The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York

I feel this is no time for small talk.

‘Fine,’ I reply, wanting to get back to my polyp.

‘Still blocked?’ he asks.

What is he, my agent?

‘Well I had a bit of spurt a couple of weeks ago,’ I admit, ‘but it wasn’t very good stuff.’

He asks to feel my polyp again and then his face lights up.

‘I think you may have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome,’ he says.

‘What’s that?’ I ask fearfully.

‘I think you guys call it Repetitive Stress Injury. It’s caused by too much typing.’

I return to the apartment to break the news to Joanna.

‘Turns out I’m fine,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not going to die after all. My test results are all negative. He thinks it’s RSI. I must be the only blocked writer who has managed to contract RSI.’

Joanna doesn’t seem particularly engaged by my relieved chatter.

‘I got my test results too,’ she says and hands me a package.

I unwrap it to find that it is a book entitled The Expectant Father.

Wednesday, 20 MayJoanna

Like most of my friends, I have put career ahead of children. In our twenties it seemed almost embarrassing to admit they were even a possibility. Now I’m suddenly aware of the explosive change that lies ahead. But instead of being scared, I find myself fizzing with elation – as though a secret trapdoor has sprung open to reveal a future quite different to the one I had been expecting.

I wonder, though, how my bosses in London will take the news of my pregnancy. I am currently the sole female staff foreign correspondent on the paper, and after only a few months I have fallen pregnant. This was clearly not part of their plan. I stare out of my greasy office window, trying to compose a memo breaking the news to the editor.

The truth is I am not a real foreign correspondent at all. I have no desire to zoom across the country clutching an overnight bag and a laptop, forever on call. I took this posting simply because I’ve always loved New York. As it turns out the job is largely office based, relying heavily on rewriting the New York papers and watching cable news. My colleague in Washington, Ed Vulliamy, calls it ‘lift ’n’ view’.

When I do try to engage in original journalism and hit the phone, no one has heard of the paper. This morning I am trying to get a comment on ‘zero tolerance’ from the NYPD press office.

‘Hello. It’s Joanna Coles from the Guardian,’ I say.

‘Where?’

‘The Guardian.’

‘La Guardia? The airport?’

‘No. The Guardian. It’s a British newspaper.’

‘Really? Never heard of it.’

The bureau itself depresses me. Though I should not complain about the location, in midtown on 44th Street sandwiched between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, the office itself reminds me of the shabby sets invariably used in amateur productions of Death of a Salesman. The windows are so fudged with dirt that I can barely tell if it’s raining. The glass top on the desk is shattered, its loosely arranged shards an industrial accident in waiting. The chair, a concave scoop of leatherette which has long since stopped revolving, has a two-inch nail sticking out of the left arm.

When I raise the issue with the foreign editor he is unsympathetic, assuming that I am exaggerating in the hope that he will allow me to refurbish with Philippe Starck accessories. Besides, he keeps reminding me, I am lucky to have an office at all. Most foreign correspondents are now required to work from a computer propped up in the back bedroom at home, something which would probably drive me mad.

Wednesday, 20 MayPeter

Joanna tells me that The Expectant Father will make me more understanding of what she is going through. I flip through the book and it falls open at an early page which advises me that the correct way to announce to my friends that Joanna is expecting a child is to say, ‘We are pregnant.’ I try saying it aloud. ‘We are pregnant’ ‘We are pregnant.’ It sounds absurd. I cannot bring myself to do this in public.

It is true however that I have been putting on some weight since the conception. John, also pregnant, has alerted me to Couvade’s Syndrome, a condition suffered by fathers-to-be. Couvade comes from the French word, to hatch, and victims of the syndrome experience phantom pregnancies. I try out the idea on Joanna and she suggests that I might go to the gym more often.

I fall back on the thought that, rather like a beautiful Italian peasant girl who, having snared a husband, rapidly inflates into a moustachioed pasta pudding, I am perhaps relaxing into middle age, propelled by fatherhood.

Later I am consoled somewhat by a news item on the Rolling Stone, Keith Richards, the bad boy of rock ‘n’ roll. It is reported that he has broken several ribs. This injury has not been inflicted in some night club brawl, however, or while trashing a hotel room. He has, in fact, sustained it in a nasty fall from the ladder in his library while trying to retrieve a volume from the top shelf. I wonder what the book was: Proust? Dickens? Or perhaps a leather-bound edition of the New Musical Express?

Eventually, it seems, a Rolling Stone does gather moss.

Thursday, 21MayJoanna

My office is on the sixteenth floor and offers a Hopperesque view across the street and into the offices opposite, where I watch the other hunch-spined workers twisted over their terminals. I like being up high, but I worry about the bank of elevators, which, I have learned, sometimes stop unaccountably between floors.

The first time this happened was between the eighth and ninth floors and I was alone and felt reluctant to press the red alarm in case it triggered a general evacuation and froze the lift altogether.

After waiting about two minutes, I tentatively pressed the button. It gave an unimpressive little buzz.

‘Hello,’ said a bored voice through the intercom.

‘I seem to be stuck,’ I said, trying not to sound panicky.

‘Yeah,’ said the voice, pausing. ‘You are.’

‘Well, can you get it going again?’

‘Yeah, the functions need resetting.’

‘Well, can you sort it out?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t panic’

‘I’m not panicking, I just want to get out.’

‘OK, OK.’

Nothing happened so, assuming it might take some minutes, I started on a muffin and opened the New York Post. I was reading the Page Six gossip column, which is usually in fact on page eight, when my eye slipped to a headline on the opposite page: ‘WOMAN NARROWLY MISSES DROWNING IN ELEVATOR’.

I read on to discover that a woman and her Jack Russell terrier had been trapped in a lift after traipsing down to the basement to do her laundry. Unbeknown to her, workmen in the street outside had accidentally cracked a water main, which started flooding the basement and cutting the power. Eventually the water started creeping into the lift, where she was frantically pressing the alarm button. As the water kept rising she kept screaming, until her husband, worried at her delay, went down to investigate and finally heard her. By now the water was up to her neck. In order to save her dog’s life, as the water rose, she had lifted him onto her head, where he had sat barking madly throughout their ordeal.

I pressed the button again.

‘Yeah?’