FOR THE NEXT few days, I stay at home. You can see a path in the carpet, like one of those sheep paths on mountains, from the sofa to the bedroom and from there to the bathroom. If I’m honest, I wasn’t really thinking it was flu, or a migraine by now, but I didn’t want to admit to myself what I suspected. I was just waiting for the doctor to tell me for sure on Thursday.
I have spent my days watching loads of daytime telly. For the most part, they’re about silly young women getting pregnant accidentally and sobbing about their predicament in front of a live studio audience. Nothing like sharing your awful dilemma with four million faceless and indifferent strangers to make you feel better.
Can you believe I have missed four days of work? I haven’t had a day sick from Horizon the whole time I’ve been there. I give the odd thought to my position in the tables now, but it flits away quickly. I can’t see myself ever going back there at the moment. Right now, I can’t see beyond the end of each day. I feel like I am in suspended animation until Thursday’s appointment.
On Wednesday afternoon, Sarah arrives with Jake, and a slab of cake. ‘This is the one I made myself,’ she announces proudly. ‘I didn’t want to give it to all those ungrateful kids at the party, so I hid it. Here, try it.’
She unwraps a paper serviette, peeling it away in the places where it has stuck to the contents, and spreads it out in her hands like precious treasure. Nestling there in the centre is a lump of brown cake coated in bright orange icing and some random green nodules with fat yellow heads.
‘It looks lovely,’ I say, eyes watering and mouth filling with saliva. I manage a weak smile at Jake.
‘It’s Bulbasaur,’ he says, meaninglessly.
I nod and smile, assuming this is kiddie speak.
‘I had the vinewhip,’ he goes on.
‘Oh,’ I say, not sure whether I should be happy or sorry for him. Is it some repulsive infection he picked up at the party?
‘And Bulbasaur evolves into Ivysaur, and then Ivysaur evolves into Vinesaur, but only if he wins loads of battles.’
‘Right.’
‘And in Safari Zone one, you can catch a Nidorhino, already evolved. Normally you have to catch Nidoran and wait for it to evolve, which takes ages. Although you can evolve it with moonstone.’
He’s not actually looking at me when he makes this announcement, which only adds to my confusion. For all I know, he’s been possessed by some ancient and malicious evil spirit from Sarah’s housing estate and is speaking in tongues.
‘Is he all right?’ I whisper to Sarah.
She nods, unconcerned. ‘It’s Pokemon,’ she says adeptly. Either he’s not possessed or she is too. ‘He’s fine. Go on, try a bit.’ She’s looking at the cake. ‘The icing’s got fresh orange juice in it.’
After I vomited up the mouthful of cake that I did try, Sarah took Jake and left.
So here I am, hunched in my doctor’s waiting room at quarter to six on Thursday afternoon. It hardly needs saying that surgery is running late. The waiting room is stuffed with old people in slippers, swollen legs wrapped in bandages, painful twisted fingers holding on to walking sticks and handbags. I’m glaring at them through slitted eyes. Surely some of these people just need a hot drink and a good talking-to. The last person that shuffled off towards the consulting-room door has not been seen for fifteen minutes. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s died in there. How frustrating if she has, taking up the doctor’s time for nothing. She might as well have not bothered coming in at all, and left the consulting room free.
At five to six, I go in. Dr Kanthasinapillai is really nice. He always makes me feel like he’s really listened to my problem, thought carefully about it and taken time over sorting it out for me, while rushing me in and out of his surgery at maximum speed. He looks up from his desk, where he’s typing up notes with one finger, and smiles.
‘Won’ keep you a minnid, Rachel,’ he says. In fact, it takes him three minutes to write up the notes from his last patient. I want to bat his silly slow finger out of the way and do it myself, but I resist the impulse. Eventually, he turns to me. ‘Well, Rachel, you’re looking a bid pale. Whad is the madder?’
While I’m telling him all about the nausea, the fatigue, the odd dizzy spell, I try not to think about what it all seems to be adding up to. It’s got to be stress or depression. ‘And I broke up with my boyfriend,’ I add at the end, just to make it a possibility.
