One Thing Led to Another

‘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.

‘This is so ridiculous,’ I say suddenly.

‘What is?’

‘This. Us.’

My cheeks burn. I don’t want to go on like this, but I’ve opened the floodgates now and it’s all coming out.

‘What do you mean?’

‘People don’t do this, Jim. Have a baby with their friend. We’re not a couple, are we?’

Jim closes his eyes and groans.

‘We were never actually an item. You’re a grown man, a teacher, a responsible person, apparently.’ I hate myself now, it’s not his fault. ‘What sort of thirty-year-old man doesn’t even have a condom?’

Jim snorts. ‘What?’

‘A condom Jim, you know, a contraceptive?’

He blinks and splutters, incredulous at this last comment.

‘It takes two to tango Tess and anyway, you were drunk.’

‘We both were!’

‘And you were wearing those knickers. Those frilly black things. I mean, they were hardly a contraceptive.’

He’s gone mad.

‘And there’s the driving issue,’ he says.

‘Driving issue?!’ I stare at him stunned.

‘The fact you can’t. And you’re always putting off learning. And the fact you always miss the last tube and hate night buses and so you end up staying at mine and…’

‘And what?! So this was bound to happen? The fact I can’t drive and favour vaguely attractive underwear over enormous belly-warmers was one day destined to get me knocked up? In case you’ve forgotten, you were in bed with another woman when I called to tell you I was pregnant.’

‘You’ve never said that bothered you,’ Jim says. ‘If you had…’

‘It doesn’t bother me. That’s the problem!’ I say, throwing my hands in the air. ‘Don’t you think it should? Don’t you think it should bother me, just a bit, that the father of my baby is shagging someone else?!’

The barman clears his throat, loudly. A party of businessmen have just gathered at the bar.

Jim’s got his head in his hands now.

‘But don’t you understand, this isn’t about us anymore,’ he says quietly. ‘It’s about this baby, a baby that needs us, more than anything now. There’s thousands of women who can’t even get pregnant, have you thought about that?’

I had, actually, and despised myself for being so ungrateful but I couldn’t help myself.

‘Forgive me,’ I say. ‘But I’m not feeling my most charitable right now.’

‘I can see that,’ says Jim, standing up and getting his coat.

We leave, go home. Our separate homes.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I came out of the bathroom in my knickers screaming, “Look! It’s positive, we’re having a baby!” Neil didn’t say anything at first and I thought, oh God, he hates it. Then he dived over to the wardrobe, took out his Polaroid camera, and took a picture of me, there and then, holding the positive test. Even now, I look at that picture, stuck up on our fridge and I want to cry. I look so damn young and thin!’

Fiona, 38, Edinburgh

Gina leans back on the window of the café, folds her arms and groans.

‘I suppose you’re thinking, “told you so”?’ she says, through half-shut eyes. ‘I suppose everyone saw it coming but me.’

I put my hand on her arm. ‘No,’ I say, but I don’t say anything else. I know the drill.

It’s been almost a fortnight since Jasper dumped her – in spectacularly cruel form – by text, half an hour before she was due to meet him at a party – and she’s still in self-loathing mode. This means she doesn’t want my sympathy or my analysis of what went wrong, she just wants me to be her punch-bag whilst she lets it all out.

It’s Sunday and this was the day I was going to tell Gina about the baby. I intended to wait until the scan like I promised Jim, but she already knows, I swear. She found my book, the Bundle of Joy book, you don’t get much more incriminating than that. I came home from work to find her reading it in the kitchen, scoffing at all the schmaltzy pictures of women cradling their bumps.

‘Check it out, how smug and tedious are this lot?’ she said, pretending to stick her fingers down her throat. Gina is not what you’d call baby-friendly. In fact to be perfectly honest, she’s actively Anti Baby. She and Vicky used to be the best of mates – we all did. But since Vicky had Dylan eighteen months ago and ‘de-camped to the other side’ as Gina sees it, their relationship has definitely suffered. Gina treats Vicks like she’s holding a bomb when she’s holding Dylan and when Vicky relayed the story of her horrific birth (which to be fair involved full stitching details and the way her placenta ‘slid across the floor’, it came out with such force) Gina was sick in her mouth.

So, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest at her reaction to the book. It was only when her face fell and she said…‘Oh my God, is this yours?’ that I went a deathly shade of pale.

‘I’m doing a health piece on pregnancy, it’s for research,’ I lied, sticking my head inside the fridge and blaspheming at the cheese.

As if. The only ‘health’ features Believe It! magazine ever ran were ones on Chlamydia, the ‘Silent Epidemic’, and another, best forgotten, on ‘excessive sweating’.

