Unlike a Virgin (21 page)

‘This is too kind,’ he says, taking the chocolates. ‘Not at all. What made you speak again?’

‘Oh, I heard a song and it made me scream, and after that I spoke.’

‘Must have been a powerful song.’

I almost laugh.

‘You could say that. Also, I’m pregnant. I want to have a … you know … a thingy. Can you help me?’

‘You have to go to the doctor.

‘Oh, I thought you could take a pill and it would cause a … you know.’

‘A thingy?’

‘Yes. Sorry, I don’t like the other word.’

‘You can take a pill that would lead to that, but first you have to go to your GP, then he or she will refer you to a clinic and they will schedule a time to administer it.’

I stare at him. I so don’t want this to be happening.

‘Can’t you give it to me?’ He shakes his head.

‘Who’s your GP?’

‘Dr McGovern.’

‘She’s a lovely woman.’

‘I know.’ I sigh. Dr McGovern’s almost too lovely. She’s known me since I was a baby and I don’t want her to know I’m in this situation.

‘Do you want to use my phone to make an appointment?’

So many appointments. So much time off work. So much talking about it.

‘No, no, I’ll do it. Thank you, though.’

‘Take these,’ he says, handing me some pamphlets. The top one is titled ‘Terminating a Pregnancy’. I stare at it sadly. There’s not much to love about a pregnancy termination pamphlet.

I walk out of the Tablet Tardis and Tara Innit makes a loud hissing sound for my attention.

‘You’ve got a stalker,’ she says.

‘Probably,’ I say, with a casual shrug. ‘It would be about the level of my luck.’

‘He’s over there, behind the kitchen towels, watching you. He was watching yous when we were talking, then he bought summink, and now he’s stood there waiting for ya. He’s fit.’

Now, I raise my eyebrows. The odds could work for me having a stalker, but he wouldn’t be fit. More likely, he would be homicidal and smell of tooth decay. No, it’s bound to be someone from work who’s caught me skiving and is taking a mobile phone photo as evidence.

‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s fit.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He’s posh.’

I turn round. It’s Posh Boy, the dastardly destroyer of my professional life, and he’s standing behind a tower of special-offer ultra-absorbent kitchen towels.

‘Oi, Posh Boy, what are you doing here?’ I shout while folding up the pamphlets in my hand so they’re as small as possible.

He doesn’t respond in time so Tara shouts, ‘He was getting some athlete’s foot stuff.’

Posh Boy reddens.

‘With all that badminton they must pong.’

‘I could ask you the same question,’ he counters.

‘I was just discussing whether now is a good time to sell a house with the pharmacist.’

‘I’m sure you were, Grace Flowers, I’m sure you were. Now, as we’ve caught each other in Sainsbury’s during office hours, shall we get a coffee?’

Danny and I stopped talking during our relationship. It wasn’t like we sat there in stony silence, wildly gesturing when we couldn’t find the remote; words did leave our mouths, but our conversations tended to focus on dinner arrangements or the perils of parking. If someone put me on the spot, not that they would, and asked me to name a memorable conversation I’d had with my boyfriend of ten years, I would be embarrassingly stumped. Looking back I realise we simply recycled the same non conversations day after day after day.

‘What we doing for dinner?

‘Dunno. What d’you fancy?’

‘Dunno. Indian
^*
?’

‘Cool.’

‘I’ll pick up the usual on the way home.’

‘Cool.’

I knew all the stories he would trot out in company, because I was either in them or had heard them a hundred times. There was the time when Anthony Hopkins was at his work doing a voice-over for a computer game and Danny made him a cup of coffee. He said it was one of the greatest cups of coffee he’d ever had, and then he did his
Silence of the Lambs
tongue flick. And there was the time we were making a star to go on our Christmas tree and he ran off for a lightning wee and superglued his thumb to his foreskin. Those were the sorts of tales he told, but he’d never reveal anything about his feelings. He would never
really
talk.

That’s something that definitely couldn’t be said for Posh Boy. He wouldn’t know a pregnant pause if it picked his nose.

‘Oi, foot rot, do you ever shut up?’

‘Oi, cavern stomach. Do you ever stop eating?’

I interrupt the important job of wiping baked-bean juice from my plate with toast to give him some rather good, if I do say so myself, evils. I wasn’t planning to join him for a coffee. I was rather keen to get back in my car and listen to an amazing song by someone called Adele on Anton’s CD, but then we walked past the café on the way out of Sainsbury’s and I spied their four-foot poster for an all-day breakfast for £4.95 and changed my mind.

‘You had a fry-up, too.’

‘I went for the more civilised five-item option. Not the eight.’

‘Ah ha, but you missed out on the fried bread. Grave error.’

‘When was the last time you ate?’

I must look like a starving midnight-diet breaker, but I had Anton’s bacon sandwich only an hour and a half ago.

‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.’

‘What?’

‘You know that day …’

‘Oh, yeah, that one. I remember it well.’ I roll my eyes. ‘You might want to narrow it down.’

‘You were stood on the street calling a man who’d parked on a red route a bastard.’

‘Even that doesn’t narrow it down to be honest.’

‘Big car. Logo on the side.’

‘Yeah, I know what you’re on about.’

‘You don’t have to tell me, I’m just looking out for you. If anyone’s giving you trouble, maybe I can help. I would have asked you before but you’ve been in Wales etc.’

‘Oh, right, thanks,’ I push my plate away. ‘This company is planning to build a housing and retail development near here. They want to build a slip road to it, which means snipping a corner off the big graveyard there, but my dad is buried in the graveyard and it means digging up his grave.’

‘Are you serious? People want to build on your dad’s grave! That’s awful.’

