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I lean against the bookshelf leafing through a book called Bundle of Joy: 101 Real Stories of Motherhood as if I do this every day, as if I do, actually, belong to this weird species, most of them mutant-shaped, milling around the shop floor, hand in hand: ‘The Expectants’.
But I am not expectant. At no point did I ever expect this! When that positive test emerged it was categorically the most unexpected thing I have ever experienced in my life. Things like this don’t happen to me, they happen to the people I interview – everything happens to the people I interview, but not to me.
My life has been one big cushy ride so far, which is why I’ve always blagged it when it comes to taking precautions against life’s eventualities. After all, the less stuff happens to you, the less you think it will, don’t you? I never did lie awake at night, dissecting my last session of oral sex and panicking that I hadn’t listened in Biology and it was perfectly feasible to get pregnant from a blow job after all. I rolled my eyes at Mrs Tucker our ‘personal health’ teacher – you can imagine what she got called – who said you could get pregnant by withdrawal – something that evoked all the risk of a banking transaction to me.
Some would say I’m reckless (my mum would, but then my mother thinks caffeine after five p.m. is reckless). I would say I’ve always been relaxed, optimistic. OK, I admit it, veering towards winging it and hoping for the best. And yet, here I am, and the thing that’s caught me most off guard, aside from the stampede of hormones currently taking over my body like an occupying army, is that I’ve been caught out. My winging it wings are out of fuel, my Bank of Blag is cleared of funds, my cat’s nine lives are all used up. Game’s over Tess Jarvis. You’ve officially fucked up.
It’s late afternoon, ten past five, and the sun is pouring in through the floor-length window, illuminating a column of dust particles which swirl to the ground, a reminder of the passing of time, of the seconds, minutes and days since my news. In the bookshop café to my right, there’s the clatter of tea cups and saucers, normal people getting on with their normal lives.
Two aisles in front, I can just see Jim’s head of dark, overgrown hair buried in a book and I am immediately transported back to the day we met. He was stood like that then too, the first time I saw him, on the second floor of the John Rylands Library, head buried in the The Death of the Author, bathed in autumn sun.
I remember thinking, just as I do now, he looked a bit vacant with those full lips hanging slightly open. But I liked his slim, defined face too, this guy with the hair that had its own mind.
I squint to read the title of the book Jim’s reading: You’re Pregnant Too Mate! The Essential Guide for Expectant Fathers. And have a sudden inexplicable urge to blow out the brains of the author. He’s been reading it since we got here. Don’t ask me how we got here either, it wasn’t a conscious decision. One minute we were buying his mum a present for her birthday. (Already made the seamless transition from friend to mother-of-child, side-stepping girlfriend and wife as I go…) The next, we’d wandered in here, on auto-pilot really, me looking as shell shocked as if I’d just emerged from a national disaster, a look I’ve been sporting for more than a week now.
I go back to my book – a cheery story of a woman whose morning sickness was so bad she would dry heave at Tesco’s cheese counter – but the words start to blur, I can’t concentrate. Everything in here is too loud, too bright.
Ever since we decided we were definitely going ahead with this, the whole world has felt like this: like I’ve woken up in a different one.
I go home, I watch TV with Gina, I go to Star’s and sip sweet Turkish tea and chat to Emete whilst she mends my trousers. I do everything I’ve always done, and yet it doesn’t feel like me doing it. It’s like someone has hijacked my body. Someone pregnant.
‘Hey, listen to this,’ says Jim, leaning over the bookshelf. ‘It says here that at six weeks pregnant, your baby is the size of a shrimp – how cool is that?’
‘Right, yes, very cool,’ I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Although I don’t much fancy the idea of a sea creature setting up home in my body.’
‘Right,’ nods Jim and goes back to his book.
‘A shrimp,’ he mumbles when I don’t say anything else. ‘Maybe that’s what we can call it, “shrimpy”.’
‘Jim, shut up,’ I mumble. I feel bad for being so moody. I can’t help it though. In less than a fortnight, we seem to have gone from best of mates – two people who actually have fun – to me weeping at not being able to work the tin opener.
