One Thing
Led to Another
Katy Regan

For Louis and Fergus

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

One Thing Led to Another

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

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.

CHAPTER ONE

‘Seven weeks before I was due, the silly bugger got down on one knee whilst I was washing up. We tied the knot at Lancaster Registry Office, with a lollipop lady as the witness and Eddie with a daffodil in his buttonhole. My waters broke, just as we were about to consummate our wedding in a B&B in Lytham St Anne’s. Eddie has never forgiven Joel for the timing, and he’s thirty-three now.’

Linda, 56, Preston

I’d always believed that sleeping with your male best friend would have one of two outcomes. Either it would be a unanimous disaster, from which your friendship would never recover. Or it would be an epiphany. You’d wonder why on earth you’d never done this before.

I’d experienced the first: Gavin Stroud, Manchester University, 1998. Gavin was my best mate on my French course, until a moment of inebriated madness – round about the four-pint point, the point at which I obviously believed I was irresistible to all members of the opposite sex. That’s also the point at which I should have gone to bed, my dignity still intact. But no, it was at this point I decided Gavin Stroud needed to know this: that my French oral in class wasn’t half as good as that in the bedroom and that I looked erotic dancing to Purple Rain. We went back to my room in halls, shut the orange and brown curtains and poured each other glass after glass of cheap white wine. With each glass, the edges of his face grew more blurred as did any good judgement I’d ever possessed. After an hour of Purple Rain on repeat play and even longer trying to get a comatosed Gavin to maintain an erection long enough to get a condom on, we passed out. When I woke up, head feeling like someone had mown over it, the blackheads on his nose rather too close for comfort, I knew it had been a big, huge, no…colossal mistake. The five-minute walk across campus to our first tutorial that day was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. How can you act normally when you’ve just spent the night wrestling with your (I think I could now safely say) ex friend’s uncooperative penis? Trust me. There’s no coming back from there.

But Jim is different. Sex with him is never a disaster, it’s just it has never been a light-bulb moment either. It’s just, you know, nice. Like getting into a warm bath after a freezing day, or finding a twenty pound note in your jeans pocket.

We met in November 1997, second floor of the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, both of us wading through our very first English essay in Critical Theory (critically dreary more like). At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially ‘independent’. Two years my senior, Jim seemed like he’d been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me with his head buried in The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes as was I (and probably every other first year English Lit student in there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feelings exactly!

‘Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?’ I said, hoping this guy with legs so long his feet were nearly touching mine under the table was in need of distraction too.

Jim looked up.

‘I.e. none whatsoever?’

‘That’s the one!’

He smiled, broadly.

‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If this death of the author lark means it’s all down to the reader’s interpretation then I’m screwed because I haven’t got the first clue what this French nutter’s on about.’

‘Me neither,’ I whispered back. ‘I thought I’d be studying books, literature – you know, novels innit…’ Jim laughed. ‘But it’s all structuralism this and post-structuralism that, seminology…’

‘Semiology,’ he corrected.

‘Yeah, that’s what I meant,’ I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

That was it, we were off. Couldn’t shut us up for two whole hours. We sacked off work and went for a pint in the end because neither of us could fathom what ‘Barthes Simpson’ as we christened him that day was on about and we were having too much of a good time chatting. When I stepped out of the student union into the crisp November air, I felt like we’d cracked the secret to something that afternoon, Jim and I. Life, probably, or maybe that was just the beer. But for all the personality fireworks I didn’t fancy Jim that day, still don’t, maybe that’s why sex with him has never been a big deal. It’s not that Jim’s un-fanciable, far from it, he’s just not my type. He’s cigarette-thin with Scottish skin and dark hair that flicks out at the sides and on top due to cow licks and various double crowns. He’s got nice full lips – if a little gormless on occasions; a sturdy, prominent nose – attractive on a man I’ve always thought; and green, sparkly eyes that crinkle up so much when he laughs they almost disappear. But I’ve never felt the urge to tear his clothes off.

And so if you had told me on that day we met (or any other day during the next eight years and six months which is how long it took us to kiss, never mind have sex: hardly a whirlwind romance) that one day James Ashcroft and I would be occasional shag partners, I’d never have believed it. But we are and it’s strange, most of all because I don’t really get why it did take us so long. Until one warm weekend last May to be exact.

It was supposed to be two days’ hard graft cleaning up my parents’ caravan, which along with fifty or so other caravans on the tiny site in Whitby hung precariously off a cliff like a stranded sheep. I’d agreed to give it a makeover in return for a hundred quid from my dad and Jim was the only person I knew who had a power drill, but from the first moment we got there, it felt more like a holiday than hard work.

I’ve never known lager taste so good as that first, exhausted pint drunk with Jim at the end of day one. We sat on a bench outside a pub in the town – the Flask and Dolphin – a prime spot with harbour views, and seagulls fat as milk jugs squawking round our feet. I remember the vinegary smart of fish and chips in the air, the lull of bobbing boats, the warmth of the sun on my chest and the feeling that I’d not been so happy for a long time. I told him all about my childhood holidays spent here in Whitby. He told me about endless summers holed up in Stoke-on-Trent, playing Connect Four in his front porch, bored out of his mind.

One pint turned into two, into three, into four, until suddenly it was almost dark and we were surrounded by towers of empty glasses and a sense of anticipation as sharp as salt air.

Jim sighed. ‘This rocks.’ he said, lifting his face to the sinking sun. ‘I’ve had the best day I’ve had in ages.’ Then he turned, his head resting on the wall and he added, ‘With you’. And it didn’t feel awkward. I didn’t get that feeling I was going to regret this in the morning. I just put my glass down, threw my legs sideways over his knee and snogged him like we’d been going out for twenty odd years and this was one of those rare romantic nights made for rekindling the flame.

We’d kissed now, what the hell – sex back at the caravan seemed like the most obvious next step. Afterwards, we sat and talked on the beach until a red dawn flooded the water. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Jim. ‘I’m probably closer to you than I am to anyone.’ And the thing was, right at that moment, I felt exactly the same.

When I opened my eyes late the next morning to find the sun in slices on the floral duvet and the North Sea wind whistling in through the windows, I felt strangely and yet wonderfully at home and at ease.

‘So, Jarvis, that was going to happen all along, was it not?’ I remember Jim muttering as he stood in his palm tree underpants pouring coffee into two chipped mugs. And I agreed. ‘Predictable as death,’ were the words I mumbled from underneath the duvet.

After all, if you rate one another highly enough to be close friends in the first place, then chances are, if you’re opposite sexes, it’s only a matter of time. That’s not to say there aren’t consequences. A quick scan of the carnage when I finally emerged that morning revealed my bra was hung on the back of a chair, my knickers gusset-side-up on the caravan hob. There were CDs scattered all over the floor, ransacked in a frenzy of drunken delight, not one in its case. We’d danced to Take That, to George Michael, to Billy Joel for crying out loud! I’d made five thousand times the fool of myself as I had with Gavin Stroud and yet I wasn’t one bit embarrassed.

I don’t know what I expected after that night. I suppose I would have been happy to give a relationship a try, but then I was also petrified of ruining what we had. In the end, Jim made that decision for me, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little deflated.

I called him on the Monday, the night after we got back. ‘I had a brilliant time this weekend,’ I said. Good opening I thought, perhaps this is where he says he couldn’t agree more and asks me out?

Or not.

‘Me too,’ he giggled. ‘It was right laugh. I have particularly fond memories of you doing a routine to ‘Relight My Fire’ wearing only your pants.’

Brilliant, I thought. Absolutely typical. Could it be, perhaps, that I failed to give off the right signals?

But maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe there’s a reason we felt no embarrassment whatsoever after our antics. So unembarrassed were we, in fact, that, a year later, we seem to have fallen into a habit of just ‘doing it’ whenever the need for a little no-strings nookie grabs us.

‘Think of it as a way of extending the fun we’re having,’ Jim always says, usually naked which doesn’t exactly help, ‘like going to an after-hours bar.’

And this suits me too, because I don’t think I know what I want. I can’t fathom the workings of his brain either if truth be told. All I know is that Jim Ashcroft and I have crossed the line. We are no longer purely platonic, nor lovers either. We’re just two misguided fools frolicking about in a vast sprawling, savannah-sized space commonly known as ‘The Grey Area’.

It’s a week since the pregnancy scare and frankly it’s a good job it was just a scare since all I seem to have done since then is accompany people to the pub. Such is the curse of the unattached I’ve always thought. What with no fall-back plan – no flat/wedding/dog to save up for – we, The Unhooked, are expected to attend everything.

Take tonight for example. ‘I may kill someone if I don’t get drunk this very evening,’ was Vicky’s raspy threat down the receiver that I, in a mid-afternoon slump, had cradled between my head and the desk. Dylan had decorated the walls with macaroni cheese, she said, Richard had come home from a hard day’s work as zoo keeper at London Zoo chatting to kids about the mating habits of camels to find his own kid, the two foot rhino, bulldozing around the house in a toddler rage and his dear, lovely wife, coiled like a cobra, ready to pounce at any time.

I love Vicky, which is weird because it was far from love at first sight. In fact, thinking back to that first day we met in Owens Park Halls when she introduced herself in her Yorkshire, ‘this-is-me-like-it-or-lump-it’ way, I’m ashamed to say a little part of me withered with disappointment.

How could I, Tess Jarvis, owner of:

 Old Skool Trainers (various)

 New (but artfully battered) leather jacket

 Entire works of Bob Dylan

 Ministry of Sound: The Annual, volumes two and three (because at eighteen years old I am both artily intellectual and just mainstream enough, you understand)

 Poster of Che Guevara (because I care about other countries and Politics)

 Obsession with Ewan MacGregor

 Occasional marujana habit that I fully intend to upgrade to ‘moderate’

possibly be sharing a room with Victoria Peddlar, owner of:

 Fluffy penguin slippers

 Fake designer sweatshirts worn over stone washed jeans (various)

 Entire works of Take That

 That’s What I Call Power Ballads 1, 2 and 3

 Poster of Patrick Swayze (because nobody puts Vicky Peddlar in the corner)

 Obsession with Dirty Dancing

 Moderate horoscope-reading habit (soon to be upgraded to borderline obsessional).

But it was true and I was utterly gutted. Especially since I’d just met a girl called Gina who had already designated her room as Smoking HQ. A room I wished I was sharing more than anything else in the world. Gina was the coolest girl in our halls and a guaranteed route to mischief, every night of the week. She had big curly hair that she wore in low bunches, boasted a dragon tattoo that snaked across her stomach, said ‘wicked’ a lot and owned a bong. And as if that wasn’t enough to make your average eighteen-year-old fresher practically pay to be her friend, she had about a million of her own friends from boarding school who were all as cool as she was.

It’s easy to see how this Peddlar girl didn’t even get a look in during those first few days at university.

‘Rich says I can go out…I just need someone to go with and guess-what? You’re the lucky lady!’ Vicky shouted over Dylan. I don’t mind really, Vicks often inspires in me selfless acts of love. When she was holed up in hospital, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, ankles as fat as an elephant’s, blood pressure soaring, I travelled half way across London to bring her the only thing that would satiate her queer, hormonal taste buds. Deep fried aubergines served up on a silver platter (well, a polystyrene tray, anyway).

I’d soon found out there was far more to this girl from Huddersfield than first met the eye. She could really put it away, for one. A childhood spent pulling pints in her parents’ pub saw to that. She had real talent too, which whoever you are, I’ve always thought, can only add to your credibility.

I will never forget the last night of Freshers’ Week, the night of the Owens Park talent competition. Vicky stood up, dressed in her Benetton sweatshirt, swinging her mousy ponytail. She took the mike in one hand and holding a pint of cider in the other, she began to sing. It was ‘Cry Me a River’, and it was utterly brilliant. Nobody moved or spoke, everyone just stared at this girl, this Big Bird of a girl who was suddenly possessed by the ghost of Ella Fitzgerald. She finished the song, put the mike down on the table, gulped down the rest of her cider and sat down. There were five seconds of dumbfounded silence, save for Gina whispering ‘fucking hell’ next to me. Then we began to clap, first slowly and then uproarious applause. It was brilliant, mind-blowing, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and even then, as stupid and self-absorbed and inexperienced at life as I was, I knew that you didn’t sing a song with soul like that if you hadn’t experienced things which, I knew instinctively, I hadn’t. Things like your mum walking out on your dad for a man half her age and then dying of ovarian cancer two months later; things like watching your dad go from jovial pub landlord to suicidal recluse; things like bringing up two little brothers pretty much single-handed as well as singing in your dad’s pub in the evenings for the tips. So yes, there was a lot more to Victoria Peddlar. Gina got the Vicky thing too, eventually, and we had things to teach each other back then. Gina and I taught Vicky how to skin up, accentuate that splendid bosom with something other than sweatshirts and basically be an irresponsible teenager – something she’d kind of missed. And Vicky was our surrogate mother when we needed one most, I suppose. Always the one with the plan of action, the best hangover cures. And the fact she’d seen a lot in her short life meant you waking up in some inappropriate bloke’s bed with no recollection of the night before was no big deal. ‘Look, nobody died, did they?’ Vicky would say, sitting on my bed as I growled under the duvet with shame. ‘And look on the bright side, at least you didn’t get so drunk you shat yourself.’ (Ever since a girl called Julianne Breeze had, actually, got so drunk she shat herself, this had been the scale against which we measured all mortifying events. After all, nothing could ever, ever be that bad.)

A fortnight into term one, Gina, Vicky and I were pretty much inseparable. By late November I’d brought Jim into the fold and we’d became a proper gang. Or as my dad put it, ‘A foursome to be reckoned with.’

And I loved my friends, I idolized them, still do. Tonight one of them is simply asking me to accompany her to a public house, her first baby-free night for weeks, for a couple of quiet beers on a Thursday night. I can usually think of nothing I’d rather do, it’s just tonight, I could do with a little help. I need Jim.

From: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk

To: james_ashcroft@westminster.edu.uk

Peddlar needs beer. I need bed. Help?

It only takes a few seconds for the reply to pop into my inbox which means Jim must be in the staff room.

