One Thing Led to Another (12 page)

Oh. My. God.

Something like realization eclipses her face. I am sure something like horror eclipses mine.

She looks at Jim, he scratches his head and mutters some expletive. She looks back at me. That’s it, we’re caught out.

At that moment, the room stands still. There’s no movement, no voices, no music, no nothing. Don’t ask me how she knows, she just does. She’s my best friend, she knows everything.

‘Oh my God,’ she says it so quietly. ‘You’re pregnant aren’t you? You and Jim are having a baby.’

We all stand there dumbly for a second, Vicky with her hand over her mouth, shaking her head in disbelief. Then she looks at Jim, who nods his head, she looks back at me, I close my eyes. Then she erupts into the widest beam I’ve ever seen, throws her hands in the air and runs towards me.

‘Aaaaaahh!’ Vicky’s ear-splitting shriek engulfs the room. ‘This is the best news EVER!!’ she says, hugging me so tight she almost winds me. Then she does the same to Jim, who
laughs, a sweet, shy laugh. ‘Rich, have we got any champagne?’ She’s running around the room now, flapping her arms. ‘If not, go and buy some, we’ve got to have champagne!! Tess, this is the best news of my life! Everyone, everyone.’ She stands on the coffee table herself now. ‘Jim and Tess are having a baby!!’

Nice one Vicks, the room’s going mad. People throw themselves at us, and then at each other. ‘This has made our fucking night! We love you guys!’ they gush, drunk and amorous.

And despite the fact I didn’t plan this at all, it’s kind of made mine too. After Gina’s reaction, I presumed nobody would be happy for us, perhaps she was right, perhaps this was a disaster. But now, here, this is the reaction I yearned for (well, just their support would have done, but this is even better).

‘So you’re not just fat, you’re preggers!’ Richard chucks his chubby arms around my even chubbier middle, drops to his knees and kisses my belly.

I laugh, the first genuine laugh of the night. Rich stands up and gives Jim a high five.

It’s brilliant and positive and it’s what, I now realize, I really needed. But despite all of this, there’s two things gnawing at my thoughts: 1) Gina is the only one not joining in. She’s over there, arms crossed in a display of the most telling body language I’ve ever seen. 2) Vicky’s already miles ahead of reality, she thinks this is it. She thinks we’re getting married. For Vicky this isn’t just an announcement about a baby, it’s about Jim and me ‘coming out’ as a couple.

She’s in her element now, filling peoples’ glasses, her wig half way off her head, spilling half the champagne on the floor.

‘Is this all we’ve got Rich?’ Vicky holds up two bottles of Cava. ‘Oh well, Moet it is not but it’ll have to do!’

‘Er…’ I try to speak but Vicky cuts in.

‘You’re alright with a little glass, aren’t you?’ she says, then she shouts over to Rich in the kitchen. ‘Did I drink much when I was preggers?’

‘Shit-faced every night!!’ he shouts back.

She tuts and rolls her eyes, then pours an inch or two in a glass, hands it to me and kisses me on the cheek.

‘Vicky…’ I just have to get it out now.

She’s sloshing wine into the glasses of Claudia and her boyfriend Martin, saying, ‘I always knew these two would see sense at some point. And at my birthday party too, oh God! I’m so touched!’

‘Vicky…’ I say, my voice weird – not to mention my Rik Waller fat suit – ‘the pregnancy, it was an accident, you know, it doesn’t change anything between Jim and I, we’re still just friends.’

‘Yeah, and I’m a lesbian,’ says Vicky, totally disregarding me. Then she stands once more, in her stockinged feet, on the coffee table, bog-eyed she’s so drunk, and raises her glass: ‘Three cheers for Jim and Tess, and their unborn child!’

Unborn Child? She makes it sound like an anti-abortion rally!

‘Not only are they my best friends,’ she continues, ‘but they have got to be the most perfect for each other couple you will ever meet.’

‘Ooooh God,’ I hear Jim groan from behind his glass. I feel my face redden with embarrassment and gesture for Vicky to get down.

