One Thing Led to Another (5 page)
1.30
No period though and that’s a fact, I’m a week late; I’m never a week late
1.00
I am stressed though, that’s also a fact and I bet two seconds after doing this negative test, I’ll come on (ruining my best knickers it’s always the way)
0.45
I glance at the test, yep, just as I thought
0.30
Two lines emerging, God, I hate wasting money, especially due to paranoia
0.25
Misplaced, neurotic, paranoia
0.14
I pick up the test and tear off some toilet roll – I’m wrapping it up now, to throw in the bin
0.10
But then the light catches it – the breath catches in my throat
0.08
It can’t be, can it?
can it?
oh my God! tell me it can’t!
0.06
I feel like I might throw up, I swallow, take a deep breath, exhale slowly, then look at it again
0.04
But it’s still there
it’s
still
there…
a
cross,
a
bright blue fuck-off cross!
I’M PREGNANT! I’M FUCKING PREGNANT!! and I can hardly breathe, I can’t get my breath – help me! – my lungs won’t expand, and all I’m aware of, apart from this sensation, is a great surging, flooding of blood to my head…
If it wasn’t suddenly rush hour in the toilets, I might be making much more noise by now. But I can hear someone in the cubicle next to me, blowing their nose, and I know – she even does that in her own special way – that it’s Anne-Marie, so I don’t, I don’t make a sound. I just stay where I am, hand clasped over my mouth, my world having just shifted on its axis, and me hanging off the side by one fingernail.
My first concern (which points towards promising maternal impulses at least) is that I must have pickled whatever is there, if it really is there, by the alcohol consumed last night, the sambucas at Greg’s birthday drinks, the drugs. Shit, the drugs! I had a spliff with Gina last night and I am overcome with a murderous guilt, a guilt I am wholly and completely unprepared for. And then comes the shock, it hits
me like a wall. Shock, guilt, shock, what the hell do I feel? The emotions seem to thrash over me, like merciless ice cold waves, pinning me to the back of the toilet door and stealing my breath.
There’s the sound of flushing next door, the taps running, the pad-pad of Anne-Marie’s hemp boots and the creak of the door as it shuts behind her. I’m feeling a whole kaleidoscope of emotions now but what are they? Am I happy? Is this elation I’m feeling? Or is it horror? I don’t know. I can’t think.
I hold the test in my hand, my breathing shaky, my palms moist, and suddenly I’m very angry. Angry that the other test lied to me, even angrier for doing this – getting pregnant in the first place, and now I’m angry at myself for handling this so badly.
Then it occurs to me. This cannot be right. No, it must be the alcohol from the weekend, turning the test positive. Like litmus paper. But I’m clutching at straws of course; I don’t really believe that. Plus, something instinctive tells me I am pregnant. I feel different. In that moment, the whole toilet cubicle in which I am standing seems to spin and to distort, as if everything I have ever known, ever experienced as my life, the feeling of just being me, is annihilated and I feel utterly disoriented.
I have to speak to Jim. Now. But I can’t face seeing someone I know, so I don’t take the lift down I take the stairs, two at a time.
Outside, everything looks different, as if I’m looking at it for the first time. It’s raining, pelting it down, and so I run, clutching my phone, to the doorway of a recruitment company at the end of the road. My hands are shaking as I find Jim’s number. I’m pregnant, I’m fucking pregnant!
It rings and rings and then he finally picks up.
‘Hello.’
His voice sounds muffled, sleepy almost.
‘Jim it’s me again.’
‘I know. Listen, can I ring you back?’ he whispers. I hear a woman cough.
Oh brilliant, Annalisa’s there. I am phoning him to tell him I’m carrying his child, and his Italian F.B. is in his bed on one of her impromptu visits to London, almost definitely naked. I met her once, his gnocchi nookie, on one of her ‘romantic’ breaks to East Dulwich.
