It was a Number One in Poland and charted well elsewhere, although it wasn’t as successful as their previous “Joyride.” Like Roxette’s other two most famous ballads, “It Must Have Been Love” and “Listen To Your Heart,” it is simultaneously glacial and impassioned, controlled ( The New York Times once, rather snidely, described Roxette’s music as “a matter of efficiency and control”) yet diffusely intense. Roxette released “Fading Like A Flower (Every Time You Leave)” in 1991. Over the next three days, filled with doctors’ visits, an early scan, swabs, search engine cursors and NHS Direct calls, with shocks of realisation at how many people have been told already, how many abject encounters might be ahead, I find myself listening-seemingly without conscious choice-to Roxette and especially to “Fading Like A Flower.” There has not been blood before and I telescope, instantly, out of my body. One Sunday evening, alone and in between episodes of Glee, I see some blood. With my partner, I Google “baby names of 1819.” Pregnancy feels banal and overwrought and numbing and too intense, all at once. I wonder whether I will be a neglectful mother, or a smothering one, or both. I do not try to quantify the size of my foetus by fruit and I avoid all pregnancy manuals, particularly those that insist on male pronouns. I dream of giving birth to kittens and ducklings that are resentful of me. I start to understand the particular indignities of big-breasted friends. I go to my favourite reiki healer who tells me my dead grandma wants me to eat more apples, so I buy a bag of Granny Smiths and then forget to eat them. I eat melons, then cherries, then feta by the block. I am three months gone (from where?) and, so far, my pregnancy has unfurled in a miasma of nausea, stricken desires for potato-based products, a destabilising aversion to reading and writing, and a kind of undulating ambivalence that I still don’t know what to do with. Now it is 2019, and I have had sex with another man and, in ways that Roxette’s songs will never warn you of, this has led to me being pregnant. But, ultimately, it was funny because there is very little about Roxette that brings to mind sex: the wanting it, the dressing for it, the having of it. It was funny because, unlike many people I have loved, he rarely misheard lyrics. I had a boyfriend once who used to hear Roxette’s “Dressed for Success” as “Dressed for Some Sex.” This was funny because of the spectacle it called up of him, aged ten, singing along, ebullient and unaware, in the car with his, no doubt, horrified parents.
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