‘Yes, John, it is.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Well, it’s true. They’re bribing everyone with thousands of pounds. Even my mother has said yes. But there’s a lovely old couple who won’t back down, and I think I’ve made my mother see sense, too. Well, as much as it’s possible for my mother to see sense.’

‘Right. What? Don’t they need the money?’

‘No,’ I say, looking at him as though he’s stupid. ‘Some things are more important than money.’

‘Sorry, Grace. I didn’t mean to—’

‘No, well, it’s horrible. Horrible.’

‘Some people don’t see beyond profit, sadly.’

‘I know.’ I sigh.

‘Oh, Grace. I’m sorry,’ he says kindly. ‘I lost my mum, too. I don’t know what I’d do if someone wanted to build on her grave.’

I nod, but leave it at that. Best not to get into one of those riotous dead-parent chats.

John smiles as though he understands, and I smile back. I don’t even want to say anything mean to him. He leans across the table and takes my hand in his. It’s like the hug he gave me after I’d hurled up outside the Italian. There’s something about his big, posh, badminton-playing hands and arms holding me that isn’t as repulsive as I would have expected. Although, if truth be told, Posh Boy doesn’t look that wowed by my touch. In fact, he’s turning his nose up, and now he’s pulled his hand from mine and is wiping it on a serviette.

‘Oh, sorry, was there bean goo on my hands?’

‘Urgh!’ He nods. ‘I can’t stand baked beans.’

‘How can you not like beans?’

‘I’m just not a bean man, although I am partial to a chickpea.’

‘Oh,’ I say flatly, remembering my predicament. ‘I’m not that fond of chickpeas at the moment.’

I’m going to miss loads of time at work because of this thingy. I’ve been out of the office for fifty minutes already this morning, most of which has been spent in the doctor’s surgery staring at a poster for chlamydia. I’m on a bogus viewing. A bogus viewing is a useful tool in the estate-agency profession.

‘I’m just going to show Chetwynd Road,’ you say, and promptly drive to the chemist to buy some Tampax. Not that I need those at the moment because of this almighty cock-up – in the depressingly literal sense. And anyway, bogus viewings haven’t been great for me since I accidentally told Lube about the gambling afternoons the boys in another branch were running. It was a very unfortunate incident, but when Lube launched an inquiry into why there was a property boom and his Notting Hill branch seemed to be sleeping through it, I thought he knew about the gambling syndicate the boys in the office there had going at William Hill. I assumed they were all in on it. ‘Look at the tits on that, put down a fiver each way for
me,’ sort of thing. But that wasn’t the case and Lube went ballistic when I mentioned it. Now I don’t get many favours from the Make A Move lads.

Dr McGovern’s just come out of her office. Please let it be my turn. I promise I now know all there is to know about chlamydia.

‘Grace Flowers.’ She smiles at me. The pharmacist was right. Dr McGovern’s a lovely woman. She’s tall, and not just by my standards, but officially so, like a man. You could most definitely rely on her to get a mug from the top cupboard. She never wears make-up or tries to look glam, but she smiles all the time, and somehow that makes her beautiful. I should correct that, she doesn’t smile all the time; she wouldn’t smile if you were telling her about your thrush symptoms or bowel cancer. She listens attentively to ailments and then she smiles the rest of the time.

The irony of all this is that for the last few years I’ve only ever needed to see her for my contraceptive pill prescriptions.

She leads me into her office, where there’s another chlamydia poster on the wall.

‘I was so pleased to see your name here. Well, not pleased that you’re ill, of course,’ she says, gesturing to a plastic chair for me to sit upon.

‘I was at a dinner last week with some other doctors. There was a group of us, we trained together and now we’re all coming up to retirement together and we were reminiscing about our more memorable appointments over the years. I told them about your mum and dad when they came to see me, pregnant with you.’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘Well, she was nervous. Your mum was quite young, wasn’t she?’

‘Eighteen,’ I say, and it suddenly hits me how young that was. I’m twenty-six and I feel too young to have this baby. Mum must have been bricking it.

‘Eighteen, my goodness.’

‘And my dad came, too?’ I ask, surprised.

‘He did. He was jumping off the walls with excitement.’

‘About me?’

‘Oh, yes. I nearly asked him to step outside. I thought he’d have something over, like your mother! But then he calmed down, and as I was examining your mum, he took her hand and he sang to you – well, to your mother’s tummy.’

‘My dad sang in here.’

‘Yes. In all my years as a doctor, no one else has ever sung in here. And it was beautiful, that’s what I was telling my colleagues.’

‘What did he sing?’

‘Oh, what was it? Oh, I’m sorry, Grace. That, I can’t remember.’

I must look disappointed because she says sorry two more times.

‘Um,’ I whisper. I need to get to the point, but suddenly I don’t want to. Come on, Grace, you have to get back to work. ‘I’m pregnant, but I can’t have this baby,’ I whisper.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, yes. I mean. I work all the time and there’s no money unless I work!’

‘Sorry, Grace, I meant are you sure you’re pregnant.’

‘Oh right. Yes, I did a test. But also I know. I feel pregnant,
sick, my boobs are killing me. I’m craving ice lollies. And there was an accident …’

Dr McGovern waits to see if I’ll continue. But I don’t.

‘So it was an accident.’

‘Yeah, I forgot I’d run out of pills, because I was working really hard to get this promotion and then we accidentally, you know … Then I took the morning-after pill but it didn’t work.’

‘Hmm.’ She smiles, not an ‘I’m so happy’ smile, more of an ‘It’ll be all right’ smile. ‘And what are your thoughts about this pregnancy?’

I sigh a deep sigh. It’s a sigh that goes right into the dusty corners of the issue, making my chin quiver and my eyes prick with tears. I’ve already told her I can’t have a baby, why does she have to dwell on this? I look down at my lap. There’s a crusty Twister lolly stain on my leggings, which I pick at.