One Thing Led to Another (21 page)

Jim’s moodiness is very off putting, totally foreign to me and I don’t know how to react. But I imagine he is, secretly, upset about Dawn, so I don’t push it, I just keep quiet.

We drive around the car park, packed on a Saturday morning with families pushing trolleys back to their four-wheel drives. We drive right around to the far right hand side, then Jim pulls up into an empty corner and turns off the engine.

‘Right,’ he says, a little more cheerful now. ‘We’re going to master the three point turn.’

We swap places, me trying not to show my nerves at doing something that sounds scarily advanced.

‘OK,’ says Jim. ‘The three point turn is all about getting you out of awkward places, about turning the car in the opposite direction in as few moves as possible.’

‘I.e. three?’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘although there’s no need to be pedantic.’

I resist the urge to rise to this, if anyone’s being pedantic it’s him! Jim explains the process and we attempt the first one but my mind’s all a tizz and I screw it up, stall on the first move.

Jim sighs, wearily.

‘It’s OK, you’re rushing, take your time,’ he says.

I take a deep breath, start again. I put the car into first gear turn to the right. ‘Now what?’ I say.

‘Reverse,’ he says, ‘put it into reverse.’

I try to put it into reverse but the gear slips and the car shrieks in protest.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ says Jim.

‘Trying my best!’ I say. ‘Give me a chance. Jim?’

I look at him but he’s already looking right at me.

‘Yeees?’

‘Do you think we’ll go on family holidays together? I mean, what do you think our kid will do for holidays, us not being together?’

Jim raises an eyebrow as if to say, ‘you never cease to amaze me.’ Then leans back on the head rest, his arms behind his head.

‘Is this to do with that article I was reading?’ he says.‘God, you’re so sensitive aren’t you? You’re always obsessing about something.’

He has a point. Now that my fantasy – as deluded as it was – of Laurence and I working out, perhaps even being a family some day is well and truly off the agenda, my thoughts are focused on Jim, the baby and I, and how we’re going to navigate our increasingly complex landscape.

‘It does at the moment, yes,’ I say, annoyed now. ‘This being quite a big deal, having a child, especially like this. Don’t you think about things like that?’

‘Not when we’re trying to do a driving lesson, no. Now, left arm down, try and do the neatest little curve you can.’

I’m offended by his dismissive attitude but I try to do as I’m told. I rev too much though and my curve is way too wide.

‘Tess! Can you try and concentrate?
Please.
’ He looks out of the window and mutters an expletive.

I take my hands off the steering wheel and glare at him, seething.

‘Well you wouldn’t be a very good driving instructor, would you?’ I say. ‘Totally losing your rag when I’m trying my best.’

Jim gives a frustrated laugh. I crane my neck to look at him but he’s looking out of the window. ‘You are upset about your mum, aren’t you?’ I say. ‘We can do this another time, you know, when you’re in a better mood.’

‘I’m not in a mood!’ He makes me jump, I start back. ‘Just, get on with it, OK. Just do the move?’

‘Yes sir,’ I mutter. ‘Whatever you say.’

I drive forward a bit and put it in reverse again. Jim looks at me, then clears his throat.

‘If you want an answer to that question no, I don’t suppose we would go on holidays, not if you had a boyfriend. I’m not Bruce Willis, you know. Now, left arm down, try again.’

This time I do it right and make a neat little curve, just as he said, so we’re facing the sea of parked cars.

‘What do you mean by that?’ I say, knowing perfectly well what he means. We poured over those pictures in
Vanity Fair
for ages in the office. Bruce Willis, bare-chested, masterfully steering that speed boat whilst his ex-wife, Demi Moore, suns herself, hair blowing in the wind, her arm around Ashton Kutcher, the archetypal blended family on holiday. I remember thinking, how brilliant, how utterly modern. But also how utterly unlikely that that could ever work in real life.

‘You know what I mean,’ says Jim.

‘Yeah, OK, I know what you mean. But it’s not all down to what I do, is it?’ I point out. ‘
You
could get a girlfriend.’

‘I could, you’re right. And I’m sure I will bag a hot, twenty-year-old. But then I wouldn’t expect you to holiday with us.’

‘I’m not suggesting you would!’

‘Good! I’m not suggesting I’d ask you!’

‘Right so, we can safely say our child would never go on holiday with his biological parents then?’

‘I think yes, we can safely say that.’

‘Get on with it then,’ says Jim.

‘With what?’

‘The three point turn, Tess! Of which you’ve done two points so far. Very poorly.’