From: james_ashcroft@westminster.edu.uk

To: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk

No can do, have hot date. I can come for the first hour to ease the pain but then I have to shoot. Going to see Swan Lake??! (help)

The thought of Jim watching the Dying Swan, whilst wondering when he’s going to fit in a pint and a snog brings a smile to my face. Still, an hour of his support is better than nothing so I call Vicks back and say, ‘You’re on.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘The day we brought Jen and Ming home from China was the happiest day of our lives. I was forty-four. We’d been trying to become parents for almost two decades, and had travelled half way across the world to adopt a baby. Three months later, I had a routine scan about my polycystic ovaries. “Mrs Freed,” said the doctor his face waxy white. “Were you aware you were pregnant? With twins”?’

Jenny, 46, Southampton

So here I am again, fifth night out on the trot, in the Coach and Horses, Soho, a warm smoky pub that smells of damp coats and stale beer, with Vicky and Jim, my very best mates.

‘Wine for the lady, Stella for Sir in the corner,’ I say, passing Jim his pint.

‘Aw thanks, you’re a beauty.’ He downs half of it in one go. ‘Chaucer and fourteen-year-olds, I tell you, it does me in every time.’

‘So Jimbo,’ says Vicky, pouring herself a bowlful of wine. ‘How come your “loverrrr”, or is she your girlfriend?’ Jim groans at this. ‘How come she’s managed to drag you to Swan Lake? When we went to see Les Miserables you said – and I quote – “It was just a load of old women with massive jugs, bounding about the stage for what felt like days.”’

Jim looks up at me from his pint, a moustache of froth on his top lip. I raise an eyebrow.

‘Did I?’ he says, genuinely incredulous. ‘Sorry Vicks, what an absolute knob.’

‘Apology accepted – even though it was my birthday, if I remember rightly – but anyway, you still haven’t answered the question.’

‘What question?’

‘How come you’re going to the ballet when you don’t even like musicals?’

‘I don’t not like musicals,’ says Jim, nervously pulling on his jacket collar. ‘I just don’t like all of them that’s all.’

‘So exactly what musicals do you like?’ says Vicky. I can tell she is enjoying this line of questioning.

‘Chicago,’ Jim shrugs.

‘Chicago?’ Vicky splutters.

‘Yeah, Chicago. You know, the one that was made into a gangster film.’

‘The one with loads of chicks in suspenders and stockings, you mean?’ I cut in.

‘That’s the one,’ winks Jim.

Vicky nods her head sagely.

‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘I should imagine you like that one.’

Jim looks at us, gives a short laugh, then looks away, shaking his head.

This is his ‘teacher’ face. It says, ‘will you all just grow up’. And the thing is, annoyingly, it kind of becomes him. Whereas everyone else went through – and came out the other side of – the ‘I want to become a teacher’ stage (spurred on by fantasies of standing on tables making inspiring speeches like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society), Jim actually did it. And he was a natural too. So much so that in less than three years of teaching English to the little tyrants at Westminster City School he had been made Head of Department. Jim can talk about Shakespeare like he’s talking about Neighbours: he knows his stuff, is genuinely mad about the subject and yet manages to never sound like a pretentious wanker. Well, hardly ever…

‘Look,’ Jim says, wearily. ‘This girl’s quite nice, she happens to like ballet, she quite likes me and she wants me to go. Since when is it a crime for a man to indulge in some culture anyway, and what is this? The Spanish Inquisition?’

‘No, it’s just, it’s quite girlfriendy, going to the ballet just because “she likes it”.’ I poke his arm playfully. ‘Selflessness, I’d say, is the first sign of true love.’

Vicky folds her arms industriously.

‘Annalisa won’t be best pleased,’ she chips in.

Annalisa is that rare thing: a holiday fling that goes on being a holiday fling. Jim met her in Rimini on a lads’ holiday a few years ago and they’ve had an ‘understanding’ (basically to be each other’s bit of no-strings fun when he visits Italy or she visits London) ever since.

‘Give it a rest will you.’ Jim sinks back in his chair. ‘Annalisa wouldn’t care and anyway, Claire’s a lovely girl but she doesn’t want anything serious anymore than I do. You two are just jealous. I’ve got a date, I’m going somewhere interesting. Meanwhile, you’re in this rubbish pub talking about makeup and periods. Probably.’

This is what we do, us lot, wind each other up. Sometimes I forget I’ve had sex with Jim. I forget he has seen me naked in all sorts of compromising positions. I don’t remember how he’s caressed my boobs, taken baths with me and commented on my rather relaxed upkeep of hair removal. It’s like we are experts at compartmentalization. When we’re having sex, we’re tender and intimate. When we’re not, we’re mates. That’s all, nothing more, nothing less. Just mates.

I look at Jim.

‘So, what are you wearing for your “hot date”?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean when are you getting changed, you know, into your going-out clothes?’

Jim examines his attire. Then looks at Vicky. He actually looks a bit hurt. A little part of me wants to give him a hug.

‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is what I’m wearing.’

‘You are kidding,’ I say. Vicky erupts, spraying scampi fries everywhere. ‘This is the ballet, Jim. You’ll get chucked out looking like that.’

‘Like what? What’s the matter with me?’

‘Like an Austin Powers/raver cross breed?’

‘Aw, give over Tess. He looks alright, don’t you Jimbo?’ Vicky puts an arm around him, trying not to laugh.

Jim looks at me.

‘What?’ he says, a smile curling at the sides of his mouth. ‘It’s a bloody good jacket this, I’ll have you know. It’s Ellesse, not your Top Man bollocks. Top notch.’

Vicky and I are pissing ourselves now. Jim’s had that jacket since about 1991. Which was about the time Ellesse was last cool.

‘Where’s your whistle and your acid tabs?’ I joke. ‘And I bet it’s still got that fag burn in the back.’

Jim sticks his bottom lip out in a mock show of hurt.

‘Come ’ere, I’m only kidding,’ I say, getting his head and putting it into an affectionate head-lock. ‘You look cool. Honestly. You really do. Kind of…what would I say? Sports casual with a seventies twist.’

We all laugh but the fact is, he does look cool, in a Jim-eclectic kind of a way. It’s a mish-mash of decades, what with the Ellesse jacket, the seventies tank top and cords, but there’s something attractive about a man who doesn’t try too hard and Jim’s certainly not guilty of that. In fact Jim doesn’t so much ‘do’ fashion as happen upon it when by the laws of probability means he does, occasionally, pull something OK out of his wardrobe.

Jim stands up, zips up his jacket and announces he’s going. ‘Well, thank you, Fashion Police,’ he says. ‘But I’m now going to get myself some refined company. A woman who knows how to conduct herself, a woman who appreciates cutting-edge style when she sees it.’

Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’ comes onto the jukebox. Jim stands up and shimmies to the bar, his small bottom wiggling.

‘Nice moves, Ashcroft!’ I shout after him. ‘The girl won’t be able to resist!’

With this, he downs the rest of his pint, puts his glass on the bar, flashes us a V-sign and dashes out of the door. I watch him as he goes, bouncing along the pavement on his Reebok Classics, hands in pockets, head down.

When I turn back, Vicky’s staring at me.

‘What?’

‘You’re smiling,’ she says.

‘Am I?’

‘Yeah, you’re really smiling.’

Here we go again.

A night out with Vicky is a bit like that film Groundhog Day. From the moment I walk in to the moment she disappears into the night only just catching the last train to Beckenham by the skin of her teeth, I know exactly what’s coming: as many bottles of house red as we can fit in and the obligatory ‘but-you-are-really-secretly-in-love-with-Jim, aren’t you?’ conversation.

Vicky has a huge soft spot for Jim. ‘So, are you two like fuck buddies? I mean, is that how you’d define yourselves?’ she asks, looking at me over her wine glass.

She no doubt got this awful term from some sordid programme about weird peoples’ sex lives hosted by Jenny Éclair, but she has a point: ‘Friends who have sex’, that’s exactly what we are. But we’re not, either, not in my eyes anyway, because ‘fuck buddy’ suggests it’s all about the sex and not much about the friendship and Jim and I are the complete opposite to that. ‘Fuck buddies (if ever there were such a grim thing) are all about sex on tap without the emotional complications that come with actually caring about someone,’ I say to her. ‘And I do care about him, I love him to bits.’

‘I know you do,’ she says, over-enunciating the words as though I am deaf. ‘And he loves you – hello! – a lot.’

‘But not like that,’ I say, staring into my glass. I always feel uncomfortable when she starts on this one. ‘As disappointing as that is – and believe me, I’m disappointed too, it’s not like that. Jim and I are just mates. Mates who occasionally shag and probably shouldn’t, I know, I know; but we’re still just mates.’

Vicky shakes her head, defeated.

‘Pretty weird ones if you ask me.’

And on we went. Until I found myself stumbling out of the pub, at almost midnight, into the crisp ring of night air and no hope of getting home before one a.m.

I decide to pass on the cab and walk through Soho, to catch a bus on Oxford Street.

There’s nowhere quite like Soho at night. It’s like the set of a West End show itself, alive with movement, light and noise. As I walk down Old Compton Street, the gay guys sit outside French patisseries with one leg snaked around the other, scarves wrapped tight around their necks, sipping their espressos. Steam from the last washing up of the evening rises from the basements and bar workers settle in for their end of shift beer.

I cut across Dean Street towards Wardour Street, snaking through the crowds of people queuing for late-night bars, members’ clubs and restaurants.

This part of London, it’s the playground of the free. A zone for those who don’t have to make any decisions yet, the circumstances of their lives still unravelling, for those still playing.

And just for now, I’m playing too. But I’ve got a funny feeling that for me, the game’s almost over, the final whistle is nearly up and I have to make some decisions and sort out what I actually want from life.

It’s ludicrous to think I could have been pregnant with Jim’s baby last week. Besides anything else, as I held that test in my hand, the potential father of the potential baby was on a date, just as he is tonight, and that can’t be right, can it?

I had been tempted to send a text. HELLO, DADDY-TO-BE would have served him right, out gallivanting while I was in a self-cleaning toilet having a near nervous breakdown.

But I couldn’t do it in the end. ‘It’s negative,’ I texted. ‘You’re off the hook.’

I didn’t even get his reply until I was standing at the bar in the Camden Head an hour later: ‘Thank fuck for that. And you had me believing that paunch was all baby.’

Cheeky git! So much for sharing the weight of responsibility.

I turn into Wardour Street where a herd of twenty-somethings, the boys all moulded hair and skinny jeans, the girls with sultry, smoky eyes, are careering across the street, singing and laughing. One of the girls is sat on what must be her boyfriend’s shoulders, lanky arms in the air, swigging a bottle of beer. Still high on the buzz of London, I think: we were like that; that would, once, have been me, Jim, Gina and Vicky, strutting our way from one late bar to the next, back to someone’s place, more beer, maybe some drugs, not caring about the next day, masters at navigating a day’s work on no sleep.

We still give it our best shot (even Vicky, who I sometimes think would sell an organ for a good night out). It’s just, sometimes I get the feeling that I’ve accelerated through most of my twenties in a beer-fuelled haze, only to arrive at almost thirty still accelerating in a beer-fuelled haze, when really I should be putting the brakes on, or at least starting to look where I’m going.

‘Next question,’ says Gina, adjusting her bikini top. Her boobs jostle about in the water, like dumplings in a boiling pan. ‘Marcus?’

Marcus licks the spliff he’s holding and sticks it down, then gestures to Gina for the lighter.

‘OK,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a good one. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said in an interview?’

Jasper cracks open a beer with a fizz.

‘I once asked an interviewer when the baby was due,’ he mumbles from beneath his trilby.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ I ask.

‘She wasn’t pregnant.’

I almost wet myself laughing at this one. I don’t know why, it’s just the thought of Jasper attending an interview – like, ever – is suddenly hilarious. Jasper is an artist. He does ‘installations’. This is absolutely no disrespect to people who are actually artists, who do, actually do installations. But in Jasper’s case, it roughly translates as ‘on the dole’.

Ooops, so much for the contemplative mood brought on by my life-affirming walk through Soho. It’s now two a.m. and I am in the Jacuzzi with Gina (now my flatmate) her current shag Jasper and a man I have never met before in my life. This is all too often the case these days; I don’t plan to have a large one, it just sort of happens. It’s one of the perils of having a Jacuzzi in the basement of your house.

Gina and I didn’t plan to live together this long; that just ‘sort of happened’ too. In our second and third university years, all four of us shacked up in a house in Rusholme. Then when we graduated, we all moved down to London together. Jim did his PGCE and then because he was now officially one of London’s ‘key workers’, got a ‘part-ownership’ deal and put down a deposit on a flat with money he’d saved from his weekend job selling padded cards in boxes with messages like ‘To the One I Love’. Gina, Vicky and I moved into 21 Linton Street in upmarket Islington, and that was it.

At that point I, having spent an awful lot of time watching tragic documentaries about people with ten-stone tumours, was doing a diploma in magazine journalism, with a view to interviewing people about stuff like that all the time. I thought I’d made it living in N1, a career in the media at my fingertips. Trouble was, with its crumbly black steps and security grating, our house looked like the Hammer House of Horrors on an otherwise elegant row of white Georgian townhouses. But we loved it. And we loved our landlady almost as much. Mrs Broke-Snell had her hair blow-dried every other day and only ever shopped in Harrods Food Hall. It’s a shame she didn’t pay as much attention to the upkeep of her properties as she did to herself but at least she had the genius idea (and a sufficient level of insanity) to install DA-DA-DAR!! THE JACUZZI.

Doubtless the most ingenious popularity device ever known to man, the Jacuzzi comes complete with wooden surround, massage jets, and a film of mould growing around the outside. 21 Linton Street has always been THE back-to-mine post-party house, scores of people padding their soap-sudded feet from the hall to the basement and vice versa, to shrivel up in our Jacuzzi and have drunken conversations about where we’ll all be in five years time. The trouble is, those five years are up now. You’d think that the novelty of having deep and meaningfuls in our swimwear would have somewhat worn off but we’re still at it.

Though Jim took my room when I went travelling in 2002 – he rented his flat out for some much needed cash – it was always very much a single girls’ pad. Then Vicky committed the ultimate crime (in Gina’s eyes anyway) which was to not only marry Richard, but have his babies. It was, of course, totally predictable but still, Gina and I didn’t expect to be here nearly a decade later. In fact Gina was so convinced that whatever bloke she was shagging at the time was about to ask her to move in with him, she didn’t buy a bed for two years.

