One Thing Led to Another

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Gina wipes her face, which is suddenly filled with steely determination.

‘Look,’ she says, coming to sit beside me. ‘We have options (we!?); let’s think about this. Because this isn’t about Jim, or the baby – it’s not even a baby yet, Tess, that’s what Mark told me when I had my abortion and he was right, it was just a cluster of cells – the only person this is about is you. You have to be selfish.’

‘But I am being selfish, I want to keep it.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I do!’

I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I know this is a shock and that I’m an idiot for letting it happen but what happened to my friend just giving me a hug, asking all those questions you’re meant to ask when someone tells you they’re pregnant?

‘I’ll come with you to the doctor’s tomorrow,’ says Gina, decisively. ‘I’ll call in sick, we’ll sort this out. I’ve been through it too remember, so I know how it feels, I’ll know what to say…’

‘No,’ I say, standing up. And it feels like I’ve never meant anything more in my life. ‘No! You don’t know what to say. I’m not going to the doctor’s, I’ve already been and that was to get my due date. December 14th if you’re interested, put it in your diary. I’m not having an abortion, Gina, I’m keeping the baby, we’re keeping the baby.’

I walk out. I slam the door shut.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_402438aa-4d53-5a8c-90a4-a7dd8379b8a6)

‘I thought the love would just be there. That I would look into my baby’s eyes and we would have an instant understanding. But when Poppy was born, I just felt terrified, like I’d been handed someone else’s baby to look after. It took seven months for me to honestly say I loved her. Obviously now, I know I was ill, but I still feel guilty.’

Sam, 36, Didsbury

I am lying next to Jim, my belly against the curve of his back, the faint whirr of a dawn flight outside. After the row with Gina yesterday, the atmosphere in the house was frosty to say the least so that evening I got on a bus and came here, to Jim’s place, a cosy Victorian flat in East Dulwich.

It had been over a week since the row in Frankie’s and I was worried how I might be received.

I needn’t have been.

When Jim opened the door, wearing his mustard dressing gown (the result of a dye disaster with a beach towel) I have never felt so welcome, or wanted to hug him so much in my life. I stood on the doorstep, a forlorn figure under the glare of the street lamp.

‘Hello you,’ he said, arms crossed, head leaning against the doorframe as if he was expecting me. ‘Come on in.’

He led me through his narrow, bright hallway, the only thing adorning the wall a framed photo of an Americana sign:

Warning: Water on Road During Rain

Lifts my mood every time.

Jim’s downstairs is open plan. The lounge is cosy in its make-do-ness. Two stripy sofas covered with dark grey throws, a huge black and white circular rug and a bobbly green swivel chair that he always does his marking on. His telly’s crap – you can only get three channels if you balance the aerial on a mug – and today (like most days) there’s a huge pile of marking on the sofa that he’s obviously just put to one side. He moved it, putting it on the Ikea coffee table along with the remote control, the remains of a Muller Light and a note-filled copy of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Then he pressed down on my shoulders, sitting me on the sofa, and went into the kitchen to make tea.

It’s a boy’s kitchen – a dazzling array of unnecessary gadgets, juicer, pasta maker, ice-cream maker, blood-red DeLonghi coffee maker that weighs a tonne – the shine of which is diminished only by a subtle layer of grime.

On the shelves above the sink are Jamie Oliver cookbooks and a few suspect ones called things like Nose to Tail Eating that contain nothing but recipes for offal and pig trotter. (Jim likes to think he’s a fearless cook – i.e. you have to be fearless to eat whatever he cooks.) Next to a pint glass of pennies is a herb garden that he actually keeps alive, unlike me who buys one every time I go to Tesco’s only to find it desiccated on top of the fridge three months later.

‘Henry IV eh?’ I said, picking up the book, thinking a bit of idle chat might do me good. ‘Sorry, but I never could get excited about Shakespeare.’

‘You blaspheme!’ spluttered Jim. ‘It’s one of the funniest, rudest books ever written.

‘How can you not fall in love with such a top bloke as Hal, or a total piss-head like Falstaff? You of all people.’

‘Oi,’ I said. ‘What are you suggesting?’

Jim handed me a cup of tea. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what owes me this pleasure?’

That was it, I was off. I poured out all the details of the showdown with Gina and the more I said it aloud the more unbelievable it felt.

‘I’m sorry for being such a cow last week,’ I said, sheepishly, when I’d off loaded. ‘Not to mention blabbing to Gina. You must hate me.’

‘Yeah, can’t stand you, hate your guts,’ Jim said, totally dead pan. ‘You were a bitch from hell but we’ll blame it on the hormones, shall we?’

‘That will be my epitaph at this rate.’

It must have been one a.m. before we went to bed. I was still pretty shook up about Gina and Jim was as confused as I was. ‘Are you sure that’s what she said?’ he said. ‘I know Gina can be unpredictable but that’s just weird.’

‘I know, I don’t understand it either. It was like me being pregnant was a personal attack. Like something I’d done wrong. I mean, I know I can’t get drunk like we used to, but I’m still me, aren’t I? I’m still the person she’s been friends with for more than a decade.’

Jim gave me a hug. It felt like he could squeeze the air right out of me.

‘It will be alright, you know, all this,’ he said, staring straight ahead, with that prophetic certainty he has about everything. ‘I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but it will.’

‘And Gina?’ I asked tentatively, as we walked up the stairs to bed.

‘She’ll come round.’ Jim yawned. ‘And if she doesn’t, we’ll kick her ass.’

