One Thing Led to Another (13 page)

And that’s it. That’s how it happens: the wrong version of my story around the office as fast and seamless as a Mexican wave. Thanks to Anne-Marie Wright and the very wrong end of the stick.

A gossipy mumble dominoes. A couple of people offer a tentative ‘Congratula…’ then sort of tail off and look at each other, not sure if Congratulations are actually in order. Someone’s mobile rings, they turn it off. Everyone is staring at me. This is a nightmare.

Say something, say something now whilst the wrong information is only just out there! But I can’t, not with all these people looking at me. Not when it’s an issue as huge as the paternity of the baby!! So I just stand there, like a total lemon. An audience with Tess Jarvis – except she’s just frozen on stage.

I try to swallow but it seems that a coffin is lodged in my throat. I feel like I’m in a Richard Curtis film (
Nightmare, Actually
) but there’s no Hugh Grant – the only bumbling fool around here being me, so this must be very much real life.

Jocelyn looks at me with a motherly gaze. Right now, I could just run into those huge fleshy arms.

‘Well,’ she says, tipping her head to one side. ‘That is fintistic news. But how do you feel about it, sweetheart?’ And I realize this is the first time I’ve been asked this. ‘Are we allowed to give you a cuddle? Or do you still need time?’

The fact she actually registers that I might not feel OK about it, makes me realize what I’ve always suspected about Jocelyn – she’s not as stupid as she looks.

‘It’s a bit of a shock.’ The moment’s gone now, my window for explanation over. ‘But yes, I’m OK about it. I think. I’m getting used to it anyway!’ I smile at everyone nervously, the room spins and distorts.

As if this is the sign they were waiting for, the whole office (except Barry who looks like he’s about to be sick he’s so shocked and Judith, who, after displaying the first hint of emotion of her entire life, is probably having to have a lie down) piles onto my desk, hugging me and commenting that yes, of course, come to think of it, they’d guessed I was pregnant ages ago!! They thought I was getting a bit podgy around the middle but assumed it was just the wheels of camembert I must be consuming with my French lover every night.

‘Tess Jarvis?’

A courier – his motorbike helmet in one arm, an enormous bunch of flowers in the other – is suddenly in our office, saying my name.

‘Oh. Mon. Dieu.’ Anne-Marie looks like she might start frothing at the mouth. ‘Only a Frenchman…you lucky, fucking bitch.’

‘I wouldn’t get too excited, they’re probably from a PR knowing my luck,’ I say, thinking they’re not, I just know it. They’re too tasteful for that.

I take the flowers (peonies and roses in deep pinks and
lilacs all wrapped up in ice-cream coloured tissue paper) and sign for them, my hands trembling.

‘They’re no freebie,’ says Anne-Marie, hands on hips. ‘And anyway. It’s not Valentine’s Day? Read the card.’

‘What? Now?’ I sound suspiciously alarmed.

‘Yes now.’ She presses her hands together. ‘
Please!
Obviously we’re living vicariously through you since all our own lives are a disaster in the romance stakes…’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Brian mumbles from behind his computer screen.

I open the little white envelope with my thumb and slip out the silver card.

‘What’s it say, what’s it say?!!’ Jocelyn claps her hands excitedly and tries to peer over my shoulder. I gently push her back.

If it weren’t for these rather unfortunate circumstances, I would probably be screaming with joy, then straight on the phone to Vicky by now but instead I just stand there, my hands trembling as I read.

‘You looked stunning on Friday and I wanted you, every curve, crevasse and fucking sexy inch of you. (P.S. is it just me or are your puppies twice their normal size?)’

‘So, come on, I can’t bear the suspense!’ gushes Jocelyn. ‘You’re smiling.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yeah! Just a bit!!’

I look up, the entire office is looking at me wide-eyed with expectancy, I take a deep breath.

‘It says best of luck telling everybody. I’ll be thinking of you, Love Laurence.’

There’s a blanket, lack-lustre ‘aagh’. I sit down at my desk. I want to go home.

