Olive

Despite life’s strange twists and turns, the four of us used to be glued together. We had always been there to lift each other up and out of everything: depression, break-ups, redundancies, you name it. We’d never missed a date at Jono’s until recently. Jono’s was our time – except for when Isla randomly brought her online date along, who wouldn’t shut up about himself and his recent adult gap year before trying to pay for the entire meal in Bitcoin. But still, on the last Thursday of every month, for over a decade, we’ve gone to the same restaurant and sat at the same table. So why were things starting to slip now? It had felt so simple when we’d first laid down the rules in our twenties, on the day we left our shared house: that no matter what happened, we would make time for each other. Many people make the mistake of kicking friendships aside for the other seemingly more important strands of life, but we all know it’s friendship that really keeps you afloat. We weren’t going to be those people who let friendships slide. Or were we?

As I go to leave, I look over at another table and see four girls – younger versions of us – sitting, cackling, in shiny dresses, with no wrinkles, their heads rolling back, eyes sparkling and not yet tired by life. That used to be us.

I take my jacket from the wooden coat stand by the door, right next to our window-side table.

‘You OK?’ Jono says, putting his large hand on my shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ I sniff. ‘Sorry Jono, for taking up your best table and not even ordering anything.’ I gesture towards our empty seats.

‘It’s OK, Olive. You will always be special customers to me.’

‘We wasted a booking – sorry.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’ve come here for a long time. You girls have a long special friendship. I’ve seen it. Hold on to each other.’

‘Thank you. I just feel like things are weird at the moment.’

‘You must move with the tides: life is full of pushes and pulls.’

‘True, Jono. True. I just need them right now.’

‘Of course you do.’ He pauses dramatically. ‘And remember, they need you.’

‘I hope so,’ I sigh.

‘Come back very soon, yes?’ he says, wiping down the table and taking away the glasses.

Instead of going home, I reroute to the bar down the road called Mizzi’s, and proceed to tell the barman – who coincidentally looks a bit like Gunther from Friends – my life story like a weirdo in a film, while slowly getting red-wine teeth. I don’t realize how much I resemble a vampire until I see my reflection in the mirror of the sticky-floored bathroom, and stare with horrified fascination at my bright purple mouth, my lips stained in the corners.

I know how much they all have going on, but I still can’t shake the feeling that the girls have let me down. I’m bursting with the need to talk to someone about the break-up with Jacob. Stumbling out of Mizzi’s, I sit on a doorway step. I reach for my phone and try to drunkenly call Colin, but his phone is switched off. I type in Zeta’s name, but she is on a charity work trip and I know she only has occasional access to Internet cafés. I can’t bear to ring Mum and tell her yet, as she just won’t get it. I put my phone back in my bag.

When I finally stumble home around 1 a.m., I have a terrible, drunken urge to text Jacob. I type out a message and instantly make a typo. A reminder of how much wine I have consumed.

No. No. I can’t.

Maybe I should?

Maybe he’d want to hear from me?

No. Olive. Stop it.

Standing by my front door, trying to fish my keys out of my bag, I notice that Dorothy Gray’s light is still on. Dorothy is my eighty-eight-year-old neighbour. Everything else is dark but I can see her fuzzy TV screen; it looks as if a black-and-white film is playing. I’ve met her a couple of times at the local residents’ meet-up or while taking out the bins. She lives in a big house directly opposite my block of flats, and we have a nice old chinwag if we’re ever going inside or leaving home at the same time. Her house is ginormous, with its own driveway. She never seems to sleep or, at least, turn out her lights. I hope she’s all right. Maybe she just watches TV all night (like me). Each to their own. My curtains are not quite closed, and there is a thin stream of bright light coming from her house into my bedroom. Perhaps it should be annoying, but I feel some warmth from it. Perhaps I’m not alone.

‘I always compare the cost of a year’s worth of nappies to how much travelling I could do instead.’