This was the weekend I was to spill the beans, but so far, it’s not looking good. When things don’t work out between Gina and men, which tends to be the norm rather than the exception, there’s a set process, a series of ‘modes’ to be gone through, each one having to be exhausted before the next can begin.

Up until this point, for example, she’s been very much in hurt mode. I got home from the cinema to find her chain-smoking in the garden, looking like she’d suffered some kind of anaphylactic shock her face was so swollen from crying.

My first thought, selfishly, was that I could do without a grief-stricken flatmate what with everything else going on. But she was so upset – distraught enough to accept a hug and that’s saying something – that there was only one thing for it: A night in watching the entire box-set of The Office, eating oven chips and planning Jasper’s downfall.

The café’s emptying now, half-eaten breakfasts and bean-smeared plates left on its round mahogany tables with their retro gingham tablecloths. Used coffee cups are piled high on the original 1950s serving kiosk. The whole place seems to ooze with bacon fat.

I zone back to Gina, her fighter mode’s at full throttle now, her mind churning over the last few weeks’ events, scouring for evidence of when the demise began.

‘I wouldn’t fucking mind,’ she says, downing an espresso, ‘but only last week he was going on about how he was really falling for me. How I was “the most intelligent woman he’d ever met”. Ha! What a load of bollocks. So intelligent I can’t see what’s right in front of my eyes half the time. A total, A grade twat.’

I bite my lip and stare at the floor. It’s always slightly embarrassing when Gina starts on one like this, especially in a public place. Very audibly.

‘Don’t torture yourself, it’s best you found out now that he was a shit. Imagine if you were really into him and then found out. You’d be well pissed off.’

‘Guess so,’ she mumbles. ‘His loss not mine and all that. Anyway, I’ve had it up to here with wankers, I reckon I’m better off single. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Do I have “I only date losers” written across my forehead?’

‘No, of course not, you moron,’ I say, getting up to give her a hug but she brushes me off.

The sad fact is, Gina’s always gone for men who are destined to let her down. She did have a decent boyfriend once, Mark Trelforth, all the way through university. But Mark’s doting just did her head in the end, she had to put him out of his misery – the morning after the graduation ball just to add insult to injury, poor bastard.

Ever since then she’s been in search of someone ‘more exciting’, someone ‘edgy’. Mr so-called Perfect.

The problem is (as I’ve reminded her today) that if a thirty-five-year-old man’s key qualities are that he is edgy and exciting, that he models himself on Pete Doherty, just for example, then chances are commitment and unconditional love are not likely to be his forte. But Gina hasn’t quite grasped this.

The windows of the café are all steamed up from the persistent London drizzle that shrouds everything in a soft-focus haze. It’s only two p.m. but it feels much later, probably because we got here two hours ago. Since then, we’ve drunk two lattes, an espresso and a cup of tea between us and seen two whole seatings arrive, eat and leave. First, the thirty-something Islington hungover crew, with their shower-wet hair and their Racing Green body warmers. Then, the twenty-something brigade who are much cooler, therefore arrive later, and tend to be still wearing the same clothes as last night.

Through all this time, Gina has barely drawn breath whilst I’ve nodded and ummed and generally kept my mouth shut for so long, we’ve worked up an appetite worthy of an all-day breakfast.

I don’t mind, this won’t last for ever. After a day or so, this rant mode will subside, making way for a brief period of calm and self-reflection. This will move seamlessly into mild euphoria as Gina embraces her new-found single status, a period which usually finds her dragging me out to hideous speed-dating nights, until she finds herself another totally unsuitable man, at which point I’ll be largely redundant.

I don’t know why I’m going on. I’m hardly a shining example of how to do relationships in my current mess. It’s just, when you’ve known someone for such a long time, you come to know these things. You ride the waves with them, experience their storms and their fleeting sunny days. Except, she isn’t riding this, the biggest, scariest wave of my life. She isn’t able to help. Because I haven’t even told her.

A surly waitress plonks the all-day breakfasts in front of us and strides off, swinging her hips.

‘Cheer up love,’ says Gina. ‘It might never happen.’

No fewer than three people have said this to me in the past week. ‘Too late!’ I’ve wanted to shout. ‘It already has!’

Gina drenches everything in tomato ketchup – a breakfast massacre – and I suddenly feel a bit sick.

‘Do you know what really pisses me off?’ she says, cutting into her food aggressively.

‘I spent a hundred quid on my dress to wear to that wanky party of his.’

‘Haven’t you got the receipt?’ I offer. ‘Can’t you just take it back?’

‘Possibly, but it’s the principle of the matter Tess,’ she snaps, stabbing her fork into a sausage. ‘The fact I went and wasted my own money, money I could have spent on New York, just to please him!’