‘Oh, I see,’ he says. ‘You had a boyfriend.’ Damn. He immediately latches on to the part of my statement that adds in very nicely with everything else. That’s why he’s a doctor, I suppose. ‘And when was your lasd period?’
I knew this would be coming. I have completely avoided working it out before now. I close my eyes. I can remember the day: I was at the pool with Susan. ‘I’m on,’ I’d said, ‘swim’s off.’ We went clubbing instead, which is probably better exercise. That was the last time I spent an evening with Susan before I met Nick, but the exact date still eludes me.
‘Here, can you urinade into dis please?’ Dr Kant is saying, handing me a tiny plastic pot with a very narrow opening. ‘You can use the toiled.’
I finger the pot and wonder for a second whether or not he’s got a funnel in his desk drawer.
Five minutes later and he’s smiling as he shows me a small white plastic rectangle. ‘Dis is de condrol window, which dells us dat de tesd has been carried oud correc’ly.’ I peer over the desk at the thing he’s holding. There’s a little blue dot in the window. My eyes leap to the other window, even before he says it. They work like a microscope, zooming in on the window, magnifying what they’re seeing there so that my entire field of vision is filled with an enormous window, white on white, and nestling right in the centre of this area, curled and sleeping, apparently harmless but full of potential, is a big, fat, blue dot.
‘And dis is de resuld window. Congradulations, Rachel, you’re going do have a liddle baby.’
Freeze. Hold it right there, right at that moment. If you look all round me, you can see that not one hair, not one molecule stirs. Suddenly it feels as though, for an elongated fraction of a second, the thick layer of nonchalance that coats me and forms a safety buffer between me and the outside world is stripped away and all my senses are magnified, intensified. I take everything in. Even the grinning GP in the consulting room is silent, unmoving.
While the doctor and I sit frozen in our seats, let’s take a look and see what the other interested party is doing at that same, seminal moment. The news has been launched that Nick is about to become a parent and take on the unfathomable, miraculous and incomparable role of being someone’s father, and here we find Nick himself close to tears. No, not with the overwhelming emotion of that incredible moment; it’s something much more basic.
Look, there he is, in the kitchen, his left hand held, palm inwards, in front of his face, his right hand tightly clutching his left wrist. In front of him on the counter is a chopping board with half an onion chopped up on it. The other half has been abandoned, as has the large and apparently rather sharp knife, on the counter next to it. If you look more closely, you can see a large red dewdrop forming on the end of Nick’s left thumb.
‘What is it, what happened?’ his mum asks breathlessly, rushing into the room. ‘I heard you scream.’
Nick sinks towards her, holding out his injured digit, his mouth turning down like a clown’s. ‘I cut my thumb.’ He squeezes his eyes shut as tears leak from them. ‘These bloody onions,’ he mutters, dragging his forearm across his eyes.
‘Oh, Nicky, let me see. Oh, darling, you poor thing. Come here.’ Helen Maxwell wraps her arms tightly around her wounded son, and gently rubs his back, talking into his hair. ‘And you were trying to get the tea ready for me, you little love. Any better now?’
Nick draws back, nods and sniffs.
‘OK, good. Well, you’d better go and put it under the tap, quickly. Then we’ll put a plaster on it, shall we?’
He slouches towards the sink as his mum takes up the knife and finishes chopping the onion. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
Of course, sitting in the consulting room, I can’t see all this. Perhaps it’s just as well. Creeping numbness has taken over.
Dr Kant seems delighted to be giving me the happy news, doesn’t he? He’s grinning as he gives me a calendar to help me remember the date of my last period, apparently oblivious to my bloodless face and shocked silence. I stare down at the numbers, coaxing my mind to work. I can’t remember my period, but I do remember the last time I had sex and tell the doctor that instead. It was the night we had seen that Sean person at the restaurant. We did it in the car in a layby on the way home, and again when we got back to my flat.
‘Layby,’ the doctor says slowly, apparently typing this on to my notes. ‘And when was dis?’
‘Fourth August. A Friday.’
‘OK. And you’re sure you had no other sexual pardners for a month before or afder?’
I nod. It’s official. Nick’s a father.