Jim sidles off to the other side of the bookshelf, taking his book and dragging his feet in mock rejection. I bite my lip. I feel awful.
The fact Jim seems to be taking this so well isn’t helping. Despite the shock, ever since we found out, it’s weird, he’s had this look on his face; a look of boy-like wonder that says, ‘I just got the best surprise of my life.’
But me? I don’t feel like that. I don’t even know how I feel.
After the official showing of the pregnancy test, I mainly lay on my bed, listening to the strangely comforting soundtrack of inner city London, or did cool, long lengths at the outdoor swimming pool, anything to stop the noise in my head.
Both Vicks and Gina must know something’s up though. I’ve refused wine for three nights at home. I told Gina I’ve got cystitis, but I don’t think she’s buying it. ‘Cystitis?’ she said. ‘Likely story. You must be pregnant.’ She was joking, but I nearly fell off my chair. Plus when Vicky called me at work the other day, my voice was doing strange things. ‘What’s up with you?’ she said. ‘What’s happened? You can tell me.’
‘I’m pregnant!’ I wanted to shout. ‘I’m up the bloody spout, what the hell do I do ?!’ But I promised Jim I’d wait until the twelve-week scan before I went blabbing to everyone. In that typical male way, he likes to do things that don’t concern him by the book but I’m not sure I can wait that long.
‘How pregnant are you now?’ enquires Jim, looking up from his book.
‘Oh, I don’t know, about six weeks I think, why?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why?’
Here we go again.
‘Because it says here that by seven weeks, the baby’s internal organs are in place, its brain is fully developed, and the body measures around two point five centimetres long.’
I almost gag.
‘That’s around an inch,’ I squeak, in disbelief. ‘How can it be?’
How can it be? I’ve barely got my head around any of this and yet its brain is a week off being fully formed? Its entire personality practically in place! There’s still a part of me too, who doesn’t really believe it. Even though Dr Cork threw her head back and laughed when I told her I’d done three tests, I can’t accept it.
‘For heaven’s sake my girl!’ she spluttered, in that soup-thick Irish accent. ‘I think we can safely say you’re expecting, can we not?’ But I didn’t believe it. Not really. Even when she scrolled down on her calendar, looked at me over her half-moon glasses and gave me a date: December fourteenth. ‘Ah! A little Christmas baby.’ I didn’t believe it was true.
I pick up another book, A Bloke’s 100 Tips for Surviving Pregnancy.
‘Your partner’s pregnancy may mean that you both rethink your domestic situation,’ it says. ‘It is still common for partners co-habiting and expecting a child to decide the time is right to get hitched.’
Right. But was it common for those ‘partners’ to be friends and not lovers? Was it common for them not to be co-habiting, or ever likely to be? Should we, after all, be rethinking our domestic situation and just get hitched anyway? Where were the rules for us? The top tips for us? I didn’t need My Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy, I needed, Help! I’m Pregnant, and it’s my Best Friend’s!
I look around me; the place is swarming with couples, the men protective of their girlfriends and wives who house the offspring that soon will make their nuclear, normal families. I look at Jim, still nose in his book. What were we? A pair of frauds.
I decide to take the Bundle of Joy. I figure some real-life tales may help with the denial. I go to the till and stand in the queue of couples, two-by-two, Noah’s bloody Ark.
I’m aware that my heart is beating but it’s only when I feel Jim’s hand on my shoulder, then his arm around my back that I realize I’m crying – again – that tears are rolling down my face and the woman at the till is staring at me.
‘Come on,’ says Jim, softly, stepping in front of a sea of staring faces and paying for the book. ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to Frankie’s.’
Frankie’s is an old jazz club on Charing Cross Road. Jim and I stumbled upon it a couple of years ago, a night that ended up with us dancing ourselves sober to a Bossanova swing band. It became our place after that. ‘Would madam care to dance ce soir?’ Jim would call and ask me, then we’d get all dolled up and we’d hit Frankie’s, dance the night away.
