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.
‘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’.
This was the weekend I was to spill the beans, but so far, it’s not looking good. When things don’t work out between Gina and men, which tends to be the norm rather than the exception, there’s a set process, a series of ‘modes’ to be gone through, each one having to be exhausted before the next can begin.
Up until this point, for example, she’s been very much in hurt mode. I got home from the cinema to find her chain-smoking in the garden, looking like she’d suffered some kind of anaphylactic shock her face was so swollen from crying.
My first thought, selfishly, was that I could do without a grief-stricken flatmate what with everything else going on. But she was so upset – distraught enough to accept a hug and that’s saying something – that there was only one thing for it: A night in watching the entire box-set of The Office, eating oven chips and planning Jasper’s downfall.
The café’s emptying now, half-eaten breakfasts and bean-smeared plates left on its round mahogany tables with their retro gingham tablecloths. Used coffee cups are piled high on the original 1950s serving kiosk. The whole place seems to ooze with bacon fat.
I zone back to Gina, her fighter mode’s at full throttle now, her mind churning over the last