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One Thing Led to Another
Katy Regan
A smart, punchy, poignant and achingly funny debut based on Katy Regan’s hugely popular Marie Claire column And then there were three…sort of.Tess Jarvis’ rules for life have always been somewhatrelaxed…1.Never go to bed before your last guest has leftTess and Gina's flat has a jacuzzi so it's the obvious location for a party … every night2.Make great friends and keep them closeThough not actually in your bed. Tess and Jim’s claims that they are ‘just good friends’ has everyone’s eyes rolling.3.Look on the bright side of lifeAfter all it could be so much worse. Tess’s job interviewing the nation’s catastrophes proves this every day.4.Don’t wait for the weekend to wear your fancy knickersAlthough be warned, this can lead to all manner of messes…Tess has always been one to wing it but she’s fast realizing that her bank of blag is running out of funds. At 28, is it time to grow up? Maybe having a baby with your best friend isn't the best way to start…
One Thing
Led to Another
Katy Regan
For Louis and Fergus
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u63424e46-4564-539e-a51c-624897c60618)
Title Page (#u8ce70a64-43ce-5cbd-8d5d-c28a7ff28351)
Dedication (#u8d31a13e-61f3-5592-9363-f07bc4f70159)
Prologue (#u681d4e92-b2cb-5fa2-9ac3-74871ace10dd)
CHAPTER ONE (#u32da7a7f-ded0-5f30-b537-24506f664ca7)
CHAPTER TWO (#u13a901f4-7ab9-5992-aa85-099a6c82abb5)
CHAPTER THREE (#u04c13669-7de3-5705-b3bd-97a941905585)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u0631bbc4-1f28-5451-b920-4c13ca664be4)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u5f2880d0-7610-59ee-b451-0643d1eaa8c8)
CHAPTER SIX (#ud5e9bd0c-bc45-592b-b445-95e0eacaa2ed)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#uedbdcc0b-5b86-5c25-bbb8-bdccb0cd04cd)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
One Thing Led to Another (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_731c6f70-2c29-5cbe-8015-c4731e119615)
Two minutes it says to wait, two minutes and bam! Your life changed forever. Imagine that. No God, on second thoughts, let’s not. Let’s just calm down, breathe deeply and concentrate. I take off my watch. It’s one of those underwater sports ones. Great for boiling eggs and ideal for timing how long my mother can monologue on the phone whilst I am doing something else.
I never dreamt I’d be using it for this.
I set it: 2.00. The numbers glow neon in the darkness, a countdown to my fate. Could I be? If I really thought I was, surely I’d have chosen somewhere better than a self-cleaning toilet in the middle of SE1 to have such a life-changing experience.
1.45
It was only once. Once! Out of only a handful of times that we’d even bloody done it in the first place – that we thought we’d…how can I put this…leave it to Jim’s impeccable timing and wing it.
1.40
But there’s winging it and winging it, isn’t there? And the more images of that night come at me like film stills on double speed replay, the more I’m thinking the odds are stacked against us.
1.35
There’s the position for a start. Oh Shit. Me on my back, legs wrapped around his neck in possibly the most sperm receptive position of all time, on day 16 ( I know, I’ve counted, about a million times) of my cycle.
1.00
And then there were the knickers: black satin tie-at-the-side jobs, and on a school night. I mean, what kind of whore am I? And the fact I can’t drive. If only I could drive, this could all have been avoided. If my mother had just bought me driving lessons at seventeen like every other reasonable mother in the whole world, if she had just trusted me, not assumed I was an accident waiting to happen (quite literally), I would have driven home, safely home, very probably in a thoroughly un-alluring pair of Bhs briefs, and been tucked up in bed by 11 p.m. instead of flat on my back with my legs around Jim Ashcroft’s neck.
0.40
Please God, I’m begging you. I cannot be pregnant. I don’t even have a boyfriend. Jim and I are just good friends. So good, admittedly, we tend to fall into each other’s beds after one too many on a Friday night when the proposition of a cuddle seems like a good idea, but still, we are ‘just good friends’.
0.27
I know this because after each encounter (and for the record there’s been more than could constitute ‘a one off’ but less than could constitute ‘seeing each other’) we don’t spend all weekend together. We don’t visit garden centres or use cutesy voices on the phone. And I certainly never buy his mother’s birthday present on his behalf.
