One Thing Led to Another (11 page)

I only just make it back to my seat and arrange myself to look natural when Laurence is back from the toilet.

‘Wow, very impressive. I see you haven’t lost your ability to speed drink, then,’ he says, his face slightly damp from having splashed it.

‘You can take the girl out of Morecambe but you can’t
take Morecambe out of the girl!’ I say. Then I say, ‘Anyway, it’s good to see you.’

Laurence sits down. ‘It’s good to see you too.’ He smiles. ‘Ridiculously good.’

Laurence finishes what’s left of his food and I make some lame excuse up that I’m on a diet, which being a bloke, Laurence unthinkingly buys. And then we leave, me feeling confused and excited and wondering how the hell I’m going to get through a whole afternoon’s work feeling this distracted.

We meander through the market, traders relaxing after the lunchtime rush, and make our way towards the Park Street entrance.

We stand in a shaft of sunshine, hugging our goodbyes next to a railway arch. A train rumbles overhead, a throng of starlings gathers above then scarpers into the blue, as if out of politeness for what’s about to happen, which is that Laurence Cane takes his face in my hands, looks at me, with the sort of tenderness that almost looks like pain, and kisses me, with as much clawing relish as smokers smoked on the eve of the smoking ban.

‘I thought I was just fat, that I’d just not managed to lose the baby weight (and also piled on some more for good measure). I was breastfeeding a seven-month-old baby: I couldn’t get pregnant could I? Ellie-Rose’s arrival five months later was all the proof we needed. I always wanted my kids close together but this is ridiculous.’

Bethan, 31, Llandudno

‘Go Grease Lightning la-la-la-la la…quarter mile Grease Lightning! Oh Grease Lightning

‘Go Grease Lightning bla-bla-bla-bla-something trial (?!) Grease Lightning woah, Grease Lightning!

‘You are supreme. Oh yeah it’s cream???? Oh Grease Lightning

Go. Go. Go-go-go-go-go-go-go!’

Could my life get anymore bizarre? Approximately eleven hours ago I was kissing my ex lover under sun-streamed arches feeling like we were in one of those black and white
photographs by Henri Cartier Bresson. Now I am in Beckenham, singing a
Grease
anthem, very badly, into a karaoke microphone, wearing vast amounts of padding and a man’s size thirty-four suit.

Trust Vicky to go for a
Pop Idol/X-Factor
fancy dress theme for her twenty-ninth birthday party on the year I am forced to remain stone cold sober. Of course she doesn’t know I can’t drink, she thinks I’m as pissed as she is. I will tell her soon about the baby – before Gina does – there’s surely a limit as to how long Gina can keep her mouth shut. However, something in me tells me that tonight – what with me dressed as Rik Waller and Vicky as Sharon Osborne – is not the time.

I wanted to come as Sharon Osborne too but I didn’t think a corset was a great idea in my condition and I decided that at least a fat suit would hide any sign of a bump. I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t gone to such extremes now.

This is an insight to say the least, being sober at my best friend’s birthday party. On my right, Vicky is putting me to shame with her huge, jazzy voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in the final of
X-Factor.
To my left, Jim, complete with Simon Cowell high-waisted jeans and a Lego-like wig, has his eyes closed in a near-orgasmic expression, and is thrusting his pelvis backwards and forwards. Lost in music.

God, it’s carnage in here. Mascara-streaked girls cavort with sweaty blokes, trays of tequila do the rounds. Hannah Burns – one of Vicks’s Beckenham mates – is dead to the world (or is she just dead?) head slumped against the speaker, unaware that her jeans are hanging down by her hips and her G-string’s on show.

Over in the corner, on top of a heap of coats and bags, there’s a couple, limbs entwined who’ve been eating each other for the last four hours, eyes closed, in their very own bubble of ecstasy just like that advert for Match.com. I think she may have come as Michelle McManus (but I haven’t
dared comment in case she’s just a big girl, it’s hard to tell). Either way, I wonder, do I look this deranged when I’m drunk? It’s a sobering thought. I’d claim it’s enough to put me off beer for good but that would be an outright lie. Every other pregnant woman in the whole world seems to go green at one sniff of alcohol. I’m more likely to go green with envy then stick my nose in your glass and inhale, violently. I cannot believe I have six more months of this mind-numbing sobriety. Jim Ashcroft has a lot to answer for.

We finish to rapturous applause. I reckon I got away with it. Nobody would ever suspect that I would come out to any social event (let alone one where I am dressed in a fat suit) and voluntarily not drink, for starters, plus I’ve discovered the technique of drinking ‘vodka lemonade’. Only, you leave out the vodka bit. A genius bit of deception.

‘We were the business, this lot are shit,’ says Jim, one arm on my shoulder, the other around Vicky. We’re sitting on the kitchen worktop now, watching three girls from Vicks’s osteopathy course do ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet.

