One Thing Led to Another (18 page)

At least Jim and I know what we’ve come for. We head straight for Children’s Ikea to look at the cots.

‘This is nice, I like this one a lot.’

Jim runs a hand down a plain, white, wooden crib and leans over it as if to test that it’s sturdy.

‘It’s classic, well made, what do you think?’

‘Yeah I like it,’ I’m speaking but my brain’s not engaged. I’m holding my ringing phone in my hand, deciding what to do.

‘Why don’t you take that call?’ Jim says eventually, a bite of annoyance in his voice. I look at him, I look at the phone and the silver ‘Laurence’ flashing up on a blue background. ‘I am,’ I say, it comes out all defensive. ‘I was just about to. Find out how much the cot costs.’

I walk as casually as I can away from where Jim’s standing, my heart racing. I think I can feel his eyes follow me but when I look again, he’s engrossed in a conversation with a sales assistant.

‘Hello?’

‘Tess, it’s me.’ I hear Laurence drag deeply on a cigarette. ‘So, I’ve done the thinking bit.’

‘Ooh, dangerous.’ I’m pretending to be all light-hearted but inside I’m in knots with the suspense. ‘And?’

‘And, I reckon we should give this a go.’

‘What, really?!’ It comes out louder than planned. I look around at Jim, he smiles, a small, tight smile, I smile back. ‘Are you sure? I mean, it’s a lot to get your head around…’

‘Yeah I know.’ He sounds strangely calm. He takes another drag of the cigarette. ‘But I’ve changed, Tess. I’ve grown up. And I’m ready for this. I mean, I’m under no illusions it’ll be easy. I know fuck all about babies and kids, let me just tell you that now.’

‘That’s not particularly encouraging, Laurence, but at least you’re honest.’

I turn to my right, Jim’s standing there now, holding up what looks like cot bedding, gesturing he’s going to the till.

‘I am, that’s the point. I’m feeling more honest than I’ve ever been with myself. At the end of the day, Tess, it’s you I want. And if you come with child, then well, that’s the way it’s got to be.’

‘But what about Chloe?’ I’m aware of a child with a nosebleed opposite me but I’m too stunned and glued to the spot to go and help.

‘What?’

‘Chloe, you know, your girlfriend?’

‘Done.’

‘Done?’

‘I finished it.’

‘No way! How did she take it?’

‘Badly. She was gutted, went a bit bonkers, you know how girls do, but to be honest, she knew it was coming. It’s been on the cards for months.’

‘Right, so.’

‘So I want to take you out for dinner.’

I can see Jim out of the corner of my eye, I smile at him but he looks away.

‘Okay. Well I’m not going to argue with that. When?’

‘I’ll call you. I need to sort something out – I have plans young lady – but soon, OK? Leave it with me.’

I hang up, my head reeling, and walk over to Jim to join him in the queue.

‘Who was that?’ he says.

‘Just Laurence, saying hi. Just finishing a conversation we started yesterday,’ I say, as lightly as I can.

‘God, he’s keen. Lunch yesterday, phone calls today…Are you sure he’s not after getting back with you? I mean he did ask you on a date before he knew you were pregnant.’

Tell him now, I think. Just tell him what’s the big deal, anyway? We’re just friends after all, but somehow him stood there, a patchwork baby blanket in his arms, it just seems so wrong, so I say…

‘Don’t be ridiculous. He knows I’m pregnant with your baby. And besides, dating anyone whilst pregnant, that’s just
weird.
’

‘I’ve always wanted a baby more than I wanted the big white wedding. Never in a million years did I imagine I’d be impregnated, my legs in stirrups on a doctor’s couch, with the sperm of a total stranger.’

Trish, 42, Birmingham

A few days later the weather broke and so did my good mood. The clouds sagged like big fat udders, then it rained so hard that the lake in Dulwich Park looked like an out of order television. Laurence still hadn’t called but I wasn’t unduly concerned since he’d said to leave it in his own capable hands and we’d not made any firm plans. No, what had suddenly hit me now was that even if it did work out with Laurence it wouldn’t be the end of this messy period. The fact I’m going ahead with this pregnancy means my whole life will be messy, period.

