by Kate Long
No such problems for Julia. She came rushing over to my table and gave me an enormous hug round my neck and then said, ‘Look at you! You look amazing! Your hair’s really glossy and your skin’s absolutely glowing! Fantastic!’
She sat down and ordered, then produced a plastic bag containing a fluffy toy from Anya, a card signed by the sixth-form girls, and a book on pregnancy month by month from Mrs Carlisle. I was completely overwhelmed.
‘Anya wanted to come too, but we thought it might outface you seeing us both together. But she says she’ll ring you next week. We’d have been in touch before but Mrs Carlisle told us when you were first off you’d got suspected glandular fever and didn’t want to get out of bed. But, wow, you’re doing great. Everyone’s really excited, and they all send their best wishes.’ She sat Anya’s little fluffy rabbit-thing up on its hind paws. ‘Sweet! So, how you doing?’
I’d been feeling not too bad until the presents, but the unexpected kindness slew me. My face went red and my voice strangled with the effort of not crying.
‘It’s really nice—’ was all I managed.
‘Say no more.’ Julia was brisk. The drinks arrived and a plate of cakes. ‘God, don’t you just love these chocolate muffins? I could literally eat them till all my buttons popped off. Fantastic. Oh, you missed some major gossip over the last few weeks. Did you know Denny’s been suspended for selling funny cigarettes to Year 9s? One of them nearly set fire to the toilets, apparently, trying to light one of his home-made fags. God knows what was in them, because it wasn’t tobacco. Martin Ainsworth reckons it was dried seaweed. Some of the kiddies lost their voices, that’s how the teachers knew something was going on, they’d all come back in after break croaking like frogs. Anyway, at least it wasn’t proper dope because he’d have been out on his ear, you know how twitchy the Head is over drugs.’
It was relaxing to have her rattle on like this. It made me pretend I could be normal again, with the usual teenage concerns and excitements. She made me laugh in spite of myself, and the baby inside me jumped and squirmed.
‘. . . So then Jimbo told Simon that he’d seen Abby and Dom eating each other’s faces in Fatty Arbuckle’s, and Simon went absolutely ballistic and told Abby she was a tart in front of everyone in the dinner queue, so Dom jumped on him and there was this huge fight, tables everywhere, and Mr Barry had to drag them apart and make them go to separate rooms to cool off and their parents were called in. It was really hectic.’ Julia stopped to draw breath. ‘So you can see you’ve missed loads. I don’t know how anyone’s got any work done. I certainly didn’t. My report was a disaster. Like I really care.’ She took a big bite of cake and winked at me.
‘Mine was brilliant,’ I said gloomily. Mum had been in a terrible temper when it came through the post. It was one of those no-win situations, like every year when the GCSE results improve and the press go, ‘Oh, standards must be slipping.’ But if ever the results were down on last year’s, it would be, ‘Oh, we see standards are slipping,’ and the Daily Telegraph would commission a special shock report on how thick today’s teenagers truly are. So if my exam marks had been bad Mum would have been beside herself because I was throwing away my chances. The fact that they were better than I could ever have expected made the pregnancy even more of a disaster because I was clearly destined for great things. Or would have been.
‘Julia,’ I said, ‘what happened when Mrs Carlisle told you about me?’
She paused for a fraction of a second only. ‘Well, we were all really surprised, and a few people looked at me because they must’ve thought I knew about it—’
‘You can understand why I couldn’t say anything?’
‘Yeah, yeah, of course. A big thing like that, you need to get your own head round it before it becomes public property. Then the twins asked if they could send you a card and Mrs Carlisle said she thought that’d be very nice. That was it, to be honest. Oh, a few people have asked me whether you’ll be around next year. Will you?’
‘I dunno. I don’t know what it’s like having a baby around. If it’s not too much hassle I could put it in a crèche or something and come back in January. Maybe sooner. I don’t want to have to repeat the year, not with all those bozos from Year 11 coming up. The teachers could send me work and I could get Special Consideration for the exams. Oh, I don’t know. It goes round and round in my mind. We’ll have to see.’