Katie, 29

3

2009

I was squatting down, in a sort of ‘twerk’ position, my knees creaking and trembling. I hadn’t done a squat since gym class at school in the late 1990s and it showed. ‘Dip’ the stick delicately in your ‘urine stream’, I whispered back to myself, as I held the (now soggy) fold-out instruction manual. Pee in a perfectly straight line? That was like a policeman asking someone to walk along a painted straight line after one too many tequilas. Like that scene in Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig and Chris O’Dowd. It was impossible to ‘dip’ anything neatly at this moment, mainly because I was a bag of nerves. I was terrified by the situation. The pregnancy test was tacky and flimsy, and I didn’t really trust it. It was purple and white and looked like it could easily snap in half. I was already worrying that it wouldn’t be accurate and that I’d have to go back to the store and do this whole shebang again and again. We bought two, Bea and I, in a ‘Buy One Get One Free’ deal. So here we were, doing it together, sitting side by side in the toilet cubicles in the loos at Foyle’s bookshop (of all places). We always joked that our wombs were ‘n sync’, Justin Timberlake style, but this time we really were. I felt so anxious, hovering awkwardly over an off-white stained loo seat that wasn’t my own. I had just peed all over my hand by accident. It was warm and looked syrupy. Quite disgusting really.

‘You all right in there?’ I shouted sideways to Bea. I didn’t hear anything, so I knocked on the partition.

‘Mmmm,’ she replied, unsurely. I could hear her heeled boots scuffling around on the tiles next to me.

I couldn’t even bring myself to wash the pee off my hand because I had to wait for the stupid plastic gadget to show me a result. Germs were lingering everywhere, I thought, bacteria probably climbing the walls. If I was a proper grown-up, I would have anti-bac in my bag – but I forgot. Hurry up, hurry up. On the cubicle wall someone had scribbled, ‘Life is beautiful’. And someone has replied ‘fuck off m8 this isn’t Tumblr’ underneath. I shook the plastic stick (like a Polaroid picture?) but I wasn’t sure it was doing anything to hurry up the process. It was just flicking small specks of urine onto the floor tiles. Gross.

‘Bea?’

‘Yeah?’ she said, impatiently.

‘Remember one line means not pregnant, and two lines means you are pregnant,’ I yelled, hoping nobody else was in the toilets with us.

‘Keep your voice down, Ol. I know what the lines mean,’ she said.

I laughed. We’d done many lines together, in old skanky party toilets. Now look at us.

Rewind a couple of hours, and Bea and I were having lunch at Fall & Well, a little coffee shop on Denmark Street run by three hot brothers, catching up on life as we normally did on any other Hump Day Wednesday. It was our thing. We used this midweek session to sit and bitch about our jobs (and our bosses) for an hour. I was interning at a celebrity gossip magazine and Bea was a gallery assistant. Both our bosses were similar in their contempt and behaviour towards us: for some reason they wanted to make our lives hell. My boss was called Amie (a pretentious way of spelling Amy, if you ask me). Her nickname behind her back was Amie Hammer because she was as hard as nails. She wore these tasselled, heeled shoes to work, and every time she marched towards you to tell you off, you heard the tassels swishing first. It was a warning sign to get ready for a bollocking. My job was to get ‘scoops’, to find out if so-and-so was pregnant so we could ‘break’ the news first. I basically sat on Perez Hilton’s website and made sure we copied (paraphrased) the hottest (or grimmest) American news stories onto our site – and I hated it. I wanted to be a writer, and this seemed like the logical first step in ‘getting my foot in the door’, according to all the career advisers at university. Just go for any old job, they said, as long as you can publish something! Writing horrible stories about reality TV stars really wasn’t what I had imagined for myself, even if I did seem to have a knack for it.

‘It feels like the better I perform at work, the more Amie Hammer hates me,’ I sighed, drinking from my coffee cup.

‘Oh Ol, don’t worry. It’s not you. I guess we just have to suck it up during these early years. The older women up the chain seem to have been told that the only way to “get ahead” is to scream at everyone.’

‘You’re right. Being the intern is just so hard sometimes.’

‘You can’t take it personally. They grew up in the “one seat at the table for women” era. Amie Hammer is threatened by you.’

‘Ha! I highly doubt that, Bea.’

‘She is. You’re young. You’ll take her job one day,’ Bea said confidently, piling more sugar into her coffee.

