Читать книгу One Thing Led to Another - Katy Regan - Страница 5

Two minutes it says to wait, two minutes and bam! Your life changed forever. Imagine that. No God, on second thoughts, let’s not. Let’s just calm down, breathe deeply and concentrate. I take off my watch. It’s one of those underwater sports ones. Great for boiling eggs and ideal for timing how long my mother can monologue on the phone whilst I am doing something else.

I never dreamt I’d be using it for this.

I set it: 2.00. The numbers glow neon in the darkness, a countdown to my fate. Could I be? If I really thought I was, surely I’d have chosen somewhere better than a self-cleaning toilet in the middle of SE1 to have such a life-changing experience.

1.45

It was only once. Once! Out of only a handful of times that we’d even bloody done it in the first place – that we thought we’d…how can I put this…leave it to Jim’s impeccable timing and wing it.

1.40

But there’s winging it and winging it, isn’t there? And the more images of that night come at me like film stills on double speed replay, the more I’m thinking the odds are stacked against us.

1.35

There’s the position for a start. Oh Shit. Me on my back, legs wrapped around his neck in possibly the most sperm receptive position of all time, on day 16 ( I know, I’ve counted, about a million times) of my cycle.

1.00

And then there were the knickers: black satin tie-at-the-side jobs, and on a school night. I mean, what kind of whore am I? And the fact I can’t drive. If only I could drive, this could all have been avoided. If my mother had just bought me driving lessons at seventeen like every other reasonable mother in the whole world, if she had just trusted me, not assumed I was an accident waiting to happen (quite literally), I would have driven home, safely home, very probably in a thoroughly un-alluring pair of Bhs briefs, and been tucked up in bed by 11 p.m. instead of flat on my back with my legs around Jim Ashcroft’s neck.

0.40

Please God, I’m begging you. I cannot be pregnant. I don’t even have a boyfriend. Jim and I are just good friends. So good, admittedly, we tend to fall into each other’s beds after one too many on a Friday night when the proposition of a cuddle seems like a good idea, but still, we are ‘just good friends’.

0.27

I know this because after each encounter (and for the record there’s been more than could constitute ‘a one off’ but less than could constitute ‘seeing each other’) we don’t spend all weekend together. We don’t visit garden centres or use cutesy voices on the phone. And I certainly never buy his mother’s birthday present on his behalf.

0.20

Having stayed the night at each other’s houses we get up then go our separate ways. Me back to my girly shared house in Islington and Jim to his south London bachelor pad. Two single people, two ends of London, two different lives. So you can see if this test is positive, it’s hardly going to be Swiss Family Robinson.

0.15

But once is all it takes isn’t it? And what if the man I decided to take a chance with had a Superhero sperm? A bloody non-conformist little sperm that when the masses herded in one direction, turned on its tail and butterfly stroked in the other shouting, Vive La Revolution! That would be typical of Jim. He’s the most non-conformist free spirit I’ve ever met. And it only takes one. One sperm, one chance, one moment, for all the other moments in the rest of your life to be changed forever.

But anyway…

0.07

We’re about to find out…

0.05

I pick up the test.

0.04

I hold it under the light of my phone.

0.03

I’m looking at it now, reading it feverishly like I remember looking for my degree results on a board of thousands.

0.02

All I can concentrate on is the sound of my pulse throbbing but I’m glaring at it, gripping it tight in my hands and I’m trying to see straight and…

0.00

Beep beep beep

…I AM! Shit I am! There’s two lines! There’s two…!

Oh. No.

But there’s not.

I’m not. Because there’s two lines, but there’s no cross. Which means it’s negative. No baby. Thank you Lord.