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.
‘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,