Julia was nodding, then she said, ‘And of course, somebody asked me who the father was . . . I told them I didn’t know, but I don’t know if they believed me. Obviously you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.’
I could tell she’d been burning to get this question out. Well, she’d been pretty good with me so far. It would be a relief to say something at last.
‘I don’t think it’s anyone you’d know. A lad I used to go to school with years ago. Paul. But we’re not together any more. He didn’t want anything to do with me once he’d found out. I got it so wrong. You’d think, if you’d . . . if you’d slept with someone – that you’d know them pretty well. That’s what I’d thought anyway, more fool me. I hope – I hope he gets run over by a lorry, very slowly, so his ribs crack one by one and you can hear his screams all the way to Blackpool. I hope he moves to the other side of the world and I never see him again. Oh—’
A pain shot through my groin.
Julia was on her feet at once.
‘Charlotte! Are you all right? Do you want me to get someone? Shall I phone for a doctor?’
I shifted on the chair. ‘It’s OK, stop flapping. I think it was a one-off. Ooh!’ This twinge bent me over and made me gasp.
‘Stay where you are, I’ll get an ambulance.’
‘Come back!’ I shouted as Julia shoved her chair out of the way and prepared to do a mercy dash. ‘I’m not going into labour. At least, I don’t think I am. The pain’s in the wrong place. It’s down here. Ow.’
Heads were beginning to turn and the panic that always overtakes me if I inadvertently become the centre of attention began to well up. There was another twinge. I had to get out, and quickly.
‘I need to go home,’ I said. ‘Can you walk me to the bus stop?’
‘To the bus stop? You must be kidding. I’m driving you home. But don’t you dare give birth on my mother’s new seat covers, we’d never hear the last of it.’
Julia drove me back from town with exaggerated care, glancing over at me continually. Was the seat belt too tight? Were the pains coming every three minutes? Did I want her to turn the car round and go to the Royal Bolton? I kept saying no and gradually the pains went off. She began telling me about her holiday plans and her new bedroom, and then we were pulling into Brown Moss Road, both of us heaving a sigh of relief.
She stopped the car. ‘You gave me a fright, missus. Are you OK now?’
I nodded.
‘You’re not just saying that?’
‘No. Honestly. Thanks.’
‘Do you want me to walk you to the door?’
‘No, really. I feel fine now, it must just have been . . .’
We both caught sight of him at the same time. Julia turned to me puzzled.
‘Who’s that man bleeding onto your doorstep?’
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Oh God oh God. This is why I never bring anyone home.’
Chapter Eight
‘Id wed a bid wrog,’ my dad said through his hanky. ‘I’b sorry, Charlie.’ Mum had got him sitting on the sofa leaning forwards and pinching his nose; she has to deal with nosebleeds all the time at school.
‘Don’t keep swallowing,’ snapped Mum, ‘it’ll make you sick. Spit into this if you have to.’ She thrust a Pyrex bowl under his chin.
‘I can’t believe you went round there. Why didn’t you say anything to me first? What was he like? Was he really angry?’
Part of me was horrified that Dad had crashed my private life like this, after years of sitting on the sidelines. But part of me was grateful that someone should finally h
ave thought to give Paul a good bollocking, it was about time. If that’s what had happened. It didn’t look too promising.
‘Aggry? He were brickid hisself when he realized who I was. I told hib the score. Dobody walks away from subbat like that. Be a ban, I said. Face up to your responsibilities.’
‘Is that when he hit you?’ said my mum. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too. He looked pathetic, with his red hanky and his head bowed, a button hanging off his shirt. Beaten up by a seventeen-year-old, nice going, Dad.
Through the muffles of clotting blood we finally got the tale, though how much he’d brushed it up I wouldn’t like to say.