And I thought I’d be long gone by now, married, living in a garden flat, but we’re both still here, maxing up the rent so we don’t have to get in a third person. Gina continues to go out with tossers (the sort who talk about moving in together by week three, and who have dumped her by week five). And I just coast along quite happily, cheered by the odd shag with Jim, wondering how I wound up, twenty-eight and a half, living like an ageing student.

When I eventually recover from my laughing fit I realize Gina’s glaring at me. Gina doesn’t like people laughing at her boyfriends, even when they offer up the jokes themselves.

‘Tess can do better than that, can’t you Tess?’ she says, playfully. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said in an interview?’

Here we go, Gina loves to wheel this one out at every social occasion. ‘Do I have to?’ I groan.

‘Yes, you have to. It’s genius. Go on.’

‘I once told the Head of a PR company that I was fluent in Italian,’ I sigh. ‘Which would have been fine, if I hadn’t failed GCSE.’ Everyone waits for the punch-line. ‘And she hadn’t been Italian.’

Gina claps her hand with glee. ‘Love it! Cracks me up every time! I wouldn’t mind,’ she continues, hardly able to talk she’s laughing so much, ‘but her name was fucking Luisa Vincenzi!!’

And I have to admit. It is quite funny.

It is only when Marcus starts to get fresh, playing footsie in the water, I come to my senses, realize I am shrivelled like a prune, and am utterly and totally shit-faced. When I eventually make it to the sanctuary of my bedroom it’s gone three a.m. I climb into bed, sink back into the coolness of my pillow and exhale, slowly, deeply. Outside I can still hear cars whizzing past, the faint sound of engines revving, London still alive and throbbing. I don’t know how I’m going to get up tomorrow, or make it through the day on four hours’ sleep.

The other thing I don’t know, is that somewhere deep inside of me, cells are multiplying, life is just beginning.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Funnily enough, Chris was watching football when I came home. “Right,” I said, “do you want the good news or the bad?” “Good news,” he said. “I’m pregnant,” I said. “And the bad?” “It’s due in June.” I called him immediately after Grace was born, but he didn’t pick up. When I heard Pearce and Bates had both missed penalties, I punched the air. Needless to say, divorce proceedings were already underway.’

Laura, 25, Leicester

The next morning, I’m sitting on a stool drinking tea in the kitchen when Gina wanders in with Jasper, still complete with trilby.

‘God, rough as a bear’s arse,’ she yawns, reaching above my head to get mugs out of the cupboard so I have to duck, spilling tea all over my nightie.

I wince slightly as the heat hits my skin. ‘Don’t feel too clever myself. How about you Jasper? You feeling rough? You’ve got the right idea with that hat, that’s for sure.’

Gina raises an eyebrow, she knows I’m being sarcastic but he doesn’t hear me anyway. He’s got his hands down his pants and his head in last Saturday’s copy of the Guardian Weekend.

Gina wanders over to the kettle, coughing, or rather hacking, and switches it on then pulls her curvaceous little frame up onto the worktop. There’s a flash of red knickers from underneath her dressing gown.

‘Jesus, I need to give up the fags,’ she says, when she’s eventually recovered from her coughing fit. She’s been saying that for ten years. I got her four sessions with a hypnotist once, in return for being in a health feature in Believe It! magazine. It did nothing to help her kick the habit, but she did gain a new one: the hypnotist. Blaise Tapp he was called, and that was his real name. She ended up shagging him for three months.

‘Tea or coffee Jasper?’

‘Er, coffee. But only if it’s proper coffee. One sugar please.’

He leans back on the kitchen chair, stretching his arms above his head. He’s wearing a string vest, so I can see his thick, dark underarm hair sprouting forth like those fake moustaches you get in joke shops.

I get up to put my bowl into the dishwasher and realize I’m wearing no bra and my nipples are probably on show.

Gina opens her side of the cupboard. We did try sharing everything once, but due to our clashing eating habits, i.e. I eat like a horse and she eats hardly anything, it didn’t work out that well.

‘Fuck, no coffee,’ she mutters under her breath.

‘Have you got any real coffee I can borrow Jarvis?’

I get it out of the cupboard and hand it her; she doesn’t say thank you.

Gina can be a bit like this: brusque, bordering on rude. It gets people’s backs up sometimes. Jim goes into teacher mode and tells her off and Vicky just steers clear. And me? Well, I’m well practiced I suppose. Gina may act like a tough little cookie, but she’s soft as treacle inside, sensitive as anything. I definitely blame the parents: palmed off to nannies as a baby, sent off to boarding school aged eight. I suppose earning £70,000 plus in the City it’s not as if Gina needs someone to give her financial security, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that even though she resists it like an exhausted toddler resists sleep, she just needs to be loved. Which is why I worry about her choice of men.

Jasper excuses himself and goes for a shower, his jeans hanging off his arse to reveal the start of a most unsightly hairy crack. I worry I’m turning into my mother.

‘He’s such an interesting guy, isn’t he?’ says Gina, walking over to the kitchen window and putting her nose to the glass. Outside, the morning light is cobalt blue, like a church window. ‘So creative.’

So obviously a prat, I want to say, but I don’t. I couldn’t. I mean it’s not that he is an evil person or anything, he just isn’t boyfriend material. And Gina, more than anyone else I know, could really do with a boyfriend.

I am getting out of the shower when I hear my mobile. Oh for God’s sake, piss off! Who can possibly have something so important to say, that it needs saying at eight a.m.?

I get to the phone on the fifth ring.

‘Hello?’

‘Tess?!’

Even though she has known me and my voice for nearly thirty years, my mother still behaves as if I am Terry Waite, and this is the first time she has spoken to me after twenty-five years in captivity. I wouldn’t mind, but this level of drama can be quite exhausting, especially when she sometimes rings twice a day.

‘Oh it’s you. Hi mum,’ I say, sitting down on my bed. I am only wearing my towel and am dripping wet through.

‘Oh, thank God. Thank God you’re OK,’ she says breathlessly.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

Had there been a national disaster whilst I was in the shower? A bombing, a military coup? A tsunami perhaps?

‘I just worry about you down there, that’s all. There’s always that part of you when you’re a mum – you’ll see when you become one! – that worries something might have happened in the night.’ Remembering the near miss I had last week, I wince at this, hold the receiver away from my head.

Welcome to the world of Pat Jarvis. Fifty-four, happily married to Tony Jarvis, two wonderful children, Tess and Edward, the loveliest woman on earth, and pathologically pessimistic, especially when it comes to the safety of her own children.

If there had been a train crash in, say, Cardiff, my mother would not rule out the chance that I had been interviewing someone in Wales that day and am therefore lying dead and mutilated on the rail-track. If I am not able to get back to her within half an hour of her ringing, she’ll imagine me bound and gagged in the boot of a crack-dealer’s car, as my phone rings futilely in my coat pocket. When I was a little girl, she would refuse to let me help her bake in case I got my hand mangled in the whisks of her electric blender or my jugular slashed through with a bread knife. To cut a long story short, my mother is constantly amazed that at twenty-eight years old, I am still alive. Such is her faith in my ability merely to survive.

‘I was just calling you to remind you about your brother’s birthday. But before we talk about that, I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news.’

Now there’s a surprise.

‘David Jewson died yesterday. Sixty-two, dropped dead in his garden, just like that.’

She awaits my reaction as I trawl through my brain, trying for the life of me to remember who David Jewson is.

‘That’s terrible. But…um…who’s David Jewson?’

Mum sighs. This is not quite the reaction she was hoping for.

‘Oh come on, you do know David Jewson, Tessa. You went to school with his daughter, Beverley. Lovely girl, very pretty, works at Natwest in town.’

Beverley Jewson had middle-aged hair and once won Young Citizen of the Year (need I say more?). That doesn’t make it any less terrible for her to lose her dad, of course, but why does my mum insist on banging on about the merits of other people’s children all the time? Wasn’t I pretty? Wasn’t I intelligent? (Wasn’t I deplorably childish and should pull myself together?)

‘Oh yes, I remember Beverley now,’ I say, biting my lip. ‘That’s awful. Absolutely terrible.’

‘Well it was Tess, it really was,’ she says, perking up. ‘The thing was, he was perfectly fine last week. I saw him in the Spar as I was buying your dad a chicken Kiev for his tea. There I was, digging around in the freezer section when I felt this hand on my back and heard this voice say, “Hi Pat, is that you?” I felt awful because I had my bi-focals on at the time and I didn’t recognize him and…’

Bla bla bla…

I am only roused from the catatonic state brought on by one of my mum’s monologues when I hear her say…

‘And your dad’s fifty-seven this year and he’s not getting any younger. And, he’s in one of his “funny moods” again.’

Dad gets in what mum calls his ‘funny moods’ every few months. He goes a bit quiet, watches telly a lot and potters around his greenhouse more than usual, but that’s about it. I don’t know why she gets all stressed about it. You just have to know how to handle him, i.e. leave him alone and stop nagging him, poor man.

‘For God’s sake, mum, dad’s not going to drop down dead. He’s got more energy than you and me put together.’

This is true. My dad owns a construction company so he’s up and down ladders, lifting sacks of cement daily. On top of that, he’s on the golf course every weekend and last year he ran the Morecambe 10K race dressed as a shrimp for Cancer Research. What my mum lacks in get up and go, my dad makes up for ten fold. If anything it’s my mum whose health is dodgy, the amount of time she spends sitting on her backside scoffing stilton and watching Emmerdale.

‘You’re right lovey, you’re absolutely right,’ she sighs. ‘But the mind does boggle. I mean, alive one minute, dead as a doorpost the next. He was just mowing his lawn at the time, can you believe it? Who’d have thought mowing your lawn could kill you.’

I chuckle to myself at the characteristic lunacy of this comment. If mum had her way, we would all be bubble-wrapped and crash-helmeted in order to protect us from the potentially life-threatening nature of grass cuttings.

It’s ten more minutes at least before she shows any sign of hanging up and allowing me to get ready for work.

‘Now, don’t forget Ed’s birthday will you? It’s next Monday so make sure you post a card on Saturday because there’s no post on a Sunday and…’

‘Yes mum. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a complete imbecile.’ I hold the receiver under my chin as I attempt to put on knickers. ‘I’ll speak to you soon. Bye! Bye…!’

I press ‘end call’ and feel instantly guilt-ridden. Poor mum. Living in London, I never seem to have the time for leisurely phone calls with her anymore and I sometimes worry she feels jealous that I manage it with my dad. It’s just, me and dad have an understanding. Whereas my mum and my brother were born with a tendency to gossip and dramatize, to expect the very worst and then delight in going on about it when that prophecy is fulfilled, me and my dad have always come at life rather more sunny-side-up: in the belief that everything and everyone is good, until proved otherwise.

I finally leave the house at 8.40 a.m. thinking I’ll just have time, if I’m quick, to pop into Star’s before catching the bus. Star’s is the dry cleaners on New North Road. Its run by a family of Turkish Cypriots, headed up by Emete, whose numerous spare tyres and racoon-ringed eyes belie an energy level so phenomenal, you wonder if this woman could pop out another five babies to add to her brood this week, and still get the whole street’s ironing done.

The bell sounds as I push open the door. Emete bustles to the front of the shop, a tape measure around her neck.

‘Tessa, my love. What a wonderful start to the day!’ She opens her arms – each the size of one of my thighs – and places an enthusiastic kiss on both cheeks.

‘Hi Emete. Morning Omer!’ I shout, peering through the rows of plastic bags to the back of the shop where Emete’s husband sits, coffee in hand, reading the newspaper. He raises a hand without looking up.

‘Now angel, what can I do for you?’ Emete pins a pink ticket to somebody’s jacket and hangs it up on a rail to her right.

I hear the doorbell go again and am half-aware of a presence beside me.

‘It’s this shirt,’ I say, taking the linen shirt out of the bag and laying it out in front of us. ‘It was in my last lot of dry cleaning but it’s not mine, there must have been a mix up.’

Emete puts the safety pin she was holding between her teeth and holds it up to the light. ‘How strange,’ she says.

‘Very strange,’ says a voice. I recognize it instantly. ‘I’ve got the same problem.’

Another item of clothing appears on the counter.

I stare at the white linen dress in front of me, and then at the hands placed on top of it: tanned, big, with slender fingers and round, shell-pink nails. I’d know those hands anywhere. I trace the arms, lean, boyish, a perfect covering of fine, black hair and then the face, I’m looking at the face. My hand goes to my mouth, my heart starts to race.

‘Laurence?!’

Brown eyes, behind which lie albums and albums of memories of us, are staring at me now, flickering with disbelief. He covers them with his hands. Those oh so familiar hands. ‘Tess?’ He uncovers his eyes again. ‘Shit, it is you.’ He looks at the shirt. ‘And that’s my shirt!’

Emete, prone to fits of the giggles at the best of times, is doubled up now, great wheezy laughs making her bosom heave.

‘You know her?!’ Her bulbous eyes are round as gobstoppers. ‘You know him?!’ She summons Omer from the back of the shop. ‘In fifteen years, Omer! I’ve never known…oh! How wonderful!’ Omer shuffles forward, puts his arm around his wife and gives a silent, toothless grin in appreciation of the moment.

We exchange clothes – Laurence gives me my white dress, I try to give him his shirt, but my hands are shaking so much that I drop it, at his feet.

‘Sorry, whoops.’ (What sort of a word is whoops?!)

‘It’s alright, I’ve got it.’ He picks it up. When he stands up, his face is so close to mine I can see the subtle bumpiness of this morning’s shave. Laurence has hardly aged at all. Hairline slightly retreating perhaps, but only to reveal two sun-kissed Vs and some fine laughter lines around those lazy, pretty eyes. I hold his gaze for as long as I can bear, then look away, embarrassed.

‘Hello,’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say. Then we look at each other, but we’re flabbergasted, half laughing, not having the slightest clue what to say. I haven’t seen him for five years. Not since that freezing November morning at Heathrow airport.

‘It really is you’ he says eventually.

‘I know, I know!’ I say, giggling like an idiot and wishing I’d at least had time to put some mascara on this morning.

‘I cannot believe…’ He steps back, as if to get a better look at me.

‘Nor can I!’ I look at Emete, who’s still shaking with laughter like a mountain in an earthquake. ‘It’s totally freaky!’