‘You should get togezzer with Tess, she is adorable!’ she apparently said to Jim afterwards. ‘You’re an English lost boy,’ she always says to him. (She means loser, but she never quite gets it right, and ‘lost boy’ sums him up so much better I always think.) I have nothing against her. I really couldn’t care less if she was in his bed four times a year, but now? ‘Christ Jim!!’ I want to say, but I can’t, because it’s not his fault. I mean I know it takes two to tango and all that, and that if I am pregnant (I am still hanging onto the fact this might all be a very large mistake), it’s his doing as much as mine, but I can’t start going all jealous wannabe girlfriend on him now. It’s just…stood here, his DNA fusing with mine, it’s in slightly bad taste, that’s all.
And so I say, ‘It’s really pretty important. I do need to speak to you. Now.’
‘OK, hang on,’ he says, and there’s a few seconds where he obviously puts his hand over the receiver and explains he has to take the call.
I can picture him now. He is getting out of bed, hair sticking up, skinny legs making for the door, holding his privates. He is slipping on his dressing gown, going into the kitchen and picking up the other phone.
‘So what’s wrong, hey?’
The concern in his voice makes me well up, my voice starts to wobble.
‘I am pregnant after all.’
Silence. He swallows.
‘What do you mean? You did a test, it was negative.’
‘I did another, it was positive.’
‘How do you know?’
‘There’s a cross.’
‘What sort of cross?’
‘A blue one.’
A pause. Just the sound of his breathing.
‘Are you sure you’ve read the instructions properly?’
‘Yes. I’m sure, I’m not that stupid.’
There’s another silence and then when he speaks again, there’s a tone in his voice I’ve never heard before.
‘Is it mine?’ he says softly. And as the tears finally fall, and I say, ‘Yes, yes, of course it’s bloody yours,’ I realize that the tone in his voice, was hope.
We arrange to meet outside the Tate Modern after work; I’ll bring the test so he can see it for himself. I put the phone down and walk back to the office, under a cloud, through a city sheathed in rain. I imagine that everyone I pass: a group of smokers huddled outside their office, a queue outside the post office, can see inside my womb, red and illuminated. And I have never felt so extraordinary in my entire life.
When I get in the lift for the third time today, who should step in behind me but Julia, my ridiculously glamorous friend from Journalism College, who is eight months pregnant herself. She’s features editor of
Luxe
now, having actually worked her way up rather than got to the first place that would have her and never moved again, so we often bump into each other like this and have some awkward conversation about how I should send her some features ideas, which of course I never get round to.
‘Hi,’ she says, but I’m not really listening, I’m too fixated on the words that bubble threateningly in my throat. ‘I’m pregnant too!’ I want to say. ‘Help! What do I do!?’ But I don’t obviously, that would be ludicrous. So instead I say, ‘Had a good week?’
‘Yeah, chilled out,’ she says, stroking her bump. ‘It’s all I can do to haul myself off the sofa these days. Fraser’s started calling me The Rock, because I’m so hard and big and immovable,’ she laughs. Then she says, ‘Oh God, don’t. My pelvic floor isn’t quite what it was.’ Then she laughs again and I do too on some very obvious delayed reaction.
I imagine she can sense it, smell the fact I’m pregnant. They say pregnant women have heightened senses. I know any minute now she’s going to say it and it’s making me nauseous with anticipation. I run through what I’m going to say in my head, how I’m going to explain.
‘Tess?’ she says eventually.
‘Yes?’ I gasp. Oh shit, here it comes.
‘I said have you?’
‘Have I what?’
‘Have you got anything planned for the weekend?’
‘Oh right! I say, letting out an almighty sigh of relief. She’s frowning at me now.
‘Yeah, quiet.’
I can sense her looking at me, but I stare at the floor. She giggles.
‘You’ve met someone haven’t you?’ she whispers in my ear. ‘Go on, I can tell by that face.’
I don’t stop staring at the floor.
‘Oh no! I know! You’ve finally got it together with Jim – that’s it isn’t?’
‘No!’ I snap, making her start back ever so slightly.
‘Oh right. It’s just, you were looking kind of shifty that’s all.’
Thankfully it’s then that we get to the eighth floor and
Julia waddles out as I mumble something about having a hangover.
I rush to my desk, the email’s there. I didn’t send it. Thank fuck I didn’t send it!
Yes I’m free, if I haven’t been taken in by a polyamorous cult by then.
