Читать книгу What Happens Now - Sophia Money-Coutts - Страница 13

IT WAS THREE WEEKS later, on the train home to Norfolk, that I developed an inkling. Or maybe the word ‘inkling’ is too strong. It suggests that I knew what was coming, which I didn’t, despite what certain people claimed later. But it was on the train that the possibility presented itself in my head and, milliseconds later, my body responded by convulsing with fear. Shit. What if? Nah, couldn’t be. And yet? What if?

It was all thanks to Jess, who’d decided to come home with me for the weekend because she said she wanted to escape London for the ‘wilds’ of the country. This seemed ambitious considering we were off to stay in my parents’ semi in Castleton, but Jess had overly romantic ideas about life. She was late to Liverpool Street that Saturday morning so I picked up our tickets and dithered for ten minutes in Caffè Nero wondering whether I could stomach a Danish. I felt sick, which was weird, because I hadn’t been out drinking last night. I stood in front of the glass cabinet frowning to myself. What did I have for supper? I remembered. My ‘special’ pesto pasta – pasta, couple of spoonfuls of pesto and a few peas – the ‘special’ element of this gourmet dinner – lobbed in from a bag in the freezer so I could tell myself I was getting one of my five a day. But it didn’t contain anything sinister, so why did I feel vommy, as if saliva was pooling at the back of my throat?

‘Can I have an Americano please? Medium?’ I said to the woman behind the till. She wordlessly nodded at the card machine in front of me.

I reached down for the purse in my bag and stood up again, but had to put a hand on the counter to steady myself. I felt like I’d been out until 3 a.m. doing parkour in the streets, yet all I’d done was eat my pasta on the sofa with Grace and Riley while we watched a weird Netflix documentary they’d chosen about dolphins. Did you know that dolphins masturbate? I didn’t. Male dolphins wrap wriggling eels around their penises apparently and that does it for them. Isn’t that odd? It made me think quite differently about ever wanting to swim with dolphins. Each to their own but I prefer a vibrator. Although even that had felt like too much work last night, so after the documentary finished I’d dragged myself into bed and, before I could hear any of Grace and Riley’s own mating rituals, fallen asleep.

I picked up my coffee from the end of the counter just as my phone rang in my coat pocket.

‘Morning, darling, I’m here,’ said Jess.

‘Hi. Just grabbing a coffee in Nero. But we should maybe hurry up because…’ I pulled my phone away from my ear to check the time, ‘we’ve only got eight minutes so our platform should be up.’

‘Amazing, I’m desperate for a coffee. Wait there and I’ll come find you,’ said Jess, ignoring my mention of the train. In the eleven years I’d known her, she’d never been early, or on time, to anything. ‘Sorry, Italian blood,’ she’d say, shrugging, and not sounding remotely sorry whenever she arrived at the pub half an hour late.

I hovered at the door of Caffè Nero, scanning the station for a familiar blonde head. There she was, not moving with any sense of urgency, rolling along in a leather jacket with a red canvas bag hanging over her shoulder. She waved as she got closer.

‘Hello, my heart. Let me get this coffee. What an adventure, I can’t wait to see your parents, it’s been FOR EVER.’

‘Could I have a cappuccino please? Large?’ she asked the Caffè Nero lady, before turning back to me, grinning.

‘Guess what?’ she said.

I narrowed my eyes at her and took a swig of my coffee. ‘Er, dunno. Give me a clue.’

‘OK. How do I look this morning?’

I scrutinized her face. It was a face I knew almost as well as my own. Unfairly small nose, wide mouth, brown eyes which were generally thick with black liner, hair, well, generally all over the place but today it was pulled over one shoulder in a plait.

I shrugged. ‘Had your eyebrows done?’

She shook her head. ‘Guess again.’

‘Cappuccino,’ grunted the coffee lady, putting Jess’s cup down at the end of the counter.