We stand there, all four of us laughing, not really sure what we’re laughing at except that this is turning out to be the most extraordinary, wonderful, glorious morning.

Omer finally speaks and when he does, it’s worth every syllable.

‘So how do you two know each other?’ he says, flashing his gummy smile.

Laurence takes hold of one of my hands. He looks at me from under those heavy lids.

‘She was my girlfriend,’ he says finally, proudly even. ‘We went out together, for two years. Till I went and ballsed it up.’

Laurence and I met in April 2000 – the unseasonably warm spring of our final year – and all I was doing in Manchester was lazing about campus with Gina, sipping beer out of plastic glasses.

‘Do you fancy coming to this party?’ Gina asked one day.

‘Er, yeah!’ I said. (Was the Pope a Catholic?) ‘What kind of party? Count me in.’

‘A garden party,’ she said. ‘At my mate Laurence’s parents’ house in Sussex. They have one every year.’

She said Laurence was studying media studies at Leeds University and was a mate from boarding school. I can’t say that ‘garden party’ really got my pulse racing but as with most things involving Gina, there were a few surprises in store. For starters, any preconceptions I had about ‘parents’ and ‘garden party’ were swiftly eradicated the moment we accelerated up to the main gates in Gina’s Fiat Bravo (the purchase of which I hold entirely responsible for me delaying learning to drive). There was some kind of French rap music, the sort you expect to throb from Parisian banlieue, reverberating from their huge, sprawling farmhouse as we walked up the long gravel path. Huge red and gold lanterns adorned the front of the house. A barefoot, wild-haired woman wearing a sequinned waistcoat and holding an enormous glass of red wine almost ran towards us, arms out-stretched. ‘Bienvenue and welcome!’ she cried, kissing Gina then me on both cheeks. (I immediately had a personality crush.) She was Laurence’s mum – or Joelle as she insisted we call her – something which seemed biologically impossible since she looked about thirty. She’d been in England for twenty years, even though her French accent was still treacle-thick. Joelle and Laurence’s dad, Paul, had met when he was a student in Aix-en-Provence and Joelle was working as a life model (so French! I loved her even more). Now he was a lecturer in French at the University of Sussex and skulked about the house wearing Woody Allen-style glasses and smoking Camel Reds. Joelle poured us equally huge glasses of wine. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ she said. ‘All my boys are outside.’

At that point, a bare-chested young man sauntered into the kitchen, wrapped his arms around Joelle, who was stirring something sweet and spicy on the Aga, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘And this,’ she said, reaching on her tip toes and kissing him back, ‘is my most beautiful and most idle one.’

I should have let that be my warning, but I fell in love – well, it was all-consuming, primeval lust at that point – on the spot.

Laurence was six foot two with closely cropped black curls which looked like they would spring to life like his mother’s if he let them, sultry dark eyes with languorous lids and an exquisite dimple in his left cheek. He was wearing Levis twisted jeans and white flip-flops that showed off the most perfect tanned toes. I remember curling mine, complete with chipped purple nail varnish and the odd unsuccessfully frozen verucca, inside my trainers.

We’re standing outside the dry cleaners now, Emete and Omer still watching from the window.

‘So what are you doing now?’ Laurence says it as if we have options.

(A coffee maybe? Stiff G&T? I suppose a quick session back at mine would be out of the question?)

‘Oh, work, unfortunately,’ I say, hoisting myself back down to earth. ‘And you?’

‘Yeah, work,’ says Laurence.

‘What kind of…?’

‘Bar manager. I manage a bar in Clerkenwell,’ he says, hands in pockets. ‘My dad’s gutted I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a fucking philosopher come to think of that but you know me.’

‘I know you.’

‘Never one to do as I’m told.’

We shuffle from foot to foot grinning inanely and not knowing quite what to do with ourselves.

‘So God, I mean, how come I’ve never seen you around here before?’ I say, wanting to keep him here, not wanting this to end. ‘Where are you living?’

‘Not here. I mean, here for now, but not usually. I’m staying at a mate’s. And you? You live with Gina of course, for which you clearly deserve a medal.’

‘She’s alright, is Marshall,’ I laugh. ‘You’ve just got to be strict. We live on Linton Street. You come out of that dry cleaners and turn first right. Bit of a party house as you can imagine…’

‘So I’m told,’ says Laurence. ‘So how is work in the big bad world of publishing? Still tragedy correspondent?’

‘Tragedy correspondent?’

‘Yeah, Gina said you earn a living hearing other people’s sob stories.’

‘Cheeky cow!’

He backtracks with a smile.

‘In a good way.’

‘It’s “triumph over tragedy”, get it right. Even if they’ve been taken in by a polyamorous cult, had all their limbs amputated and all their family have been massacred by a crazed gunman, there’s always a positive angle. And if there isn’t, we just make one up.’

‘Like?’

‘Like he didn’t like his family anyway. Or his legs come to think of it.’

Laurence laughs. I find my face reddening with pleasure.

‘I forgot how funny you are.’ He studies me. ‘And quite how foxy.’

It’s a good job we both see a bus trundling towards us at that point, otherwise I might have had to react to that statement and it would definitely, have been idiotic.

‘Well, this is me,’ Laurence says, taking his wallet out of his pocket. ‘But here, here’s my card.’

‘And here’s mine,’ I say, hastily rummaging in my bag and handing over my fuscia pink business card with Believe It!’s slogan emblazoned all over it: From the touching to the twisted, every single week! Classy.

‘Thanks, um…’ As Laurence reads the card I see his eyebrows flicker and inwardly cringe. He says, ‘Just ring the bar, I’m usually there. Well, I come and go.’

Like a cat. An elusive cat.

He gives me a kiss on the cheek ‘Bye,’ he says.

‘Yeah, bye,’ I say dumbly.

Then he runs across the road, and I keep watching him. He’s almost jogging now, his rucksack over one shoulder, his jacket riding up. Cute arse. Gorgeous arse. Round and perfectly formed and slightly uplifted and filling out those jeans like an arse should. He still makes the blood rush to my nether regions. He still makes my head surge with indecent thoughts.

It’s 8.30 a.m., barely an hour since I got up, and I am walking to work in broad daylight, wondering how the hell we buggered that one up.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘When I said my vows, “In sickness and in health”, little did I know how far that would be tested. But when I saw Howard in hospital bandaged and bloodied, his face unrecognisable from the burns, there was no doubt in my mind that he was still my Howard. Freddie was born three weeks after the bomb and it’s been so hard. But even now, I look at both my boys and all I see is that they are the spitting image of each other.’

Dee, 32, London

I stride into the atrium of Giant Publishing with, miraculously, fourteen minutes to spare. 9.16 and already the place looks like Piccadilly Circus only shinier.

I get into a lift with two people: one is Justine Lamb, the Editorial Director, head to toe in cream cashmere. The other is Brian Worsnop, owner of the lowest hairline in trichological history, currently devouring a Ginster’s Scotch Egg, very noisily.

He beams at me, revealing bits of sausage meat between his dentures.

‘Super night last Friday wasn’t it? You looked a little merry, to say the least, I particularly liked your…’

‘Yes, OK, Brian.’ I smile, tight-lipped. Justine Lamb does not need to know about my drunken impressions of Blanche Jewell, our MD, complete with a pair of enormous false teeth.

I landed my job as writer on Believe It! magazine in 2003, as soon as I got back from what turned out to be a pretty traumatic year travelling. It was the least glamorous title in Giant Publishing’s portfolio and was edited by Judith Hogg, a pigeon-chested tumour of a woman who couldn’t feel empathy if her life depended on it. However, it was a proper job in journalism and with stories like ‘I lost my nose but still sniffed out love’ it was hard not to see the funny side. The relentless interviewing of people with such shit lives meant you couldn’t help but think your own was maybe not that bad. It was the perfect distraction from a broken heart, too. A heart broken by Laurence Cane.

Bing! The lift door opens and I stride out, into a pool of morning sun which drenches the office in an orange-pink glow.

‘Morning Tess.’

‘Morning Jocelyn.’

Jocelyn, our receptionist, is from Perth in Australia. She has a shocking-red bob that swings around her face when she walks or even moves (mainly due to a sort of wave effect brought on by her sheer size) and a bottom as wide as her homeland.

I feel I can say this and not sound fattist because Jocelyn is far from embarrassed about her body. In fact she accentuates her ‘womanly curves’ with sleeveless, bingo-wing-revealing tops in lurid prints and tight, white, cellulite-enhancing trousers.

‘May I say Tessa, you look fintistic today,’ she trills, biting into a ham and cheese croissant. ‘Off on a date tonight by any chance, met someone nice on the Internet again?’

Ever since I made the grave mistake of telling Jocelyn I had a date with a guy from Match.com, she has asked me this question on average twice a week.

‘No, not tonight, Jocelyn,’ I say, hanging up my coat. ‘I’ve gone off men from the Internet anyway, all they ever seem to be into is skydiving and bungee jumping if their photos are anything to go by.’

‘Quite right too,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I’ve never been one for adrenaline sports myself.’

Back at my desk, I hear Anne-Marie busily relaying the latest in the saga of Vegan Boyfriend to someone on the phone. ‘He won’t even kiss me if I’ve eaten a bacon sandwich, you know,’ she’s saying proudly, pop-sock-clad feet up on the desk. ‘That’s how committed he is.’

I give her a little wave, she gives me one back. I turn on my computer and see the little red light is flashing on my phone.

‘You have two new messages,’ says the automated voice.

Beep.

‘Hiya…is that Tess? This is Keeley. You came to our house last week to interview me and Dean. Fing is, yeah, we woz a bit pissed when we did the interview. Dean had just bought me that bottle of Asti to help with the nerves and now we’re worried everyone’s gonna find out…’

Oh dear. Another second thoughts casualty. You’d think what with the tape running and the photographer turning up, people might realize the larger ramifications before they start blabbing about their boyfriend’s penis enlargement to the national press.

Next!

I try to concentrate but thoughts of Laurence are like a swarm of butterflies in my brain.

Next is a message from a woman from Dudley. Her husband is forty-three stone and bed-ridden, can we do a campaign to save his life?

‘Before I ballsed it up,’ he said. I can’t stop those words from circulating in my mind. Admittedly, there had been a brief moment when I felt like punching the air – it is only right he should have suffered a bit after what he did to me. But that was years ago now and anyway, let’s face it, I ballsed it up too. If I hadn’t been so flighty, if I hadn’t done a Tess special and buggered off around the world, assuming everything would be hunky dory when I got back, maybe we would be together now, in love, married, maybe even a baby on the way.

I’ve got seventeen things to do on my desktop To Do list but I all I can do is day-dream. The fact is, when I look back to my two and a half years with Laurence the entire era reverberates with a huge WHAT IF. What if I had engaged my head as well as my heart, what if I had not been so naïve, what if I had been thinner, more demure, more exotic. What if, for example, I had not got caught having sex with Laurence Cane the very first time I met him, by Mrs Cane herself? At her garden party. Maybe it was jinxed from the start.

I blame the sun. That and his liberal parents who plied us with an endless flow of Beaujolais. (My parents would have provided two boxes of Asda’s best, announcing, ‘and when that’s finished, it’s finished, Tessa.’) By three a.m. everyone who was going home had gone and Gina had passed out on the sofa-bed in the spare room. So, it was just the two of us, talking and drinking at the kitchen table.

‘Your mum’s so cool,’ I slurred, nursing about my eightieth glass of wine, my teeth black as a peasant’s. ‘So exotic and bohemian.’

Laurence laughed. ‘Everyone says that,’ he said. ‘And yeah, I suppose she is.’ Then he paused, hesitated, then said, ‘But she’s not as cool as you.’

That’s when he turned to me, took my face in his hands and started kissing me, passionately and urgently. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘Funny?’

‘Yeah, and kinda sexy, you make me laugh.’

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. But what did it matter anyway? I was snogging a Thierry Henry look-alike.

He reached inside my top and placed his hand on my breast. ‘Come here,’ he whispered, fixing me with eyes that told me how much he wanted me. Then his hand was suddenly in my bra and he drew me close and we were kissing, harder this time, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths hungrily, hot, quick breath moist on my skin. He gestured for me to hold my arms up, he removed my top. He removed my bra. And not with a teenage fumble, but in one, smooth, masterful stroke, as if he undressed women for a living.

Then, pulling me upwards, never taking his lips from mine, he put his hands around my waist and picked me up, sitting me on the table in front of him. His hands were big and warm and as they explored me: my shoulders, my neck, my stomach, the nerves in my groin suddenly sparked into action.

‘Should we be doing this?’ I looked at him, eyes shining under the table lamp.

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I bloody want to!’ I said, which came out far more eager than I had anticipated.

‘Well that’s good then,’ he said, looking at me from under canopy-sized eyelashes.

He swept my hair back from my face, then gently pushed me back onto the table, never diverting from my gaze.

‘Stop it!’ I giggled. ‘Your parents might come down, your brothers might hear!’

‘So what,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’

He undid my jeans and I undid his, my hands trembling, and we were kissing all over each other’s faces and necks and he ran his hands through my hair, pushing it back from my face and kissing me again. Then he was flicking his tongue all over my nipples and I was moaning and half laughing at the same time and pulling him into me and we were going at it hammer and tongs over this huge oak table and I’d already decided it was true what they said about French men. And the lamp above us was creaking slightly with the motion of us, and I felt like Vanessa Paradis in one of those late-night saucy films. Then:

‘Putain de merde Maman! Qu’est ce que tu fou?!’

Doing a course in French, I knew this loosely translated as ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Then Laurence leapt off me, his erection waving about like a rather awkward third person and pulled up his jeans.

‘Oooh la la.’ I noted the distinct lack of humour in his mother’s voice. Then in her face. She was standing right in front of us. ‘It’s three a.m. And you have a bedroom to go to, Jesus Laurence, have some respect.’

And then I said the weirdest thing, to this day I don’t know what possessed me.

‘Merci beaucoup!’ I shouted after her. Just like that. No joke. I nearly died.

‘What did you say?’ Laurence said incredulously. Eyeing me up like he’d just spent the last half an hour getting off with a mutant.

But I couldn’t say anything. I covered my face with my hands.

My stomach churns at the memory. I turn back to my inbox and there it is.