It was Julia’s baby shower that did it. Anne-Marie told me to expect games like ‘Guess What’s In The Nappy’ where the host would smear different baby foods in Pampers and we’d have to be blindfolded and guess what it was. Not this one. Oh no. I doubt even the babies themselves had dirty nappies:
there were vintage tea cups filled with big pink blooms (Julia knows she’s having a girl) and ornate cake stands with immaculately-iced cup cakes. Everybody brought presents such as Elemis pregnancy massages and Jo Malone candles. I bought a cow that mooed when you pressed its middle.

If Julia wasn’t such a lovely person you could really hate her. She’s five feet ten with never ending legs that she always shows off in 60s mini dresses (even at nine months pregnant) bee stung lips and auburn hair that she wears effortlessly tousled on top of her head. Her photographer husband Fraser’s beautiful too in a period drama kind of a way, brooding brown eyes and expensively cut hair that’s stylishly unkempt – as distinct from Jim’s whose fuzzy look is definitely not deliberate. I bet they’ll have gorgeous kids who will model for Boden and be called things like Felix and Manon. And they’re so in love, it’s sickening. Even after eighteen years together they still speak to each other as if they are in the honeymoon period. Fraser was at the baby shower of course, he spent the afternoon charming the pregnant ladies and capturing the occasion on camera, leaping about in his nerdchic cardigan.

Since I told her about the baby, Julia’s been so cool, so understated about my situation. Like most married people she said, ‘I think that sounds like the perfect set up! I’d love to have somewhere to go when Fraser’s annoying me!’ I had coffee with Rachel and Tilly the other morning and Rachel said the same thing, but I know neither of them means it, they’re just trying to make me feel better. And I still cried all the way home from the baby shower. All those women had their future mapped out, they know what they’re doing. They’re not flailing around like Jim and I, going against the grain and pretending that it doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. I really wish it didn’t, but it does. It matters that I’m not having my first baby with someone who’s
in love with me. It matters that my life will be for ever complicated and never will I be able to have a three day love-in with Laurence or any other future boyfriend because I will have a baby permanently suckling at my nipple. And perhaps most importantly, it matters that this baby, who didn’t ask to be born, will have a mother who, at almost thirty, cannot drive herself home, does not carry condoms and has a very warped idea of ‘friends’.

It is in this unhelpful mood that on the Thursday after the baby shower I turn up to see Dr Cork for my sixteen-week scan. She’s deep into some classical music when I walk in, sitting at her huge mahogany desk, in the middle of writing a prescription. ‘Isn’t this just wonderful?’ she muses, eyes closed, pretend-conducting with one, sinewy arm. ‘It’s Vaughan Williams “The Lark Ascending”: makes me feel happy to be alive!’ I look at her glumly.

‘Now.’ She eyes me up and then my midriff, myopically. ‘Are we sixteen weeks yet?’

‘Yep,’ I say, as cheerfully as I can muster. Dr Cork does not seem the type to suffer mopers readily.

‘This pregnancy is going along like a train, is it not?’ she enthuses, marching over to the stereo – also housed in more imposing heavy furniture – and switching off the music (Dr Cork is a big fan of the inverted question) ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’ (Not to mention the odd religious declaration.)

‘Now, pop yourself on that bed and pull your top up for me. Let’s see how strong this little one’s ticker is.’

I climb up onto the bed. Outside it’s drizzling. I can see it land in smears on the window pane then dribble downwards miserably like custard pies. I pull my top up and roll my knickers down to my hips. Dr Cork presses the ultrasound on my belly and smiles at me. I have always taken a kind of twisted delight in the fact she has a thirty-a-day-Benson-and-Hedges smile and she’s a doctor, nobody’s perfect after all. She
slides the ultrasound around me this way and that and smiles at me again. And then we wait. Five seconds. Seven seconds. It’s got to be more than ten seconds now. She re-positions it and clears her throat and smiles at me again. She looks worried, should I be worried? Should we have heard something by now? What if we never hear anything, would that be the end of the world? Perhaps I’m not meant to be a mum, not this time. Perhaps I will walk out of here and never have this baby, start over with Laurence and have a new baby, with none of these complications. It occurs to me that I am maybe not as horrified by this possibility as I should be. Or perhaps this is just my mind playing tricks on me, throwing dark thoughts in there just to freak me out. This particular dark thought thuds away somewhere in the recesses of my mind. Thud, thud, thud. Then I realize that this thud is not the thud of my dark thought at all, but of my baby’s heart, clear and regular as a metronome. It fills me with relief, a sudden, delicious relief that almost makes me laugh out loud, ‘There it is! I heard it!’ But there it is again, along with the wild joy, that faint but definite tinge of anxiety. This baby’s coming, like it or not.