Unsurprisingly, as soon as I get out of the surgery my head clears a bit and I can remember everything. My last period was the fourteenth of July. That’s why I put black crosses on my calendar fourteen days later, the weekend of 28 July, and for five days either side. I always do that. That was also why I had one or two embryonic worry lines while Nick was doing press-ups on my living-room floor. I knew. I had known at the time but I had overlooked it in favour of Nick’s performance. That was the moment I let everything slide: the moment I defined the rest of my life.
By the time I leave the surgery, it’s almost six twenty. I walk slowly back towards the car park. The beauty of having your surgery in the middle of a business park is that no matter what depressing and hideous news you’ve just received from your GP, there’s always loads of parking. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Smith, you’ve only got two weeks to live.’ ‘Oh no, that’s bad. Thank God we managed to park nearby.’
It’s a totally gorgeous summer evening – warm and golden, with a very light breeze that is full of the scent of cut grass from the roundabout on the bypass – but I’m stumbling along blindly, eyes turned inwards – not literally, of course, that would be hideous – oblivious to all of it. Ahead of me is the fountain. The water oozing from the slavering chops of the snarling hounds looks cool and refreshing so I head for that and sit on the rim. The sound of splashing water behind me is very relaxing and I close my eyes for a few moments.
‘Are you OK?’ says a voice nearby.
I open my red eyes and find myself looking directly into a warm, brown pair that seem almost familiar. Their owner, a tall man with a dark suit jacket slung over his shoulder, is leaning over me, his face very close to mine. I lean back a bit. My head is full of insistent, unsettling images based on everything I have ever heard about childbirth – lots of poking and prodding, people peering into every orifice, scrapes and swabs and stretch marks, forceps, tears and stitches. Mentally, I am lodged firmly in a terrifying waking nightmare, suffering anguish like I have never known, teetering on the edge of a full-blown panic attack; and physically I am intensely, eye-wateringly nauseous, so tired I can barely hold my head up on my neck, and wracked by an explosive headache that is limiting my capacity to think clearly and shrivelling my brain.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘OK then,’ he says, and walks two yards away, where he sits down on the rim and looks at his watch. I ignore him and close my eyes again. After a while, the splashing, trickling noises sound like a large crowd chattering and it fills my head so I can’t think about anything else.
Next to me, the stranger is glancing at me repeatedly. I’m not looking my best at the moment, as you see, but I’m still better looking than probably seventy-five per cent of all the people this man knows, so he’s having a good look. Luckily I’ve still got my eyes closed.
‘Are you sure?’ says the same voice, a few minutes later.
I open my eyes again. He’s not standing over me but has twisted around from where he’s sitting and called across.
‘Yes,’ I say, glancing at him quickly, then looking away.
‘All right then,’ he says. He looks at his watch again, then takes out a mobile phone and dials a number. I give up on closing my eyes and decide that I had better get going, when my handbag beside me starts to make an unfamiliar sound. I stare at my bag for a second. Of course, it’s the mobile phone. With a lurch I realize that I have missed our meeting. I reach in to pick it up and press answer.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello,’ says the voice next to me.
I turn to look, still holding the phone up to my ear. ‘Oh,’ is all I can manage.
He smiles gently. ‘Hello,’ he says again. I hear his real voice, then half a second later I hear his electronic voice in the earpiece. ‘You must be Ruth.’
‘Er, oh, yes, Ruth, yes, that’s me. In which case, you are Hector.’
He nods. ‘You can hang up now,’ he says, his words travelling to the stars and back to reach me.
I’m still holding the phone to my ear, so I bring it down and switch it off. ‘Well, you’d better take it then,’ I’m saying, handing it over. He doesn’t take it straight away. In fact, he doesn’t take it at all.
‘Would you have a cup of coffee with me?’ he says simply.
This kind of thing happens a lot. I have learnt over the years to try and keep on the move when I’m out because when I stop, even for just a few minutes, I turn into a kind of target. They don’t often just come up to ask me out, but they appear from nowhere like woodlice and start trying to make conversation. It usually goes along the lines of, ‘You all right?’ Yes, I’m fine thanks. ‘Excellent.’ It tends to dry up at this point and the lunatic grinning takes over.