I look at Jim, his green eyes bright with exasperation, his hair still in stupid peaks, his face baggy with sleep. He’s wearing an enormous hooded top with the name of a hip-hop rapper on it that he’s never even heard of but he got it from a sixth-form sale and therefore assumes it must be cool, a pair of baggy, chav, Adidas tracksuit bottoms and his Reebok Classics. But it’s oddly attractive, worryingly so and for some stupid reason I put my foot on the clutch, put the car into first, and give it far more gas than is strictly necessary.

‘Brake! Tess! Put your foot on the brake!’

I do, just in time. Inches from a smart black Saab. Jim looks at me, stumped, and opens the car door. Then he gets out, closes it behind him and very calmly walks away.

I sit in the car, wiggling my knees, my heart palpitating, my mind racing. What’s wrong with me? My emotions are all over the place. Vicky’s
Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy
warned me I’d lose the plot but I didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly. And completely.

A knock on the window. Jim’s back, carrying drinks from Sainsbury’s Starbucks.

He opens the car and gets in, hands me one hot paper cup
and starts slurping on his own. ‘Finished?’ he says, ‘coz I reckon I am.’

‘Yep.’ I stare straight ahead. ‘I think I’ve got it out of my system now.’

‘I’d travelled from Zimbabwe alone to have my spinal tumour removed. I knew there was a fifty per cent chance I could be paralysed from the waist down. When I woke up, a nurse gently told me I was one of the unlucky ones. In the next breath she told me I was pregnant. I called the baby Kayode – it means “he brings joy”. He is my one and only reason for living.’

Betty, 39, East Finchley

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just my own feelings and expectations (dashed as they are) with regard to Laurence, that I was having to manage. But no, thanks to Anne-Marie and my own cowardice and stupidity, there is also most of my colleagues’.

‘So go on, tell all, do you still have sex when you’re pregnant? Or do you get that –’ Anne-Marie pokes one curled fist with her finger ‘– nudging the head feeling.’

‘Shh! Christ, Anne-Marie.’ Jocelyn looks around to check nobody heard. ‘This is a family restaurant and that is
difinitely
below the belt.’

I give a non-committal laugh and pray they’ll shut up about Laurence. In fact, if I’d known that we’d get onto the subject
of Laurence at all, I might have chosen to go with another group for this morning’s task.

Judith had one of her rants this morning. We were called into her office to be told that none of us had a clue who our readers were and that we were living in La-La land where everyone worked in the media and went to Yo Sushi for lunch. (What planet is she on? I’m lucky if I can afford a Boots own sushi on my measly wage.)

She demanded we get into groups then dispatched us all off to different eateries where we had to have lunch and ‘chat to
Believe It!
readers’ and do a vox pop about whether or not Fern Britton really had deceived her fans by having a gastric band op (most of our readers just wanted to know where they could get a gastric band op themselves). I chose McDonald’s on the South Bank because it was nearer and I could have murdered a filet-o-fish. But now I wish I’d gone with Barry’s group to Nando’s at the Elephant and Castle, at least I wouldn’t have been subjected to this interrogation from Anne-Marie (journalists are always the worst).

Putting aside the minor detail that I am no longer seeing Laurence, let alone that he was ever the father of my child, the longer this farce about the paternity goes on, the guiltier I feel. At first, before I was showing, before I moved in with Jim, before I felt this close to Jim, it was an idiotic blip, something I really believed I could reverse in a second – it would just take a lot of guts and explanation about being put on the spot and the emotional rollercoaster of those first disorientating weeks. Now, however, it’s become like a dark, spectre-like shadow that wakes me in the early hours, tugging at my conscience. Sometimes I can’t get to sleep again till dawn, the shadow taking over my entire bedroom and enveloping me in panic. Despite the fact that neither Anne-Marie nor Jocelyn has met Laurence, in their heads he’s the stuff of dreams. He’s French, he sends me flowers on a whim, he
romances me with spontaneous dinners. And better than all of this, it’s a whirlwind romance, a full-blown love-affair-and-baby, all in a matter of months, what could be more romantic than that? It’s pathetic, I know, but part of me doesn’t want to shatter their dreams. The fact my own are not exactly intact any longer is by the by.

I watch Anne-Marie pick moodily at her fries. She’s wearing the sullen expression of someone who knows they’ve crossed the line but I know she’s still dying for an answer to her question.

‘I take it that question is off limits then?’ she says, after nobody’s said anything for five minutes.

‘Okay,’ I sigh. ‘Yes, course one can still have sex when one is impregnated and no, I have not yet experienced the nudging the head feeling.’

Jocelyn tuts, but she wanted to know the answer just as much as Anne-Marie, I know she did.

‘Well
I
want to know about the romance,’ she says. A wave of nausea engulfs me. ‘I bet he thinks you’re so beaudiful, doesn’t he? So natural, as God intended?’ She closes her eyes, dreamily. ‘A naked pregnant woman is magnificent, I’ve always thought.’

