i
To all parents, whatever shape they come in.
Contents
I WASN’T SURE I had enough wee for the stick. I pressed my bladder through my jeans with my fingertips, holding the pregnancy test in the other hand. Not bursting but it would have to do. I peeled off the top of the foil packet, balanced the stick on the top of the loo roll and unzipped my flies. I sat down and reached back for the stick.
Looking down at my thighs, I realized I was sitting too far forward on the loo seat, so I shuffled my bottom backwards and widened my knees until there was enough space to reach my hand underneath me, trying to avoid grazing the loo bowl with my knuckles. Christ, this was unsanitary. There must be better ways.
I narrowed my eyes at the bath in front of me and wondered if it would be easier to step into that, crouch down and wee on the stick in the bath, letting it trickle out down the plughole. No worse than weeing in the shower, right?
I shook my head. I was in my parents’ bathroom. Couldn’t do a pregnancy test by pissing on a stick in my mum’s bath. She loved that bath. She spent hours in it wearing her frilly bath hat, shouting at Radio Norfolk.
I frowned down into the dark space between my legs again where the stick was poised in mid-air, ready for action. What a simple bit of plastic to deliver such potentially life-changing news. It was the shape of the vape my friend Clem carried round with him everywhere, loaded with lemon sherbert- flavoured liquid.
‘Why lemon sherbert?’ I’d asked him once. He’d shrugged and said he just liked sweets.
I shook my head again as if to try and physically dispel thoughts of Clem and lemon sherbert. Concentrate, Lil. The stick. Wee on the stick. Get on with it. But I couldn’t. At this, the most important moment of my bladder’s life so far, it had stage fright. Funny how, when you really concentrate on weeing, you can’t. And yet normally, when you sit yourself down what, six, seven, eight times a day, out it comes, no trouble.
I sighed. The other problem was I wasn’t sure where to hold the stick in order to catch maximum wee. I shifted my hand slightly towards the front. Was that a good place? Maybe. But if it came out as more of a trickle than a jet it would need to be in the middle.
‘Oi,’ came Jess’s voice from outside the bathroom door. I’d locked it because I knew she’d come in otherwise. ‘Have you done it yet?’
‘Shhhh,’ I hissed back. ‘No. I haven’t. And pressure from you won’t help.’
Jess went quiet for a few seconds, then I heard her whistling from outside the door.
‘Why are you whistling?’
She stopped. ‘It makes horses pee when you’re riding them.’
‘I’m not a horse.’ Although it gave me an idea. With my left hand, I reached across for the bathroom sink and twisted the hot tap, then held my hand underneath the warm water.
It worked instantly. I started weeing and moved the stick into prime position, sort of between the front and the middle. Please could I not be pregnant, I thought, my eyes fixated on the stick as I felt warm wetness on my fingers. Brilliant, I’d weed on my own hand. Please, please, please could this not be positive. I was thirty-one, single, barely able to afford my rent. I had a life plan. Well, a vague life plan. This was not it.
I finished and jiggled up and down on the loo seat, trying not to drop the stick. Then I turned off the hot tap with my left
