Читать книгу The Baby Diaries - Sam Binnie - Страница 11

Christ, I still feel so terrible. The fact that there are some women who feel like this every day of their nine months I think is a pretty reasonable explanation for only children. I just about manage to stay upright at work, but I come home and just lie, with a downturned mouth, either on the bed or the sofa and try not to smell the food Thom is doing his damndest to cook and eat in a secretive manner. Then I eat as many mouthfuls of cornflakes and cold, cold milk as I can before my rebellious stomach sends reinforcements and the refuelling party is over. The enemy has realised my plan and all I can do is retreat to the sofa again, trying not to groan out loud and wishing so very, very hard that the feeling of being on a whirling roundabout would stop. Any time now. Like, now. Or now. Or now?

I’m sorry to feel so sorry for myself. As long as this baby is growing, and healthy, and all that jazz that pregnants say to one another like a mantra, then I can stomach this stomach.

Unless I wake up tomorrow and it’s still like this. In which case, I will not be happy.

OK, I can do this. Millions of people – women, I suppose; millions of women – get pregnant every day, and they just get on with it, don’t they? I mean: there will be frightened girls and women who don’t want their babies and don’t know what to do, and women who want babies so much and can’t have them, and here I am, happily married (for less than three months) with a supportive husband and family, so what am I worried about?

Yet the reality of this pregnancy rattles around my head. I can actually hear it: rattle rattle rattle, all the time. Are these sound-effect thoughts also a symptom of pregnancy? I’m delighted, then I’m terrified. I think of the fun we shall have with our own child, then I think of my body, and my social life, and – oh GOD – my career. Tony’s hardly a dream boss, but I love Polka Dot. What am I supposed to do? I’ve had this new position for even less time than I’ve been married, and I’ve got to somehow get a carrier pigeon to Tony in distant lands to let him know that he took a punt on me and it backfired? How am I going to face any of them? And Pamela too! She championed me against her son, and now I’m dragging the Polka Dot offices back sixty years, into the dark days when young women married, bred and vanished into a life of baking and school fêtes. Not that that’s even what I want – I don’t want to watch my career dissolve while I stay in the kitchen, weeping while my kids pelt me with Lego. But that’s definitely the assumption Pamela and Tony will make.

But then I get excited again. A baby, with Thom. Not that I even like babies – I really don’t, not at all – but it’s exciting, to be doing something so different, so wonderful, so creative, and to have this massive responsibility and to be sharing it with Thom. What an honour. This is the most wonderful thing. And then I think: a baby. Jesus. Not a baby Jesus, but a baby nonetheless. And one that I imagine will do a hell of a lot more crying than the one we have to thank for Christmas. How the hell are we going to cope with that?

And then the nausea comes back.

We spent tonight watching some belated fireworks from a pub window with Jim (a session musician and source of great kindness, and my oldest friend besides Eve) and Poppy, the girl he brought to our wedding and who seems like a keeper. I sat sipping an apple juice (‘Sorry, I’ve been feeling rough all week’) and trying to steady my stomach and absorb the letter from Dr Bedford this morning, confirming the date for the twelve-week scan. Thom’s got permission from school to go in late, and I’ll tell Polka I’m editing from home that day. I can’t stop thinking about it. Something about that scan will make it real, rather than just a distant To Do. And I’m sure it’s going to be much harder to keep up my heroin habit afterwards. Joke.

TO DO:

Start reading any of those pamphlets Dr Bedford gave me