This is a bit different from how it usually goes, though. For a start, he doesn’t seem to have lost the ability to speak coherently. He’s not grinning like a loon, but looking at me with a small furrow between his eyebrows and a concerned little smile on his face. As I look at him, I realize that it’s almost fatherly. I look at my watch. It’s just gone half past six. Well, I’ve paid for parking until seven, so I might as well. It will put off the moment of going home to think for another half an hour, if nothing else.
I nod. ‘OK.’
‘Thank you,’ he says, as if I’ve just agreed to give him one of my kidneys. He stands up and holds out his hand and I realize he’s offering to help me up. I take it, and he raises me up gently from the fountain. We don’t carry on holding hands, though. He lets go of mine as soon as I’m upright, then does a sweeping motion with his other arm in the direction of a little café called Cream Tease.
I’ve seen this place from the outside loads of times, but I’ve never been in. Tea shops are not really my thing, to be honest. But I don’t say anything as he pushes the door open in front of me. The first thing I notice is the smell. It’s a rich, warm, hot chocolatey smell, with a hint of vanilla and something else that I can’t identify. He guides me over to a table in the corner. There’s a single yellow rose in a really narrow glass vase on the white tablecloth. It’s very simple and plain but not entirely unpleasant.
‘I’ll get us some drinks,’ Hector says with a reassuring smile. I nod, not really bothered about a drink at all. I’m just passing time before starting to think about what I’ve just been told.
He returns with two steaming mugs, each with a mound of whipped cream on top.
‘Try this,’ he says, putting one down in front of me and sitting down in the seat opposite. ‘It’ll perk you up.’
I look up at him. ‘How do you know I need perking?’
He leans forward, reaches out his hands and puts them on the table between us. ‘Ruth,’ he says kindly, ‘I know we’ve never met before, but I don’t think I have ever seen anyone more in need of a perk. Are you all right?’
I smile weakly. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’
He shakes his head. ‘You say that, but I’m not buying it. Are you sure?’
I look at him. I’ve got this tiny, enormous thing inside me that I haven’t confided to anyone yet and I really need to offload. Why shouldn’t it be this guy? He’s a stranger so I never have to see him or speak to him again. I can talk absolutely freely without worrying about what he’ll think of me, which I couldn’t do if I spoke to any of my friends. I don’t think I could bear to talk to Mum at the moment either. She’s bound to be revoltingly emotional about becoming a granny and I don’t want to think that far ahead yet. In fact, talking to a stranger is the perfect solution. He might even help me make a decision about what I’m going to do, and then my friends and family might not need to know that I ever was pregnant.
I take a sip from the mound of cream. It’s hot chocolate, which seems a strange choice on such a lovely summer’s day, but it’s oddly comforting. He raises his eyebrows expectantly.
‘I might be able to help,’ he says by way of encouragement.
I lick cream off my lips and put the mug down. ‘Well, I don’t know about that, unless you’re an obstetrician. You’re not, are you?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve just had a bit of bad news, you see. I’m going to have a baby.’
‘I see. And this is bad news?’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Oh God, now he’s judging me. I pick up my bag. ‘Look, this was obviously a mistake. There’s your phone, thanks for the drink—’
‘Hold on a minute. What’s the problem?’
‘Well, I am in a bit of a state at the moment and what I really don’t need is you judging me. You know, if you’re one of those pro-life people or something and think that all babies have some kind of right to life and therefore any pregnancy should be seen as a wondrous, joyful occasion, then I’m afraid that I’ve got nothing—’
‘Oh no, no.’ He’s shaking his head. ‘That’s not what I meant at all. I’m really sorry, I honestly didn’t mean to upset you.’
I hesitate. ‘What did you mean then? When you said you were sorry to hear that me being pregnant was bad news?’
‘Well, I meant exactly that. I’m really sorry that for you, it’s bad news. It suggests to me that . . .’
‘What?’
‘No, it doesn’t matter. It’s really none of my business.’
How frustrating is that? I stare at him. ‘Please tell me.’
‘But I’m not—’
‘Look, Hector, I’ve just come straight from the doctor so I haven’t told anyone yet. Not even my mum. You, me and the doc are the only people who know, so technically it is your business, in a way. You asked if you could help and I decided to confide in you, for the simple reason that you are a stranger and can therefore give me your objective opinion without the complication of knowing me. Plus, I don’t have to put up with sympathy or criticism. I mean, can you imagine my mum? The first thing she’s going to say is, Oh Rachel, how could you let this happen? You should have taken precautions. Yeah, thanks, Mum, great advice, but how the hell does that help me now?’