‘And now they’re having a baby, I’m sure they’ll bang their thick little heads together, come to ther senses and live happily ever after just as I always knew they would. Three cheers for Jim and Tess, hip hip hooray! Hip hip…!’

But I don’t stay for the rest, I disappear into the kitchen to hide behind the buffet. For the rest of the evening, all Jim
and I get is the same old stuff. ‘Isn’t it just the most romantic story you’ve ever heard? Like Ross and Rachel from
Friends
but the real life version?’

‘Er, no,’ I strain, wanting to either slap them or cry by the end of the night. ‘It’s not like that, actually, it’s a bit more complicated.’

At gone two a.m. I finally persuade Jim to share a taxi. I am so tired I could almost die. Jim sinks down into the seat and flops his head on my shoulder.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, exhaling slowly. ‘Was that a party and a half or what?’

I mumble an answer but I’m too tired to talk, so I just stare out of the window, at the catseyes that come at us like meteors out of the dark, wondering if he’s thinking the same thing.

‘Jim?’ I say, when he doesn’t say anything for a while. ‘Are you awake?’

‘Yeah, I’m awake.’

‘You know tonight?’

‘Mmm, I do.’

‘And what everyone was saying…?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, do you think we should?’

Jim lifts up his head

‘Should what?’

‘Just get together.’

He studies my face. The city lights dance in his eyes.

‘I know what you mean,’ he says, sitting up properly. ‘It would make this a lot easier, let’s face it. But no, no, I don’t think we should just get together.’

‘Really?’

My feelings are also telling me this is the right answer.

‘No, because I don’t want to make a relationship of circumstance, we’re worth more than that. I’d rather we were one
hundred per cent what we can be – which is friends – than fifty per cent of what we
should be.’
Jim can be so annoyingly wise sometimes.

‘And I couldn’t stand the thought of it not working out.’

‘No, me neither, that would be awful.’

‘Because there’s so much more at stake now. So much more to lose.’

We travel in silence for most of the way, but as my house draws close, the guilt gets too much.

‘You know it’s funny.’ I don’t know how else to broach the subject so I just blurt it out. ‘I met Laurence for lunch today.’

Jim doesn’t say a thing for what seems like days.

‘That’s a bit weird isn’t it? You being pregnant and all that?’ he says, eventually, and I breathe a sigh of relief that’s he doesn’t seem that annoyed. ‘Mind you, I suppose as long as you told him you’re pregnant now and it’s just as mates it can’t do any harm.’

I shut my eyes tightly and lay my head against the window.

‘You did tell him you were pregnant didn’t you?’

‘Course,’ I say, looking out of the window. ‘Of course I told him I was pregnant. What do you take me for?’

‘I must have been the only mum to-be in Britain praying for a ginger baby. The one-night stand with Glenn was a mistake. A gigantic, horrid mistake. It ruined my pregnancy – I tortured myself from start to finish – and the timing could not have been worse. When Dave held up Ben and I saw that shock of carrot hair just like his dad’s I cried tears of joy. Dave thinks it’s because he was a boy, but I will always know the truth.’

Emma, 34, Portishead

The truth is, I look fat. Not pregnant, just fat. I look like those middle-aged women who holiday in the Costa del Sol out of season: thick-waisted, apple-shaped, weird, that’s what.

Right, let’s try the denim skirt. I rifle through the avalanche of clothes on my bedroom chair until I find it, crushed in a ball. I put it on and face the mirror. Good God, I look appalling. My eyes are dead, I’ve got a halo of frizz, and I’ve erupted in several hormonal boils. Pregnant spots aren’t like normal spots. They don’t collect in the same area like period spots, or even really hurt like toxic spots. They just erupt, yellowy-red, in the most unfortunate of places – the middle
of the cheek, the end of the nose, like those fake spots you get in joke shops.