I smiled but at the back of my mind I was still worried. How could I confide in her about anything now? And what if everyone, even Vicky, reacted as badly? What if I was utterly deluded and keeping this baby was the worst, most irresponsible idea in the world?

‘All a baby needs is love,’ Jim said. I play those words in my head again and again. ‘All a child needs is to feel wanted.’ And I want this baby. If I don’t, why do I wake up, my heart in my mouth with every twinge, petrified this is the start of losing it? The fact is, I think to myself as I lay here, if I was to lose this baby now, we couldn’t try for another. Not like real couples.

It is one thing to have an accident and make the best of a less than ideal situation but quite another to make something happen again that should never have happened in the first place.

This unborn child that already has fingers and toes and maybe my curviness and Jim’s long legs (Eva Herzigova eat your heart out!) is a fluke, it slipped through the net. And so if fate decided it wasn’t meant to be then it would be heartbreaking, but we’d have to accept it. Why did the thought of this terrify me so much?

Jim is sleeping but I can’t, my mind won’t let me. I know it must be almost morning because I can just about make out shapes in his familiar room in the emerging light and the photograph on his bedside table, the one in the red frame that’s never meant much before, is staring right back at me now, making my mind race.

Me, Jim, Gina and Vicks sitting under the awning of our caravan, that camping trip in Norfolk last summer. Jim and I had been hopping into each other’s bed when the fancy took us for three months by then. How many times have I looked at this picture? And it has never stirred much more than nostalgia before. But now suddenly the body language says it all: Gina and Vicky leaning against each other, laughing into the camera which we’ve got balanced on a beer crate. Me, reclining on a deckchair, feet tucked up by my bum, my head on Jim’s shoulder but what’s he doing? Ruffling my hair. Not a spark of sexual tension between us.

That didn’t stop me getting carried away though. It didn’t stop me thinking that I might even be falling in love with Jim, that he might, even, be falling for me.

I still cringe when I think of what happened a few hours after that photo was taken. We’d been to the pub that night, then walked home through windy country lanes, arm in arm. When we got back to the campsite, Jim went straight to his tent, pitched next to the caravan, and I crawled in next to him.

‘Jim, we’ve been doing this weird on/off thing for some time now,’ I said, staring at the canvas, my heart pounding. ‘Maybe we should, you know, make a go of it. Go out with each other, like, properly.’ After a long pause in which I wondered whether he might be about to express his undying love for me he just turned over the other way.

‘Tess, you’re drunk,’ he said, flatly. ‘We’re soul-mates, something special, something really good. Let’s not spoil it.’

What a twat. What an absolute wanker! So I open myself up, put myself on the line and he makes me feel so small I could have disappeared up his arse, along with his own head. Well sod you, I thought. But I didn’t say anything, I was too mortified. I just made thoroughly mature V-signs up at the roof of the tent.

But he was right of course. Thank God somebody saw sense. Looking at us, sitting under that awning now, I cannot believe I did that. I didn’t fancy Jim as much as he didn’t fancy me – not really, not in the right way. It was all just wishful thinking.

And the hard fact to swallow is, if I hadn’t screwed it up with Laurence, I would probably never have even been in that tent, I would never have made an arse of myself, I would never have carried on having ‘no-strings’ sex with Jim and I certainly wouldn’t be pregnant with his baby!

Under Jim’s tartan duvet, I can feel that he’s had got an erection. A James Ashcroft Morning Glory. Ordinarily, that’s to say pre-baby, this would have meant one thing to me: a quickie, sleepy, hungover shag that would have left me with the smug feeling that I really was a thoroughly modern girl. I occasionally slept with my male best friend and we were cool with it.

Today though, it’s an unwelcome pressure and I feel my body stiffen as he eases closer. He takes a sleepy breath in and as he breathes out, he kneads the inside of my thigh with his knee, trying to gently prize me open. I resist. I can’t do this. My head’s too muddled and weighed down. Where sex before was like an added extra, now it is loaded with meaning. It is as if the lightness had been shot out of it, leaving it withering to the floor like a deflated balloon.

Jim puts his arm around me.

‘Morning,’ he murmurs, then kisses my head, then slips his hand between my legs.

I gently remove it.

‘Jim,’ I say, pushing him gently off me, trying not to sound too annoyed, ‘Jim, look…I can’t, I’m sorry.’

He rolls onto his back and for what seems like for ever, he doesn’t say anything.

When he speaks again, he sounds almost sad.

‘It’s different now, isn’t it?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I guess it is.’

He reaches for my hand, strokes it for a second or two and then turns onto his side. ‘Come on,’ he says, pressing his warm, long body against mine. ‘Let’s just have a cuddle.’

We must have eventually drifted off, because when I wake up again, it’s 7.10 a.m. and Jim isn’t in the bed. I sit up and hear the shower going, so I plump up the pillows and pick up the Bundle of Joy book.

I like waking up in Jim’s flat. Like everything in his life – his car, his beloved books, his friends, he got it a long time ago, nurtured it, tended it lovingly and it’s served him well in return.

Jim has always had to look after things, because he’s never known when anything new or better will come along. He was fifteen when his alky waster of a dad walked out, leaving only his mum’s income from her part-time job as a school nurse to support the family, and so he and his sister Dawn never got much. As a result, the bookshelf in his bedroom, made from red bricks and planks of wood, is full of childhood books that he’s looked after for twenty odd years. There are records that he’s had since the eighties, too, and all manner of retro chic – a leather chair, an orange seventies phone – none of it bought in trendy design bric-a-brac shops, but just things he’s kept all this time.