From: _LCane@blackberry.co.uk

To: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk

I was wondering, now we have our glad rags back, you free tomorrow night?

I am now!

I am on my way back from lunch, after reciting the email word for word and relaying the whole dry cleaners scenario to Anne-Marie and Jocelyn and basically the entire office, when I feel the growling vibration of a text message in my pocket.

It’s Jim.

Warren. House party tomorrow. Keep it free.

Presumptuous or what! Now I get my own back. I text:

Sorry, no can do, have hot date with sexy ex. Ha! Kiss that! One all. I do have a social life of my own, you know.

My phone rings immediately. ‘Jim’ flashes up.

‘Oh, now that is lame,’ he says.

‘Come again?’

‘Resurrecting an old boyfriend. I don’t think that counts.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize this was a competition!’ I laugh.

‘You started it. You’re the one who said “one all”.’

Jim is always like this when he is on school holidays. Too much time on his hands, gets very childish.

‘It’s a date isn’t it?’ I say. ‘He’s a bloke isn’t he? He fancies me, I fancy him, what’s not to like?’

‘Fine, it’s just, you know, take your good friend Jim for example. Not one to resort to dredging up old flames when in need of a bit of excitement, I travelled far and wide for romance and found an Italian corker who can offer me first class stays at exquisite hotels with no strings attached.’

‘Annalisa found you, remember? White as a sheet, having just barfed in a bin in Rimini town centre you were so hungover, I seem to remember.’

‘She didn’t know I’d just barfed in a bin.’

‘Bet she did, bet she could smell it on you.’ (I always sink to Jim’s level eventually.)

‘No, I was gentlemanly and paid for her coffee actually and anyway she fell for my northern charm and quick wit.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Yeah, whatever. The point is, I thought you hated Laurence?’

‘What makes you think it’s Laurence?! I know it’s hard to believe but I have had other boyfriends, you know.’

‘Not ones you’d call your “sexy” ex, you haven’t.’

I protest but Jim’s right. I would not call any of my other exes my sexy ex. Not because they weren’t sexy at all (I like to think I have upheld some standards in my life) but because Laurence was THE sexy ex. The One. Or as near as damned as I’ve ever been to it.

‘Anyway,’ I continue, feeling ever so slightly triumphant, that Jim has even thought about my past relationships enough to even make this observation, ‘I never said I hated him.’ Did I? He broke my heart; I was gutted for a while. OK, maybe I hated his guts for a while but I never actually hated him. ‘We were young, I expected too much. That was like, seven thousand years ago now anyway. Give the guy a break.’

‘I’ve got nothing against Laurence,’ protests Jim. ‘It was you that he upset, or have you forgotten the night you got back from travelling and demanded I come round, having drunk a bottle of wine in about half an hour feeling practically suicidal? What makes you think he’s changed is all I’m saying.’

‘Jesus Jim, it’s just a date, he didn’t ask me to marry him.’

‘OK. Well that’s OK then,’ says Jim, cheerily now. ‘Have a good time and make sure you give old Cane a damn good seeing to.’

I hang up, walk back to work smiling to myself. Jim really is weird sometimes.

I text Gina ‘how’s the evil hangover?’ And look at my watch: 1.53 p.m. There’s seven minutes till lunch officially ends. Still, a lot can happen in seven whole minutes. I go to the Ladies and then, I don’t know why, perhaps it’s women’s instinct that draws my attention just then, to something in my bag. Shimmering among the bus tickets and leaflets about cultural events I know I will never get round to attending, the blue wrapper containing the other pregnancy test from the pack of two I bought glints at me from the bottom of my bag. I’m not pregnant, I can’t be, I had a negative test. (Shelley Newcombe told me back in Year 9 that you can never have a positive after a negative.) But it cost me fifteen pounds and I really don’t like waste. And so I go into a cubicle and I get it out. It’s less of a conscious decision, more of a cleaning-up exercise, just as you might eat the one leftover stick of Kit-Kat that was making your desk look untidy. I wee on the little stick and balance it on top of the toilet roll holder, not thinking, just doing. Then I set the timer on my watch for two minutes.

1.50

This is ridiculous, I’ve even got PMT: sore boobs, knackered, short fuse, the Works

1.30

No period though and that’s a fact, I’m a week late; I’m never a week late

1.00

I am stressed though, that’s also a fact and I bet two seconds after doing this negative test, I’ll come on (ruining my best knickers it’s always the way)

0.45

I glance at the test, yep, just as I thought

0.30

Two lines emerging, God, I hate wasting money, especially due to paranoia

0.25

Misplaced, neurotic, paranoia

0.14

I pick up the test and tear off some toilet roll – I’m wrapping it up now, to throw in the bin

0.10

But then the light catches it – the breath catches in my throat

0.08

It can’t be, can it? can it? oh my God! tell me it can’t!

0.06

I feel like I might throw up, I swallow, take a deep breath, exhale slowly, then look at it again

0.04

But it’s still there

it’s still there…

a cross, a bright blue fuck-off cross! I’M PREGNANT! I’M FUCKING PREGNANT!! and I can hardly breathe, I can’t get my breath – help me! – my lungs won’t expand, and all I’m aware of, apart from this sensation, is a great surging, flooding of blood to my head…

If it wasn’t suddenly rush hour in the toilets, I might be making much more noise by now. But I can hear someone in the cubicle next to me, blowing their nose, and I know – she even does that in her own special way – that it’s Anne-Marie, so I don’t, I don’t make a sound. I just stay where I am, hand clasped over my mouth, my world having just shifted on its axis, and me hanging off the side by one fingernail.

My first concern (which points towards promising maternal impulses at least) is that I must have pickled whatever is there, if it really is there, by the alcohol consumed last night, the sambucas at Greg’s birthday drinks, the drugs. Shit, the drugs! I had a spliff with Gina last night and I am overcome with a murderous guilt, a guilt I am wholly and completely unprepared for. And then comes the shock, it hits me like a wall. Shock, guilt, shock, what the hell do I feel? The emotions seem to thrash over me, like merciless ice cold waves, pinning me to the back of the toilet door and stealing my breath.

There’s the sound of flushing next door, the taps running, the pad-pad of Anne-Marie’s hemp boots and the creak of the door as it shuts behind her. I’m feeling a whole kaleidoscope of emotions now but what are they? Am I happy? Is this elation I’m feeling? Or is it horror? I don’t know. I can’t think.

I hold the test in my hand, my breathing shaky, my palms moist, and suddenly I’m very angry. Angry that the other test lied to me, even angrier for doing this – getting pregnant in the first place, and now I’m angry at myself for handling this so badly.

Then it occurs to me. This cannot be right. No, it must be the alcohol from the weekend, turning the test positive. Like litmus paper. But I’m clutching at straws of course; I don’t really believe that. Plus, something instinctive tells me I am pregnant. I feel different. In that moment, the whole toilet cubicle in which I am standing seems to spin and to distort, as if everything I have ever known, ever experienced as my life, the feeling of just being me, is annihilated and I feel utterly disoriented.

I have to speak to Jim. Now. But I can’t face seeing someone I know, so I don’t take the lift down I take the stairs, two at a time.

Outside, everything looks different, as if I’m looking at it for the first time. It’s raining, pelting it down, and so I run, clutching my phone, to the doorway of a recruitment company at the end of the road. My hands are shaking as I find Jim’s number. I’m pregnant, I’m fucking pregnant!

It rings and rings and then he finally picks up.

‘Hello.’

His voice sounds muffled, sleepy almost.

‘Jim it’s me again.’

‘I know. Listen, can I ring you back?’ he whispers. I hear a woman cough.

Oh brilliant, Annalisa’s there. I am phoning him to tell him I’m carrying his child, and his Italian F.B. is in his bed on one of her impromptu visits to London, almost definitely naked. I met her once, his gnocchi nookie, on one of her ‘romantic’ breaks to East Dulwich.

‘You should get togezzer with Tess, she is adorable!’ she apparently said to Jim afterwards. ‘You’re an English lost boy,’ she always says to him. (She means loser, but she never quite gets it right, and ‘lost boy’ sums him up so much better I always think.) I have nothing against her. I really couldn’t care less if she was in his bed four times a year, but now? ‘Christ Jim!!’ I want to say, but I can’t, because it’s not his fault. I mean I know it takes two to tango and all that, and that if I am pregnant (I am still hanging onto the fact this might all be a very large mistake), it’s his doing as much as mine, but I can’t start going all jealous wannabe girlfriend on him now. It’s just…stood here, his DNA fusing with mine, it’s in slightly bad taste, that’s all.

And so I say, ‘It’s really pretty important. I do need to speak to you. Now.’

‘OK, hang on,’ he says, and there’s a few seconds where he obviously puts his hand over the receiver and explains he has to take the call.

I can picture him now. He is getting out of bed, hair sticking up, skinny legs making for the door, holding his privates. He is slipping on his dressing gown, going into the kitchen and picking up the other phone.

‘So what’s wrong, hey?’

The concern in his voice makes me well up, my voice starts to wobble.

‘I am pregnant after all.’

Silence. He swallows.

‘What do you mean? You did a test, it was negative.’

‘I did another, it was positive.’

‘How do you know?’

‘There’s a cross.’

‘What sort of cross?’

‘A blue one.’

A pause. Just the sound of his breathing.

‘Are you sure you’ve read the instructions properly?’

‘Yes. I’m sure, I’m not that stupid.’

There’s another silence and then when he speaks again, there’s a tone in his voice I’ve never heard before.

‘Is it mine?’ he says softly. And as the tears finally fall, and I say, ‘Yes, yes, of course it’s bloody yours,’ I realize that the tone in his voice, was hope.

We arrange to meet outside the Tate Modern after work; I’ll bring the test so he can see it for himself. I put the phone down and walk back to the office, under a cloud, through a city sheathed in rain. I imagine that everyone I pass: a group of smokers huddled outside their office, a queue outside the post office, can see inside my womb, red and illuminated. And I have never felt so extraordinary in my entire life.

When I get in the lift for the third time today, who should step in behind me but Julia, my ridiculously glamorous friend from Journalism College, who is eight months pregnant herself. She’s features editor of Luxe now, having actually worked her way up rather than got to the first place that would have her and never moved again, so we often bump into each other like this and have some awkward conversation about how I should send her some features ideas, which of course I never get round to.

‘Hi,’ she says, but I’m not really listening, I’m too fixated on the words that bubble threateningly in my throat. ‘I’m pregnant too!’ I want to say. ‘Help! What do I do!?’ But I don’t obviously, that would be ludicrous. So instead I say, ‘Had a good week?’

‘Yeah, chilled out,’ she says, stroking her bump. ‘It’s all I can do to haul myself off the sofa these days. Fraser’s started calling me The Rock, because I’m so hard and big and immovable,’ she laughs. Then she says, ‘Oh God, don’t. My pelvic floor isn’t quite what it was.’ Then she laughs again and I do too on some very obvious delayed reaction.

I imagine she can sense it, smell the fact I’m pregnant. They say pregnant women have heightened senses. I know any minute now she’s going to say it and it’s making me nauseous with anticipation. I run through what I’m going to say in my head, how I’m going to explain.

‘Tess?’ she says eventually.

‘Yes?’ I gasp. Oh shit, here it comes.

‘I said have you?’

‘Have I what?’

‘Have you got anything planned for the weekend?’

‘Oh right! I say, letting out an almighty sigh of relief. She’s frowning at me now.

‘Yeah, quiet.’

I can sense her looking at me, but I stare at the floor. She giggles.

‘You’ve met someone haven’t you?’ she whispers in my ear. ‘Go on, I can tell by that face.’

I don’t stop staring at the floor.

‘Oh no! I know! You’ve finally got it together with Jim – that’s it isn’t?’

‘No!’ I snap, making her start back ever so slightly.

‘Oh right. It’s just, you were looking kind of shifty that’s all.’

Thankfully it’s then that we get to the eighth floor and Julia waddles out as I mumble something about having a hangover.

I rush to my desk, the email’s there. I didn’t send it. Thank fuck I didn’t send it!

To: LCane@blackberry.co.uk

Yes I’m free, if I haven’t been taken in by a polyamorous cult by then.

(Or if I haven’t been impregnated.)

I press delete.

By some miracle, I make it through the rest of the day, the sun sinking behind St Paul’s by the time I meet Jim outside the Tate.

He’s sitting on one of the black rubber benches when I get there. His gangly legs are stretched out in front of him and he’s carrying a bunch of freesias with foil wrapped around the stems.

He looks up when I say hello and squints into the light.

‘These are for you,’ he says holding out the flowers. They smell amazing. ‘I’m sorry about before.’

‘About what?’

‘Er, for being in bed with Annalisa when you rang to tell me you’re pregnant? I feel awful.’

‘Don’t worry, honestly I’ve forgotten already.’ A picture of her, nude, black hair flowing all over the pillow pops into my head. ‘Was she naked?’ I ask.

‘I thought you’d forgotten,’ says Jim. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘I have, I have.’

I sit down beside him. The evening sun flickers like embers on the river in front of us. ‘Anyway,’ I say. ‘Look at this.’

I undo the front pocket of my bag, take out the test and hand it to him. He unwraps it, looks at me, squeezes my thigh, then holds up the test to the light.

‘Mmm. There’s definitely a cross there isn’t there?’

‘Really? Oh God, I was hoping…Do you think?’

The reality hits me, there’s no getting away from this now. I burst into tears, tears of pure shock.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I just don’t know what to do. I cannot believe this is happening, what are we going to do?’

Jim rubs his face with his hands then puts an arm around me and we don’t say anything for a while, just stare blankly at the water. Then Jim says, ‘I don’t know. But whatever happens it will be alright, OK? I promise. Whatever happens, I’m here for you.’

In reality there never really was any question of whether I was going to keep the baby.

‘It’s your decision,’ Jim said, as we walked across Millennium Bridge. ‘I’ll stand by you whatever you decide.’

It felt like I was alone at that moment. As if the glittering towers at either side, the Gherkin glowing orange like a burning rocket and the river below us were holding their breath, awaiting my decision.

But the truth was, I had already made my decision. The decision was made the moment the blue cross emerged. If I was eighteen, I wouldn’t think twice, I’d have an abortion. But I am twenty-eight, a grown woman and besides, the way things are going lately – Laurence showing up out of the blue and now this, the second earth-shattering event of the year and it’s only April – half of me wonders whether life is trying to tell me something and I should sit up and listen.