It’s hardly surprising since I’ve had about five hours’ sleep all weekend. After getting back at three in the morning on Sunday after Vicky’s party, I was then woken up again at five by the throb of Daft Punk on downstairs and the sound of Gina and a voice I didn’t recognize cackling like a pair of demented witches. When I went downstairs, cursing them as I went, Gina and a friend were coked up to the eyeballs, doing fat lines off the lounge mirror which was, for the purpose, laid flat on the coffee table.

I couldn’t help but feel that Gina was making a point. No, I know Gina was making a point: look at me, young and fun, with new young and fun friend. Look at you, pregnant, and no fun at all.

And it worked, I felt like a right square stood there in my Tote socks and brushed cotton pyjamas. People on coke talk such a load of bollocks, too.

Gina: Hey, Tess! How’s it going? (She’d changed her tune.)

Me: Not great, um, it’s five o’ clock in the morning?

Gina: Is it? Fuck.
Really?
(Eyes like globes.) This is Michelle by the way.

Michelle dabbed at a few molecules of coke on the mirror and rubbed them on her gums. I rubbed my eyes and grunted a ‘hello’.

Gina: She’s stunning, isn’t she? Her dad’s Sudanese. God, I wish I was mixed race. (Cringe.) Mixed race people are soooo stunning don’t you reckon? (Double cringe.) And her mum’s from Stockholm. Is it Stockholm?

Michelle: It’s Stockport actually.

At which point I gave up. I closed the door and trudged upstairs, saying ‘selfish fucking cow’ at a level I hope she could hear. I don’t care. I’ve spent the last few weeks worrying about me and Gina, feeling like I’m the one who’s let her
down by getting pregnant. Well, no more! I can’t go out and get pissed anymore (as much as I would love to), I can’t have that life anymore, and if she can’t accept that, then what can I do?

I face the mirror, I turn sideways, I tuck my top in, I pull it out. Whatever I do, it looks crap, just like everything else I have tried on this morning. I eventually settle on jeans (again) and a white hide-all blouse from Monsoon (again). True, the level of glamour at
Believe It!
is not exactly haute couture. (I’m always slightly embarrassed when people meet my editor. What they imagine to be a Gucci-clad, Manolo-Blanik-heeled, blow-dried vision of groomedness turns out to be more of a Barratts-heeled vision in beige, with permanent sticky tissues in her cardigan pockets.) But still, they must have noticed my standards are slipping and that I’m scoffing like there’s no tomorrow. Anne-Marie, for one, has noticed the number of muffins I’ve been putting away.

‘All that wheat and sugar’ll play havoc with your digestive system you know,’ she chirped up the other day, just as I bit into a second banana muffin. ‘Greg (Vegan Boyfriend) said that’s what used to cause his candida outbreaks.’

‘What’s candida?’ I asked. I wish I hadn’t.

‘A yeast infection, but not like you get in your vagina?’ (The muffin suddenly hung loose in my mouth.) ‘It’s in your stomach?’ (Anne-Marie goes up at the end of every sentence so it sounds like a question.) ‘And it wipes out all the good bacteria? And if it gets really chronic your gut can perforate? And then all the undigested bits of food seep into your bloodstream.’

I decided to keep the rest of the muffin till later.

I stand front-on to the mirror once more. Yep, I’m going to have to tell work. I’ve had my scan now, so there’s really no excuse, but I’m dreading it.

I can see it now: ‘Real Life Shocker!!!! Knocked up by best mate because I couldn’t drive!!’

I hear Gina clattering about downstairs and think better of having breakfast before I go so I quickly do my ablutions, slap some concealer on my zits and I’m out of the door before I have to endure any sort of run-in with Gina, or face the lounge, which if there’s been no improvement since yesterday, looks like the aftermath of Glastonbury.

I get on the bus and sit at the front, early summer blowing hair-dryer-warm through the window. I sense Laurence everywhere: a sun-kissed neck, the back of a shaven head, a molecule of aftershave, a throaty laugh. Since we met on Friday, there’s been a flurry of texts and emails. Friday afternoon was a write-off, mainly spent conjuring up witty email banter (i.e. writing, deleting and rewriting emails to make it look like it all came naturally) and Googling the bar he runs, just you know, so I could imagine him at work.

