Babies in Waiting (13 page)

‘Within reason.’

‘Within reason, of course. I’d suggest you stay off roller-coasters and you don’t consider rodeo as a new career path.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

‘Now I know with Lesley, she read far too much on the internet and got on to all those chat forums, and she knew her risk factor for this, that and the other thing. And you know what? She got herself in a right tizwaz, and the babies both turned out fine.’

Lesley was James’ eldest brother Peter’s wife.

‘But Lesley also had a miscarriage,’ I pointed out.

‘As did I, Toni. In fact, I had two. You’ll find most women who have children will have had at least one. I’m not promising you this pregnancy will go perfectly, or that
you definitely won’t lose the baby. I’m just saying worrying about it won’t affect the outcome. So maybe it’s better not to worry.’

What she said made such total, perfect sense. I couldn’t do it, of course. I was already too wound up, too involved. I’d already found too many things to worry about. But Eileen’s calm, practical view of things made me feel much better.

I said goodbye, and then went back and curled up in the crook of my husband’s arm on the sofa. That night, we made love for the first time since I found out I was pregnant. James was gentle and careful. I still felt weird, like my body wasn’t quite mine, but I managed to enjoy it. We’d get through it somehow, these strange nine months. Somehow, this baby and James and me would make it.

I’d listened to most of Eileen’s advice, especially the bit about there being no point in worrying. But I didn’t stay off the internet. I’d got totally addicted to the baby website, especially the forum. We used an online calculator to work out when our baby was due . . . 14 September, according to the dates we’d estimated. Someone had started a group for mums having babies in September, and I joined it. It was such a relief finding a bunch of women going through all the same things I was . . . and the discussion was really no-holds-barred. Cystitis, constipation, husbands who’d gone off sex . . . whatever people were going through, they shared in a big way. It was hilarious. I found myself having
discussions I’d never have had, even with my closest friends, with a bunch of complete strangers. Maybe that was what made it easier.

I told them about having to plan a pee break into the middle of my morning Tube journey, and loads of people wrote back and said they had to do it too. One of them even confessed to wearing old-lady incontinence pants. I soon got to know some of the screen names . . . some women obviously had a lot of time to post, and commented on nearly every discussion thread. There were lots who write their posts in text-speak or with lots of awful misspellings (‘should of’ just made me want to scream), but some girls’ posts were really witty and interesting to read.

I suppose I got a bit too caught up in it for a while. I’d check the site first thing in the morning before I left for work, then again when I got to work, then again at lunchtime and if it got quiet in the afternoon in the office I might sneak on to see if anyone had posted anything interesting. Then while James watched telly in the evenings I’d spend another hour or so online. At first, I told James a lot of the things I read about, but after a while, if I started a sentence with ‘You’ll never guess what I read on the baby website today’, his eyes started to glaze over. To be perfectly fair, I knew it was a bit much to ask for him to be interested in the day-to-day lives of a bunch of women he’d never met (although neither had I). It was like having two hundred new, very close friends. Linda_Q, who lived in Lincoln, was always online, and every lunchtime she’d start a thread
about what she was cooking for tea. We’d all respond, and it was a bit like we were all sitting together in the same office. The website also made me feel like I wasn’t so weird for being a young mum . . . in fact by most people’s standards I was average to quite old at twenty-six! There were lots of mums who were twenty and younger, often having their second or third babies. There were also some older mums . . . one whose first child was eighteen. She’d been on her own for years and then met a lovely guy in her late thirties, and now she was having a new baby. Her son was the same age as some of the mums she was chatting to, but everyone seemed to get along and find something in common, no matter how different we all were.

I really wished that I was having the same sorts of experiences in real life (or IRL, as we called it on the site), but that wasn’t the case. We’d been very careful not to tell anyone but close family until the twelve-week scan, but once we’d got over that hurdle, we started telling our friends.

Well, Robyn was just furious. We had a proper row about it. ‘Fucking hell!’ she said when I told her. She slapped the table top in the coffee shop, making the two old biddies at the next table jump. It seemed like a bit of a strong reaction to the news, but I let it go. I chattered on about the scan and took out the pictures, but I could see her building up a proper head of steam, and, being Rob, she didn’t wait long to let rip. ‘So you’re telling me now?’ she said sharply. ‘How long have you known?’