He’d gone round late afternoon when he knew Paul would probably be in (and I guess hoping his old man wouldn’t). A ‘little lad’ opened the door and then shouted for Paul who came down the stairs unsuspecting. Dad started his speech which quickly turned into a slanging match, during which Paul maintained first that the baby wasn’t his, and then that since it was my decision to keep it against his wishes, he couldn’t be called to account. (I broke in to argue at this point but my mother shut me up.) After a few minutes of hurling insults at each other, Paul had turned to go back upstairs and my dad had completely lost it, lunged forward and grabbed Paul round his legs. Paul fell face-first onto the step – ‘He’ll have a beltin’ black eye tomorrow’ – and in the struggle to get away kicked out, making contact with Dad’s nose – ‘it were nowt, a lucky blow’. At this point Mr Bentham appeared on the landing, bleary with sleep and taking out his earplugs – ‘though he soon looked sharp when he saw me’. He ran down and hoisted Paul upright, checked him over briefly and propped him against the banisters. Meanwhile Dad had been shouting the odds about his son’s behaviour, and despite Paul’s denials, the finer details of the situation had begun to dawn on Mr Bentham. He’d apparently turned to take a swipe, seen Dad’s berserk blue eyes and his bloody nostrils and let his arm drop to his side. (I suspect this bit is true. Mr Bentham goes in for a quiet life.) Then he’d told Dad to get out of his house and if he wanted to take it further to get a blood test done. ‘I will, don’t worry. We’ll have the CSA on you. An’ you want to see that lad of yours gets a good hidin’,’ my dad had told him, and stormed out.
‘So, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing,’ I muttered. My mother leaned over and cuffed me round the ear.
‘Less of that, madam. A thank you would be nice, after what your dad’s been through. Even if it was a waste of time.’
Dad shot us a despairing glance and I immediately felt sorry. A proper daughter would have got up off her backside and given him a hug, but of course that was impossible, so I just gave him a thin smile instead. ‘Thanks, anyway. Hope your nose doesn’t hurt too much.’
He took the hanky away experimentally.
‘I was trying to help.’
‘I know you were. He’s a total git.’
‘Well, I must admit, I don’t know what you ever saw in him, love. I thought he were an arrogant little gob-shite.’
The baby elbowed me sharply and I thought, You poor bugger, that’s your father we’re talking about. What an inheritance.
‘Do you mind if I go upstairs and have a lie-down?’
Mum and Dad shook their heads and I dragged myself up to my room. Next door Nan was snoring and mumbling. I flopped onto the bed. The baby kicked on.
‘It’s probably something called “round ligament pain”,’ said Dr Gale. ‘Nothing to worry about. Your muscles are having to hold up a tremendous weight, it’s not surprising they’re putting up a bit of a protest.’ We were in the back garden of Daniel’s enormous house enjoying the sunshine. They’d installed me in a sun-lounger in the shade of a beech tree; later on, under that same beech tree, Daniel would try to kiss me and I would refuse, so spoiling a perfect day.
‘That’s what the midwife reckoned. All the joints are under such pressure I’m bound to get some aches and pains. It was really scary, though. My friend thought I was about to give birth.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ smiled Mr Gale. ‘You look perfectly healthy to me, anyway.’
He was nice, Daniel’s father. Tall, like his son, but more assured, quite distinguished. Lovely newsreader accent. I bet all his menopausal women patients harboured fantasies about him. He made me feel relaxed despite the fact that I’d never met him before and I was seven months pregnant and I didn’t know what he’d been told about me. I suppose he sees all sorts in his surgery. The sun shone warm on us both and bees crooned among the lavender at our feet.
Inside I could hear Mrs Gale and Daniel preparing the evening meal. I’d have called it tea, but here it was dinner and it happened at seven not five. I remembered Mum trying that one out on us a few years ago; Nan was nearly eating the tablecloth in frustration, and I kept sneaking Custard Creams so by the time the food was on the table I didn’t want it. ‘Eeh, I can’t be doin’ with this caper every night,’ Nan had said. Big row.