I’m sitting in front of Dr Cork now, she’s scribbling notes, intermittently looking at me from beneath her frizzy, black fringe.

‘So,’ she says, ‘baby’s strong as an ox but what about mum? Mm? How’s mum?’

‘Yeah great,’ I shrug, after a pause. It always takes me a moment or two to realize that ‘mum’ means me.

‘And dad? How’s dad feeling about impending fatherhood? Excited?’

‘Oh yeah, he’s
really
excited.’

‘Started painting the nursery yet?’

‘Well, no. Well, basically.’ I take a deep breath. ‘I’m sort of in what would be the nursery so, erm, I’m not sure how we’ll work that one out.’ I laugh, nervously.

Dr Cork crosses her legs and ponders this for a second. The creak of the floorboards in the room above seems suddenly deafening. ‘So you are in what would be the nursery…’ her voice trails off. ‘You mean, you’re
both
in what would be the nursery? So it’s a one bedroom flat, right?’

‘No, it’s got two.’

‘Oh.’ She looks stumped. Dr Cork’s the sort to want to get everything right. ‘So, you’re not in the same bedroom at the moment but…’

‘We’re not together,’ I cut in. I can’t bear to drag this out any longer. ‘We’re not a couple. Basically what happened was, we were friends – friends who occasionally had sex, admittedly, but we were still just good friends.’ Dr Cork straightens up in her chair, suddenly intrigued. ‘Then one night we both got really drunk at Jim’s place – Jim’s the dad by the way – and I never learnt to drive, because my mother refused to get me driving lessons in case I blew up the engine or killed myself by crashing into a lamppost on the first lesson.’ She smiles, amused. ‘And I didn’t want to get a night bus home because there’s always loads of strange characters on the night buses and also I was drunk, I was four-pints drunk
at least.
And one thing led to another and we ended up having unprotected sex, on my most fertile day of the month as luck would have it.’ I raise an eyebrow, sarcastically. ‘I didn’t have a condom which is bad, I know. But neither did Jim, although I’m very careful not to fire the blame. (This is bollocks, I’m always firing the blame.) And I was wearing these stupid frilly tie-at-the-side knickers for the simple reason that they were the first thing I pulled out of my drawer that morning although Jim doesn’t believe that, he thinks I’m a prick tease.’ Dr Cork gives a phlegmy chuckle.

I cannot believe I am telling my doctor this stuff! If she didn’t have a packet of fags and a bottle of Jamesons in her top drawer (oh yes, nothing gets past me) I definitely wouldn’t
be. ‘And so that’s how I got pregnant and come to be having a baby with my friend – who’s not my boyfriend, never has been my boyfriend, and never will be my boyfriend. And the most infuriating thing is it was all so, so
avoidable.
’ To my horror, I start welling up. Dr Cork passes me a tissue with a look on her face that tells me I am definitely not the only hormonal nutter to breakdown in her surgery.

‘So there’s no way getting pregnant could change your feelings about…’

‘No. Everyone says that and before you ask, it was a mutual decision. Not to suddenly become an “item” that is.’

‘OK but you’re living with him, right?’

‘Yes.’ I wipe my face with the tissue, a big clump of mascara comes off. ‘He was kind enough to offer me to live rent free in separate rooms until the baby is born and I’ve saved up for a deposit on a flat.’

‘And then what are you going to do?’ she asks, in that nononsense way that she does.

‘Move out, I guess, into my own flat as near as possible to Jim so we can share the childcare, “co-parent” – I think that’s the modern term,’ I say, all too aware that ‘co-parenting’ does not seem quite so cool in reality.

