One Thing Led to Another (9 page)

I am momentarily stumped. I’d totally forgotten about the
email. ‘What email?’ I say, impressed with my quick comeback.

‘The email I sent last week. Asking if you wanted to go out on Friday – I was gutted when you just blanked me like that.’ He says it with a smile, half wounded, half flirtatious. I go bright red.

‘I didn’t get it,’ I say eventually.

‘Right, I see,’ says Laurence, obviously unconvinced. Then he takes my hands and holds them and I’m not sure where to look, this has taken me by surprise.

‘Tell me the truth. I acted like a cock didn’t I?’ he says. ‘Breaking up with you like that.’

I look straight into his eyes now, until he closes them and hangs his head. I fight a tingle of pleasure.

‘I’m not going to lie,’ I say. ‘You broke my heart.’

I am transported to the day he finished it, everything starts to flood back. I was in Victoria Falls, I’d been canoeing down the Zambezi, but even surrounded by one of the Wonders of the World, I was sidetracked by thoughts of him. He hadn’t emailed for days, and when I called, he was always mysteriously out. For the second time that night I padded across the campsite in my bare feet, into the Internet café to check just once more for messages. And there it was.

Dearest Tess

I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore. I know you’re gonna think I’m a shit – please don’t think that Tess! – Think of all the good times we’ve had!! But three months is such a long time and I miss you!! I can’t do it. I’ve also met someone – I didn’t want you to hear that from anyone else! Nothing’s happened yet, but I think it might.

I wanted to tell you face to face but I felt too bad. I had to get it off my chest.

I will always love you. xxx

God, I cried. I cried like my heart had been torn from my chest and then I cried some more. I couldn’t do anything, holed up in sodding Africa, no phone card, no nothing. I emailed him back:

Please call the camp number at 10 p.m. tomorrow, I’ll be here.

But nothing. Not a word. My feelings went from hurt to rage in a matter of hours. Who was this other girl that was so good he couldn’t bear to wait for me? How had I been such a dumb ass to assume he could keep his hands to himself? How could he end a two year relationship by goddamn email? And did he think all those exclamation marks would soften the blow?!!!!

I was knocked for six after that. Half way through my six month trip around Africa, my trip of a lifetime, my last few months of freedom before making a proper commitment, I suppose. Laurence was going to concentrate on getting work experience in film (that never came off) and I was going to spread my wings before finally knuckling down to finding a job writing for a proper magazine (rather than writing about copper piping on
Kitchens and Bathrooms
magazine). I’d only ever been to Spain (and Lanzarote in 1992, but all I remember is my ungrateful brother moaning that the sand was black). I had almost killed myself getting up at four a.m. to clean aeroplanes to save up for the trip. And although I knew I would miss Laurence, I felt I needed to do this, I needed to get it out of my system, if only so I didn’t feel such an ignoramus in front of Laurence’s worldly-wise family.

The goodbye at Heathrow airport was agony. I cried, Laurence cried. We clung to each other, me with my hands in his jeans back pockets, in the middle of the departure lounge until the last call for the flight came and I had to run,
or else I never would have gone. I didn’t wave, I didn’t say goodbye, I couldn’t utter the words, it physically hurt.

‘I love you baby,’ whispered Laurence, placing a lingering kiss on my forehead.

‘I love you too,’ I said, taking his face and kissing it for the final time. Then I ran, boarded the plane with the taste of his salty tears still on my lips.

The plan was this: Laurence would come out and meet me five months into my trip, in Tanzania; we’d go from there to Zanzibar, spend three blissful weeks looking like the Bacardi advert in paradise before coming home and moving in together. But of course it never happened.

After he dumped me, I extended my ticket to a full year. After all, what was there to come back for now? I had a few liaisons in those last few months, but as fun as they were I was only trying – and failing – to fill the gaping hole left by Laurence. It was a veritable desert after that. Three years in a sex wilderness. Until Jim, in that May of 2006, I hadn’t let a man near me – not close enough to penetrate me anyway – I was too broken, too wounded.

Laurence opens his eyes again now, his gaze intense.

‘I know. I know. God, Tess, I fucking hated myself,’ he says. ‘Then I saw you in the dry cleaners the other day and I just thought, wow.’