I wondered what Mum would make of the Gales’ Edwardian villa. Actually she’d be struck dumb with envy and inadequacy as she ticked off their Minton floor, the polished staircase, the quality art prints on the walls. By the time we reached the dream kitchen her jaw would be on the floor, as mine was. Kitchens aren’t my thing, I tend just to breeze through on the scrounge, but even I could see this one was like a show-home. It was huge, for a start, with a quarry-tiled floor and immaculate units and – yes, Mum would have died – an Aga and a conventional high-tech built-in oven. Then there were all those little tasteful touches that I’ve seen on the front of Mum’s house magazines; bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, gleaming copper pans, a hotchpotch of Victorian tiles along the back wall.
‘Mum does cake decorating for weddings and parties,’ said Daniel dismissively. ‘She works for Relate too.’
He’d taken me out through French windows into the lovely garden and introduced me to his father, brought us drinks, then left us alone to have a chat.
‘So, have I set your mind at rest?’ asked Dr Gale. ‘You don’t want to be brooding and worrying just now, especially over something that’s perfectly normal. Try to keep yourself calm. Calm mums-to-be make calm babies, so the research has it.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. You think about it. There are all sorts of chemicals passing between you, including all the ones your body releases when you’re under stress. In the later stages of pregnancy it could have an effect on the foetus’s eventual personality. And at this point, well, you’ve got a viable baby in there now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that if you went into labour tomorrow there’d be a good chance the baby would survive. Provided it got immediate and proper care. It’d be a skinny little chap but it would have all its parts, more or less.’
I laughed and stroked my bump. ‘It’s certainly pretty active.’
‘Good.’ Dr Gale took a sip of his drink and looked out over the lawn.
I wish I could move in here with you for the next three months, I thought.
Dinner was grilled trout and salad and, guess what, Mrs Gale had grown all the parsley and dill herself. I thought of Mum’s Herb Garden two summers ago, a row of pots along the back windowsill. Most of the herbs grew fantastically tall and then fell over; some of them didn’t grow at all. Nan kept putting her used teabags in the pot nearest the drainer, which didn’t help.
‘Daniel tells me you’re hoping to read English at university,’ said Mrs Gale pleasantly. I say pleasantly, but really she was gritting her teeth to stay nice. I had some sympathy. There was her precious son bringing home some pregnant slapper who clearly didn’t know which knife to use and, having wrecked her own life, was hatching God knows what plan to wreck his.
‘I’d like to go to Oxford,’ I said through a mouthful of fish.
‘We wanted Tasha to apply, but she had her head set on Birmingham, for some reason.’ Grimace. ‘Still. Daniel’ll probably apply to Lincoln. David went
there.’ Mrs Gale nodded at her husband.
‘Smashing. Is that a nice university, then? Isn’t it very hilly?’
Dr Gale coughed politely. ‘I think you’ve misunderstood. I went to Lincoln College, Oxford.’
How we all laughed. I gave up the battle with the fish and put my cutlery down. I’d begun to feel sick if I ate too much at one go.
‘Gillian went to St Hilda’s. We met at a May Ball.’
‘How romantic,’ I said, meaning it. These were people who’d got everything right, done their lives in the right order.
‘Yes, she was with a chap I detested. Ended up punching him in the mouth.’ He smiled at his wife and raised his glass. ‘Marvellous days.’
‘And you were with Elise Osborne, owner of the most irritating laugh in Oxford,’ replied Mrs Gale smartly. ‘Finished with that plate, Charlotte?’
I helped clear away and we finished with fruit, which is also something which never makes an appearance in our house due to it generally sitting in a bowl till it goes mouldy and then getting thrown out. Poor Mum. She’d love to do this: Italian bread, wine, five cheeses, grapes. She used to try us with different foods but she’s given up now. Nan’s preferred dish is belly pork, two disgusting bow-shaped pieces of meat covered in a thick layer of fat which Nan eats with her fingers; she’d have it for breakfast, dinner and tea if Mum’d let her. Alternatives are a nice bit of tripe, Fray Bentos steak pudding, Greenhalgh’s whist pies or potted shrimps. Oh, and tinned salmon. Should Mum ever be foolish enough to serve up something mad like rice or pasta, it ends up in the bin, untouched. How Nan got through the war I’ll never know.