Saturday’s text made me laugh, a lot.

Hope u have a gr8 time at V’s party

Don’t go lookin 2 hot. I’ll be jealous as hell.

There was never any danger of that of course! (Unless morbidly obese failed reality show singers do it for him.) Thank the Lord I refrained from telling him about the Rik Waller outfit. Can you imagine!? I really should rein myself in sometimes.

All weekend I was hoping he’d ring. My stomach was in my mouth every time my phone went, then up and down again like an out of order lift. Two calls from Vicky (Had I come to my senses yet? Had Jim proposed?) One from dad (mum thinks the cat’s got a brain tumour. One of its eyes looks cloudy) and one from Jim.

When his name, not Laurence’s flashed up, I was disturbed
to feel a pang of disappointment – how awful is that? The father of my child calls to enquire how I’m feeling of a Sunday afternoon and what am I doing? Pining after my ex! Jim was sweet too, in his sympathy rage with Gina. ‘Get her on the phone now,’ he demanded. ‘What the fuck does she think she’s playing at, keeping you awake till five a.m.?’

‘Jim, just leave it,’ I said. ‘I know you care but you’ll only make things worse.’

‘Well it’s not just you, it’s my baby too that I care about. I don’t like the idea of Gina on class As in the same house as my baby.’ For a non-conformer, Jim can be surprisingly moral sometimes.

‘OK, I won’t talk to her now if you don’t want me to,’ he said. ‘But I will let her know she’s bang out of order.’

I feel so wrong and yet so right at the moment so…skewwhiff. Something tells me I shouldn’t be having all these feelings, that ‘permanently on heat’ doesn’t quite fit with the natural order of things. Take this heavily pregnant woman waddling onto the bus now, her sticky-outy belly button visible through a thin, white top. With her glossy black hair and radiant skin, she’s very desirable but she’s also the epitome of ‘taken’. She’s wearing a badge: ‘Move on! I’m off the market.’

But me? What’s my badge? I’m growing a new life inside me, but my own is yet to unravel.

I’m psyching myself up to tell Laurence, I can’t believe I haven’t told Laurence! When I think of what I said in the taxi to Jim – an outright lie, lest we forget – my stomach turns inside out with guilt. And even if I do tell Laurence and this thing works out and it’s all modern and wonderful, what will our early courtship be like, realistically? I’ll be the size of a weeble and yet madly in lust, wanting acrobatic sex and barely able to see my own toes. Even more of a reason to get the shags in now.

I get off the bus on Waterloo Road and walk down The Cut, planning my speech in my head.

‘Judith, I have some news. It’s a bit scandalous.’

No, no I can’t say that. If Judith even so much as smells the word scandal her hack antennae will start twitching and before I know it she’ll have me nailed down to the sofa in her office, sucking every last morsel of my story out of me with those nicotine-stained fangs.

Try again.

‘Judith, I’ve got some news. I’m pregnant…’

Perhaps I should leave the ‘pregnant’ bit right until the end. As annoying as Judith is sometimes, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of her. That’s to say, I don’t want to give her the impression I am anything but married to my job. It’s important to get in the other person’s shoes when delivering news like this and I’m guessing Judith doesn’t ‘do’ babies. My guess would be that babies to Judith mean a pain in the arse, a staffing nightmare. When Sonya in the art department’s little boy had chicken pox and the nursery wouldn’t have him, Judith’s empathy amounted to: ‘Well bring him in here. If he’s really that ill, he won’t bother you and you can still get all your work done’. Not exactly Miriam Stoppard.

OK, how about, ‘Judith, I know this may not be what you want to hear, I didn’t either when I first found out, but these things happen and well, I’ve decided to keep the baby’ – sidetrack the P word, it might go down better – ‘the dad and I are not together but are very good friends and…’

Too much information? What about…

…‘Judith! Hi!’ Suddenly I’m face to face with my editor, she’s sucking on a Berkeley Menthol outside the newsagents, her mouth like a baboon’s bottom.

