If you’re sure, that would be lovely. The appointment will be at St Thomas’.’
‘Good, that’s sorted,’ I said, trying to sound confident, as if the scan was a routine check-up and there was nothing to worry about. ‘Now let’s have a sniff of those prawns.’
By Friday afternoon, I had six posh babies and their scan pictures. Where the hell were another four going to come from? My phone vibrated beside my keyboard and a text popped up from Bill, an old friend who always threw a dinner party at the end of the first week of January to celebrate the fact the most cheerless week of the year was over.
Come over any time from 7! X
I looked back at my screen full of baby scans. Jesus. A baby. That seemed a long way off. I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since university when I went out with a law student called Harry for a year, but then Harry decided to move to Dubai and I cried for about a week before my best friend, Lex, told me I needed to ‘get back out there’. My love life, ever since, had been drier than a Weetabix. The odd date, the odd fumble, the odd shag which I’d get overexcited about before realizing that, actually, the shag had been terrible and what was I getting so overexcited about anyway?
Last year, I’d had sex twice, both times with a Norwegian banker called Fred who I met through a mutual friend at a picnic in Green Park in the summer. If you can call several bottles of rosé and some olives from M&S a picnic. Lex and I drank so much wine that we decided to pee under a low-hanging tree in the park as it got dark. This had apparently impressed Fred, who moved to sit closer to me when Lex and I returned to the circle.
We’d all ended up in the Tiki bar of the London Hilton on Park Lane, where Fred ordered me a drink which came served in a coconut. He’d lunged in the car park and then I’d waited until I was safely inside my cab home before wiping off the wetness around my mouth with the back of my hand. We’d gone on a couple of dates and I’d slept with him on both those dates – possibly a mistake – and then he’d gone quiet. After a week, I texted him breezily asking if he was around for a drink. He replied a few days later.
Oh, sorry been travelling so much for work and not sure that’s going to change any time soon. F
‘F for fucking nobody, that’s who,’ said Lex, loyally, when I told her.
So, that, for me, was the total of last year’s romantic adventures. Depressing. Other people seemed to have sex all the time. And yet here I was, sitting in my office like an asexual plant, hunting for scan pictures, evidence that other people had had sex.
I squinted through the window up the alleyway towards Notting Hill Gate. It was the kind of grey January day that couldn’t be bothered to get properly light, when people hurried along pavements with their shoulders hunched, as if warding off the gloom.
Whatever. It would be six o’ clock soon and I could escape it all for Bill’s flat and a delicious glass of wine. Or several delicious glasses of wine, if I was honest.
At one second past six, I left the office, winding my way through the hordes of tourists at Notting Hill Gate Tube station. They were dribbling along at that special tourist pace which makes you want to kick them all in the shins. Then, emerging at Brixton, I walked to the corner shop at the end of Bill’s street to buy wine. And a big bag of Kettle Chips. ‘Let’s go mad, it’s Friday, isn’t it?’ I said to the man behind the till, who ignored me.
Bill lived in the ground-floor flat on a street of white terraced houses. He’d bought it while working as a programmer at Google, though he’d left them recently to concentrate on developing an app for the NHS. Something to do with making appointments. Bill said that it was putting his nerd skills to good use, finally. He’d never tried to hide his dorkiness. It was one of the reasons we became friends at a party when we were teenagers.
Lex had been off snogging some boy upstairs in the bathroom (she was always snogging or being fingered, there was a lot of fingering back then) and I’d been sitting on a sofa in the basement, tapping my foot along to Blue so it looked like I was having a good time when, actually, I was having a perfectly miserable time because no boy ever wanted to snog me. And if no boy ever wanted to snog me then how would I ever be fingered? And if I was never fingered how would I ever get to have actual sex? It seemed hopeless. And, just at the moment when I decided I might go all Sound of Music and enter a convent – were there convents in South London? – a boy had sat down on the other end of the sofa. He had messy black hair and glasses that were so thick they looked double-glazed.
‘I hate parties,’ he’d said, squinting at me from behind his double-glazing. ‘Do you hate parties too?’
I’d nodded shyly at him and he’d grinned back.
‘They’re awful, aren’t they? I’m Bill by the way.’ He’d stuck out a hand for me to shake, so I shook it. And then we’d started talking over the music about our GCSEs. It was only when Lex surfaced for air an hour or so later, gasping for breath, mouth rubbed as red as a strawberry, that I realized I’d made a friend who was a boy. Not a boyfriend. I didn’t want to snog Bill. His glasses really were shocking. But he became a friend who was a boy all the same. And we’d been friends ever since.
‘Come in, come in,’ Bill said when I arrived. He opened the front door with one hand and held a pair of jeans in the other. ‘Sorry, I haven’t changed yet.’ He grinned. ‘You’re the first.’
‘Go change,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No. Leave those bottles on the side and open whatever you want. I’ll be two minutes,’ he said, walking towards his bedroom.
I opened the fridge. It was rammed. Sausages, packets of bacon, some steaks. Something that might once have been a tomato and would now be of considerable interest to a research scientist. No other discernible vegetables. I reached for a bottle of white wine and fished in a drawer for a corkscrew.
Bill appeared back in the kitchen in his jeans and a t-shirt that said ‘I am a computer whisperer’ on it. In the years since I’d met him, he’d discovered contact lenses but developed a questionable line of t-shirts. ‘I’ll have one of those please. Actually, no I won’t. I’ll have a beer first. So, how’s tricks?’ he asked, opening a bottle. ‘How was Christmas? How was your birthday and so on? I’ve got you a card actually.’ He picked up an envelope from his kitchen table and gave it to me. ‘Here you go.’
‘Being single at 30 isn’t as bad as it used to be,’ the front of the card read. I smiled, ‘Thanks, dude. Really helpful.’ I put the card down on the side and had a sip of wine. ‘And Christmas was lovely, thanks. Quiet, but kind of perfect. I ate, I slept. You know, the usual.’ I’d been worrying about Mum and her scan all week, but I didn’t want to mention it to anyone else yet. If I didn’t talk about it, I could keep a lid on the panic I felt when I woke in the middle of the night and lay in bed thinking about the appointment. I had decided to wait for the results of the scan and then we could go from there. ‘Anyway, how was yours?’
‘Terrible,’ Bill replied. ‘I was working for most of it, trying to sort out some investors.’ He took a swig of beer and leant on the kitchen counter. ‘So, I haven’t left the office before midnight this week and I’m doing no exercise apart from walking from my desk to have a pee four times a day. But that’s how start-up life is,’ he sighed and