But I don’t want to go now. Frankie’s won’t make this any better.
‘I dunno,’ I say, as we glide down the escalator, ‘I’m just not sure I’m in the mood.’
We go anyway – after all I’m not in the mood for anything. It’s only just gone 6.30 p.m. by the time we arrive and thankfully it’s almost empty.
We sit at the bar sipping on virgin pina coladas which makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Laugh because Jim is sipping on a drink with a cherry and an umbrella in it, as a show of solidarity, when really he’d kill for a beer, and cry because why did we have drinks with umbrellas and cherries in anyway? It didn’t feel like we were celebrating.
My chin starts to go again.
‘Sorry, I’m a mess, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I say, forcing a smile.
‘Hey, come on,’ says Jim, dragging his stool closer, ‘Look at me.’
‘I’m scared too you know.’ He takes my hands in his, trying to ignore the snail trail of snot up one side where I’ve wiped my nose. ‘I’m scared shitless to be honest.’
‘But you seem…you’re amazing…you’re just handling this so well, so much better than me. It’s like you’re, I don’t know, happy about it all,’ I say.
He thinks about this, clears his throat. ‘Well, I’m definitely not unhappy about it. I’m thirty Tess. I don’t want to end up some sad old bachelor boy, no children, no life, answering the door in my underpants.’
‘You do that already.’
‘Oh. So I do.’
The barman places a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts on the bar which only makes me want to blub some more. Mainly because I can’t even have one. No peanuts, Dr Cork said. I can’t even have a goddamn peanut.
‘Give it time,’ Jim says, ‘it’s so early.’
‘I know, it’s just, I can’t help feeling this has fucked everything up. You could have met someone else, got married, done it properly, we both could have. But things are going to be so much more complicated now.’
I lean back in my chair and squeeze my eyes shut. Every time I think of one consequence of all this, another rears its head, a can of worms.
‘But I was never after a wife, Tess, you know that,’ says Jim, making me look at him. ‘All that wedding, two point four kids conventional thing was never something I dreamt of.’
I look at the floor.
‘But I did, Jim,’ I say, looking up at him. ‘I did dream of that.’
A horrid silence. Jim stares at his drink. It’s only as the words leave my mouth that I realize how true they are. I had it all planned. I don’t mean planned like Vicky planned things – a subscription to You and Your Wedding at twenty, married and pregnant by twenty-seven. I don’t mean planning your child so meticulously its birthday coincides with school holidays. The point I’m making, and the problem with me I suppose, is that I didn’t realize I needed to ‘plan’ anything. I had it all filed under ‘goes without saying’. Meeting ‘The One’, the white wedding, the joint mortgage and ceremonious last pill as we give up binge-drinking in preparation of our forthcoming child. The shagging – oh the shagging! – as we’d take to our bed on sun-drenched afternoons, giggling at the decadence of it all. The leaping into each other’s arms with joy at the positive test and the first scan on dad-to-be’s phone. And who is that dad-to-be in my mind’s eye? Not Jim, my friend, the man I love platonically but hadn’t even considered casting for this role. No, that man I imagined, before this whole ‘life plan’ went utterly tits up was Laurence. But I let him slip through my hands, just like fine golden sand, like clay on a potter’s wheel, like a brand new slippery baby. Like life itself.
‘This is so ridiculous,’ I say suddenly.
‘What is?’
‘This. Us.’
My cheeks burn. I don’t want to go on like this, but I’ve opened the floodgates now and it’s all coming out.
‘What do you mean?’
‘People don’t do this, Jim. Have a baby with their friend. We’re not a couple, are we?’
Jim closes his eyes and groans.
‘We were never actually an item. You’re a grown man, a teacher, a responsible person, apparently.’ I hate myself now, it’s not his fault. ‘What sort of thirty-year-old man doesn’t even have a condom?’
Jim snorts. ‘What?’
‘A condom Jim, you know, a contraceptive?’
He blinks and splutters, incredulous at this last comment.