‘So you’re . . .?’
‘I’m pregnant, and it’s a disaster. Exactly. Now what I could do with is to talk it through with someone who won’t judge, who won’t sympathize, someone who I don’t know so that if I tell you something really private it won’t matter because by the end of today we’ll both have forgotten all about it.’
He fixes his eyes on mine. ‘I’m afraid that already that’s not very likely.’ He jerks a bit. ‘I mean, I’ve just met the girl who stole my phone, and it turns out she’s only recently discovered she’s pregnant and she wants my advice. I’m not likely to forget that very quickly, am I?’
‘Well, maybe not. But you get my point? I mean, it really doesn’t matter what you ask me, or what I tell you, because we’re strangers so I can’t possibly be offended at anything you ask, and you can’t be offended at anything I tell. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘Right. So tell me what you were going to say.’
‘Ah. Yes. Well . . .’
‘You won’t offend me. I promise.’
‘All right.’ He clears his throat. ‘All I was going to say was that the fact that the pregnancy is a disaster suggests to me that the father is not a factor in the equation. I mean, you’re not in a relationship?’
‘Is that all? I thought it was going to be something really personal.’
‘Not these days. Don’t you watch Jeremy Kyle?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Oh. Well, no I’m not in a relationship. But I was, or I thought I was, when this happened.’
‘Right. So you’re on your own?’
‘Yep.’
‘So you’ve got to decide then, haven’t you?’
I look at him questioningly. ‘What I mean is, you’ve got to decide, fairly quickly, whether you are going to have the baby and change your life for ever, or terminate now and keep your life exactly the way it was.’
I think about those words for a few moments. Just like that, in a matter of no more than ten minutes, he’s summed up exactly the enormous dilemma I’m facing. And having been summed up so precisely and easily, it no longer seems so enormous. It’s become suddenly very simple. I smile and nod, a gleam of light just becoming visible through the cloud of despair.
‘By the way,’ he says, as I take another sip of the hot chocolate, ‘it’s cinnamon. The extra ingredient. It makes it somehow more comforting, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does. It’s delicious.’
‘Good. I thought it would do the trick.’
We sip in silence for a few moments. Then he says, ‘You mentioned your mum.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is she a bit forgetful sometimes? Crashes the car a lot? Suffered a recent head injury perhaps?’
I frown. ‘No. Why do you say that?’
He grins. ‘Well, when you were talking about her just now, she called you Rachel. Do you think she confuses you with someone else, Ruth?’
Here’s Hector, later that same evening, just arriving home. He’s still grinning and the anxiety he usually experiences on entering the house is suspended for a few moments. All seems quiet and he creeps up the stairs. Sure enough, his mother is fast asleep, curled up like a child, her feet sticking out of the end of the covers. He tucks them round her gently, then softly kisses her forehead before heading back downstairs to the kitchen.
He gets a glass from the cupboard and takes it into the next room, his study, where he pours himself a whisky from the cabinet. He feels peaceful, content. For the first time in many months he can imagine a future for himself, a future with someone special in it. He doesn’t know how, or even if, this friendship with the mobile girl – Ruth, no Rachel – he’s grinning about that again – might develop, but she had interested him. A great deal. Even her current predicament doesn’t alter his feelings. In fact, quite the opposite. He feels more caring and protective of her because of the baby. So much so that he told her to keep the phone. He had already replaced it anyway, and changed all the stationery to the new number, so it was as good as useless to him now. She protested, of course – she had her own phone already, why would she need another? But he had convinced her that it would be useful, just in case her other phone ran out of charge or credit. Plus he would be able to call her on it without her having to give him any of her own numbers. And she could call him on it whenever she wanted to talk. All his work numbers were programmed in, and it was easy enough to add his home number. It was also very easy for him to keep paying the monthly charges. Eventually she had agreed to keep hold of it ‘for now’. He didn’t know how long that gave him, but he hoped it was long enough.