‘I want to keep it,’ I say. And even though I mean it, I still want to gobble all the words back again as soon as they’ve left my mouth.

‘You do?’ Jim stops, turns and looks at me. He looks…what is that look?…delighted?! And for a fleeting second, I think what a brilliant dad he’ll make and maybe, just maybe this isn’t so terrible after all.

‘Yes,’ I say looking at him. ‘It’s scary as hell but I do. I mean, it’s not sunk in yet, and this isn’t conventional. Actually it’s utterly mental! But…’

But what? I think.

‘But to have an abortion would feel like the coward’s way out,’ I say, and for that moment I really believe what I’m saying. ‘It would feel like not choosing life. Not just literally in terms of the baby, but for me, for us.’

Jim gets hold of my hand. We’re right on top of the bridge now and the wind is blowing our hair sideways, making our eyes sting.

‘I agree, Tess, it’s alright, I agree…’ He says beaming at me now.

‘And the main reason,’ I add.

‘What’s the main reason?’ Jim asks.

‘In the future, the years to come, I couldn’t deal with what could have happened, you know?’

‘I know, I know.’

‘I couldn’t deal with what might have been.’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I knew as soon as I set eyes on Mac that I was in big trouble. At fifty to my twenty-six, he was way too old. But he was so bloody sexy – a big hairy bear on wheels, how could I resist that? People stare when he’s pushing Layla down the street in his leathers and old enough to be her grandad but I don’t care. He’s not what I expected, but he’s a kitten. The most loving dad Layla could ever wish for.’

Georgie, 27, Brighton

I could tell Jim was secretly delighted by his own virility – by the fact that he shot and he scored. But I also knew, despite his usual optimism, that he was freaked out beyond belief.

The days that followed were totally surreal.We were both – we still are – in a state of shock and took to calling each other sometimes three times a day with phone calls that went a bit this.

Me: Hello

Jim: Hello

Long pause

Jim: How are you feeling?

Me: Weird. How are you feeling?

Jim: Yeah, weird

Long pause

Jim: I’m going to be a dad, I can’t believe it

Me: You can’t believe it!? Try being the one who’s got to carry the thing for nine months

Jim: I thought I wouldn’t be able to have kids though, that I’d have killed all my strong swimmers with all the booze I’ve quaffed

(See, I was so right about the virility thing)

Me: Well you can and it’s true

Jim: I know, I just can’t believe it though, it’s like it’s happening to someone else

That particular line was not that encouraging. And I told him so.

We’re on the fourth floor of Borders on Oxford Street in the Parenting section.

I need to say that again.

We’re on the fourth floor of Borders on Oxford Street in the Parenting section.

Nope. Still sounds ridiculous.

I lean against the bookshelf leafing through a book called Bundle of Joy: 101 Real Stories of Motherhood as if I do this every day, as if I do, actually, belong to this weird species, most of them mutant-shaped, milling around the shop floor, hand in hand: ‘The Expectants’.

But I am not expectant. At no point did I ever expect this! When that positive test emerged it was categorically the most unexpected thing I have ever experienced in my life. Things like this don’t happen to me, they happen to the people I interview – everything happens to the people I interview, but not to me.

My life has been one big cushy ride so far, which is why I’ve always blagged it when it comes to taking precautions against life’s eventualities. After all, the less stuff happens to you, the less you think it will, don’t you? I never did lie awake at night, dissecting my last session of oral sex and panicking that I hadn’t listened in Biology and it was perfectly feasible to get pregnant from a blow job after all. I rolled my eyes at Mrs Tucker our ‘personal health’ teacher – you can imagine what she got called – who said you could get pregnant by withdrawal – something that evoked all the risk of a banking transaction to me.

Some would say I’m reckless (my mum would, but then my mother thinks caffeine after five p.m. is reckless). I would say I’ve always been relaxed, optimistic. OK, I admit it, veering towards winging it and hoping for the best. And yet, here I am, and the thing that’s caught me most off guard, aside from the stampede of hormones currently taking over my body like an occupying army, is that I’ve been caught out. My winging it wings are out of fuel, my Bank of Blag is cleared of funds, my cat’s nine lives are all used up. Game’s over Tess Jarvis. You’ve officially fucked up.

It’s late afternoon, ten past five, and the sun is pouring in through the floor-length window, illuminating a column of dust particles which swirl to the ground, a reminder of the passing of time, of the seconds, minutes and days since my news. In the bookshop café to my right, there’s the clatter of tea cups and saucers, normal people getting on with their normal lives.

Two aisles in front, I can just see Jim’s head of dark, overgrown hair buried in a book and I am immediately transported back to the day we met. He was stood like that then too, the first time I saw him, on the second floor of the John Rylands Library, head buried in the The Death of the Author, bathed in autumn sun.

I remember thinking, just as I do now, he looked a bit vacant with those full lips hanging slightly open. But I liked his slim, defined face too, this guy with the hair that had its own mind.

I squint to read the title of the book Jim’s reading: You’re Pregnant Too Mate! The Essential Guide for Expectant Fathers. And have a sudden inexplicable urge to blow out the brains of the author. He’s been reading it since we got here. Don’t ask me how we got here either, it wasn’t a conscious decision. One minute we were buying his mum a present for her birthday. (Already made the seamless transition from friend to mother-of-child, side-stepping girlfriend and wife as I go…) The next, we’d wandered in here, on auto-pilot really, me looking as shell shocked as if I’d just emerged from a national disaster, a look I’ve been sporting for more than a week now.

I go back to my book – a cheery story of a woman whose morning sickness was so bad she would dry heave at Tesco’s cheese counter – but the words start to blur, I can’t concentrate. Everything in here is too loud, too bright.

Ever since we decided we were definitely going ahead with this, the whole world has felt like this: like I’ve woken up in a different one.

I go home, I watch TV with Gina, I go to Star’s and sip sweet Turkish tea and chat to Emete whilst she mends my trousers. I do everything I’ve always done, and yet it doesn’t feel like me doing it. It’s like someone has hijacked my body. Someone pregnant.

‘Hey, listen to this,’ says Jim, leaning over the bookshelf. ‘It says here that at six weeks pregnant, your baby is the size of a shrimp – how cool is that?’

‘Right, yes, very cool,’ I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Although I don’t much fancy the idea of a sea creature setting up home in my body.’

‘Right,’ nods Jim and goes back to his book.

‘A shrimp,’ he mumbles when I don’t say anything else. ‘Maybe that’s what we can call it, “shrimpy”.’

‘Jim, shut up,’ I mumble. I feel bad for being so moody. I can’t help it though. In less than a fortnight, we seem to have gone from best of mates – two people who actually have fun – to me weeping at not being able to work the tin opener.

Jim sidles off to the other side of the bookshelf, taking his book and dragging his feet in mock rejection. I bite my lip. I feel awful.

The fact Jim seems to be taking this so well isn’t helping. Despite the shock, ever since we found out, it’s weird, he’s had this look on his face; a look of boy-like wonder that says, ‘I just got the best surprise of my life.’

But me? I don’t feel like that. I don’t even know how I feel.

After the official showing of the pregnancy test, I mainly lay on my bed, listening to the strangely comforting soundtrack of inner city London, or did cool, long lengths at the outdoor swimming pool, anything to stop the noise in my head.

Both Vicks and Gina must know something’s up though. I’ve refused wine for three nights at home. I told Gina I’ve got cystitis, but I don’t think she’s buying it. ‘Cystitis?’ she said. ‘Likely story. You must be pregnant.’ She was joking, but I nearly fell off my chair. Plus when Vicky called me at work the other day, my voice was doing strange things. ‘What’s up with you?’ she said. ‘What’s happened? You can tell me.’

‘I’m pregnant!’ I wanted to shout. ‘I’m up the bloody spout, what the hell do I do ?!’ But I promised Jim I’d wait until the twelve-week scan before I went blabbing to everyone. In that typical male way, he likes to do things that don’t concern him by the book but I’m not sure I can wait that long.

‘How pregnant are you now?’ enquires Jim, looking up from his book.

‘Oh, I don’t know, about six weeks I think, why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why?’

Here we go again.

‘Because it says here that by seven weeks, the baby’s internal organs are in place, its brain is fully developed, and the body measures around two point five centimetres long.’

I almost gag.

‘That’s around an inch,’ I squeak, in disbelief. ‘How can it be?’

How can it be? I’ve barely got my head around any of this and yet its brain is a week off being fully formed? Its entire personality practically in place! There’s still a part of me too, who doesn’t really believe it. Even though Dr Cork threw her head back and laughed when I told her I’d done three tests, I can’t accept it.

‘For heaven’s sake my girl!’ she spluttered, in that soup-thick Irish accent. ‘I think we can safely say you’re expecting, can we not?’ But I didn’t believe it. Not really. Even when she scrolled down on her calendar, looked at me over her half-moon glasses and gave me a date: December fourteenth. ‘Ah! A little Christmas baby.’ I didn’t believe it was true.

I pick up another book, A Bloke’s 100 Tips for Surviving Pregnancy.

‘Your partner’s pregnancy may mean that you both rethink your domestic situation,’ it says. ‘It is still common for partners co-habiting and expecting a child to decide the time is right to get hitched.’

Right. But was it common for those ‘partners’ to be friends and not lovers? Was it common for them not to be co-habiting, or ever likely to be? Should we, after all, be rethinking our domestic situation and just get hitched anyway? Where were the rules for us? The top tips for us? I didn’t need My Best Friend’s Guide to Pregnancy, I needed, Help! I’m Pregnant, and it’s my Best Friend’s!

I look around me; the place is swarming with couples, the men protective of their girlfriends and wives who house the offspring that soon will make their nuclear, normal families. I look at Jim, still nose in his book. What were we? A pair of frauds.

I decide to take the Bundle of Joy. I figure some real-life tales may help with the denial. I go to the till and stand in the queue of couples, two-by-two, Noah’s bloody Ark.

I’m aware that my heart is beating but it’s only when I feel Jim’s hand on my shoulder, then his arm around my back that I realize I’m crying – again – that tears are rolling down my face and the woman at the till is staring at me.

‘Come on,’ says Jim, softly, stepping in front of a sea of staring faces and paying for the book. ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to Frankie’s.’

Frankie’s is an old jazz club on Charing Cross Road. Jim and I stumbled upon it a couple of years ago, a night that ended up with us dancing ourselves sober to a Bossanova swing band. It became our place after that. ‘Would madam care to dance ce soir?’ Jim would call and ask me, then we’d get all dolled up and we’d hit Frankie’s, dance the night away.

But I don’t want to go now. Frankie’s won’t make this any better.

‘I dunno,’ I say, as we glide down the escalator, ‘I’m just not sure I’m in the mood.’

We go anyway – after all I’m not in the mood for anything. It’s only just gone 6.30 p.m. by the time we arrive and thankfully it’s almost empty.

We sit at the bar sipping on virgin pina coladas which makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Laugh because Jim is sipping on a drink with a cherry and an umbrella in it, as a show of solidarity, when really he’d kill for a beer, and cry because why did we have drinks with umbrellas and cherries in anyway? It didn’t feel like we were celebrating.

My chin starts to go again.

‘Sorry, I’m a mess, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I say, forcing a smile.

‘Hey, come on,’ says Jim, dragging his stool closer, ‘Look at me.’

‘I’m scared too you know.’ He takes my hands in his, trying to ignore the snail trail of snot up one side where I’ve wiped my nose. ‘I’m scared shitless to be honest.’

‘But you seem…you’re amazing…you’re just handling this so well, so much better than me. It’s like you’re, I don’t know, happy about it all,’ I say.

He thinks about this, clears his throat. ‘Well, I’m definitely not unhappy about it. I’m thirty Tess. I don’t want to end up some sad old bachelor boy, no children, no life, answering the door in my underpants.’

‘You do that already.’

‘Oh. So I do.’

The barman places a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts on the bar which only makes me want to blub some more. Mainly because I can’t even have one. No peanuts, Dr Cork said. I can’t even have a goddamn peanut.

‘Give it time,’ Jim says, ‘it’s so early.’

‘I know, it’s just, I can’t help feeling this has fucked everything up. You could have met someone else, got married, done it properly, we both could have. But things are going to be so much more complicated now.’

I lean back in my chair and squeeze my eyes shut. Every time I think of one consequence of all this, another rears its head, a can of worms.

‘But I was never after a wife, Tess, you know that,’ says Jim, making me look at him. ‘All that wedding, two point four kids conventional thing was never something I dreamt of.’

I look at the floor.

‘But I did, Jim,’ I say, looking up at him. ‘I did dream of that.’

A horrid silence. Jim stares at his drink. It’s only as the words leave my mouth that I realize how true they are. I had it all planned. I don’t mean planned like Vicky planned things – a subscription to You and Your Wedding at twenty, married and pregnant by twenty-seven. I don’t mean planning your child so meticulously its birthday coincides with school holidays. The point I’m making, and the problem with me I suppose, is that I didn’t realize I needed to ‘plan’ anything. I had it all filed under ‘goes without saying’. Meeting ‘The One’, the white wedding, the joint mortgage and ceremonious last pill as we give up binge-drinking in preparation of our forthcoming child. The shagging – oh the shagging! – as we’d take to our bed on sun-drenched afternoons, giggling at the decadence of it all. The leaping into each other’s arms with joy at the positive test and the first scan on dad-to-be’s phone. And who is that dad-to-be in my mind’s eye? Not Jim, my friend, the man I love platonically but hadn’t even considered casting for this role. No, that man I imagined, before this whole ‘life plan’ went utterly tits up was Laurence. But I let him slip through my hands, just like fine golden sand, like clay on a potter’s wheel, like a brand new slippery baby. Like life itself.

‘This is so ridiculous,’ I say suddenly.

‘What is?’

‘This. Us.’

My cheeks burn. I don’t want to go on like this, but I’ve opened the floodgates now and it’s all coming out.

‘What do you mean?’

‘People don’t do this, Jim. Have a baby with their friend. We’re not a couple, are we?’

Jim closes his eyes and groans.

‘We were never actually an item. You’re a grown man, a teacher, a responsible person, apparently.’ I hate myself now, it’s not his fault. ‘What sort of thirty-year-old man doesn’t even have a condom?’