‘About . . . um . . . eight weeks?’ I sounded a bit timid, I know, but Rob can do that to you.

‘And you’ve spoken to me how many times in those eight weeks?’

‘A few. Quite a few. Look, I’m sorry, Rob . . . I . . . we weren’t ready to tell anyone.’

‘We. Being you and James.’ She said this a bit snidely, as if my relationship with James couldn’t possibly be as important as my friendship with her.

‘Yes.’

‘Does Caro know?’

‘No. Just my dad and James’ mum. You’re the first other person I’ve told.’

She nodded then and leaned back and folded her arms. She wasn’t satisfied, but at least she wasn’t yelling.

Robyn doesn’t stay cross for long, though. And she’s insatiably curious, so she was soon asking a million mad questions. ‘So what does it feel like?’

‘What does what feel like?’

‘Being pregnant, numbskull. Can you feel it moving around?’

‘No, it’s still much too small.’

‘It’s really freaky. You’ve got a whole other person growing inside your body. It’s like
Alien
.’

‘Thanks, Rob.’

‘Wow . . . imagine it bursting out of your belly button, all teeth and mucus . . .’

‘You do know how babies are born, don’t you?’

‘Yeah. I don’t really want to think about that, thanks.’

‘That’s because you don’t have to do it.’

‘No, but you do. Sucker! So do you have lots of weird
cravings? Do you want to chew the wallpaper and eat coal? Wow . . . imagine if it’s a boy. You’ve got a penis growing inside you! That’s grotesque! And if it’s a girl, you’ve got two twinkles. They’ll call you two-twinkle Toni . . .’

After an hour or so of this, I was exhausted . . . half from laughing at her total lunacy, and half because even though she was trying, she just really, really didn’t get it. It was like I was a lab experiment she was staring at through a plate-glass window, not her friend going through something big, but really quite normal.

Now Caro tried, I’ll give her that. Despite her allergy to children, she pretended to be excited at first and asked slightly more sensible questions. But she soon lost interest and wanted to talk about holidays or going clubbing. I’d known all along that this wasn’t something I’d be able to share with her, and that was OK.

James told me when he told his footie mates, he got a lot of teasing about his life being over, and how he’d been tricked into fatherhood by the old ball-and-chain. His close friends, Alex and Dave, seemed to be thrilled for him, but, like Rob and Caro, they were nowhere near becoming parents themselves, so their interest was a bit academic.

I’d never been a massive drinker, but I really like to go out and be sociable, so I saw no reason for our lives to change on that front just because I was pregnant. I could still chat, I could still dance, and I was a world-champion eater once the morning sickness died down. So for a few weeks after we’d had the twelve-week scan and told all
our mates, we tried to carry on our lives pretty much as we used to.

Nothing’s ever simple though, is it? Firstly, anyone and everyone appointed themselves boss of me. I’m not kidding. People I hardly knew: new girlfriends of friends, the barman in our local, some old geezer we often see in the Italian down the road . . . as soon as they knew I was pregnant, they’d keep an eye on what I was eating and drinking.

‘Is that water?’ someone would ask suspiciously. As if I would sit in a public bar quaffing a pint glass of neat vodka.

‘No prawns for you!’ said a waiter with a cheeky grin when I tried to order a seafood salad for dinner. And, ‘Isn’t it late for you to be out?’ from an oh-so-concerned girl I hardly knew when James and I walked into a bar. For God’s sake! It was 9 p.m.!

It made me want to dig my heels in and keep going out, but I was fighting a losing battle. You see, I finally had to admit to myself that it just wasn’t as much fun any more. There’s nothing duller than being the sober one in the pub sipping lime and soda, while everyone else gets pissed and raucous. Drunk people think they get wittier and funnier as the night goes on, but that’s only true if their only audience is other drunk people. To the sober people, they just look stupid. I also learned that drunk people have no sense of personal space. After the second or third evening we’d spent in a pub when someone had lurched and bumped into me, and someone else had leaned too close and breathed beery fumes into my face
while telling me a very boring, very long story, I decided that, for now at least, my party days were over. It wasn’t for long, though, I kept telling myself. Once the baby was born and sleeping through the night, we’d get a babysitter and I’d be out and partying with the best of them! I wasn’t dead, I was just going to be a mum.