(Or if I haven’t been impregnated.)
I press delete.
By some miracle, I make it through the rest of the day, the sun sinking behind St Paul’s by the time I meet Jim outside the Tate.
He’s sitting on one of the black rubber benches when I get there. His gangly legs are stretched out in front of him and he’s carrying a bunch of freesias with foil wrapped around the stems.
He looks up when I say hello and squints into the light.
‘These are for you,’ he says holding out the flowers. They smell amazing. ‘I’m sorry about before.’
‘About what?’
‘Er, for being in bed with Annalisa when you rang to tell me you’re pregnant? I feel awful.’
‘Don’t worry, honestly I’ve forgotten already.’ A picture of her, nude, black hair flowing all over the pillow pops into my head. ‘Was she naked?’ I ask.
‘I thought you’d forgotten,’ says Jim. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘I have, I have.’
I sit down beside him. The evening sun flickers like embers on the river in front of us. ‘Anyway,’ I say. ‘Look at this.’
I undo the front pocket of my bag, take out the test and hand it to him. He unwraps it, looks at me, squeezes my thigh, then holds up the test to the light.
‘Mmm. There’s definitely a cross there isn’t there?’
‘Really? Oh God, I was hoping…Do you think?’
The reality hits me, there’s no getting away from this now. I burst into tears, tears of pure shock.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I just don’t know what to do. I cannot believe this is happening, what are we going to do?’
Jim rubs his face with his hands then puts an arm around me and we don’t say anything for a while, just stare blankly at the water. Then Jim says, ‘I don’t know. But whatever happens it will be alright, OK? I promise. Whatever happens, I’m here for you.’
In reality there never really was any question of whether I was going to keep the baby.
‘It’s your decision,’ Jim said, as we walked across Millennium Bridge. ‘I’ll stand by you whatever you decide.’
It felt like I was alone at that moment. As if the glittering towers at either side, the Gherkin glowing orange like a burning rocket and the river below us were holding their breath, awaiting my decision.
But the truth was, I had already made my decision. The decision was made the moment the blue cross emerged. If I was eighteen, I wouldn’t think twice, I’d have an abortion. But I am twenty-eight, a grown woman and besides, the way things are going lately – Laurence showing up out of the blue and now this, the second earth-shattering event of the year and it’s only April – half of me wonders whether life is trying to tell me something and I should sit up and listen.
‘I want to keep it,’ I say. And even though I mean it, I still want to gobble all the words back again as soon as they’ve left my mouth.
‘You do?’ Jim stops, turns and looks at me. He looks…what is that look?…
delighted
?!
A
nd for a fleeting second,
I think what a brilliant dad he’ll make and maybe, just maybe this isn’t so terrible after all.
‘Yes,’ I say looking at him. ‘It’s scary as hell but I do. I mean, it’s not sunk in yet, and this isn’t conventional. Actually it’s utterly mental! But…’
But what? I think.
‘But to have an abortion would feel like the coward’s way out,’ I say, and for that moment I really believe what I’m saying. ‘It would feel like not choosing life. Not just literally in terms of the baby, but for me, for us.’
Jim gets hold of my hand. We’re right on top of the bridge now and the wind is blowing our hair sideways, making our eyes sting.
‘I agree, Tess, it’s alright, I agree…’ He says beaming at me now.
‘And the main reason,’ I add.
‘What’s the main reason?’ Jim asks.
‘In the future, the years to come, I couldn’t deal with what could have happened, you know?’
‘I know, I know.’
‘I couldn’t deal with what might have been.’
‘I knew as soon as I set eyes on Mac that I was in big trouble. At fifty to my twenty-six, he was way too old. But he was so bloody sexy – a big hairy bear on wheels, how could I resist that? People stare when he’s pushing Layla down the street in his leathers and old enough to be her grandad but I don’t care. He’s not what I expected, but he’s a kitten. The most loving dad Layla could ever wish for.’
Georgie, 27, Brighton
I could tell Jim was secretly delighted by his own virility – by the fact that he shot and he scored. But I also knew, despite his usual optimism, that he was freaked out beyond belief.