‘Come on,’ I said, checking the time on my phone again. ‘We’ve got to go. Can’t stand round playing Guess Who?. Tell me on the train.’

Since it was early Saturday morning, the train was empty. One middle-aged man in a rugby shirt sitting at a table, reading his paper.

‘This one?’ I said, gesturing at a free table opposite him.

Jess nodded and sat. ‘OK, since you’re not going to guess it, I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘Are you listening?’

‘Yup,’ I said, sniffing my coffee. I wasn’t even sure I could drink it. I felt like swallowing anything would make me gag.

‘Lil?’

‘Mmmm,’ I said, lifting the paper cup towards my mouth.

‘Did you hear me? I just said I think I’m in love.’

‘What?’ I put the cup back down on the table and frowned at her. ‘With Walt?’

Jess quickly shook her head. ‘No. No, not Walt. I’ve had to let him go. I’m talking about Alexi.’

‘Who’s Al— Ohhhhh. That guy from the exhibition?’

‘Exactly,’ said Jess. ‘We’ve been texting ever since that night and I saw him again last night. And he’s amazing, Lil. Like, properly amazing. Funny and clever and he’s into art and—’

‘Hang on,’ I said, holding my hands up in front of me as if stopping traffic. ‘We need to go back to the start. You met him on that Friday but you only saw him again last night? And now you’re in love with him?’

‘I know, I know. It’s mad. But he was travelling after the exhibition. In America. And then he got back on Thursday so he came over last night. That’s why I was asking about my face. I only got about two hours’ sleep and I probably look like hell.’

‘No no, you don’t at all.’ She didn’t. She hadn’t bothered to remove last night’s eye make-up so it was smudged, but she looked kittenish, like a 1960s model. Whenever I slept in my make-up I woke up looking like Miss Havisham.

‘I know I’ve said this before but I think he’s maybe… well, I just have a good feeling about this, Lil. You know when you know? Or you know when people say “you know when you know”? I think I know.’

I hate that saying. I thought I’d known with Jake and then look what happened. I didn’t know at all. And then I thought about Max. Ha, Max! Another thing I was wrong about. He’d seemed a nice one on our date but then off he’d scarpered, up that mountain quicker than Ranulph fucking Fiennes on speed.

‘Lil?’

Obviously I did not say any of this to Jess, who was radiating such excitement that I felt I had to be enthusiastic.

‘Exciting! Although poor old Walt. But how come I’m only hearing about this now?’

Jess looked guilty, pulling one side of her mouth into a grimace. ‘I didn’t want to say anything until I saw you because I just thought it might be mean, given the Max thing. I’m actually still so cross with him that I don’t even like saying his name. I never want to say it again.’

I laughed. ‘Thanks, love, but never mind about him,’ I said. ‘Tell me about last night. What did you do? How was the…’ I glanced across the aisle to the table with the man reading his paper, then I lowered my voice and turned back to Jess. ‘S-e-x?’

‘Why are you spelling it?’

‘Because…’ I flicked my head towards the table.

Jess rolled her eyes. ‘You’re so paranoid. And we didn’t have sex because I’ve got my period, which was annoying.’

I heard the man rustle his papers as Jess rattled on: ‘But we did everything else, then we just lay there for hours chatting. About my work, about his work, about my family and where he comes from. He’s got an aunt who lives in Liguria too. Isn’t that spooky?’

I listened to her while holding my cup in the air. It was when she mentioned her period that my brain clicked, as if in a film scene, like a police detective who has a brainwave in his car while eating a doughnut. My period. Where was my period? Shit. I was due this week. I’d finished a packet of the pill last week, hadn’t I? I picked up my phone and scrolled through my apps for my calendar. I opened it and counted by drumming my fingers on the table. Thumb, two, three, four, five.

‘What you doing?’ said Lex.

‘Counting,’ I said, still looking down at my phone screen.

‘Counting what?’

I took a breath and paused before going on. ‘I’m late.’

