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