‘It takes two to tango Tess and anyway, you were drunk.’
‘We both were!’
‘And you were wearing those knickers. Those frilly black things. I mean, they were hardly a contraceptive.’
He’s gone mad.
‘And there’s the driving issue,’ he says.
‘Driving issue?!’ I stare at him stunned.
‘The fact you can’t. And you’re always putting off learning. And the fact you always miss the last tube and hate night buses and so you end up staying at mine and…’
‘And what?! So this was bound to happen? The fact I can’t drive and favour vaguely attractive underwear over enormous belly-warmers was one day destined to get me knocked up? In case you’ve forgotten, you were in bed with another woman when I called to tell you I was pregnant.’
‘You’ve never said that bothered you,’ Jim says. ‘If you had…’
‘It doesn’t bother me. That’s the problem!’ I say, throwing my hands in the air. ‘Don’t you think it should? Don’t you think it should bother me, just a bit, that the father of my baby is shagging someone else?!’
The barman clears his throat, loudly. A party of businessmen have just gathered at the bar.
Jim’s got his head in his hands now.
‘But don’t you understand, this isn’t about us anymore,’ he says quietly. ‘It’s about this baby, a baby that needs us, more than anything now. There’s thousands of women who can’t even get pregnant, have you thought about that?’
I had, actually, and despised myself for being so ungrateful but I couldn’t help myself.
‘Forgive me,’ I say. ‘But I’m not feeling my most charitable right now.’
‘I can see that,’ says Jim, standing up and getting his coat.
We leave, go home. Our separate homes.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_e0ccf768-9387-55d3-8e60-9f4e474a3bc9)
‘I came out of the bathroom in my knickers screaming, “Look! It’s positive, we’re having a baby!” Neil didn’t say anything at first and I thought, oh God, he hates it. Then he dived over to the wardrobe, took out his Polaroid camera, and took a picture of me, there and then, holding the positive test. Even now, I look at that picture, stuck up on our fridge and I want to cry. I look so damn young and thin!’
Fiona, 38, Edinburgh
Gina leans back on the window of the café, folds her arms and groans.
‘I suppose you’re thinking, “told you so”?’ she says, through half-shut eyes. ‘I suppose everyone saw it coming but me.’
I put my hand on her arm. ‘No,’ I say, but I don’t say anything else. I know the drill.
It’s been almost a fortnight since Jasper dumped her – in spectacularly cruel form – by text, half an hour before she was due to meet him at a party – and she’s still in self-loathing mode. This means she doesn’t want my sympathy or my analysis of what went wrong, she just wants me to be her punch-bag whilst she lets it all out.
It’s Sunday and this was the day I was going to tell Gina about the baby. I intended to wait until the scan like I promised Jim, but she already knows, I swear. She found my book, the Bundle of Joy book, you don’t get much more incriminating than that. I came home from work to find her reading it in the kitchen, scoffing at all the schmaltzy pictures of women cradling their bumps.
‘Check it out, how smug and tedious are this lot?’ she said, pretending to stick her fingers down her throat. Gina is not what you’d call baby-friendly. In fact to be perfectly honest, she’s actively Anti Baby. She and Vicky used to be the best of mates – we all did. But since Vicky had Dylan eighteen months ago and ‘de-camped to the other side’ as Gina sees it, their relationship has definitely suffered. Gina treats Vicks like she’s holding a bomb when she’s holding Dylan and when Vicky relayed the story of her horrific birth (which to be fair involved full stitching details and the way her placenta ‘slid across the floor’, it came out with such force) Gina was sick in her mouth.
So, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest at her reaction to the book. It was only when her face fell and she said…‘Oh my God, is this yours?’ that I went a deathly shade of pale.
‘I’m doing a health piece on pregnancy, it’s for research,’ I lied, sticking my head inside the fridge and blaspheming at the cheese.
As if. The only ‘health’ features Believe It! magazine ever ran were ones on Chlamydia, the ‘Silent Epidemic’, and another, best forgotten, on ‘excessive sweating’.