‘Huh?’ Jess leant towards me to look at the calendar. ‘Ohhhhhh. You mean period late?’

‘Mmm.’

‘You should have got it when?’

‘Er, like, Tuesday. Wednesday latest.’

‘OK, Tuesday,’ went on Jess. ‘And it’s now Saturday. But you’re never normally regular, right?’

I thought back. I’d had my first period when I was thirteen. I went to the girls’ loos during lunch break and was astonished to see rust in my pants. Why was I rusting? But then I’d wiped myself, seen blood all over the tissue and nearly screamed over the cubicles that I was dying, only to realize this must be the great moment of womanhood that my mother had told me about. I’d felt so pleased with myself. A grown-up! A woman! I couldn’t wait to get home and share the news. Mum embraced me with a hug when I told her, and, later that evening, I found a box of tampons and a copy of The Female Eunuch on my bed with the corner turned down on a particular page, a sentence underlined in faint pencil: If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby. That didn’t seem a very sanitary idea to me. I’d ignored it and tucked the book underneath The Worst Witch on my bedside table.

Over dinner that night at the kitchen table, Mum had advised how to insert a tampon, waving her index finger in the air by way of demonstration. ‘You have to angle it towards your back, darling.’ I studied the leaflet in the box while sitting on the loo afterwards, musing that tampons looked like cocktail sausages with string, and when I finally succeeded getting one in there, it felt like a milestone. Not dissimilar to when I later passed my driving test. Just a bit messier.

It only took a few more periods for me to realize it wasn’t a great development. All those sanitary products, all that leaking, the pain, and all that paranoia about suddenly dying from Toxic Shock Syndrome if you slept with a tampon in.

It was now eighteen years on and, what’s eighteen times twelve? I did the sums in my head: 18 times 12 equals 216. I was now roughly 216 periods into my life but I couldn’t single any of them out. They’d all blended in my head, a boring hiccup that punctuated every month. Sometimes three days, sometimes five days. But mine were never late because I’d been on the pill for years. Ever since Jake and I started going out. Give or take a day, I knew when it would arrive. I knew when my stomach would bloat like a barrel and I’d start crying at adverts for donkey sanctuaries. I knew when to stock up on Feminax Express because the pain felt like my uterus was about to fall out of my vagina.

I’d thought about coming off the pill when Jake and I broke up, about giving my body a break, but decided to carry on just in case. So where was my freaking period?

I shook my head. ‘No, I’m always regular. I’m still taking the pill. But does that happen sometimes, that you sort of miss a period? If you’ve been taking it for years?’ I looked hopefully at Jess.

‘I don’t really know, love. Maybe?’ Jess didn’t believe in contraceptives. She insisted that she knew where she was in her cycle, then made them pull out and hoped for the best. ‘Or maybe it was so light you didn’t even notice it?’ she suggested.

That seemed unlikely. Quite hard to miss a whole period, right? I was always amazed at those headlines you sometimes saw: ‘Woman who didn’t know she was pregnant gives birth in a motorway service station!’

I put my right hand over my left boob, then my right one. They felt a tiny bit sensitive, like I was about to get my period. But it was so late. I wondered if I should google it, and then decided against it. Google would only tell me I was 100 per cent pregnant. Or I had some form of cancer. Then I looked at my coffee again.

‘I don’t feel great either this morning,’ I said to Jess. ‘Like, a bit sick. But I can’t be… can I? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ she said, reassuringly. And then slightly less reassuringly, ‘But maybe we should get a test just to make sure? So you don’t worry?’

I nodded and looked across at the man with his newspaper, who briefly met my eye and then looked back down. Poor man. He presumably thought he was catching a peaceful Saturday morning train with the paper only to find he was trapped in his very own live version of Loose Women.

We walked straight to Boots from King’s Lynn station, praying that I didn’t see anyone I knew. One of Mum’s t’ai chi women asking questions about my love life, that was all I needed. But we reached Boots unscathed, and I grabbed a £4.99 Boots own brand test despite Jess’s grumbling that I should get a more expensive one.