Jim calls just as I am about to get on the 76 bus home.
Despite my best efforts to stop him he’s been having ‘words’ with Gina all day.

‘You shouldn’t have said anything. I can fight my own battles you know.’

I say this partly because it’s true but also because I feel so guilty that whilst Jim’s been sticking up for me all day, I’ve been telling my work mates that our baby’s not his. It just beggars belief.

‘Yeah well, she pisses me off.’ Jim rarely sounds pissed off. ‘She’s so fucking self-absorbed sometimes, I just wanted to give her a piece of my mind.’

‘And did it go down well?’

‘Not really, you know what she’s like.’

‘So what did she say?’

‘That it’s her house too, bla-di-bla and that we can’t drop a bombshell like that and expect it to be just “all OK”.’

The 76 approaches but I wave it on, not knowing what to do with myself. I’m three months pregnant and I don’t even like being in my own house. Surely pregnancy’s a time for nesting? Surely it’s not meant to be like this?

‘This is ridiculous,’ I say, and as soon as I have, it makes perfect sense. ‘I need to move out.’

I hear Jim sigh, and he doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he says,

‘I don’t see you have a choice. Especially if she’s going to carry on like this. Come over here tonight, we can flat-hunt online.’

Jim pushes his glasses further up his nose and leans right in towards the screen.

‘Right, what about this one. Needs some decorative attention but with room to expand and close to all the amenities of Camberwell Green, it’s a perfect first time buy.’

‘Great. How much is it?’ I say.

‘£210,000. But I reckon we could get knock them down.’

‘Still too much. I still can’t afford it. I’m going to end up in a single-mothers’ hostel! My baby will be wearing knitted hand-outs from old ladies. Oh God I can’t bear it!’

‘Shut up woman, no you’re not,’ says Jim, but I can tell by the way he rubs his eyes wearily that he’s getting as sick of this as I am.

The fact is, I can’t afford anything. In fact, it’s a mystery how anyone who earns under £50,000 can ever buy a flat.

‘You know there is another option we haven’t discussed yet,’ says Jim.

‘And that is…?’ I look at him blankly.

‘Well, you could always move in here, live rent free and save up for a deposit, move out when the baby’s a few months old?’

Part of me wants to say yes, now, let’s just move in now! (At least I could go home at night without risking finding him snorting class As off the kitchen table.) But the other part is really scared. It would feel like being ‘happy couples’; it might throw our less-than-ideal situation into sharper relief.

‘That’s so kind of you Jim, it really is, but I don’t know, I just don’t know.’

‘It’s OK,’ says Jim. ‘I know it might be a bit weird. But the offer’s there, so if you change your mind, just let me know. It would be separate rooms of course, no hanky panky.’

‘You’re dead right there,’ I say, ‘look where that got us last time.’

‘Billy was nine days old when Rob just walked out and boarded a plane for Australia. He said he loved us, but knew immediately he wasn’t up to the job (right, and I knew I was!?) so we’d be better off without him. That was two years ago, now he thinks he can just waltz back into our lives as easy as that. But we’ve coped this long so we can carry on coping. He’s got a lot of making up to do.’

Maria, 30, Cirencester

Vicky’s kitchen smells of coconut and fish sauce. I sit at the pine kitchen table and inhale the aroma, hungrily.

‘Come over on Saturday,’ she’d said on my mobile last Wednesday as I was walking home from having my bikini line waxed. (Yet another expensive tactic aimed at avoiding my monosyllabic housemate who is intent on pulling the biggest strop Britain has ever seen.) ‘It’ll probably be a madhouse but I can cook lunch and we can have a proper chat.’

I knew that ‘proper chat’ probably meant an interrogation about my and Jim’s forthcoming ‘wedding’ but to be honest, I didn’t care. Even if Dylan had a small army of similarly
bombastic mates over and the ceiling had fallen down, it would be more relaxing than being at home.