‘Stop, honestly,’ I say, ‘it really doesn’t matter now. Anyway, you’re happy now, you’ve got a girlfriend.’

I don’t know for sure whether he’s got a girlfriend, this is a trick statement. Last time I asked Gina whether he was still with Chloe – and I do try to leave it at least a couple of months between enquiries – he was, but he didn’t mention it when we met at the dry cleaners. Chloe’s another of Gina’s expansive circle. She was in the year below her and Laurence at boarding school, but didn’t surface (or steal my boyfriend) until she went to a barbeque that Laurence
happened to be at too, while I was travelling, and ensnared him when he was at his most drunk, weak and stupid.

I hold my breath.

‘Girlfriend?’

My heart pounds. Hasn’t he?

‘Oh, Chloe you mean?’ He sounds surprised.

‘Yes. The girl you finished with me for all those years ago. The girl you met, whilst I was in Africa, remember? You are still with her, aren’t you?’

I say it like this more to jog his memory, because he looks like he seriously needs it, than through any sort of maliciousness. I’m so over maliciousness. Looking at it from his point of view, I was the one who left him to go off around the world after all. I was the one who chose to be without him for six months. What message did that give out about my feelings for him? What would I have thought if it was the other way round and he’d been the one to go travelling? I would have supported him but I probably wouldn’t have been thrilled.

I zone back to Laurence. ‘Yes,’ he says finally, ‘I am still with her. But Tess, listen, it’s not like she was better than you. It’s not like, I chose her over you.’

(Oh yeah? It certainly looked like that!)

‘It’s just, you know, she was here, and you weren’t and…’

He knows from the look on my face that this isn’t really washing.

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘what about you? You seeing anyone?’

Although I say no I have to stop and think about this one. My head is a mess of conflicting emotions, like the mish-mash of lawns and rivers and parks and buildings below us. On the one hand, here I am, with the man I had thought was The One, a man I am certain is now flirting with me quite outrageously, and yet part of my brain zooms, like a telescope, to a classroom somewhere in a school, just over there where the river hugs Hyde Park, where the father of
this baby growing inside me, a man with wayward hair and the sparkliest green eyes you’ve ever seen, is trying to excite fourteen-year-old boys on the subject of the
Canterbury Tales.
I feel…I don’t know, unfaithful. But why? Jim isn’t my boyfriend, I’m not his girlfriend. I owe him nothing and more than that, we’re not in love anyway, so what’s the point?

‘I can’t believe that for a minute,’ says Laurence, bringing me back to myself. And then the carriage stops and the doors open and a voice says, ‘Thank you for flying British Airways’ and we step off the ride, onto the platform, go down the steps and we are back down to earth.

He grabs hold of my forearms and pulls me close. A pain shoots through my chest, making me gasp.

‘Ow!’

‘What’s the matter?’ Laurence jumps back, alarmed.

My boobs! I think. My boobs are like two giant, rock-hard bruises! And I realize I’ve not thought about being pregnant for almost an hour.

‘Nothing,’ I say, aware I must seem quite unhinged. ‘Nothing, don’t worry.’

‘Right,’ says Laurence. ‘OK, well…that was cool, hey? Can we do this again?’

‘Yeah!’ I say, thinking that is so a good and bad idea all rolled into one. ‘I’d love to.’

He rubs my arms for a second, then pats my bum and pulls away with a smile that tells me that if he hadn’t, he may have crossed the line and never come back. I peck him on the cheek, aware of wanting to be the one who leaves first, who leaves him wanting more.

Then I say thanks for a great lunch hour, turn in the direction of the office and disappear into the faceless crowd. And as I walk back to work and back to the real world, I don’t know if it’s the ride or what has just happened, but my legs are like jelly beneath me.

‘It was a one-night stand, that’s all, someone I pulled at a salsa dancing night after too many tequilas. I was twenty-two, about to start an MA the next week. I would be lying if I said there weren’t times during my pregnancy when I wished I’d not decided to keep the baby, but now my son’s here I can’t imagine loving anyone or anything more.’