‘All I’m going to do is wee on it. I don’t think it matters whether I have the Rolls Royce test or the Skoda version,’ I told her. ‘Let’s just get it and go.’

‘Do you want a bag?’ asked the lady behind the till as I paid.

‘Nah, it’s all right thanks,’ I said, stuffing the box down the side of my overnight bag.

When we got home ten minutes later, I pushed open the front door to a familiar smell – the sweet, fruity tang of boiling jam. Mum was always making jam for local markets and selling it for good causes – women’s charities, animal charities, children’s charities. Distressed llamas of North Norfolk, that sort of thing. She loved a cause.

‘Hi,’ I shouted loudly into the hall, dropping my bag at the foot of the stairs and waving at Jess to follow me through to the kitchen.

Mum, standing with her back to us at the oven, whirled around with a wooden spoon in her hand. She was wearing her favourite apron – ‘There are no soggy bottoms in my kitchen’ slogan on the front – and a pair of glasses that had steamed up.

‘Hello, my ducks,’ she said, reaching for her glasses with her free hand and taking them off. ‘Give us a hug.’

She reached for me first, wooden spoon going over one shoulder, then Jess. Drops of jam fell to the lino.

‘How was the journey? Do you want a cup of tea? Dennis is at the football. Won’t be home till sixish, so I’m making a batch of this for the market tomorrow. Look, sit down, sit down.’ Mum always talked quickly, imparting information in bursts as if we only had a limited number of seconds left on this planet and she had to get it all out.

Mum met Dennis in the early 1990s while she was teaching students and working on her PhD (about the role of the Victorian prostitute) at Norwich University. She’d already had me by then since my biological father was a guitarist called Adrian, who Mum had a brief fling with while studying for her undergraduate degree at Manchester a few years before. Dennis appeared on the scene when I was four. He was a military historian in the same faculty at Norwich, and moved into our lives overnight. Sometimes, Mum would refer to a period of her life ‘BD’, which meant ‘Before Dennis’, but I didn’t remember that time. Dennis was the man who taught me to swim one summer off Holkham beach. Dennis was the man who taught me to recite the dates of famous battles – the Siege of Thessalonica, Verdun, Barbarossa – like other children reeled off nursery rhymes. Dennis was the man who smelled like his writing shed in our garden, of strong coffee and old history books.

Mum had explained the situation to me with a biology lesson not long after she met Dennis. As I sat in the bath one evening, she drew a picture in the fogged-up bathroom window of a pair of ovaries, a womb and a single sperm. She explained the facts of life with huge enthusiasm and talked about how she’d made me with another man, not Dennis.

‘But can Dennis be my daddy?’ I’d apparently asked her, having digested the drawing on the window in silence for some minutes.

I didn’t remember this conversation. It became one of those memories I formed in my head from Mum recounting it to me when I was older. She often used the story about the biological drawings to embarrass me as a teenager. But the upshot of that bath-time chat was Dennis became my father in everything but name. Not stepfather, because he and Mum never married, but also because calling Dennis a ‘step’ felt disloyal. He was more than that to me. He was everything. Adrian, a stranger I’d never met and knew nothing about, was technically my father, but Dennis was my dad.

He and Mum had bought the house in Castleton a couple of years on and had taught at Norwich ever since, combining academic life with their social crusades. These days, subjects they felt strongly about included but were not limited to: the demise of the Labour Party, the lack of education funding, the lack of NHS funding, Andrew Marr, the bus service in their area of Norfolk and the price of milk in the Tesco Express.

Both he and Mum were now sixty and retained the zeal and energy of Russian revolutionaries. That’s why I was called Lil, or Lilian technically, after one of Mum’s favourite suffragettes, Lilian Lenton. She was a flinty-eyed woman who, in a black and white picture taken in 1955, looked like a witch. But she’d been part of the suffragist movement during the pre-First World War years, committing arson, going on hunger strike and escaping prison so many times she was nicknamed the ‘tiny Pimpernel’.