It feels like a barbershop quartet has taken residence in my brain lately. The lead: that hideous day at work and the paternity mix up, is dominating, loud as a drum. Cutting through the notes of that main melody to my life is Gina’s ongoing frostiness and Jim’s offer of moving in with him, and down below, throbbing intermittently, are three things: the fact I haven’t told Vicky about Laurence, the fact I haven’t told Laurence about the pregnancy, and the fact I lied to Jim that I had.

If anyone needed to get away for the day, it’s me.

Vicky clatters down the stairs where she’s been excitedly rummaging for pregnancy paraphernalia.

‘Here we go, I knew I had it somewhere.’ She hands me a book called
My Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy
and goes back to the pan bubbling on the hob.

‘It’s quite funny, down-to-earth, possibly a bit scare mongery.’

‘What do you mean a bit scare mongery?’ I start flicking through it.

‘Well, it’s full of all the grim reality of pregnancy, you know, turning into a psycho.’

‘Turning?’

‘Sprouting hair all over your face, incontinence…’

‘What? Urrgh!’

‘Yeah, exactly. If the beautiful miracle of giving life is what you’re after, you won’t find it in there.’

I smile to myself. Whereas Vicky might once have bought into the sentimentality of motherhood, now she actually is one she takes a far more cynical line.

I put the book down and walk over to nosy at the soup she’s cooking. Vicky would kick ass on
Ready Steady Cook.
She can whip up a gourmet dinner from a pepper and an old
potato – a skill that comes from having to be mum for most of her teenage years. She doesn’t talk about it that much, but I know it was really tough for Vicky. After her mum ran off with the twenty-five-year-old Bolivian lifeguard (quite hard to find in Huddersfield, you’d imagine, but somehow she managed it) her dad became depressed and started helping himself to the optics behind the bar every night. Immediately Vicky went from big sister to surrogate mum to Tom, who was seven, and Steven, nine. When Vicky’s mum died – in an unbelievably cruel twist of fate – two months later and only seven weeks after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Vicky’s dad lost it completely. One evening Vicky came home from school choir practice to find the police at her house. Her dad had driven to Tesco’s where he’d nicked three Tesco’s finest ready meals. He’d been arrested for shop-lifting, drink driving and leaving minors unattended. Not bad for a halfhour outing. The boys were safe, thank God, happily munching through a dinner of Wagon Wheels, but Vicky told me, ‘That day, I knew that was it, dad had lost it and it was up to me to look after my brothers.’ That’s the day Vicky lost her own childhood, too, I guess; only finding sanctuary in the half hour before she fell asleep at night, where she’d listen to the soundtrack to
Dirty Dancing
and fantasize about Patrick Swayze rescuing her.

I put my arm around my best friend and dip my finger in the soup. ‘Oi!’ She smacks my hand. ‘Get your mucky mitts out.’

‘Why do I need
My Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy
when I’ve got you, eh? I’m sure you’re more than qualified to tell me the truth about pregnancy madness, incontinence – sorry but…?’

‘Do your pelvic floor exercises religiously. Someone I know at work was doubly incontinent for months afterwards.’

‘Oh God!’

Vicks laughs. ‘Well you did ask!’

Vicky pours Thai chicken soup into two matching blue-rimmed bowls. Steam clouds the patio doors that lead to the garden but I can still see Rich and Dylan kicking a football under the willow tree that droops, sleepy in the sun.

Again, how did Vicky’s life get like this and mine like mine? I’m not saying one is more or less desirable than the other, it’s just, getting pregnant by my best friend and living in what feels like a ravers’ commune is not what I had imagined. This is what I imagined: nice, comfortable house in suburbs, husband playing with child in the garden at the weekend, muddy wellies by the door, Ikea pine kitchen and terracotta tiles, joint mortgage, joint bills. Much like my own parents I suppose.

‘Don’t you two ever open your bills?’ I say, clocking a tower of unopened letters beside me.

‘Don’t get me started.’ Vicky pushes the pile aside. ‘That’s Richard’s job. Which he’d have time to do if he wasn’t so busy messing around on Facebook like he’s fifteen and pretending to write his screenplay.’

Rich has been writing a romantic comedy about a zoologist (funnily enough) since before Dylan was born but so far it doesn’t seem to have quite received the international critical acclaim he had hoped.