‘Mornin’.’ She chucks her fag end on the floor and demolishes it with one stamp and twist of her Trailfinders sandal. ‘I
haven’t seen you here before. Is this your normal route, then?’

Judith’s not very good at small talk. Get her on the phone bidding for a story and she’s as snappy as a racing commentator, but put her next to you at the office Christmas party or now, on a five-minute walk to the office, and you’d get more conversation in an execution waiting room. Sometimes I wonder if she just likes the cut and thrust of getting the story, not actually people themselves. And I’m struggling here, too, because she lets on nothing about her own life to talk about. Does she have a partner? She’s never mentioned one but we can’t be sure. Does she have kids? The chances are even more remote but she’s never revealed anything either way. All we know is that apparently she lives in Hounslow (although Jocelyn reckons she just camps down in a sleeping bag in the office every night) and that most of the time she looks utterly miserable.

‘So, er…how’s your dog? What’s his name again?’ I ask – since it’s the only thing I can think of to say.

She roots in her handbag for another cigarette.

‘Titch.’ She stops and lights it under the shelter of her hand. ‘And he’s fine thanks.’

And that’s it. The grand total of our conversation. Thankfully there’s road-works all along Blackfriars Road to drown out the silence but Jesus Christ, painful or what? It’s not exactly setting us up for the conversation we have to have. And we have to have it soon. Once the day starts, she’ll never have time.

When we get into the office, there’s only Jocelyn in.

‘Morning Ladies! And what a fintistic morning it is!’ she says, inextinguishable as ever. (God, I love Jocelyn.)

Judith hangs up her coat, goes into her office and switches on the light. I hover at the doorway like a spare part.

‘Yes?’ she peers at me over her glasses. I notice one side is held together with sellotape.

‘Um…’ Bollocks, this is way harder than I imagined. ‘Do you have five minutes?’

I’ve really gone and done it now.

At first she thinks I’m leaving.

‘Don’t tell me you’re pissing off to a competitor because if that’s the case, you’d better tell Jocelyn you can’t come to the conference before she books it and yet more of our budget goes down the drain.’

‘It’s not that, I’m pregnant.’ It just slides out.

She doesn’t tut, she doesn’t groan, she doesn’t even take her glasses off and bang her head on the desk like she usually does when someone tells her something she doesn’t like. She just sits down, very slowly, and says, ‘Oh. I see.’

I’m stumped. Utterly stumped! Where’s the snarl of abuse? The dirty look? The dismissive look (actually that’s the worst).

‘It was an accident, totally unplanned, to be honest it’s been a bit of a nightmare these past few weeks.’

I’m rambling now…

‘But we are really good friends, you know, and I know we can get through this. My work won’t suffer…’

‘Hang on, hang on…’

Judith takes off her glasses and rubs her face. I finally stop talking.

‘But you are keeping the baby…’ She frowns at me. ‘Aren’t you?’

Uh?

I thought she’d offer to pay for my abortion (in return for my story) or send me packing to
You’re Having a Baby!
magazine with the rest of the career casualties, as she sees it, but instead, there’s something like actual concern on her face. For one minute, Judith Hogg looks like she might, even, be human.

‘Um, yes,’ I smile, far more relaxed now. ‘Of course I’m keeping the baby.’

‘Good.’ I get the feeling she’s reining herself in now. ‘Well you’d better tell Human Resources. Today, please.’

Telling everyone else in the office doesn’t turn out to be quite so low-key.

Anne-Marie smacks her hand to her mouth.

‘I knew it, I ber-loody knew it! I said to Jocelyn – Joss, what did I say to you?’

Jocelyn stands up behind her desk. ‘What’s that doll?’ Everyone turns round.

‘I said, there was no way one person would be scoffing that much unless they had one in the oven and guess what?!’

‘What?’

‘Tess had got a bun in the oven. Tess and French Fancie are having a baby!’