‘You were fucking Robbie Williams up there,’ slurs Vicky.

She’s definitely drunk, she never swears when she’s sober.

‘You wanna see me do my “My Way”. Dead ringer for ol’blue eyes. But I won’t bother tonight. I don’t want to outshine the birthday girl,’ Jim teases. ‘Get up there Vicks, go on.’ He nudges her off the worktop. ‘Go and show these muppets how it’s done.’

Vicky staggers purposefully towards the karaoke machine, clearly intent on hogging it, as she has the entire evening.

‘Another belting power ballad on its way,’ I say. Jim laughs and turns to me. ‘You coping?’ he mouths to me. ‘Tell me the truth.’

‘I’m cool,’ I shrug. Then I look down at the vast acres of shiny, navy suit covering my gigantic spongey form. ‘Well actually, tell a lie. I’m absolutely boiling.’

Jim gives it up, starts laughing like me in a fat suit is the funniest thing he’s seen in his life.

‘Fair play, Jarvis. I don’t know many girls who would have the balls to come to a fancy dress party dressed as Rik Waller. Especially sober and pregnant ones!’

‘At least mine’s fancy dress, you wear your jeans that high all the time.’

‘Cheeky…!’ Jim pulls them higher. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I like them like this. They show off my manly bulge.’

Jim jumps down from the worktop, shouts out in pain (the fact it hasn’t got a whacking great plaster on it means Jim constantly forgets his little toe is broken) and goes to the fridge, pausing to do the chord change of ‘Gold’ with imaginary drum sticks.

‘I’m getting a beer, want anything fatso?’

‘A pint of white wine? Followed by four barrels of lager and forty Marlboro Lights. No, tell you what, I’ll just have a lemonade.’

Jim sticks his head around the fridge door.

‘Wise decision,’ he says, looking me up and down. ‘I’d say you’re already piling on the baby weight.’

I’m suddenly aware of being stone cold sober. I’d like to talk to Gina, but she’s doing sambucas with Vicky, Claudia from uni and a couple of other people I don’t really know. She’s come as the ginger one from Girls Aloud and is wearing MY BLOODY SEQUINNED DRESS!

OK, so I can’t wear it – I have to wear a bra with everything now my boobs have ballooned to twice their former size – but considering we’ve barely even had a conversation in the past month, I think it’s a bit much. Things were getting mildly better, until last week, when I had to tell her I couldn’t go to New York.

Gina had just come off the phone from an hour’s conversation
with some bloke she pulled on the tube when I broached the subject.

‘Right, so you’re not coming?’ she snapped, standing against the radiator in our hall, arms folded.

I forgot how scary she is when’s she’s pissed off. Her nostrils flare and she stares at you like you’re the most useless, pile of crap in the world.

‘I’m sorry, I just really don’t think it’s a good idea,’ I mewed, hating myself for being so meek.

‘I thought it was only when you were fit to drop that you couldn’t fly. When you couldn’t like, fit into the seat you were so fat?’

(Gina Marshall at her sensitive best…)

‘The doctor says past thirty weeks…’

‘So what’s the problem, you’re only about ten.’

‘Actually I’m thirteen weeks,’ I said, ‘but it’s not really that. It wouldn’t be much fun for me for a start, would it, let’s be honest, not being able to drink? And anyway, I couldn’t relax, there’s too much stuff going on in my head.’

Gina gave me a look as if to say told you so then stropped off to her bedroom to have another fag. I know what she was thinking – that I’m regretting keeping it – but nothing could be further than the truth. After seeing the scan, the reality if it all, I am happy to be pregnant. I just wish things weren’t so messy.

Jim puts a glass of lemonade, complete with ice and lemon down next to me, plus a vodka and tonic for Vicky.

‘Here you go. Go steady on that,’ he says. ‘I don’t want that baby being a lush like its mum.’

He limps off, tries to dance with a girl in a T-shirt that says ‘Louis Walsh is always right’ and I know, I just know that his perpetual good mood is due to one thing: the little fuzzy picture, folded up and slipped inside his wallet. Concrete evidence that this is really happening.

Oh maybe we should just get together, do what you do when you get pregnant, do the happy ending thing – even if we have to compromise, it would make life so much easier.

The music throbs, disco lights swirl and hug the walls, as blinding and distracting as my thoughts: I’m having Jim’s baby, but I’m falling in love with someone else. It’s craziness when I say it like that. Should I even be letting myself? Can I even
stop
myself? I don’t know anything anymore.

‘God, I’m shit-faced.’ Something matted and streaked with red lands on my lap. Vicky’s head. ‘I’ve just double-dropped two sambucas.’

‘Where’s Rich?’ I say, patting her head. ‘I haven’t seen him all evening.’

‘God knows, you know what he’s like.’ Vicky adjusts her Sharon wig in the reflection of the kitchen window. ‘He’s probably in his element, doing his Rolf Harris impression somewhere. Telling his story about the time the parrot said “fuck you” during a children’s presentation – God, if I’ve heard that once.’