Kate, 24, London

I really don’t know what’s eating Gina. It’s been four weeks since I told her I was pregnant and still we are like ships in the night. Gina goes out in the morning, doesn’t come home till after I’ve gone to bed. I spend most of my time at Jim’s, not wanting the confrontation. But I miss her. And the thing that hurts the most is that I don’t really know why I’ve lost her.

The other thing that happened almost four weeks ago and the thing that’s eating me, I suppose, is that that was the last time I saw Laurence. Since then there’s been the sum total of two and a half texts (the half was a round robin to all his friends notifying them that he’s at a different address for a while). I really should forget it. He’s got a girlfriend anyway,
so I don’t know where I think it is going. And I’ve got another man’s baby on the way so really, if we’re going to get technical here, the possibility of us getting together is probably more remote than the prospect of Posh letting herself go.

Jim is late. Rudely and unforgivably late. I scan the street, jiggling my legs nervously. Please don’t make me hate you today, Jim. Of all the days to want to kill you, slowly, agonizingly and preferably with a blunt instrument, I really don’t want it to be today.

Another couple, hand in hand, flash me a sympathetic smile as they push by where I’m sitting on the steps of the antenatal department of University College Hospital. There was a point when I was smiling back, but since my sense of humour failure approximately ten minutes ago, I can only manage a sulky look.

Where the fuck is he?

I call his mobile and contemplate hurling mine onto the road when I get his voicemail.

‘Hi, this is Jim. Can’t get to the phone right now but leave a message and I’ll…’

Completely ignore you?

I wouldn’t mind but this is not like him at all. Jim hates being late, he thinks lateness in other people is rude and inconsiderate. He has many annoying characteristics: uncalled for chirpiness in the mornings, talking over films and giving you a running commentary even though you never asked for one, and an unhealthy obsession with Manchester United. However, rude and inconsiderate he is not, which is why I’m getting worried.

And very annoyed.

If he misses this, our twelve-week scan, the day we see our baby for the very first time, I will never speak to him again. Maybe even deny him access to his child. OK, no,
perhaps that is a bit strong, but I will never ever let him forget it, that’s for sure. Of that you can be certain, James Ashcroft.

I look at my watch, it’s 1.30 p.m. He is now officially fifteen minutes late. I think about just going in on my own. I have told the friendly receptionist in the canary yellow jacket I am here after all so I stand up, utter a few more expletives, ( it must be the hormones. Lately I’ve been known to tell our toaster to eff off) and give the street one last scan, just in case.

That’s when I see him.

I know it’s him, because only Jim has hair that big and only Jim’s head wobbles like that when he moves. But hang on, why is he moving like that? Like he’s doing an impression of a train for a child, using his elbows to propel him along, a sort of demented power walk?

It’s only as he comes nearer, waving like a madman at me now, that I realize he’s actually limping. This doesn’t concern me quite so much as what he appears to be wearing. It’s a black and acid yellow ensemble, stripy at the top and shiny at the bottom, making him look like a giant bumble bee that’s been on a stretching machine (then splatted by a heavy-footed predator if his current physical condition is anything to go by).

I walk towards him, squinting, trying to compute this information. Then, as if in fast forward motion, he is there before me and it all becomes horribly clear. He’s wearing his school tracksuit which is caked – as he is – in mud, his face is bright purple, he’s sweating profusely and he’s done something sinister to his foot.

‘Tess…listen…I’m so sorry, I’m so…’

He collapses onto the railings at the side of the hospital, one hand on my shoulder, gasping for breath.

I stand there staring at the sky for a few moments, trying to find the right words.

‘You stink,’ I say, eventually. ‘You absolutely stink.’ With that, I flounce back to the entrance of the hospital, through the revolving doors (getting my bag caught in it and having to go round several times which somewhat takes away from the intended impact) shouting back to a limping Jim as I go: ‘You remove that mud, have a wash and find some deodorant. Otherwise I will erase all knowledge of you fathering this baby, do you understand?’

The antenatal waiting room is lit with harsh strip lighting that makes everyone’s face look green. Jim’s is still fuscia pink.

‘I’m sorry, OK?’

‘I know you are.’

‘I had to cover for Awful, he’s ill.’

‘Ill?’ I throw him my best exasperated wife look (I’ve been practising this of late).