Mine and Bea’s lives have always paralleled, almost exactly. The four of us in the friendship group have gone through most things together, but Bea and I are something else. Our birthdays are just a few days apart, we started our periods at the same summer camp together, we both tried to insert our first tampon in the same bathroom together, we started our very first jobs years later in the same local pub pulling pints; and now we both had jobs that made us cry in our respective company toilets. For so long, we’d moved up the same ladder and our friendship had become more and more solidified on this basis. But today we’d found something brand new in common! Sitting in Fall & Well, we were both complaining about the same bodily annoyances: change in appetite, sore boobs, being grouchier than normal, having annoying headaches and a little bit of nausea thrown in for fun. Oh, and (er, most importantly) a very late period. Upon announcing this, we looked at each other through gritted teeth and realized we should probably check it out, together. We didn’t really have time to discuss how we felt about it emotionally – never mind what our boyfriends would think – as we had less than half an hour before we needed to traipse back to the office, aka our prison cells. So, we walked in silence to quickly find some answers. And the answers to modern life’s big questions were normally found in Boots.

We walked in and headed to the ‘family planning’ area at the back of the store – walking past life-size posters of catalogue model babies in shiny nappies smiling creepily at us – and popped the tests in our baskets. I took them to the till. I find it strange that at times of such great personal uncertainty, the cashier knows more about the intimate details of someone’s life than their partner or anyone else close to them. Fanny rash? Pregnancy? Fungal infection? They scanned your life’s secrets. Beep. Bea went off to look for some mouthwash. The older woman serving me, with two long earrings in the shape of cacti, gave me a wink as she put them in the bag as if to say ‘good luck’, which was weird, because how could she possibly know what I wanted? Fine, I clearly looked of an age at which buying a pregnancy test was something totally normal and something I might be excited about, but still.

‘I’m not happy about this, you know,’ I said to the presumptuous cacti-earringed cashier, pointing to the pregnancy tests.

‘Er—’

‘Yeah, this purchase,’ I said, pointing at the offending item with my eyebrows, ‘is the opposite of exciting.’

‘Oh I see – OK! Well, then. Have a good day.’

Bea and I left the store, and I put one test in each pocket of my big coat. Where should we do them? This felt the same as buying cigarettes back in the day, needing to find a good hiding place to stash our new goodies and consume them privately.

That’s when we duck into the flagship Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, because we knew they had some spacious toilets in there, next to the café on the fifth floor. Whilst everyone else was queuing up to buy their jacket potatoes with salad and coleslaw and skinny lattes, with shiny new hardback books stashed in their bags, we scurried off to the loos to see if our lives were going to change for ever.

When we entered the women’s loos on the fifth floor, a little boy – who couldn’t be older than two – popped out from behind the door. I let out a scream. Terrifying! Like something out of The Shining. He started crying and his mother appeared, with her wet soapy hands still dripping, rubbing them on her jeans. She huffed and puffed and tutted at me, checking her watch dramatically and swiping at his face with a wet wipe. He was inhaling quickly, still crying.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. I literally screamed in the child’s face.

‘It’s OK,’ the mum replied abruptly. I stood there like an awkward lemon. This kid’s chubby little legs were stuffed into his tiny Converse shoes. I guess he was quite cute. My hand clamped around the pregnancy test box in my pocket.

Time ticked on frustratingly slowly. I waited for the purple line to become a little clearer. I brought the test up close to my face. My eyes crossed over and blurred. Why do seconds seem so stretched out when you are waiting for something important? Bea always told me to ‘zoom out’ when I became too overwhelmed with daily life. ‘Like you would do with your fingers on a photo online, Ol, just breathe and use your two fingers to adjust, in and out,’ she’d say. I often get so anxious that I can’t find a logical way out of my own muddled-up thoughts, like a spider spasming in its own cobweb. That’s why looking at the sky and out to the sea scientifically relaxes humans – because when we look into that deep, deep blue we realize we are insignificant specks. I sometimes found my brain racing around and around like a merry-go-round, and I felt like I was going to be sick but couldn’t find a way to jump off safely. Breathe. Zoom out. Switch to bird’s-eye view, Olive. Breathe. It’s OK, I told myself. This was a Sliding Doors moment, but whatever happened, it would be OK.

I heard Bea shuffle out from her cubicle, the door gently closing. When I eventually emerged myself, the door accidentally slammed loudly behind me. I looked over at Bea, who had red cheeks with mascara-stained tears streaking down them.

‘You OK?’ I asked.

‘It’s … negative,’ she said, sniffing.