The days that followed were totally surreal.We were both – we still are – in a state of shock and took to calling each other sometimes three times a day with phone calls that went a bit this.
Me: Hello
Jim: Hello
Long pause
Jim: How are you feeling?
Me: Weird. How are you feeling?
Jim: Yeah, weird
Long pause
Jim: I’m going to be a dad, I can’t believe it
Me:
You
can’t believe it!? Try being the one who’s got to carry the thing for nine months
Jim: I thought I wouldn’t be able to have kids though, that I’d have killed all my strong swimmers with all the booze I’ve quaffed
(See, I was so right about the virility thing)
Me: Well you can and it’s true
Jim: I know, I just can’t believe it though, it’s like it’s happening to someone else
That particular line was not that encouraging. And I told him so.
We’re on the fourth floor of Borders on Oxford Street in the Parenting section.
I need to say that again.
We’re on the fourth floor of Borders on Oxford Street in the Parenting section.
Nope. Still sounds ridiculous.
I lean against the bookshelf leafing through a book called
Bundle of Joy: 101 Real Stories of Motherhood
as if I do this every day, as if I do, actually, belong to this weird species, most of them mutant-shaped, milling around the shop floor, hand in hand: ‘The Expectants’.
But I am not expectant. At no point did I ever
expect
this! When that positive test emerged it was categorically the most unexpected thing I have ever experienced in my life. Things like this don’t happen to me, they happen to the people I interview – everything happens to the people I interview, but not to me.
My life has been one big cushy ride so far, which is why I’ve always blagged it when it comes to taking precautions
against life’s eventualities. After all, the less stuff happens to you, the less you think it will, don’t you? I never did lie awake at night, dissecting my last session of oral sex and panicking that I hadn’t listened in Biology and it was perfectly feasible to get pregnant from a blow job after all. I rolled my eyes at Mrs Tucker our ‘personal health’ teacher – you can imagine what she got called – who said you could get pregnant by withdrawal – something that evoked all the risk of a banking transaction to me.
Some would say I’m reckless (my mum would, but then my mother thinks caffeine after five p.m. is reckless). I would say I’ve always been relaxed, optimistic. OK, I admit it, veering towards winging it and hoping for the best. And yet, here I am, and the thing that’s caught me most off guard, aside from the stampede of hormones currently taking over my body like an occupying army, is that I’ve been caught out. My winging it wings are out of fuel, my Bank of Blag is cleared of funds, my cat’s nine lives are all used up. Game’s over Tess Jarvis. You’ve officially fucked up.
It’s late afternoon, ten past five, and the sun is pouring in through the floor-length window, illuminating a column of dust particles which swirl to the ground, a reminder of the passing of time, of the seconds, minutes and days since my news. In the bookshop café to my right, there’s the clatter of tea cups and saucers, normal people getting on with their normal lives.
Two aisles in front, I can just see Jim’s head of dark, overgrown hair buried in a book and I am immediately transported back to the day we met. He was stood like that then too, the first time I saw him, on the second floor of the John Rylands Library, head buried in the
The Death of the Author
, bathed in autumn sun.
I remember thinking, just as I do now, he looked a bit vacant with those full lips hanging slightly open. But I liked
his slim, defined face too, this guy with the hair that had its own mind.
I squint to read the title of the book Jim’s reading:
You’re Pregnant Too Mate! The Essential Guide for Expectant Fathers.
And have a sudden inexplicable urge to blow out the brains of the author. He’s been reading it since we got here. Don’t ask me how we got here either, it wasn’t a conscious decision. One minute we were buying his mum a present for her birthday. (Already made the seamless transition from friend to mother-of-child, side-stepping girlfriend and wife as I go…) The next, we’d wandered in here, on auto-pilot really, me looking as shell shocked as if I’d just emerged from a national disaster, a look I’ve been sporting for more than a week now.
I go back to my book – a cheery story of a woman whose morning sickness was so bad she would dry heave at Tesco’s cheese counter – but the words start to blur, I can’t concentrate. Everything in here is too loud, too bright.
Ever since we decided we were definitely going ahead with this, the whole world has felt like this: like I’ve woken up in a different one.