‘Oh, so he wants to be involved then?’

The very fact she asks this, the possibility that he might
not
want to be fully involved seems bizarre to me. I realize I have not even considered that. Perhaps because Jim has never given me reason to.

‘Oh yeah, Jim wants to be involved alright. He’d start antenatal classes now if he could, buy a pram just to practise with if I let him. He’s more excited about having this baby than me.’

‘So you trust and like this man then, he’s a good friend, not some sort of…’ She leans in and whispers the next bit, ‘fuck buddy?’

I shake my head, embarrassed but it’s only when she says this that I get an inkling as to how the majority of people might see our situation: girl has casual sex with boy, girl gets knocked up, boy runs a mile at the first sign of a bump. But that’s not Jim. We’re not that cliché.

‘No.
No.
’ I lean forward, emphatically. ‘We’re really close. Jim’s a gorgeous person, I think you’d like him. He’s funny and genuine and totally individual. He cries at stuff on the news and he’s great with his family – and that’s saying something because they’re like the Addams Family – and he’s dead sweet with his mum. But he’s tough, too, do you know what I mean?’

‘Mm-mm,’ she nods, smiling.

‘He doesn’t put up with any of my hormonal rubbish anyway and he’s loyal, he’s solid as a rock, is Jim. He’d never let you down.’

Dr Cork sits, hand over mouth, digesting this information for a minute or two. Then she leans forward, splaying her hands on the desk and she says, ‘So, forgive me. Do tell me if I am speaking out of line here but as I understand it, this fella, this Jim –’ she counts each point on a pale, bony finger ‘– he’s loyal, he really wants to be a dad, he’s agreed to let you live in a house rent free whilst you save up for a deposit. He makes you laugh, he’s genuine and to top it all off, it wasn’t just the once you two got it on, was it? I mean you’d been having on/off sex for a while, yes?’

‘Yes,’ I say, meekly.

‘So, do tell me if I’m just being a nosy old Irish pain in the arse,’ she says. She smiles. I smile back and fill up with tears all at the same time. ‘But why aren’t you together again? Because I can tell you, those sorts of men don’t come around very often. Most men in this situation would run a bloody mile and I should know.’ She cups her mouth with her hand as if she’s telling me a secret, saying, ‘You don’t get to look
this haggard if you haven’t had your heart broken a fair few times. Plus,’ she adds, her eyes narrow and glint, ‘I think you love this fella, don’t you?’

I give a short embarrassed laugh. Put like this, she has a great case, it is hard to see why we’re not together. But it’s the last bit that puts a spanner in the works. That’s the broken fuse in this particular circuit.

‘I do love him, we love each other. But we’re not, I’m not “in love with him”,’ I finally manage.

‘Ah,’ she says, with a slow smile. ‘That old chestnut.’

I walk through Camden Passage towards the tube gawping at things I can’t afford. That was a bit heavy for a check up. I certainly didn’t bargain for that when I went in today. But I like Dr Cork, I like her hard-living ways and her tough love approach. She makes me think.

However, I also know I’m right. I do love Jim, but it’s not the sort of love to build for ever on. Love is what happened when I saw Laurence standing across the road from me last week on Regent Street and I felt that thrill take hold like a temporary insanity. Love is what happened when he called, asked me out to dinner and I couldn’t even hear his voice, the rush in my ears was deafening. Love has to be intoxicating, maddening, about I’d-die-for-you passion –
especially
at the beginning – or else we’d all be up the duff by our mates, walking down the aisle with Mr Platonic, surely?

When I finally get to the office at 11 a.m., Jocelyn’s got ‘that look’ on her face.

‘Why have you got that look on your face?’ I ask, hanging up my jacket.

‘What look?’

‘The look that says, “I’ve got something to tell you but you’ll have to pin me down and extract it with pliers before I do”.’

‘Oh well, now that is rude,’ she says, podgy hands on generous hips. ‘I was just happy to see you that’s all.’

Today Jocelyn’s wearing a Pucci-esque print blouse knotted at the front to reveal a doughy, pale midriff and cropped, white trousers with a broderie anglaise trim.