My phone is making loud noises. My initial thought is my usual daily one: must be time for work, ugh. But it’s still pitch black and my Ikea blackout curtains aren’t that good. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s a Sunday. Someone must be calling me. What time is it? My alarm clock says 3am. Surely not PPI calls in the middle of the bloody night, I groggily think. Then I catch myself and realise no one calls at this hour unless they have bad news. I scramble for the phone, see it’s Freya calling, and with a voice that is a mixture of panic and sleep I ask what’s happened.

Freya’s still in Greece. Is that why she’s calling so late, I think? Time difference? But surely not, it’s not that far away. Freya’s hysterical, there are loud noises in the background and the signal’s terrible. I try to find out where she is, who she’s with, but she gives me nothing, she just wails. I finally manage to coax her into moving to a quieter area and she begins to take deep breaths and calm down. After about fifteen minutes, during which time I establish she isn’t in immediate physical danger and head to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, Freya starts her story.

Freya absolutely positively had every intention of heading to the refugee camps to help out but first she wanted to get a feel for Greece and get insider tips on which camps to head to. So obviously she spent her first three weeks in a hostel on the beachfront in Thessaloníki, drinking and partying with kids on their gap years. She met a guy who was happy to pay for her accommodation when she couldn’t afford to stay longer. He shouted her two-for-one fishbowl cocktails, MDMA, poppers – retro, I think to myself – and rides on the banana boat. What a catch. She found out about the Elaionas refugee camp in Athens and figured she could be useful there, but before going to the camp she of course had to see the sights. She met a tour guide who kindly let her stay with him and he showed her around The Parthenon and The Acropolis and The Temple of Olympian Zeus. Then she remembered that her friend Eleni from university, whom she hadn’t seen in four years, and hadn’t really known all that well at university anyway, lived in Athens. So she messaged Eleni on Facebook and asked if she could swing by. Eleni inexplicably agreed, and so she did indeed swing by.

It was hot when she arrived, so Freya was wearing a top that tastefully, in her opinion, showed some of her midriff. At first I’m not quite sure why Freya’s thrown her outfit choice into the story, except maybe to rub it in my face, which she loves to do from time to time, that I’ve never had the physique to pull off a crop top. But I see its significance soon enough. Freya was welcomed into the good Greek household, where she received hugs from Eleni’s mother and sister and brother and father and some people who were maybe cousins or aunts, in name if not in blood, and she was plied with aggressive amounts of food and drink. She regaled Eleni and her family with her tales of London life, her travels thus far, and her worthy intentions for Elaionas. Then Eleni’s grandmother, old and doddery and plump yet withered, and dressed all in black, joined them after waking from her nap. She took a while to register that a stranger was in her midst but when she did she started speaking rapid Greek, apparently offering more food and drink and apologising for not acknowledging her before. She moved towards Freya for the traditional Greek embrace and kisses, and as Freya rose from her seat at the centre of the table the old yiayia became even more animated. It was ‘Enkyios’ and ‘moro’ and ‘bravo’ and pointing at Freya, and more specifically at Freya’s stomach.

Freya understood enough Greek and human body language to clock what was happening. How embarrassing, she thought. Freya had clearly gorged on their hospitality to such a degree that she’d developed a little food baby. I could imagine how she’d felt, as I feel that same wave of shame whenever a man offers me a seat on a train. Well, this outfit is going straight in the bin when I get home, is my usual thought. And that’s what Freya thought about the crop top. Maybe, she pondered, she’d reached the age when, like me, she could no longer pull off a bare midriff. Except, she pointed out, it wasn’t really like me, because of course I’d never been able to pull off a bare midriff. I was heartened to hear that even in her current emotionally tumultuous state she hadn’t let a chance to tease me pass her by. Anyway, there she was in the house of someone she hardly knew, being congratulated on her pregnancy by an old grandma who surely must be partially sighted and perhaps have a touch of dementia to boot. How are we all going to navigate this awkward situation, she wondered, as she pulled a light shirt over her shoulders and across her stomach, as if hiding it away would make everyone forget what had just happened. It had all been said in Greek after all, so perhaps, Freya thought, she could simply pretend she hadn’t understood, and the whole family could pretend to believe her. After a few moments silence that seemed like forever, during which everyone looked between Freya and the grandma and then back again, Eleni started to speak in Greek to her yiayia. She must be correcting and admonishing her, Freya imagined. But she imagined wrong, because Eleni next turned to her, and in plain English congratulated her. How bad Eleni had felt for not noticing before. That was why Freya seemed to be glowing from the moment she saw her, Eleni said, that was why her hair seemed so thick and lustrous, and her skin was so beautifully clear. Eleni’s sister had the same glow each time she was pregnant and she’d had three girls, so maybe that means Freya would have a girl, the baby girl hormones coursing through her would probably be what was giving her that extra colour.