Anne-Marie laughs, a bit of burger bap spraying from her mouth. (She made us promise we’d never tell Vegan Boyfriend. Faced with a Big Mac, her will power was pushed just that bit too far.)

‘I don’t know about that, Joss,’ I say, cringing at the memory of the one and only time Laurence saw me without my clothes on. ‘I don’t look that hot with my clothes off, believe me.’

‘But it all happened so fast, that’s the beauty of this!’ she gushes. ‘Normally, by the time a woman gets pregnant, she’s been in the relationship for years and, you know,’ she screws her nose up, ‘he’s already a bit over her.’

‘Jocelyn!’
Jocelyn stuns me with her lack of sisterhood sometimes.

‘But you, you and Laurence, this all happened in the first flushes of love, a baby born of real passion!’

Oh God, PLEASE shut the fuck up.

‘I bet he’ll be, like, Fit Dad at school,’ says Anne-Marie, picking the gherkin out of her Big Mac.

Why does something tell me Anne-Marie felt like this about all her mates’ dads?

‘So when are we going to meet him, this Laurence?’ says Jocelyn. ‘Yeah, when can we see the fittie in the flesh?’ adds Anne-Marie.

‘Soon,’ I say. ‘Maybe at my leaving do.’

Maybe like, never?

‘Anyone for a hot apple pie?’

The afternoon at work is unbearable. Jocelyn and Anne-Marie just won’t let the Laurence thing lie. What does he looks like? Olive-skinned? Ooh! The baby will tan well. Will he speak French to it? Bi-lingual kids, how exotic! Sonya, our level-headed picture editor who has a child herself, has some more realistic questions, funnily enough. Don’t I worry a new-born will scupper any chance to really get our relationship off the ground (it’s already underground, thanks very much). Have I thought whether this might just be lust rather than love and when the reality of a baby comes along, we’ll suddenly feel in too deep? (He worked that out already.)

Sometimes, being pregnant feels like you’re one of those bags of bird seed that hang from a washing line: everyone can come and have a peck at you, chew you around, spit you out. Don’t they realize my head’s already fit to burst with my own questions and worries and fears without having theirs crashing the party too?

The office finally descends into the 5 o’clock silence, everyone suddenly realizing they’d better do some work. There’s the soft patter of keyboards, like the first fall of rain on a windowpane. A dramatically loud sneeze explodes from Brian Worsnop’s nose. I blow some crumbs from in between my keypads, and idly click on my inbox.

From:
[email protected]

Seeing a client in town later. Fancy meeting me and G in CaH for a half shandy? about 7pm?…x

Thank God for mates.

The Coach and Horses is empty inside, everyone’s outside on the street, drinking in the sun. Gina’s sitting on a stool on the elevated section, Vicky doing some pummelling thing to her back. I stand there, my two bags of shopping pulling on my arms.

‘Hi,’ I say eventually, after nobody notices I’ve arrived.

‘Oh hello,’ says Vicky, as if she was, actually, engrossed in massaging Gina’s vertebrae one by one. Gina’s got a knack for commanding this type of undivided attention.

I put my bags down on the floor with an exaggerated groan and sit down on the stool opposite.

‘Can I have a go after her?’

‘I’m expensive,’ says Vicky. ‘This would set you back forty quid if I was doing it at my practice I’ll have you know.’

I bend down to get a look at Gina who’s got her chin on her chest and occasionally mumbles sounds of appreciation when Vicky gets to a particularly tight knot.

‘That’ll be all the shagging you did in New York then will it, Gine?’ I almost shout, so she can hear over The La’s ‘There She Goes’ bouncing from the jukebox
.

‘Traipsing around every goddamn record shop in
Manhattan with Michelle more like.’ I move a corkscrew of hair that’s dangling in front of her face.

‘I take it the honeymoon’s over already then?’ says Vicky, matter-of-factly.

‘No, we’re still very much in love, thank you. Although
obviously
she could never replace you two,’ says Gina. Then she says, ‘Actually that’s a lie, ha! She’s moving into your room in a few weeks, Tess.’

Vicky pats Gina on the back. ‘That should do you,’ she says, sitting back down to her glass of wine. She’s got her hair up today – she looks lovely with her hair up, like a young Felicity Kendall but a lot less posh.

I order my half shandy from the bar and sit down. The pub smells of dust, of sunshine on velvet. ‘So what’s this business about Laurence?’ says Vicky. It takes me by surprise.

‘What business about Laurence?’

‘About it all being on again. I thought he hadn’t even called.’

Gina grimaces as if to say ‘oops, sorry’ and takes a swig from her bottle of Becks.

‘OK so we did go out. But I didn’t bother telling you because it was a bit of a disaster.’