Oh … shit. She actually wanted it to say she was pregnant? Were those tears of disappointment?

I looked down at my hands cupped around the pissy plastic container. ‘Me too. Negative,’ I said. I couldn’t help but sound relieved. I thought of Jacob then, and I tried to imagine what he’d say. If I told him.

Two women, one result, two totally different responses whirring around in our heads, I could feel them clashing in the air. I thought we were in this together, Bea and I; I thought we wanted the same thing. We always did. I felt my utter joy and relief deflate slightly. I was well and truly off the hook – not pregnant! Yes! We could carry on living our sweet, sweet lives. Wahoooo! But I couldn’t bounce up and down, I had to pretend to look sad. Also: Bea’s reaction had really knocked me for six. How did I not know she was trying for a baby? We knew absolutely everything about each other.

Pfft. This was ridiculous. We didn’t want kids. We were only in our early twenties. And I thought Jeremy was away all the time for work. She’d be really screwing herself over if she got pregnant now. We hadn’t even been out of university that long, and there was so much time stretched out ahead of us to do big crazy things before we settled down. We had parties to attend, careers to smash, hangovers to indulge in, impromptu cinema trips and dinner parties to throw. I had a work acquaintance who had just had a baby and she said that even a trip to the cinema cost her over £50 because they had to book a babysitter on top of the tickets, snacks and car parking. Was that really what we wanted, so soon? Our lives to be put on hold?

After a slow afternoon back at work we went to a small bar just off Soho Square – we both needed a drink after all of that lunch-time palaver. We ordered a bottle of rosé. Then another one. After that we ended up in a dingy basement club nearby, where the barman gave us a free bottle of champagne – I lied and said it was Bea’s birthday.

‘This is the silver lining eh, Bea – if you’d had a different result you wouldn’t be able to drink this delicious ch-champagne!’ I slurred, sloshing my glass around.

‘Oh sshhhh,’ she said, smashing her champagne flute into mine. Luckily they were plastic.

Part of me wanted to ask her about the test, her disappointment: why a baby now, Bea? And why couldn’t you tell me? But the bigger, more selfish part of me kept quiet.

So, there we were, marking a real milestone together. Me celebrating – Bea commiserating.

I drunkenly called Cecily on the way home, around 11 p.m., from the night bus. I got off a few stops early so I could get some fresh air. Cec always worked super-late, as a paralegal, so I knew she’d be up reading through a pile of documents that her boss couldn’t be bothered to read. Sirens seem to blast past me every ten minutes. Motorbike engines pierced my eardrums. I sat inside a bus shelter to get away from the noise and replayed the whole ordeal to her, my leather jacket perched on my shoulders, with a cigarette in my hand. I was a bit drunk and I realized too late into the conversation that I was being a bit bitchy.

‘I mean thank god my test was negative, Cec. And Bea being pregnant would be so weird, it’s too early! But she did look very gutted though,’ I said, exhaling smoke. I suddenly felt guilty, remembering the intense disappointment on Bea’s face.

‘Well, I think Bea and Jeremy have mentioned wanting kids one day, but yeah, I agree that it’s very early …’ Cec replied. It sounded echoey where she was; clearly her office was pretty empty as it was so late.

‘Yeah. I guess I just assumed we’d both be freaking out. We were both so nervous buying the pregnancy tests because, you know, it was an accident. Well, at least for me? So I was totally taken aback when she looked upset at it coming out negative.’

‘Wow,’ Cec gasped, joining in. ‘I suppose I’d be shocked too. It’s a huge change and responsibility.’

‘We’re only twenty-two,’ I said, tapping ash on the floor.

‘There’s no rush. I’m personally not ready at all. I’ve only just got properly going at work. It’s bloody competitive in my office as well.’

‘Same! I mean, do you think you will have one, one day though?’ I asked.

‘Dunno. Not until I’m much older, I think. I reckon I’ll have one when I’m like thirty-eight or something? When I’m bossin’ it as a lawyer with millions of pounds,’ Cec said, laughing.

‘That sounds good Cec – and there’s no doubt you’ll be bossing it. I guess we can just wait and see, can’t we?’

‘Exactly. And anyway Ol, don’t worry about today, and keep me posted. Right, I’d better sign off, I’ve got to get through a mountain of stuff and wanna be home by 1 a.m. God help me. Love you.’