There’s the bang of the back door.

‘Talk of the devil,’ murmurs Vicky.

‘The Gerrrr…and Old Duke of York he had ten thousand men…!! He marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again!!’

Richard, bent at the waist and with a giggling Dylan on his shoulders ploughs through the kitchen door.

‘Hey, it’s Jarvis the Hack!’ (This is Richard’s joke. It sounds a
bit
like Jabba the Hut) ‘You didn’t tell me Tess was coming over.’

‘Yeah I did.’ Vicky slurps her soup. ‘You just didn’t take it in.’

Richard tips forward so that his chubby-legged son slides off his neck then toddles over to his mum who hauls him up on her lap.

‘So.’ Rich pulls down his Hawaiian shirt over his belly (Rich gets all his clothes from a shop called ‘Life’s a Beach’ which says it all really) and gives me a peck on the cheek. ‘How’s junior? Cookin’ nicely?’

‘Yeah, look I’m massive already!’

‘Ooh.’ Richard sizes me up…‘You’ve got a way to go yet. Vicks was the size of a bus, weren’t you love?’

‘Richard!’ I gasp.

‘So smooth isn’t he?’ says Vicky. ‘So complimentary.’

‘So how’s the screenplay coming along?’ I ask, changing the subject.

‘Yeah fantastic, really shaping up. I reckon I’ll have a draft good enough to send to agents by the end of the month.’

‘Wow.’

‘Talking of which…er…Vicks?’

‘Yes, my darling husband.’

I smile and make funny faces at Dylan who’s busy climbing all over his mum.

‘Can I ? You know…’ He gestures upstairs.

‘Rich! It’s lunchtime. I’ve made you soup and now you’re just going to piss off upstairs?’

‘Please, seriously, I’ve only got one scene to perfect and then…’

‘And then we’re going to be multi-millionaires when your sitcom becomes a hit and wins a BAFTA. Meanwhile I’ve divorced you and the bailiffs have taken everything we own?’ Vicky flutters her eyelashes sarcastically at her husband. I smirk into my soup.

‘I knew you had vision.’ Rich grabs hold of his wife’s face
and kisses her squashed, reluctant cheek. ‘Just a couple of hours, I promise, and then I’ll do the washing up.’

Rich skids towards the kitchen door but Vicky stops him in his tracks.

‘I think you’re forgetting something.’ She holds Dylan out for him to take. ‘It’s time for his kip, put him down will you, and change his nappy beforehand.’ She takes the pile of unopened letters from the kitchen table. ‘And sort these out Rich, for God’s sake. I already did the other pile. How hard can it be?’

‘Phew, sorry about that,’ says Vicky, once Richard and Dylan have disappeared upstairs.

‘Don’t mind me,’ I say. I’m so used to Rich and Vicky’s hilarious little domestics and anyway, I’ve always thought there was something sinister about people who never argue in public.

‘So,’ says Vicky tucking into her soup. ‘Are you going to take the book?’

‘I’ve got one a bit like it thanks, well, it’s more women’s real-life stories than a blow-by-blow account of pregnancy, but thanks. Anyway…’ I stir my soup. ‘It’s not really the physical stuff that’s worrying me, it’s more…’

‘More what?’ Vicky puts down her spoon.

‘How I
feel
about being pregnant. I mean take Julia – you know Julia? The one I did my NCTJ with?’

‘The one with legs up to her neck?’

‘Yeah, her. Well I went to her leaving lunch last week – she’s leaving to go on maternity leave – and she was just
so
happy,
so
excited it’s awful, but I couldn’t relate to it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, at one point, one of the girls she works with asked her how it feels to be pregnant and do you know what she said?’

‘A religious experience?’

‘No, worse. She said she it was like having a birthday every day, she couldn’t wait to open the present.’

A round ha! explodes from Vicky’s lips.

‘Is that how I’m meant to feel?’ I ask.

‘No!’

‘Because I don’t. I feel terrified most of the time.’