Freya didn’t know what to say. Like most women, she does not respond well to being told she has a large stomach, but at the same time she couldn’t cause a scene in Eleni’s house after the family had been so kind to her. Plus, she had nowhere else to stay for the next few nights. So Freya simply thanked them all and claimed she was feeling a little tired and needed a nap. Eleni showed her to the room she would be staying in for the next couple of nights, and Freya, who suddenly felt genuinely incredibly tired, lay down her head and went to sleep chuckling to herself about the misunderstanding, and wondering how she was going to keep the pregnant act up for the next few days. When she awoke a few hours later it was to the sudden and terrifying realisation that perhaps it wasn’t an act. Or not perhaps. Definitely. Something clicked while she was asleep, and she knew. She just knew. She hadn’t had a period for months, but she hadn’t thought anything of it because between her poor eating and drink and drug habits, her periods were always rather hit and miss. She’d stopped taking the pill years ago because she suspected it was contributing to her moods, but she always used protection, didn’t she? It was sometimes hard to recall after a heavy night, but she thought she had. So maybe it couldn’t be true. She talked herself down, laughing again at the misunderstanding, and harder this time because this crazy family had managed to not only insult her, but fool her into believing she could be pregnant too.

She kept up the act for the next couple of days, which was easier than she might have thought because heartburn had turned her off alcohol and the taboo of Freya apparently being a not only unwed but also completely un-partnered mother-to-be meant Eleni and her family waited on her hand and foot without asking too many questions. The only difficulty was convincing Eleni that a woman in her alleged state would be fine volunteering at a refugee camp. It was draining, but Freya liked that Eleni cared enough to try and stop her. She almost let Eleni persuade her, so enmeshed had she become in her story by the end of her short stay with them. But no, she had to go, although first she would go via Milos, which she had read was an island of great unspoiled beauty, although it is not actually on the way to the camps, of course. Are you getting the sense she was avoiding them? I certainly was. Despite Milos’ reputation for being untainted, Freya managed to find the tourist blemishes and found herself partying with strangers until the early hours in Adamas. On her way she had picked up a pregnancy test, well three separate testing kits actually, almost on autopilot, not thinking much of it. And one night, in a club toilet, urine flowing freely due to all the vodka sodas she had powered through her heartburn to consume, she used all three. A short wait while angry party girls banged on the door and crossed their legs, and the votes were in. It was unanimous. Yiayia always knows. Freya was with child.

Yet I knew this alone was not enough to warrant such hysteria. Freya was well acquainted with the morning-after pill and she’d had at least one abortion I knew of because I had been there with her. Her story continued. Freya was clear about what had to be done, even if it meant flying back to England for the procedure. But a quick google and she found she wouldn’t have to fly back home, she could get what she needed easily enough in Greece. She convinced a German tourist to take her back to the mainland with him and she visited a clinic in Athens. She knew from experience how painful the procedure could be and was lamenting the days she would lose from her holiday, and of course, how she would have to wait for even longer now to offer her help at the camps. Ahem, sure. She answered the doctor’s intrusive questions, she was used to those, and she wasn’t shy when she was handing over her urine sample or giving her blood or pulling up her top or opening her legs to be examined. But her heart sank when the nurse and doctor started talking to one another in hushed Greek. Why were they hushing? She wouldn’t have been able to understand what they were saying anyway, but she could understand hushing. Hushing meant something was wrong. And indeed it was. They instructed her to get dressed and take a seat at the desk when she was ready. Her heart was beating so loudly in her ears that at first she had to ask them to repeat themselves. Twenty-five weeks, they said again. Freya was twenty-five weeks pregnant. Her enviable stomach muscles had worked against her, holding the burgeoning new life so tightly inside her that it had more than half-formed by the time it started to show. There was no chance of getting an abortion in Greece, where the limit is twelve weeks. What about England, Freya asked? I can go back to England. I’ll go back to England immediately and it will be fine. No it won’t, she learned. The limit in England is twenty-four weeks.

What were you doing twenty-five weeks ago? It’s tricky to remember. Freya found it difficult too. She’d assumed this person growing inside her had been made somewhere on her travels in Greece. Now she had to cast her mind back a lot further. Back to a drier spell. She thought perhaps she and that amateur drug-dealer she met at a house party had tried to hook up in the bedroom on the coats. They were very unlikely to have used protection, but she was pretty sure it hadn’t worked anyway. The sex. They’d tried and failed. But maybe not. Something had succeeded. What was his name? She didn’t know. She couldn’t even remember the colour of his hair. Maybe she’d find out before too long, in the hair of the human she was creating. A human girl. At the clinic they had told her she would be having a girl.

It is the middle of the night and my sister is shouting and crying and screaming all of this down the phone at me. But I am wide awake and I am calm. I know what I have to do.

‘I’m buying you a ticket home.’ I tell her. ‘You’ll stay with me, both of you, until you’re on your feet. This will be ok. It will all be ok.’