Mum put the spoon down beside the cooker and gathered up a pile of papers in her hands, moving them from the table to the wooden dresser underneath the kitchen window. Gerald the tortoise was eating a piece of lettuce under a kitchen chair.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said. ‘Jess – tea?’

She nodded at me. ‘Yep, please. What you making?’

‘Well,’ said Mum, a note of uncertainty in her voice. ‘I picked some plums from the farm this week, so it’s supposed to be plum jam. But…’ she stopped and peered into the pan, ‘I’m not sure it’s going to set properly. So it might be plum sauce, at this rate.’

‘Delicious,’ said Jess.

‘Mmmm,’ said Mum, still peering into the pan, before she spun around again. ‘But forget the jam. How are you both?’

‘Jess has exciting news actually,’ I said, keen to deflect attention from me.

‘Oh yes?’ said Mum.

‘I think I’m in love,’ said Jess, a faraway smile on her face.

‘Oh that is exciting,’ said Mum, stirring the plums. ‘Who with?’ Mum loved a romance. If I ever came home from school when I was younger and even mentioned a boy’s name, she’d start asking about who he was and did he want to come over for tea.

‘He’s a Russian art collector, called Alexi. I only met him recently. Lil was there, actually, so it’s super quick but we spent all last night together and just…’ Jess exhaled loudly, ‘I think he’s the dream.’

I’d gone through this process several times with Jess. Complete and utter obsession with a man for a few weeks, couldn’t think about anything else, mentioned his name every other sentence, fantasized about their future life and how many children they’d have until it was nearly intolerable for the rest of us. If falling in love was like being high, it was as if Jess had taken several drugs simultaneously.

I’d felt that high briefly when I started going out with Jake, but then it mellowed into something more sedate, less manic. I longed for that thrill again. That buzz of clicking with someone and wanting to spend every minute with them, of dreading the moment you had to leave them even if it was for a night. Of falling into a gloom if you weren’t going to see them for a few days. That was love, right? It made idiots of us all, but it was also the most intoxicating feeling in the world.

Which is why whenever Jess declared she’d fallen in love, part of me felt jealous. How did she manage it? How did she fall in love and find someone who fell in love with her back, when I couldn’t even get a reply on WhatsApp? I didn’t want to feel bitter towards my best friend, but it seemed a tiny bit unfair. Although her latest story kept Mum distracted for half an hour, before she said she had to nip into town to drop off the jam at the village hall for the market in the morning.

That’s how I ended up standing outside Mum and Dennis’s bathroom, having handed the damp, positive pregnancy stick to Jess. I didn’t do the second test. We’ve all seen films where the woman has the bladder of a horse and does 193 pregnancy tests, simply unable to believe that it’s positive. But firstly, I didn’t have any wee left, and secondly, it was like I kind of knew.

I didn’t know know. I wasn’t telepathic. But from the moment on the train when I realized I was late, I suspected. I still hoped I wasn’t pregnant with a strange man’s baby, but a little voice inside my brain told me I was. I put a hand on my stomach. I was pregnant with the baby of a man I’d met once. I was carrying a bundle of cells, half of which technically belonged to someone else. It felt freakishly intimate. What was one normally left with after a first date? A bad case of thrush? A string of embarrassing, flirty WhatsApp messages which stop immediately the morning after when you both realize it wasn’t meant to be? I remembered Jimmy Day in biology lessons at school once asking Mrs Martin if it was true that semen survived for three days. Mrs Martin had looked at him with the unfazed expression of a long-serving biology teacher and said yes, spermatozoa could indeed survive for up to seventy-two hours, or even longer in the correct, ‘hospitable environment’.

Jimmy had sniggered and gone round for weeks afterwards asking confused girls if their stomachs were ‘hospitable environments’. I don’t know what happened to Jimmy. I suspect he hadn’t gone off to work in Silicon Valley or find the solution to world peace.