Even if my two best friends weren’t totally on the same page, I had my new online friends and a whole wide world of fascinating baby and pregnancy things to learn about, but James had a big hole in his social life.

‘You go out tonight without me,’ I told James one Saturday evening. ‘It’s no fun for me. I’ll wait at home like a good little wife.’

‘But I’ll miss you,’ he said, putting his arms around me and kissing my neck. ‘Going out is no fun without you.’

‘It’s no fun
with
me, pumpkin,’ I said. ‘I spend my time perched on a bar stool, sipping my soft drink, worrying about how I’m going to get through all the people to go to the loo
again
, and hoping nobody’s going to elbow me in my bump. I don’t have a nice time, and I don’t want to spend the evening sulking or pulling on your sleeve, asking you to take me home. Go! Have fun. And come home to me and tell me stories of your wild adventures.’

But, that night, he didn’t go out. He stayed in with me and spent the whole evening drinking wine and flicking between channels on the TV. He got himself into a completely foul mood by the end of the evening, and stomped off to bed in a massive sulk. I got into bed a few minutes later and curled myself around his broad back. I
knew he wasn’t asleep. I thought about it for a while, and then I whispered in his ear.

‘Love, you should just have gone out, you know,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a test or a trick . . . I really don’t mind.’

He thought about it for a while, then he said, ‘I know. But what kind of dickhead goes out on the lash and leaves his pregnant wife at home alone?’

‘The kind whose wife told him to go?’

‘Yes, yes . . . but it just looks bad.’

‘To whom? I don’t care. I bet Alex and Dave and the guys don’t care. And it’s not like you were going to go to a lap-dancing club and come home at four a.m. with some girl’s thong dangling from your ear. You were going to Hoxton for a few drinks.’

I knew he was smiling in the dark. ‘So, the thong dangling from my ear. That would be a bit of a no-no?’

‘It would be frowned upon by the wife department.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Then he turned over and took me in his lovely warm arms.

After that, he would go out one night at the weekend, and often for a few drinks one night during the week. I was quite happy for him to go, although a little part of me wished he wouldn’t come home so happy, clearly having had a fabulous time without me.

If our friends were a bit odd about my being pregnant, work was worse. All the wrong people, i.e. scary Angela, were really excited. My work friends, the ones who were the same age as me, were a bit like my non-work friends
. . . they pretended to be interested, but having babies really wasn’t on their radar. Most of them were still single and interested in advancing their careers above all else. As soon as word got out that I was pregnant, some of the more obvious ones started circling like sharks.

One Tuesday morning, a girl called Naomi, who works on medical and pharmaceutical accounts, cornered me in the kitchen while I was making myself a cup of caffeinefree tea and a bowl of porridge.

‘Toni!’ she said, and her over-friendly voice set my bullshit radar going. We don’t work on any of the same accounts, and we’ve probably only ever crossed paths in the loo or at big staff parties. We’d not spoken two words to each other in the years we’ve both worked there. ‘I heard your happy news, congratulations! When is it due?’ she gushed.

‘September,’ I said warily.

‘Wow . . . just as the Christmas campaigns launch!’ She sounded heartbroken for me. Then she added, ever so innocently, ‘Who’ll be looking after your cosmetics accounts?’

I laughed and walked away, but I was furious. I’ve worked really hard to get where I am, and I know it’s a competitive industry. Someone would obviously have to look after my accounts while I’m on maternity leave, but I’d be back and no mistake.

I’ve always been really close to my boss, Kate. She’s only a few years older than me, and, of everyone, I would count her as my closest friend at work. We went out for lunch that day, and I told her the story about Naomi. ‘It’s outrageous!’ I said, viciously chopping at my Caesar salad. ‘They
all seem to see it as a signal that it’s open season on my clients! It’s like I’m not even dead yet and they’re picking through my clothes. I mean, I know I’m not going to die, I’m going to go on maternity leave and come back.’