‘That’s far more normal Tess, believe me.’

‘How did you feel when you were pregnant with Dylan
?
’ As I say this I am horrified to realize that I don’t think I ever once asked her, not properly.

‘I was happy to have actually been able to get pregnant but apart from that, I was mainly bricking it.’

Vicky only ever admits emotional weakness in retrospect. It’s part of this sense of duty she has that somehow she has to keep everything, and everyone together. ‘We didn’t have much money – I was still studying for my osteopathy course and so we only had Rich’s crap wage and there was the “my mum” factor.’

‘Your mum factor?’

‘Well, let’s face it, she wasn’t ever much cop, was she? I loved her – she was my mother – but she was never much of a mum.’ I’ve never heard Vicky say this. ‘She left her husband and three kids for a man practically half her age for God’s sake! She left me, when I was about to do my GCSEs. Part of me was worried…’

‘Vicks, as if, you’re a brilliant mum.’

‘Whatever.’ Vicky’s never been much good at taking compliments. ‘But it was there in the back of my mind, you know, what if I’m just not maternal. What if I turn out like my own mother. What if I turn out like my father for that matter, he was hardly a tower of strength in the face of everything.’

In that moment, I think I finally realize what Vicky had to go through whilst I was swanning around Morecambe having a real childhood. I suddenly want to hug her with pride.

‘Anyway,’ she sighs, ‘enough about me, what about you?
I know you’re intent on fighting against what is so ridiculously obvious and yes, it must feel strange, you and Jim not having been an “item” before you got pregnant. But be patient, honestly, you two are so meant to be.’

‘He asked me to move in with him.’ As soon as I see the expression of pure joy on Vicky’s face, I regret opening my mouth.

‘I can’t believe you’ve kept that to yourself for two whole hours!’

‘I haven’t said yes.’

‘
Tess!
’ She covers her face and groans.

‘No, listen, seriously, you don’t get it. It’s such a kind offer and obviously things being the way they are with Gina, I may be forced to take him up on it, but I just feel with us not being together it would be like playing happy couples.’

‘But he
wants
you to be a happy couple. This is his way, it’s a sign – don’t you realize – of saying, “let’s make a go of it”.’

‘It’s not.’

‘Aw!’ Vicky slaps the table. ‘He adores you! you adore him. What
is
it with you two?’ She curls her fingers in frustration. ‘I want to bang your little heads together.’

‘He told me he didn’t want to be with me.’

‘When!?’ Vicky’s voice goes up five octaves.

‘Norfolk, on the camping trip.’

‘Right…But, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was so embarrassed, oh God, Vicky, I made such a tit of myself.’

It’s all coming out now.

‘You know when we came home from the pub on the Saturday night? Well, me being me – decided fuck it, I’ll just go for it. We’d been doing this ridiculous drunkenly-going-back-to-each-other’s houses thing for months by then…’

‘Tell me about it.’ Vicky rolls her eyes.

‘And I thought, maybe I have real feelings for Jim, maybe I actually love him and we have something worth fighting for…’

‘Er…yep…’

‘And. So. I told him.’

Vicky’s jaw drops.

‘I got in the tent with him and I just said let’s try and make a go of it. Let’s just go out with each other.’

‘And? What did he say?’ Vicky’s got her hands over her mouth in anticipation now.

‘No, basically. He said I was drunk and that I should be glad of what we did have – that we were soul-mates.’

Vicky shakes her head. ‘Jim, you
moron
!’

‘I know. What a dickhead. So basically, I asked him out and the man rejected me. Did I feel like the school minger or what?’

Vicky folds her arms and shakes her head.

‘Don’t get it,’ she says. ‘I really, really don’t.’

‘Well, it’s true. And on the taxi home from your party, he said it again. When we’d – well you, mainly – had told everyone I was up the duff and everyone was asking, were we now going to get together, I said to him, maybe we should. But he said he didn’t think it was wise to make a “relationship of circumstance” and I have to say, I agree. So that’s that. It’s not going to happen. Which is why I feel extra weird about being pregnant.’