My stomach flips when she says this. New York. Shit. How could I go to New York now? Gina and I arranged to go to New York together a year ago – when we were in a pub (which is where I agree to most things). But how can I go anywhere now I’m pregnant?

Gina studies my face, my stomach rolls: does she know something? Every time we’ve talked in the past week, every time Vicky has rung and I’ve made some excuse to get off the phone, I’ve thought this is it. This is the moment my cover is blown. But then her face falls.

‘Look at us, eh?’ she says, laughing. I brace myself. ‘Pair of total fuck wits.’

You have to watch Gina when she does this. Tar you with the same brush as she tars herself, it’s a most irritating habit.

‘Speak for yourself!’ I laugh. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t mean anything bad by it,’ she shrugs. ‘I just mean, you know, look at us.’

‘Look at what?’

‘Our lives, I suppose, look at our lives. We’re in our late twenties, prime of our lives, witty, talented, devastatingly attractive…’

‘Now you’re talking.’

‘Exactly. And can either of us get it together to find a boyfriend? Can we fuck.’

I try to think of something enlightened or positive to say, but all I can think about is the wave of nausea currently washing over me. I wish Gina would stop talking.

She doesn’t.

‘Do you remember when we were at uni and we used to play Would You Rather?’

Would You Rather was something we’d all play when we were too skint to go out. It mainly involved debating the lesser of two evil scenarios – the merits of shagging Noel Edmonds over, say, having to bear children to Bruce Forsyth.

When we got bored with debating the ridiculous, we’d introduce more serious dilemmas, like whether we rated marriage over kids, or whether a glittering career was more important than true love. It never occurred to us then of course, when thirty-year-olds were just people who wore court shoes – that we’d be heading towards being left on the shelf without either. (Well, almost.)

‘We still don’t know what we’d rather have in a way, don’t you think?’ says Gina. ‘We still don’t know what we want.’

I don’t answer, I can’t. I feel too rough. Plus, I don’t much like the way this conversation is going.

‘I mean, look at you and Jim. That was never going to work.’

She says this nonchalantly but I flinch.

‘I really like Jim, you know, despite his obvious shortcomings…’

What were they?!

‘…and I think he’s mad for not snapping you up. But it would have happened by now if it was going to happen. You need to stop pissing about, you two, find the real thing. I always thought you and Laurence would go the distance, if he hadn’t messed it up, that is. You two were so cool together. You were just too young.’

I feel the colour drain from my face. Should I have gone on the date? Should I have emailed back anyway? Maybe I am selling Laurence short assuming he’d never want to date me because I’m pregnant? He is a grown man, he can make his own decisions, after all.

‘And then there’s me,’ Gina goes on, ‘not a fucking clue what’s good for me. I thought Jasper was great, so different from anyone else I’ve ever gone out with…’

So a carbon copy of every other dickhead you’ve dated since Mark, I want to say but I’m too busy looking at the bloodied mess of eggs and beans streaked with ketchup on her plate and trying to keep the contents of my stomach intact.

‘Thank God we’ve got each other, eh? Thank God for you, Tess Jarvis. Who’d have thought we’d be still be living together now, eh? Right pair o’ lezzers.’

Gina’s on a roll now, but I’m not listening, I suddenly feel very, very sick. If I just keep quiet, I’ll be OK. If I just concentrate, this nausea will pass, right?

Wrong.

The adrenaline rushes around my veins, my cheeks suddenly burn, my mouth fills with liquid, I’m going to throw up. I’m actually going to puke!

‘Tess, what’s wrong? Are you alright?’ I hear Gina say, but it’s too late.

I stand up, throwing my chair behind me so violently it makes an ear-splitting shriek across the wet floor. I briefly weigh up my options – the door, toilet or bag. I have the good sense – even in this state – to remember my bag has a very nice Mulberry purse in there and the downstairs toilet is way too far so I make a dash for the door.

I practically sprint to the other end of the café, pushing anyone in my path – a horsey blonde, a child – out of my way.

I grab hold of the handle of the door, fling it open, lurch onto the pavement and…let’s just say it’s not pretty. I just wasted several drinks and half an all-day breakfast, narrowly missing a yummy mummy with pristine toddler in pram.

I hear Gina swear from inside the café, then rush outside.

‘Chist’s sake Tess,’ she says to me, arms folded, almost telling me off. ‘What brought that on?’

‘God knows,’ I say, wiping away the tears. ‘Probably just some twenty-four hour bug.’

The nausea passes as quickly as it came. After a glass of water drunk shakily and some baby wipes donated by the glamorous mother – so much more glamorous than me, at this precise moment and I haven’t even had the baby yet – I feel ready to brave it home.