Jim snorts. ‘What?’

‘A condom Jim, you know, a contraceptive?’

He blinks and splutters, incredulous at this last comment.

‘It takes two to tango Tess and anyway, you were drunk.’

‘We both were!’

‘And you were wearing those knickers. Those frilly black things. I mean, they were hardly a contraceptive.’

He’s gone mad.

‘And there’s the driving issue,’ he says.

‘Driving issue?!’ I stare at him stunned.

‘The fact you can’t. And you’re always putting off learning. And the fact you always miss the last tube and hate night buses and so you end up staying at mine and…’

‘And what?! So this was bound to happen? The fact I can’t drive and favour vaguely attractive underwear over enormous belly-warmers was one day destined to get me knocked up? In case you’ve forgotten, you were in bed with another woman when I called to tell you I was pregnant.’

‘You’ve never said that bothered you,’ Jim says. ‘If you had…’

‘It doesn’t bother me. That’s the problem!’ I say, throwing my hands in the air. ‘Don’t you think it should? Don’t you think it should bother me, just a bit, that the father of my baby is shagging someone else?!’

The barman clears his throat, loudly. A party of businessmen have just gathered at the bar.

Jim’s got his head in his hands now.

‘But don’t you understand, this isn’t about us anymore,’ he says quietly. ‘It’s about this baby, a baby that needs us, more than anything now. There’s thousands of women who can’t even get pregnant, have you thought about that?’

I had, actually, and despised myself for being so ungrateful but I couldn’t help myself.

‘Forgive me,’ I say. ‘But I’m not feeling my most charitable right now.’

‘I can see that,’ says Jim, standing up and getting his coat.

We leave, go home. Our separate homes.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I came out of the bathroom in my knickers screaming, “Look! It’s positive, we’re having a baby!” Neil didn’t say anything at first and I thought, oh God, he hates it. Then he dived over to the wardrobe, took out his Polaroid camera, and took a picture of me, there and then, holding the positive test. Even now, I look at that picture, stuck up on our fridge and I want to cry. I look so damn young and thin!’

Fiona, 38, Edinburgh

Gina leans back on the window of the café, folds her arms and groans.

‘I suppose you’re thinking, “told you so”?’ she says, through half-shut eyes. ‘I suppose everyone saw it coming but me.’

I put my hand on her arm. ‘No,’ I say, but I don’t say anything else. I know the drill.

It’s been almost a fortnight since Jasper dumped her – in spectacularly cruel form – by text, half an hour before she was due to meet him at a party – and she’s still in self-loathing mode. This means she doesn’t want my sympathy or my analysis of what went wrong, she just wants me to be her punch-bag whilst she lets it all out.

It’s Sunday and this was the day I was going to tell Gina about the baby. I intended to wait until the scan like I promised Jim, but she already knows, I swear. She found my book, the Bundle of Joy book, you don’t get much more incriminating than that. I came home from work to find her reading it in the kitchen, scoffing at all the schmaltzy pictures of women cradling their bumps.

‘Check it out, how smug and tedious are this lot?’ she said, pretending to stick her fingers down her throat. Gina is not what you’d call baby-friendly. In fact to be perfectly honest, she’s actively Anti Baby. She and Vicky used to be the best of mates – we all did. But since Vicky had Dylan eighteen months ago and ‘de-camped to the other side’ as Gina sees it, their relationship has definitely suffered. Gina treats Vicks like she’s holding a bomb when she’s holding Dylan and when Vicky relayed the story of her horrific birth (which to be fair involved full stitching details and the way her placenta ‘slid across the floor’, it came out with such force) Gina was sick in her mouth.

So, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest at her reaction to the book. It was only when her face fell and she said…‘Oh my God, is this yours?’ that I went a deathly shade of pale.

‘I’m doing a health piece on pregnancy, it’s for research,’ I lied, sticking my head inside the fridge and blaspheming at the cheese.

As if. The only ‘health’ features Believe It! magazine ever ran were ones on Chlamydia, the ‘Silent Epidemic’, and another, best forgotten, on ‘excessive sweating’.

This was the weekend I was to spill the beans, but so far, it’s not looking good. When things don’t work out between Gina and men, which tends to be the norm rather than the exception, there’s a set process, a series of ‘modes’ to be gone through, each one having to be exhausted before the next can begin.

Up until this point, for example, she’s been very much in hurt mode. I got home from the cinema to find her chain-smoking in the garden, looking like she’d suffered some kind of anaphylactic shock her face was so swollen from crying.

My first thought, selfishly, was that I could do without a grief-stricken flatmate what with everything else going on. But she was so upset – distraught enough to accept a hug and that’s saying something – that there was only one thing for it: A night in watching the entire box-set of The Office, eating oven chips and planning Jasper’s downfall.

The café’s emptying now, half-eaten breakfasts and bean-smeared plates left on its round mahogany tables with their retro gingham tablecloths. Used coffee cups are piled high on the original 1950s serving kiosk. The whole place seems to ooze with bacon fat.

I zone back to Gina, her fighter mode’s at full throttle now, her mind churning over the last few weeks’ events, scouring for evidence of when the demise began.

‘I wouldn’t fucking mind,’ she says, downing an espresso, ‘but only last week he was going on about how he was really falling for me. How I was “the most intelligent woman he’d ever met”. Ha! What a load of bollocks. So intelligent I can’t see what’s right in front of my eyes half the time. A total, A grade twat.’

I bite my lip and stare at the floor. It’s always slightly embarrassing when Gina starts on one like this, especially in a public place. Very audibly.

‘Don’t torture yourself, it’s best you found out now that he was a shit. Imagine if you were really into him and then found out. You’d be well pissed off.’

‘Guess so,’ she mumbles. ‘His loss not mine and all that. Anyway, I’ve had it up to here with wankers, I reckon I’m better off single. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Do I have “I only date losers” written across my forehead?’

‘No, of course not, you moron,’ I say, getting up to give her a hug but she brushes me off.

The sad fact is, Gina’s always gone for men who are destined to let her down. She did have a decent boyfriend once, Mark Trelforth, all the way through university. But Mark’s doting just did her head in the end, she had to put him out of his misery – the morning after the graduation ball just to add insult to injury, poor bastard.

Ever since then she’s been in search of someone ‘more exciting’, someone ‘edgy’. Mr so-called Perfect.

The problem is (as I’ve reminded her today) that if a thirty-five-year-old man’s key qualities are that he is edgy and exciting, that he models himself on Pete Doherty, just for example, then chances are commitment and unconditional love are not likely to be his forte. But Gina hasn’t quite grasped this.

The windows of the café are all steamed up from the persistent London drizzle that shrouds everything in a soft-focus haze. It’s only two p.m. but it feels much later, probably because we got here two hours ago. Since then, we’ve drunk two lattes, an espresso and a cup of tea between us and seen two whole seatings arrive, eat and leave. First, the thirty-something Islington hungover crew, with their shower-wet hair and their Racing Green body warmers. Then, the twenty-something brigade who are much cooler, therefore arrive later, and tend to be still wearing the same clothes as last night.

Through all this time, Gina has barely drawn breath whilst I’ve nodded and ummed and generally kept my mouth shut for so long, we’ve worked up an appetite worthy of an all-day breakfast.

I don’t mind, this won’t last for ever. After a day or so, this rant mode will subside, making way for a brief period of calm and self-reflection. This will move seamlessly into mild euphoria as Gina embraces her new-found single status, a period which usually finds her dragging me out to hideous speed-dating nights, until she finds herself another totally unsuitable man, at which point I’ll be largely redundant.

I don’t know why I’m going on. I’m hardly a shining example of how to do relationships in my current mess. It’s just, when you’ve known someone for such a long time, you come to know these things. You ride the waves with them, experience their storms and their fleeting sunny days. Except, she isn’t riding this, the biggest, scariest wave of my life. She isn’t able to help. Because I haven’t even told her.

A surly waitress plonks the all-day breakfasts in front of us and strides off, swinging her hips.

‘Cheer up love,’ says Gina. ‘It might never happen.’

No fewer than three people have said this to me in the past week. ‘Too late!’ I’ve wanted to shout. ‘It already has!’

Gina drenches everything in tomato ketchup – a breakfast massacre – and I suddenly feel a bit sick.

‘Do you know what really pisses me off?’ she says, cutting into her food aggressively.

‘I spent a hundred quid on my dress to wear to that wanky party of his.’

‘Haven’t you got the receipt?’ I offer. ‘Can’t you just take it back?’

‘Possibly, but it’s the principle of the matter Tess,’ she snaps, stabbing her fork into a sausage. ‘The fact I went and wasted my own money, money I could have spent on New York, just to please him!’

My stomach flips when she says this. New York. Shit. How could I go to New York now? Gina and I arranged to go to New York together a year ago – when we were in a pub (which is where I agree to most things). But how can I go anywhere now I’m pregnant?

Gina studies my face, my stomach rolls: does she know something? Every time we’ve talked in the past week, every time Vicky has rung and I’ve made some excuse to get off the phone, I’ve thought this is it. This is the moment my cover is blown. But then her face falls.

‘Look at us, eh?’ she says, laughing. I brace myself. ‘Pair of total fuck wits.’

You have to watch Gina when she does this. Tar you with the same brush as she tars herself, it’s a most irritating habit.

‘Speak for yourself!’ I laugh. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t mean anything bad by it,’ she shrugs. ‘I just mean, you know, look at us.’

‘Look at what?’

‘Our lives, I suppose, look at our lives. We’re in our late twenties, prime of our lives, witty, talented, devastatingly attractive…’

‘Now you’re talking.’

‘Exactly. And can either of us get it together to find a boyfriend? Can we fuck.’

I try to think of something enlightened or positive to say, but all I can think about is the wave of nausea currently washing over me. I wish Gina would stop talking.

She doesn’t.

‘Do you remember when we were at uni and we used to play Would You Rather?’

Would You Rather was something we’d all play when we were too skint to go out. It mainly involved debating the lesser of two evil scenarios – the merits of shagging Noel Edmonds over, say, having to bear children to Bruce Forsyth.

When we got bored with debating the ridiculous, we’d introduce more serious dilemmas, like whether we rated marriage over kids, or whether a glittering career was more important than true love. It never occurred to us then of course, when thirty-year-olds were just people who wore court shoes – that we’d be heading towards being left on the shelf without either. (Well, almost.)

‘We still don’t know what we’d rather have in a way, don’t you think?’ says Gina. ‘We still don’t know what we want.’

I don’t answer, I can’t. I feel too rough. Plus, I don’t much like the way this conversation is going.

‘I mean, look at you and Jim. That was never going to work.’

She says this nonchalantly but I flinch.

‘I really like Jim, you know, despite his obvious shortcomings…’

What were they?!

‘…and I think he’s mad for not snapping you up. But it would have happened by now if it was going to happen. You need to stop pissing about, you two, find the real thing. I always thought you and Laurence would go the distance, if he hadn’t messed it up, that is. You two were so cool together. You were just too young.’

I feel the colour drain from my face. Should I have gone on the date? Should I have emailed back anyway? Maybe I am selling Laurence short assuming he’d never want to date me because I’m pregnant? He is a grown man, he can make his own decisions, after all.

‘And then there’s me,’ Gina goes on, ‘not a fucking clue what’s good for me. I thought Jasper was great, so different from anyone else I’ve ever gone out with…’

So a carbon copy of every other dickhead you’ve dated since Mark, I want to say but I’m too busy looking at the bloodied mess of eggs and beans streaked with ketchup on her plate and trying to keep the contents of my stomach intact.

‘Thank God we’ve got each other, eh? Thank God for you, Tess Jarvis. Who’d have thought we’d be still be living together now, eh? Right pair o’ lezzers.’

Gina’s on a roll now, but I’m not listening, I suddenly feel very, very sick. If I just keep quiet, I’ll be OK. If I just concentrate, this nausea will pass, right?

Wrong.

The adrenaline rushes around my veins, my cheeks suddenly burn, my mouth fills with liquid, I’m going to throw up. I’m actually going to puke!

‘Tess, what’s wrong? Are you alright?’ I hear Gina say, but it’s too late.

I stand up, throwing my chair behind me so violently it makes an ear-splitting shriek across the wet floor. I briefly weigh up my options – the door, toilet or bag. I have the good sense – even in this state – to remember my bag has a very nice Mulberry purse in there and the downstairs toilet is way too far so I make a dash for the door.

I practically sprint to the other end of the café, pushing anyone in my path – a horsey blonde, a child – out of my way.

I grab hold of the handle of the door, fling it open, lurch onto the pavement and…let’s just say it’s not pretty. I just wasted several drinks and half an all-day breakfast, narrowly missing a yummy mummy with pristine toddler in pram.

I hear Gina swear from inside the café, then rush outside.

‘Chist’s sake Tess,’ she says to me, arms folded, almost telling me off. ‘What brought that on?’

‘God knows,’ I say, wiping away the tears. ‘Probably just some twenty-four hour bug.’

The nausea passes as quickly as it came. After a glass of water drunk shakily and some baby wipes donated by the glamorous mother – so much more glamorous than me, at this precise moment and I haven’t even had the baby yet – I feel ready to brave it home.

The plan is perfect: DVDs, toast and a full on hibernation fest for the rest of the day.

Gina puts her arm around me as we walk along the Essex Road.

‘You scared me then,’ she says. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me to shut up?’

‘Easier said than done,’ I say.

‘True,’ she says, ‘sorry about that.’

It’s a miserable grey sludge of a day, one of those that never quite gets going. In the last eight days, since the row in Frankie’s, the only contact I’ve had with Jim has been three stilted phone conversations. We can usually yabber on for England on the phone, me and Jim. We once spent an hour debating whether Davina McCall had married out of her league when she married that fit bloke off Pet Rescue. Jim has been known to wander off mid-conversation then forget I am there, leaving me on the end of the phone, listening to him fart. We are so comfortable with one another it’s ridiculous. But not this week. This week for the first time ever I’ve sat in bed having small talk with Jim Ashcroft.

But now, I don’t know whether it’s because I don’t feel quite so sick anymore, or because I feel bonded to Gina, comforted that she’s here with me, after that ordeal, but for the first time in ages I feel the tentative fingers of something like calm feather my senses.