‘OK, hungover. But he’s my mate, he would have done the same for me. It’s not like he teaches English or Geography or anything where he could have just sat there quietly whilst the kids got on with their work, is it?’ Jim says, trying to placate me. ‘It was double PE, rugby union in fact and he was a scary shade of green, Tess, I kid you not. There was no way he would have made it.’

He says this with an infuriatingly genuine tone of concern.

‘It was our baby’s scan, Jim,’ I hiss, trying to keep my voice down so the entire waiting room doesn’t hear. ‘And now you’ve probably broken your leg.’

Jim looks at me and laughs through his nose. I momentarily feel like punching it.

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ he says in the patronizing tone he reserves only for me and Gina. (Jim is one of few people who knows how to handle Gina.) ‘You always have to exaggerate.’

I hate Awful right now. I can now perfectly understand why girlfriends sometimes hate their boyfriends’ mates and Jim
isn’t even my boyfriend. Awful (Warren Woolfall but we just call him Awful) is Jim’s best boy mate, but sometimes I wonder whether Awful would like to be more. They grew up together in ‘Stokey’ (Stoke-on-Trent to non ‘Stokies’) went to primary school, secondary school, even the same university town together (although Awful only made it to Manchester Met, something his enormous ego has never quite recovered from). They had a brief spell apart between 1998 and 2000 when Awful finally found himself a Polish girlfriend called Marta whom he proceeded to treat like shit. But it clearly proved too painful to be apart, because when Jim landed a job as English teacher at Westminster City School in the autumn of 2001, who should rock up as the most unlikely pot-bellied PE teacher you’ve ever seen? Warren bloody Woolfall.

‘I got the time wrong, didn’t I?’ Jim says, getting defensive now. I realize I can only string out this guilt trip so far. ‘It was only when I got back to the changing rooms and checked your text that I realized it was quarter past, not half past. I did skip on the shower and get here as fast as humanly possible for a man who may be at risk of losing his foot, you know.’

‘Ha! Who’s exaggerating now?’ I say.

‘Whatever,’ he says, petulantly.

‘I couldn’t get hold of you Jim.’

‘I ran out of battery.’

‘I thought you’d forgotten.’

‘I’m sorry, OK?! I totally fucked up.’

Silence. I sigh and pat his knee, resignedly. Jim announces he’s ‘gagging for a slash’ – I do hope this child has more decorum – and wanders off to the Gents. Why is nothing ever easy? Why is this, the first milestone in my pregnancy, not going like it does in the films, and why is the father of my child hobbling to the toilet with a swollen foot, leaving wafts of Impulse body spray behind him?

Thankfully, the nice lady on reception who lent it to him took pity on us and we’re still going to be seen, but it’s not ideal. Plus, the thing that’s really concerning me now is that having drunk two pints of water as instructed (something to do with being able to see the baby properly on the scan) I am in real danger of wetting myself.

This is a strange place. But then I’ve come to accept strangeness as my current state of being. When I look around at all the pregnant ladies, the doctors and nurses striding back and forth in white coats, and the ancient posters about breastfeeding in which all the women seem to have hair like Lady Diana, I feel like I’m an observer, not a participant. I still feel like a fraud. A woman with a snotty-nosed toddler sitting next to her strokes her bump; I wonder if she can tell. There’s something strange about those two over there, I imagine she’s thinking. Those two aren’t together, those two are impostors.

I look around. It’s true, everyone but me looks professionally pregnant. I thought I was showing. At almost thirteen weeks, I already feel enormous, but looking at some of these women, I realize how far I have to go.

Take the girl in the far corner for example, she looks as if her waters might break at any second. She and her boyfriend can only be eighteen at the most, they look like kids themselves. The boyfriend’s got his hair gelled so that it sticks together in clumps and you can see bits of scalp in between. The girl has ironed blue-black hair and a comedy sized bump protruding from the zipped front of her bubble-gum-pink tracksuit top. The entire ensemble reminds me of Mr Greedy in the Mr Men books. I smile at her, she looks me up and down. I look away, a bit scared.