‘Love you – bye Cec.’

I loved Cec’s ambition, her general go-getting attitude. She was a party animal at the weekends and worked super-hard in the week. I loved that we both weren’t in any rush to settle down. I was suddenly worried about losing Bea. Terrified that this was the start of the downhill slope. The downhill slope to adulthood and suburbia and staying on the sofa 24/7. Was she going to be getting excited about Tupperware parties next?

It felt like something had shifted. I felt another stab of guilt for judging Bea’s life decisions so harshly. But we all know the fear that once your friends start to grow their family, you might become less needed and, then, fully redundant.

4

2019

The office is full to the brim today with extra bodies as our largest meeting room has been turned into a makeshift studio for a shoot. We have partnered with a huge fashion brand for the issue and we’ve roped all the interns into being the models. Gill’s idea, as she says it’ll save us money and shows ‘diversity’. I pop to the sandwich shop directly below the office to get lunch, and to get away from all the hustle and bustle in the office. Bit lazy of me, but it’s nice enough – I just need some peace and quiet. I sit by the window, looking out at all the frantic Londoners, people smoking while speaking on the phone; with stressed-out faces, shouting at cyclists. As I go to take a bite of my crayfish sandwich, a baby starts howling behind me. Howling. Wailing loudly and then choking on its own cries. I turn around and see the red-faced baby is in a pushchair, seemingly discarded right in the middle of the café.

‘Whose baby is this, please? Whose baby?’ cries a waistcoated woman with an Australian accent and short hair. I glance at her chest – ah yes, she has a big badge that says ‘manager’.

People look around, confused.

Short-haired Australian woman shouts through to the kitchen. ‘Hi Rodge, we have a pushchair here in the middle of the caff and I’m not entirely sure where the mother is. Seems to have been abandoned.’

‘The parent, you mean, Rach,’ a stern disembodied voice from the kitchen replies.

‘Eh?’

‘You assumed the gender of the primary care-giver.’

‘Rodge – not now. I haven’t got the time for this.’

‘OK, I’ll be out in a sec,’ says Rodge.

Suddenly there is the sound of running feet coming up the spiral staircase that goes down to the extra seating area below, and a tiny woman with a long swinging blonde ponytail appears, panting.

She suddenly takes the reins of the buggy, keeping her head down, not making eye contact.

‘Excuse me – is this your baby?’ Rach asks.

‘Yes! Sorry, I was desperate for the loo,’ she says in between breaths. ‘I couldn’t get the buggy down those stairs … and—’

‘Madam, you can’t just leave your baby alone like that.’

‘It was only for a few minutes!’ she gasps.

‘Long enough to terrify all of us,’ Rach says sternly. ‘Please make sure you don’t do that again.’

I shudder. Imagine that, not even being able to go to the loo without causing some sort of chaos?

I check my watch and realize I need to get back to the office.

Back at my desk, I lean back on my fancy chair, kick off my shoes and tuck into a huge wedge of carrot cake to calm my nerves after the baby fiasco. I’m going to Bea’s this weekend with the girls – after much back and forth with calendar checking and WhatsApp chasing. I have my overnight bag underneath my desk and I keep accidentally kicking it and stubbing my toe. I’ve packed face masks, thick socks, chocolate and a bottle of Pinot Noir. I can’t deny my disappointment after the failure of our last meet-up so I’m excited to be having a girly sleepover: a cosy night in, where we can all be together, with no distractions or stresses.

I hear footsteps coming towards me. Gill, the editor-in-chief, saunters past my desk in thigh-high pleather boots over jeans. She throws a newspaper clipping onto my desk, hands on hips.

‘I think there’s something in this. Maybe we should cover it. You up for it?’

I look down and see a picture of a girl in a red jumper holding a weird-looking dog – with a bold headline: ‘MILLENNIALS CHOOSE PETS OVER CHILDREN’.

I laugh. ‘Wow – that’s quite an assumption.’

‘I think it’s true, though. Millennials are cash poor and fucked over. Poor sods. Probably can’t afford to do the whole kid thing until they’re in their forties, or even older, and most of them aren’t home-owners, at least in London. But … they could have a pet in the meantime and feel like they are moving towards something. Maybe you could interview some people about it? I reckon it’ll get a lot of clicks online and retweets.’