It’s still elusive. Like an under-developed Polaroid, but it’s there alright and it feels good. It’s as if everything that was hurled in the air, an emotional tornado, is suddenly floating gently back down to earth, to resume its rightful place.

I’d feel almost good now if it weren’t for the big secret hammering away in my brain, chipping away, trying to get out. Maybe I should tell her? Tell her now whilst we’re bonded in our respective misfortunes.

We turn into Blockbusters, pick up some shamelessly girly films, essential Sunday supplies, and carry on along the Essex Road that we’ve pounded so many times it’s imprinted on the soles of our shoes, our well charted territory.

By the time we make it home, the bottoms of our jeans are soaking wet and it feels like we’ll never get warm. I go and change whilst Gina puts the kettle on, turns up the central heating and arranges our supplies in little bowls.

‘Does poorly patient want a cup of tea?’ she shouts from the bottom of the stairs, as I root around in my wardrobe for something to wear.

‘Yes please nurse,’ I shout back, smiling to myself. Is this TLC I am experiencing? Is this me, Tess Jarvis being looked after by Gina Marshall for a change? And she doesn’t even know.

I pull on some old tracksuit bottoms and my netball sweatshirt. ‘Officially better,’ I announce, as Gina hands me a steaming mug at the bottom of the stairs.

I want to tell her. I’m burning to tell her so I won’t have to handle this alone and yet, I want to savour this moment, hold it for ever. Never again, when I’ve told her, will we stand in this kitchen as two, single, childless friends with nothing but ourselves and the rain battering the roof for company.

We move into the lounge and collapse on the sofa. Now’s your moment, ‘Do it now,’ I urge myself. ‘Find the words, come on!’

‘Gina,’ I say. My heart throws a punch at my rib.

She leaps to her feet. Shit, this is it!

‘I know, we’d better get on with it. Which one shall we watch?’ she says, marching over to the bag of the DVDs.

She takes out Lost in Translation, shows it me, I nod, weakly. She crawls over to the TV, bends down, her back to me, muttering something about Bill Murray, putting it in the machine.

I think about my promise to Jim, how we said we’d wait until after the scan to tell anyone…but the words are too big, they don’t fit in my mouth anymore, out they topple like I’ve got Tourette’s.

‘Gina,’ I say, ‘I’m pregnant. I’m having a baby.’

If I thought Gina was going to take this well, I was mistaken, sorely mistaken. I’m not prepared for the look on her face when she turns around. Shock is not the word. Something like disgust would be more fitting. She doesn’t say anything for what seems like ages. She just sits there, DVD in hand, and glares at me.

‘What?’ she says, through gritted teeth. It’s barely audible, a whisper.

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Whose…?’

‘It’s Jim’s,’ I say, staring at the floor.

She looks at me through a gap in her fingers.

‘How pregnant are you?’

‘Eight and a half weeks,’

‘And you didn’t tell me?!’

‘Well can you blame me?’ I say. ‘Look at your reaction.’

‘But Tess, you’re not even with Jim, you don’t even love him like that. You’re not in love, either of you!’

The words sting. Didn’t she think I already knew that? And didn’t she think I wished it was different?

‘I do know that,’ I say, quietly. ‘But it’s happened now, and we’ve decided we’re keeping the baby.’

‘What?’ says Gina, half laughing, half crying. I retreat further back into the sofa.

‘But you can’t,’ she says, ‘that’s ridiculous; you can’t have that baby, not like this.’

‘Who says?’ I say, crying now. ‘Why is that so wrong? We’re both adults, this is not some teenage pregnancy. If I was to opt out of having this baby then I’d be opting out of life, choosing the easy way out, can’t you see?’

Gina wipes her face, which is suddenly filled with steely determination.

‘Look,’ she says, coming to sit beside me. ‘We have options (we!?); let’s think about this. Because this isn’t about Jim, or the baby – it’s not even a baby yet, Tess, that’s what Mark told me when I had my abortion and he was right, it was just a cluster of cells – the only person this is about is you. You have to be selfish.’

‘But I am being selfish, I want to keep it.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I do!’

I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I know this is a shock and that I’m an idiot for letting it happen but what happened to my friend just giving me a hug, asking all those questions you’re meant to ask when someone tells you they’re pregnant?

‘I’ll come with you to the doctor’s tomorrow,’ says Gina, decisively. ‘I’ll call in sick, we’ll sort this out. I’ve been through it too remember, so I know how it feels, I’ll know what to say…’

‘No,’ I say, standing up. And it feels like I’ve never meant anything more in my life. ‘No! You don’t know what to say. I’m not going to the doctor’s, I’ve already been and that was to get my due date. December 14th if you’re interested, put it in your diary. I’m not having an abortion, Gina, I’m keeping the baby, we’re keeping the baby.’

I walk out. I slam the door shut.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘I thought the love would just be there. That I would look into my baby’s eyes and we would have an instant understanding. But when Poppy was born, I just felt terrified, like I’d been handed someone else’s baby to look after. It took seven months for me to honestly say I loved her. Obviously now, I know I was ill, but I still feel guilty.’

Sam, 36, Didsbury

I am lying next to Jim, my belly against the curve of his back, the faint whirr of a dawn flight outside. After the row with Gina yesterday, the atmosphere in the house was frosty to say the least so that evening I got on a bus and came here, to Jim’s place, a cosy Victorian flat in East Dulwich.

It had been over a week since the row in Frankie’s and I was worried how I might be received.

I needn’t have been.

When Jim opened the door, wearing his mustard dressing gown (the result of a dye disaster with a beach towel) I have never felt so welcome, or wanted to hug him so much in my life. I stood on the doorstep, a forlorn figure under the glare of the street lamp.

‘Hello you,’ he said, arms crossed, head leaning against the doorframe as if he was expecting me. ‘Come on in.’

He led me through his narrow, bright hallway, the only thing adorning the wall a framed photo of an Americana sign:

Warning: Water on Road During Rain

Lifts my mood every time.

Jim’s downstairs is open plan. The lounge is cosy in its make-do-ness. Two stripy sofas covered with dark grey throws, a huge black and white circular rug and a bobbly green swivel chair that he always does his marking on. His telly’s crap – you can only get three channels if you balance the aerial on a mug – and today (like most days) there’s a huge pile of marking on the sofa that he’s obviously just put to one side. He moved it, putting it on the Ikea coffee table along with the remote control, the remains of a Muller Light and a note-filled copy of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Then he pressed down on my shoulders, sitting me on the sofa, and went into the kitchen to make tea.

It’s a boy’s kitchen – a dazzling array of unnecessary gadgets, juicer, pasta maker, ice-cream maker, blood-red DeLonghi coffee maker that weighs a tonne – the shine of which is diminished only by a subtle layer of grime.

On the shelves above the sink are Jamie Oliver cookbooks and a few suspect ones called things like Nose to Tail Eating that contain nothing but recipes for offal and pig trotter. (Jim likes to think he’s a fearless cook – i.e. you have to be fearless to eat whatever he cooks.) Next to a pint glass of pennies is a herb garden that he actually keeps alive, unlike me who buys one every time I go to Tesco’s only to find it desiccated on top of the fridge three months later.

‘Henry IV eh?’ I said, picking up the book, thinking a bit of idle chat might do me good. ‘Sorry, but I never could get excited about Shakespeare.’

‘You blaspheme!’ spluttered Jim. ‘It’s one of the funniest, rudest books ever written.

‘How can you not fall in love with such a top bloke as Hal, or a total piss-head like Falstaff? You of all people.’

‘Oi,’ I said. ‘What are you suggesting?’

Jim handed me a cup of tea. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what owes me this pleasure?’

That was it, I was off. I poured out all the details of the showdown with Gina and the more I said it aloud the more unbelievable it felt.

‘I’m sorry for being such a cow last week,’ I said, sheepishly, when I’d off loaded. ‘Not to mention blabbing to Gina. You must hate me.’

‘Yeah, can’t stand you, hate your guts,’ Jim said, totally dead pan. ‘You were a bitch from hell but we’ll blame it on the hormones, shall we?’

‘That will be my epitaph at this rate.’

It must have been one a.m. before we went to bed. I was still pretty shook up about Gina and Jim was as confused as I was. ‘Are you sure that’s what she said?’ he said. ‘I know Gina can be unpredictable but that’s just weird.’

‘I know, I don’t understand it either. It was like me being pregnant was a personal attack. Like something I’d done wrong. I mean, I know I can’t get drunk like we used to, but I’m still me, aren’t I? I’m still the person she’s been friends with for more than a decade.’

Jim gave me a hug. It felt like he could squeeze the air right out of me.

‘It will be alright, you know, all this,’ he said, staring straight ahead, with that prophetic certainty he has about everything. ‘I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but it will.’

‘And Gina?’ I asked tentatively, as we walked up the stairs to bed.

‘She’ll come round.’ Jim yawned. ‘And if she doesn’t, we’ll kick her ass.’

I smiled but at the back of my mind I was still worried. How could I confide in her about anything now? And what if everyone, even Vicky, reacted as badly? What if I was utterly deluded and keeping this baby was the worst, most irresponsible idea in the world?

‘All a baby needs is love,’ Jim said. I play those words in my head again and again. ‘All a child needs is to feel wanted.’ And I want this baby. If I don’t, why do I wake up, my heart in my mouth with every twinge, petrified this is the start of losing it? The fact is, I think to myself as I lay here, if I was to lose this baby now, we couldn’t try for another. Not like real couples.

It is one thing to have an accident and make the best of a less than ideal situation but quite another to make something happen again that should never have happened in the first place.

This unborn child that already has fingers and toes and maybe my curviness and Jim’s long legs (Eva Herzigova eat your heart out!) is a fluke, it slipped through the net. And so if fate decided it wasn’t meant to be then it would be heartbreaking, but we’d have to accept it. Why did the thought of this terrify me so much?

Jim is sleeping but I can’t, my mind won’t let me. I know it must be almost morning because I can just about make out shapes in his familiar room in the emerging light and the photograph on his bedside table, the one in the red frame that’s never meant much before, is staring right back at me now, making my mind race.

Me, Jim, Gina and Vicks sitting under the awning of our caravan, that camping trip in Norfolk last summer. Jim and I had been hopping into each other’s bed when the fancy took us for three months by then. How many times have I looked at this picture? And it has never stirred much more than nostalgia before. But now suddenly the body language says it all: Gina and Vicky leaning against each other, laughing into the camera which we’ve got balanced on a beer crate. Me, reclining on a deckchair, feet tucked up by my bum, my head on Jim’s shoulder but what’s he doing? Ruffling my hair. Not a spark of sexual tension between us.

That didn’t stop me getting carried away though. It didn’t stop me thinking that I might even be falling in love with Jim, that he might, even, be falling for me.

I still cringe when I think of what happened a few hours after that photo was taken. We’d been to the pub that night, then walked home through windy country lanes, arm in arm. When we got back to the campsite, Jim went straight to his tent, pitched next to the caravan, and I crawled in next to him.

‘Jim, we’ve been doing this weird on/off thing for some time now,’ I said, staring at the canvas, my heart pounding. ‘Maybe we should, you know, make a go of it. Go out with each other, like, properly.’ After a long pause in which I wondered whether he might be about to express his undying love for me he just turned over the other way.

‘Tess, you’re drunk,’ he said, flatly. ‘We’re soul-mates, something special, something really good. Let’s not spoil it.’

What a twat. What an absolute wanker! So I open myself up, put myself on the line and he makes me feel so small I could have disappeared up his arse, along with his own head. Well sod you, I thought. But I didn’t say anything, I was too mortified. I just made thoroughly mature V-signs up at the roof of the tent.

But he was right of course. Thank God somebody saw sense. Looking at us, sitting under that awning now, I cannot believe I did that. I didn’t fancy Jim as much as he didn’t fancy me – not really, not in the right way. It was all just wishful thinking.

And the hard fact to swallow is, if I hadn’t screwed it up with Laurence, I would probably never have even been in that tent, I would never have made an arse of myself, I would never have carried on having ‘no-strings’ sex with Jim and I certainly wouldn’t be pregnant with his baby!

Under Jim’s tartan duvet, I can feel that he’s had got an erection. A James Ashcroft Morning Glory. Ordinarily, that’s to say pre-baby, this would have meant one thing to me: a quickie, sleepy, hungover shag that would have left me with the smug feeling that I really was a thoroughly modern girl. I occasionally slept with my male best friend and we were cool with it.

Today though, it’s an unwelcome pressure and I feel my body stiffen as he eases closer. He takes a sleepy breath in and as he breathes out, he kneads the inside of my thigh with his knee, trying to gently prize me open. I resist. I can’t do this. My head’s too muddled and weighed down. Where sex before was like an added extra, now it is loaded with meaning. It is as if the lightness had been shot out of it, leaving it withering to the floor like a deflated balloon.

Jim puts his arm around me.

‘Morning,’ he murmurs, then kisses my head, then slips his hand between my legs.

I gently remove it.

‘Jim,’ I say, pushing him gently off me, trying not to sound too annoyed, ‘Jim, look…I can’t, I’m sorry.’

He rolls onto his back and for what seems like for ever, he doesn’t say anything.

When he speaks again, he sounds almost sad.

‘It’s different now, isn’t it?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I guess it is.’

He reaches for my hand, strokes it for a second or two and then turns onto his side. ‘Come on,’ he says, pressing his warm, long body against mine. ‘Let’s just have a cuddle.’

We must have eventually drifted off, because when I wake up again, it’s 7.10 a.m. and Jim isn’t in the bed. I sit up and hear the shower going, so I plump up the pillows and pick up the Bundle of Joy book.

I like waking up in Jim’s flat. Like everything in his life – his car, his beloved books, his friends, he got it a long time ago, nurtured it, tended it lovingly and it’s served him well in return.

Jim has always had to look after things, because he’s never known when anything new or better will come along. He was fifteen when his alky waster of a dad walked out, leaving only his mum’s income from her part-time job as a school nurse to support the family, and so he and his sister Dawn never got much. As a result, the bookshelf in his bedroom, made from red bricks and planks of wood, is full of childhood books that he’s looked after for twenty odd years. There are records that he’s had since the eighties, too, and all manner of retro chic – a leather chair, an orange seventies phone – none of it bought in trendy design bric-a-brac shops, but just things he’s kept all this time.

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