Jim hobbles back from the toilets, obviously struggling with the pain but trying his best not to show it. He’s just about eased himself into his chair, leaning on me for support, when scary girl in a pink tracksuit’s other half pipes up:

‘Alright sir?’

I flash Jim a look of horror but he looks more horrified than me, his cheeks turning suddenly anaemic.

‘Oh, hi Connor,’ he says, unable to disguise the dismay in his voice. ‘I er, I would ask what you’re doing here but I think that’s probably obvious.’ He gestures at the girlfriend’s beach-ball of a bump. The hard stare she gives him back means I have to look away in order to keep a straight face.

Superb. As if this whole antenatal experience could get any worse, we now have to engage in chit chat with one of Jim’s pupils and his mardy teen girlfriend.

‘Yeah,’ says Connor, his tracksuit rustling as he leans forward. ‘Two weeks to go till the birth, sir, it’s proper weird.’

(You can say that again.)

‘Congratulations,’ says Jim. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be a father.’

‘Nor did I to tell you the troof, sir,’ he says. When he smiles, he flashes a gold tooth. ‘It was totally unplanned, wa’n it, Sade?’ Sade raises an eyebrow – the first time her face has moved since we got here. ‘First time we’d done it in all, which was proppa unlucky but that’s life, innit, I s’pose.’

Jim smiles shyly at Connor, then looks at me and raises his eyes to the ceiling. Turns out he’s got more in common with his pupils than he thought.

Connor fidgets, leans forward, leans back. He probably had a line of coke an hour ago I think, then cuss myself for sounding like a
Daily Mail
reader.

‘So er…you expecting too then, sir?’

Sade punches her boyfriend on the arm. ‘Connor shut up will ya!’

‘What me?’ Jim is thrown. ‘No, but Tess is pregnant,’ he says, as if I’m someone random he just met on the street.

‘Is she your wife, sir?’

‘No, no she’s not my wife.’

‘I am
not
his wife,’ I throw in, just to clear up any misunderstanding about that one.

‘So she’s your girlfriend then?’

Jim looks at me helplessly, ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She’s my girlfriend.’

‘She’s well buff sir.’

‘Connor!’ Sade bolts at this one. ‘Just give it a rest, will ya? You’re doing everyone’s heads in.’ Me and Jim are trying not to laugh now, me unable to hide my delight that a teenage boy just called me buff.

‘Congratulations,’ says Connor, before being dragged off by his girlfriend. ‘I hope everything goes well with the little ’un, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ says Jim. ‘And you too Connor.’

Jim and I are shaking our heads in disbelief when a nurse pops her head around the door.

‘Mrs Jarvis?’ she trills, cheerfully. ‘Please come through now and when you do, bring your notes with you, will you dear?’

The room for the scan is dark and quiet, just the gentle beep, beep of some equipment or other.

I lie on my back, my skirt pulled down to my hips, a few stray wiry pubes on show. (Why didn’t I think of that?).

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, for seven whole weeks – the longest seven weeks of my life filled with endless fibbing and avoiding people. This is the moment of truth.

‘So this is your…husband?’ says the nurse as she rubs freezing jelly into my stomach. I tense my muscles. ‘Er, no.’

‘Your boyfriend?’

‘Um, well.’

‘Partner,’ says Jim. I look at him, he winks at me. ‘I’m her partner.’

It’s a word I’ve sniggered at in the past, the kind of word Anne-Marie at work would use, due to some misplaced sense
of political correctness. But right now, at this moment, in this room, it was suddenly a word I liked, a word – at last – that fitted us. We were not many things, after all, but partners in this, we are.

We’ve been partners in crime for ten years. We’ve spent interminable nights together writing essays; he’s been the first person I’d called when my brother had an accident, the first person I’d wanted to tell when I got my first job. He’s seen me hiccupping with tears wearing slipper-socks and a bobble hat, so pissed I am trying to light the wrong end of a fag. And now we are partners in this, our biggest adventure to date, suddenly it felt good. Truly good.

We all look at the fuzzy screen in front of us and I am suddenly gripped by nerves: what if there is nothing there? My God, what if I have imagined all this! What if this is a figment of my delusional mind! I look at Jim for reassurance, he is shifting in his chair, more nervous than I’ve ever seen him.