Gina looks at me as if to say ‘news to me’ which of course it is.

‘Basically, I told him I was pregnant…’

Someone outside drops a glass and smashes it. Everyone cheers. We wait for them to stop.

‘And, surprise, surprise, he didn’t want to know.’

‘He did finish with Chloe, though? Right?’ Vicky says, already indignant on my behalf.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘he did at least have the decency to finish his first relationship before he finished his second. But, to be fair, he didn’t know I was pregnant when he finished with Chloe, he clearly got more than he bargained for.’

‘Right, so, he didn’t actually do a runner the moment you
told him?’ Gina is eager for her friend not to be demonized, for all this not to reflect too badly on her.

‘No, not exactly. He freaked a bit when I told him – as you would, I suppose – then he said he needed time to think. Then he rang me when I was with Jim in Ikea buying cots of all things and said he’d
had
time to think and thought he could handle it. Then we went out for dinner but I got the feeling he really wasn’t into it, then he said he’d call, but he hasn’t. That was two weeks ago. I mean, I don’t really know why I’m so surprised. The man dumped me, by email, for another woman, why the hell would he want to know me now, pregnant for God’s sake!?’

‘Oh, come on!’ says Gina, flopping back into her seat as if I am being completely disingenuous. ‘There’s loads of time yet! He could still call.’

I raise a ‘get real’ eyebrow at her.

‘He ain’t gonna call, Gina, let’s face it. I think after two rejections, I kind of get the message.’

‘Oh mate, I’m sorry,’ says Vicky, doing her best to look genuine. ‘Perhaps it was never meant to be in the first place – he is a Scorpio after all and you’re a Sagittarius, biggest clash ever.’

‘Thanks for trying to make me feel better,’ I smile. ‘But I don’t think astrological clashes are to blame for this one. Let’s face it, he’s always been an arse…’

Gina has to leave early. Gina always has some better invitation up her sleeve. Vicky’s a bit drunk now, she puts her arm around me and gives me a consoling hug.

‘Oh, Tess Jarvis.’ She squeezes me tight. ‘Sorry about Laurence, seriously, I am. I know you know what I think about Laurence, but I also know how much you liked him, so I’m sorry for you.’

‘Honestly, don’t be, I’m just mainly cringing now,’ I say.
‘I cannot believe I almost shagged my ex when I was pregnant with another man’s child!’

‘What? Did you?!’

‘Oh God…’ I wilt inside. ‘I didn’t tell you about that bit did I?’

When Vicky really laughs, she doesn’t just shed a tear or two, her whole face contorts and she makes these gasping sounds like she’s having an asthma attack.

‘Alright,’ I say, after five minutes of this. ‘It’s not
that
funny. Laurence clearly didn’t find it that funny anyway.’

‘God, sorry,’ she says, blowing her nose on a napkin. ‘It’s just, that impression of Sebastian Snail on repeat play does me in. Hey, but look on the bright side.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I say, because I know exactly what’s coming next, ‘at least I didn’t shit myself.’

‘So what about Jim?’ says Vicky when we’ve finally calmed down.

‘Well, I probably won’t tell him that I nearly had sex with Laurence, that might be a bit off.’

Vicky nods, vigorously.

‘But I think I might tell him that I was dating him. We had this house rule you see, that we wouldn’t snog, shag or date other people whilst I was pregnant. But Jim’ll understand. He knows how things don’t always happen in the right order.’

‘Er, I wouldn’t,’ says Vicky.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, put it this way, how would you feel if he suddenly announced he’d been seeing someone, what if he got a girlfriend?’

‘I’d be happy for him.’

My mouth moves but it’s not attached to me.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘You wouldn’t be jealous?’

‘No!’

‘Tess, I don’t believe you. I think you’re in love with Jim.’

‘Victoria!’ I’m almost laughing now. ‘Just stop it will you, just give it up!’

‘Fine,’ she says, raising her hands in defence. ‘But I will just say.’

‘Go on,’ I sigh, ‘what will you just say?’

‘That I’ve been thinking of what you said happened in Norfolk, you know, Jim pushing you away like that. It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘Well it happened, OK? God, don’t make it worse by making me feel like I imagined it!’

‘There’s something I didn’t tell you,’ she says.

‘Oh? Like what?’

‘It’s something Jim told me.’

She sees my eyes light up, I know she does.

‘A couple of months before we went camping, we all went to that restaurant called Ping-Pong, remember – you couldn’t come? Anyway, we all got really pissed and ended up in LUPOs. Jim was wrecked and started on about you…’

I take a shaky breath in.

‘Basically, he told me he’d never loved anyone like he loves you. He said you were his dream girl.’ Her eyes are filling with tears. ‘Isn’t that a gorgeous thing to say?’