While leaning against the bathroom doorframe, I felt Jess’s hand on my arm.

‘You all right?’

I nodded slowly and looked at the test in her hand. ‘Yeah, but shall we get rid of that and go for a walk before they get back?’

‘Good plan,’ said Jess.

I took the stick back from Jess and went to the kitchen, where I grabbed a Co-op bag from under the sink and bundled it in there.

We walked for five minutes, straight to the pub, via a bin just outside the village shop where I chucked the plastic bag.

‘What d’you want?’ said Jess, once inside the Fox and Cushion, as I looked around for a table.

I opened my mouth to say ‘vodka and tonic’ and then stopped.

Jess read my mind. ‘I think you need one.’

I shook my head. ‘Nope. Just… lemonade?’

I found a table in the corner, bench along the back, rickety wooden chair on the other side of it. I sat. My brain was flitting about like a sparrow, unable to settle on any thought for more than a few seconds.

In your twenties, maybe in your teens, did you ever play that game with your girlfriends: what would you do if you got pregnant? Jess and I would discuss it at uni from time to time, together with our three flatmates – Nats, Lucy and Bells – as we lay on the sofa watching Ready, Steady, Cook, still in our tracksuit bottoms, still hung-over from the night before. Probably one of us had had a scare, or forgotten to take our pill, and the answer had always seemed obvious. ‘Get rid of it,’ we would agree, before discussing whether it was a red tomato or green pepper day. We could just about afford to keep ourselves in pasta and have enough money left over for tequila in Edinburgh nightclubs. The thought of a baby was laughable. Not for us. We had plans. We were going to graduate, get jobs, work and have children at a blurry date in the future. That was how it would go.

When we got to our mid-twenties, nearer thirty, the question came up again in cheap Italian restaurants in London where we met for catch-up dinners. Breadsticks. Bottles of chianti that made your teeth furry. Bowls of spaghetti, or tricolore salads for the ones who were on diets. By that point, I’d been going out with Jake for a few years. The others had boyfriends too. Apart from Jess, who always had someone but was about to move on to a different victim.

The game had become trickier by this stage, more of a moral maze. If we’d got pregnant with our boyfriends, what would we do? There were still dozens of reasons not to: lack of money, I wanted to spend more years teaching, I remained too young, I wanted to get married first, I wasn’t even sure that I could keep a baby alive. What if I dropped my imaginary baby on its head and it fell on that soft bit where its skull hasn’t fused yet? That seemed like the kind of thing I would do.

But the idea of being pregnant was less terrifying than it had been at uni. I was in a long-term relationship with Jake, I wanted to have children with him one day anyway, he had a job which could just about support us. Plus, what if I got pregnant, then aborted it, then found out I couldn’t have any more? We decided at these dinners that it would depend on the circumstances and we wouldn’t necessarily ‘get rid of it’. Then we’d order another bottle of wine and merrily move on to another topic – some new TV drama, our mothers, how much we hated our bosses, whether one of us should get a pixie cut or would it make our face look fat?

A few years on, people started getting married and having babies anyway and the game was forgotten. Everyone started changing their Facebook profile pictures to them on their wedding day, like a badge of honour. There was Nats being showered with confetti as she came out of church. Lucy sitting in the back of a posh car, beaming through the window. Bells on her new husband’s shoulders, the dress bunched up around her hips, while we all waved sparklers around her. My profile picture remained just me, on the beach in Norfolk, a picture taken by Dennis a few years ago.

Jess came back from the bar, a white wine in one hand, lemonade in the other.

‘Right,’ she said, sitting down and raising her eyebrows at me, ‘what you going to do?’

I shrugged. ‘Honestly, I don’t know.’

‘Did you miss a day? Or take it at a different time?’

I shook my head. The packet lived on my bedside table and I always took it when I woke up in the morning.