I go home, I watch TV with Gina, I go to Star’s and sip sweet Turkish tea and chat to Emete whilst she mends my trousers. I do everything I’ve always done, and yet it doesn’t feel like me doing it. It’s like someone has hijacked my body. Someone pregnant.
‘Hey, listen to this,’ says Jim, leaning over the bookshelf. ‘It says here that at six weeks pregnant, your baby is the size of a shrimp – how cool is that?’
‘Right, yes, very cool,’ I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Although I don’t much fancy the idea of a sea creature setting up home in my body.’
‘Right,’ nods Jim and goes back to his book.
‘A shrimp,’ he mumbles when I don’t say anything else. ‘Maybe that’s what we can call it, “shrimpy”.’
‘Jim, shut up,’ I mumble. I feel bad for being so moody. I can’t help it though. In less than a fortnight, we seem to have gone from best of mates – two people who actually have fun – to me weeping at not being able to work the tin opener.
Jim sidles off to the other side of the bookshelf, taking his book and dragging his feet in mock rejection. I bite my lip. I feel awful.
The fact Jim seems to be taking this so well isn’t helping. Despite the shock, ever since we found out, it’s weird, he’s had this look on his face; a look of boy-like wonder that says, ‘I just got the best surprise of my life.’
But me? I don’t feel like that. I don’t even know how I feel.
After the official showing of the pregnancy test, I mainly lay on my bed, listening to the strangely comforting soundtrack of inner city London, or did cool, long lengths at the outdoor swimming pool, anything to stop the noise in my head.
Both Vicks and Gina must know something’s up though. I’ve refused wine for three nights at home. I told Gina I’ve got cystitis, but I don’t think she’s buying it. ‘Cystitis?’ she said. ‘Likely story. You must be pregnant.’ She was joking, but I nearly fell off my chair. Plus when Vicky called me at work the other day, my voice was doing strange things. ‘What’s up with you?’ she said. ‘What’s happened? You can tell me.’
‘I’m pregnant!’ I wanted to shout. ‘I’m up the bloody spout, what the hell do I do ?!’ But I promised Jim I’d wait until the twelve-week scan before I went blabbing to everyone. In that typical male way, he likes to do things that don’t concern him by the book but I’m not sure I can wait that long.
‘How pregnant are you now?’ enquires Jim, looking up from his book.
‘Oh, I don’t know, about six weeks I think, why?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why?’
Here we go again.
‘Because it says here that by seven weeks, the baby’s internal organs are in place, its brain is fully developed, and the body measures around two point five centimetres long.’
I almost gag.
‘That’s around an inch,’ I squeak, in disbelief. ‘How can it be?’
How can it be? I’ve barely got my head around any of this and yet its brain is a week off being fully formed? Its entire personality practically in place! There’s still a part of me too, who doesn’t really believe it. Even though Dr Cork threw her head back and laughed when I told her I’d done three tests, I can’t accept it.
‘For heaven’s sake my girl!’ she spluttered, in that soup-thick Irish accent. ‘I think we can safely say you’re expecting, can we not?’ But I didn’t believe it. Not really. Even when she scrolled down on her calendar, looked at me over her half-moon glasses and gave me a date: December fourteenth. ‘Ah! A little Christmas baby.’ I didn’t believe it was true.
I pick up another book,
A Bloke’s 100 Tips for Surviving Pregnancy.
‘Your partner’s pregnancy may mean that you both rethink your domestic situation,’ it says. ‘It is still common for partners co-habiting and expecting a child to decide the time is right to get hitched.’
Right. But was it common for those ‘partners’ to be friends and not lovers? Was it common for them not to be co-habiting, or ever likely to be? Should we, after all, be rethinking our domestic situation and just get hitched anyway? Where were the rules for us? The top tips for us? I didn’t need
My Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy
, I needed,
Help! I’m Pregnant, and it’s my Best Friend’s!
I look around me; the place is swarming with couples, the
men protective of their girlfriends and wives who house the offspring that soon will make their nuclear, normal families. I look at Jim, still nose in his book. What were we? A pair of frauds.