‘Yeah but it is a funny story.’

‘Not after the millionth time, it’s not.’

From someone else, this comment could sound like a dig, but I never worry about Vicky and Rich. Ever since the day they met at the Musical Theatre Society auditions for
Oliver Twist
during the first year it’s been Vicky and Rich, Rich and Vicky, and nobody can imagine it ever being any other way. The story comes round at many a drunken night in the pub: Rich had never sung or acted in his life, he only went to the audition for
Oliver Twist
because he knew Vicky was auditioning and he fancied her something chronic (it was the heaving bosoms in a wench dress). But then she got the part of Nancy and he got the part of Fagin and that’s it, the rest is history. The fact they did a specially choreographed rendition of ‘I Had the Time Of My Life’ at their wedding complete
with the lift at the end (only made possible by both of them eating nothing but turkey steaks for six months) says it all. Vicky had found her Patrick. Her Pa Larkin. He was her bon-vivant, she was his salt-of-the-earth.

‘Er…how’s Gina?’ I enquire, trying to sound nonchalant. She’s said a sullen ‘hi’ to me this evening and that’s about it.

‘On form,’ says Vicks, ‘Haven’t you seen her all night? Hey,’ she gets a sudden glint in her eye, ‘and she’s got sambuca. Come with me, let’s do another shot.’

‘No!’ I protest, rather over-zealously. ‘I’m drunk enough already, I’ll puke if I do.’

Vicky stops and squints at me, her glittery eyeshadow all over her face.

‘Are you, Tess?’ she says eventually, scrutinizing my face. ‘Because you don’t seem that pissed to me.’

‘Riiiight!’

Suddenly the music goes off. Jim is standing on the coffee table, swaying slightly, beer in hand.

‘As we can’t find Victoria’s betrothed…‘

‘Yeah, actually where is my husband?’ Vicky says, as if she’s only just remembered she’s got one.

‘And he is probably face down in a pint of Guinness, or talking to the dog, or whatever it is Dr Dolittle types do, I have taken it upon myself to take over Peddlar’s annual birthday speech.’

‘Good one Jimmy!’ Gina shouts from the sidelines. (I don’t know what she’s on about, she’s not spoken to him for a month.)

‘Go Ashy!’ I join in, hoping I might get some camaraderie going with Gina. She doesn’t even look at me.

‘Now, as we all know this has been a big year in the Moon household. Vicks has finally started drinking properly again, thank God, after what can only be described as a very selfish
decision, on her part, to abandon partying properly with her shambolic mates for over a year to bring up her son…’

I throw Jim an amused ‘that’s rich!’ look. He realizes what he’s said and instinctively covers his mouth.

‘Plus.’ He takes a swig of beer, tries to smooth it over. ‘As everyone knows, she’s been Super Mum, working really hard on her osteopathy course, only to pass with flying colours…’

A huge crash as someone literally falls in through the kitchen back door.

‘I’m here! Everyone calm down, I can take over now…!’

A sea of people parts as Richard swerves towards the coffee table.

‘Rich! My God!’ Vicky gasps. ‘How pissed
are
you?’

Rich is very pissed. Wasted actually. In fact in all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him in such a state. His cheeks look like Noddy’s, his Gareth Gates, spiky hair is flattened to his head. And his little belly…‘Baby, put your gut away!’ says Vicky, tugging at his top…is sticking out of his ‘I love my mam’ T-shirt.

But Richard couldn’t care less because this is his moment, this is his world, his and Vicky’s world. This is his family home, the wife he loves, his annual speech.

‘F f f f f f first of all…’

Everyone gets the Gareth Gates joke. He’s got his audience captivated already.

‘I just wanna say thank you to my beaudiful Sharon…’

Someone guffaws from the sidelines.

‘For putting up with me for the past year.’

And on he goes. Shit-faced but seamless. He tells everyone, what a star his wife is, how she put him back together after his dad died, how she is a wonderful mother, has the ‘best chest in Beckenham’, could join a circus she’s so good at juggling. How she makes him a happy man.

A speech like this – just for a birthday – could come across as twee, but somehow, Vicky and Richard get away with it. Rich jokes it’s to make-up ‘for all the grief he gives her the rest of the year’. Vicky jokes it’s the only reason she stays married to him.

‘Richard Moon, you drunkard!’ Vicky gives her husband a smacker on the lips as he staggers down, eventually, from his podium. ‘Where the hell have you been, I haven’t seen you all night.’

There’s three cheers for Vicky’s birthday and then she picks up her vodka and lemonade.

Oh. No. That’ll be my lemonade.

‘Uurgh what’s this?’ she turns to Jim. I see Jim panic and turn to me. ‘This hasn’t got vodka in…’ she looks at me. ‘It’s just lemonade.’