0.20
Having stayed the night at each other’s houses we get up then go our separate ways. Me back to my girly shared house in Islington and Jim to his south London bachelor pad. Two single people, two ends of London, two different lives. So you can see if this test is positive, it’s hardly going to be Swiss Family Robinson.
0.15
But once is all it takes isn’t it? And what if the man I decided to take a chance with had a Superhero sperm? A bloody non-conformist little sperm that when the masses herded in one direction, turned on its tail and butterfly stroked in the other shouting, Vive La Revolution! That would be typical of Jim. He’s the most non-conformist free spirit I’ve ever met. And it only takes one. One sperm, one chance, one moment, for all the other moments in the rest of your life to be changed forever.
But anyway…
0.07
We’re about to find out…
0.05
I pick up the test.
0.04
I hold it under the light of my phone.
0.03
I’m looking at it now, reading it feverishly like I remember looking for my degree results on a board of thousands.
0.02
All I can concentrate on is the sound of my pulse throbbing but I’m glaring at it, gripping it tight in my hands and I’m trying to see straight and…
0.00
Beep beep beep
…I AM! Shit I am! There’s two lines! There’s two…!
Oh. No.
But there’s not.
I’m not. Because there’s two lines, but there’s no cross. Which means it’s negative. No baby. Thank you Lord.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_d11081cb-df4e-5ccc-96fe-7eaa46f7259b)
‘Seven weeks before I was due, the silly bugger got down on one knee whilst I was washing up. We tied the knot at Lancaster Registry Office, with a lollipop lady as the witness and Eddie with a daffodil in his buttonhole. My waters broke, just as we were about to consummate our wedding in a B&B in Lytham St Anne’s. Eddie has never forgiven Joel for the timing, and he’s thirty-three now.’
Linda, 56, Preston
I’d always believed that sleeping with your male best friend would have one of two outcomes. Either it would be a unanimous disaster, from which your friendship would never recover. Or it would be an epiphany. You’d wonder why on earth you’d never done this before.
I’d experienced the first: Gavin Stroud, Manchester University, 1998. Gavin was my best mate on my French course, until a moment of inebriated madness – round about the four-pint point, the point at which I obviously believed I was irresistible to all members of the opposite sex. That’s also the point at which I should have gone to bed, my dignity still intact. But no, it was at this point I decided Gavin Stroud needed to know this: that my French oral in class wasn’t half as good as that in the bedroom and that I looked erotic dancing to Purple Rain. We went back to my room in halls, shut the orange and brown curtains and poured each other glass after glass of cheap white wine. With each glass, the edges of his face grew more blurred as did any good judgement I’d ever possessed. After an hour of Purple Rain on repeat play and even longer trying to get a comatosed Gavin to maintain an erection long enough to get a condom on, we passed out. When I woke up, head feeling like someone had mown over it, the blackheads on his nose rather too close for comfort, I knew it had been a big, huge, no…colossal mistake. The five-minute walk across campus to our first tutorial that day was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. How can you act normally when you’ve just spent the night wrestling with your (I think I could now safely say) ex friend’s uncooperative penis? Trust me. There’s no coming back from there.
But Jim is different. Sex with him is never a disaster, it’s just it has never been a light-bulb moment either. It’s just, you know, nice. Like getting into a warm bath after a freezing day, or finding a twenty pound note in your jeans pocket.
We met in November 1997, second floor of the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, both of us wading through our very first English essay in Critical Theory (critically dreary more like). At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially ‘independent’. Two years my senior, Jim seemed like he’d been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me with his head buried in The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes as was I (and probably every other first year English Lit student in there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feelings exactly!
‘Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?’ I said, hoping this guy with legs so long his feet were nearly touching mine under the table was in need of distraction too.
Jim looked up.
‘I.e. none whatsoever?’
‘That’s the one!’
He smiled, broadly.
‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If this death of the author lark means it’s all down to the reader’s interpretation then I’m screwed because I haven’t got the first clue what this French nutter’s on about.’
‘Me neither,’ I whispered back. ‘I thought I’d be studying books, literature – you know, novels innit…’ Jim laughed. ‘But it’s all structuralism this and post-structuralism that, seminology…’
‘Semiology,’ he corrected.
