes up to me, and he tells me a very familiar story. He tells me how he came to the show by himself because he doesn’t have any friends. And he told me how he had to take the bus into the city by himself. His mother wouldn’t give him a ride, because she was worried that driving her son to a Spice Girls concert would make him gay.

  (In her defense, that is usually how it happens.)

  But he said to me, “I wish that I could be like you. I wish that I could do something that made me so happy and not care what anybody thought about me.”

  And I did not know what to say back to him. I wanted to comfort him in some way, but I didn’t want to lie to him.

  I could say, “It gets better.”

  But honestly…does it? At the end of the tour, this money’s not coming back to me, and this feeling of me being liked by everybody is going to prove to be fleeting. Like, at the end of this tour, I might possibly be homeless, but I’m definitely going to go back to being plain old unspecial, next-to-nothing me.

  But the tour marches on. I’m still recognized everywhere. Even the Spice Girls recognize me at this point. I mean, granted I’m one of very few adult men with a bleached-blond Posh Spice haircut in the front row every night, but I’ll take it.