I decide to take the
Bundle of Joy.
I figure some real-life tales may help with the denial. I go to the till and stand in the queue of couples, two-by-two, Noah’s bloody Ark.
I’m aware that my heart is beating but it’s only when I feel Jim’s hand on my shoulder, then his arm around my back that I realize I’m crying – again – that tears are rolling down my face and the woman at the till is staring at me.
‘Come on,’ says Jim, softly, stepping in front of a sea of staring faces and paying for the book. ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to Frankie’s.’
Frankie’s is an old jazz club on Charing Cross Road. Jim and I stumbled upon it a couple of years ago, a night that ended up with us dancing ourselves sober to a Bossanova swing band. It became our place after that. ‘Would madam care to dance ce soir?’ Jim would call and ask me, then we’d get all dolled up and we’d hit Frankie’s, dance the night away.
But I don’t want to go now. Frankie’s won’t make this any better.
‘I dunno,’ I say, as we glide down the escalator, ‘I’m just not sure I’m in the mood.’
We go anyway – after all I’m not in the mood for anything. It’s only just gone 6.30 p.m. by the time we arrive and thankfully it’s almost empty.
We sit at the bar sipping on virgin pina coladas which makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Laugh because Jim is sipping on a drink with a cherry and an umbrella in it, as a show of solidarity, when really he’d kill for a beer, and cry because why did we have drinks with umbrellas and cherries in anyway? It didn’t feel like we were celebrating.
My chin starts to go again.
‘Sorry, I’m a mess, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I say, forcing a smile.
‘Hey, come on,’ says Jim, dragging his stool closer, ‘Look at me.’
‘I’m scared too you know.’ He takes my hands in his, trying to ignore the snail trail of snot up one side where I’ve wiped my nose. ‘I’m scared shitless to be honest.’
‘But you seem…you’re amazing…you’re just handling this so well, so much better than me. It’s like you’re, I don’t know, happy about it all,’ I say.
He thinks about this, clears his throat. ‘Well, I’m definitely not unhappy about it. I’m thirty Tess. I don’t want to end up some sad old bachelor boy, no children, no life, answering the door in my underpants.’
‘You do that already.’
‘Oh. So I do.’
The barman places a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts on the bar which only makes me want to blub some more. Mainly because I can’t even have one. No peanuts, Dr Cork said. I can’t even have a goddamn peanut.
‘Give it time,’ Jim says, ‘it’s so early.’
‘I know, it’s just, I can’t help feeling this has fucked everything up. You could have met someone else, got married, done it properly, we both could have. But things are going to be so much more complicated now.’
I lean back in my chair and squeeze my eyes shut. Every time I think of one consequence of all this, another rears its head, a can of worms.
‘But I was never after a wife, Tess, you know that,’ says Jim, making me look at him. ‘All that wedding, two point four kids conventional thing was never something I dreamt of.’
I look at the floor.
‘But I did, Jim,’ I say, looking up at him. ‘I did dream of that.’
A horrid silence. Jim stares at his drink. It’s only as the words leave my mouth that I realize how true they are. I had it all planned. I don’t mean planned like Vicky planned things – a subscription to
You and Your Wedding
at twenty, married and pregnant by twenty-seven. I don’t mean planning your child so meticulously its birthday coincides with school holidays. The point I’m making, and the problem with me I suppose, is that I didn’t realize I needed to ‘plan’ anything. I had it all filed under ‘goes without saying’. Meeting ‘The One’, the white wedding, the joint mortgage and ceremonious last pill as we give up binge-drinking in preparation of our forthcoming child. The shagging – oh the shagging! – as we’d take to our bed on sun-drenched afternoons, giggling at the decadence of it all. The leaping into each other’s arms with joy at the positive test and the first scan on dad-to-be’s phone. And who is that dad-to-be in my mind’s eye? Not Jim, my friend, the man I love platonically but hadn’t even considered casting for this role. No, that man I imagined, before this whole ‘life plan’ went utterly tits up was Laurence. But I let him slip through my hands, just like fine golden sand, like clay on a potter’s wheel, like a brand new slippery baby. Like life itself.