Shaken, I grabbed the trolley, made my way straight back to the aisle I’d just left and, snatching the nearest package without regard to its cost or percentage reliability, shoved it under the pack of frozen peas I’d picked up earlier. In the checkout queue I had the sudden thought that the Arctic conditions of the peas might possibly hamper the chemical reaction in the test and hastily withdrew it, looking for a more suitable hiding place. This was getting ridiculous. I was acting like a fifteen year old, not a mature, married woman of nearly forty. Mind you, I seemed to be acting less and less like a mature woman of any age these days.
Once on the moving belt, the copy of the Daily Telegraph I’d used in place of the frozen peas sailed unhindered towards the checkout girl, leaving the rectangular blue box gaily adrift on an open sea of black rubber. Red-faced, I shoved it once more under the newspaper, meeting the amused, appraising glance of Sam Bolton’s mother as I did so. Sam had been in my class last year and, on the few occasions I’d met his mother, had always got on well with her.
‘For my neighbour,’ I mouthed across to the parallel checkout where both Sam and Angela Bolton waited patiently for their turn with the checkout girl.
‘Absolutely,’ she mouthed back. Sam, wondering to whom his mother was miming her response, glanced in my direction, before turning the same colour I’d flushed earlier. Strange how children can be perfectly at ease with their teacher in the school environment, but place them in a situation where they don’t expect said teacher to be, and they instantly clam up, embarrassed at seeing them in the real world, as real people.
The checkout guy, a young, bored student obviously working off his loans debt, had no interest in either me or my blue box and, thanking God (and the local education authority) that my October salary cheque had obviously gone into my account, I was able to make good my escape while Sam and his mother were still packing their orange plastic carrier bags.
Driving home, my stomach a tight knot, I suddenly remembered Diana and Dad’s appointment with Mum’s GP later on that day and felt myself tense further. I seemed to have more plots and subplots in my life than an omnibus edition of ‘EastEnders’.
Stuck in a traffic jam, the cause of which I couldn’t work out, I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, making a mental list, in no particular chronological order of what was making me feel so uptight:
We’re broke and more than likely getting broker.
My son is a Peeping Tom.
My neighbour is a Peeping Tom. (Do I really care?)
My husband is very probably being seduced by another, very glamorous, very rich woman. Will rich woman’s husband execute revenge on my husband, making him forfeit all of Sylvia’s money?
Worse still – maybe it’s my husband doing the seducing. Oh shit! Double revenge.
My best friend is possibly up to no good with my husband’s new boss’s very young son.
Will husband’s boss and boss’s wife want revenge on best friend and best friend’s family for possible deflowering of said son? (Scrub that about the deflowering – no way on this planet was a gorgeous sex god like Sebastian a virgin.)
Will resulting revenge mean we have to sell house and live in council-supplied Bed and Breakfast with a geriatric Granny and decrepit dachshund?
What about poor old Mum? Who will look after her? And Dad?
Is Margaret Walker’s daughter pregnant? (No scrap that one too. I really don’t care. Not my problem even if said daughter was fertilised on my Persian rug.)
OK. Let’s go for the biggy I’ve been leaving until last. Never mind Jennifer Walker. Am I pregnant and what the fuck do I do if I am?
A sharp but insistent blast of a horn from the car behind brought me out of my preoccupation with unsolved problems and, realising that the gridlock had miraculously sorted itself, I put the car into gear, pulled out into the fast lane and headed for home. The little blue pregnancy-test packet sat innocently in the Sainsbury’s bag on the passenger seat next to me, waiting to be opened. Like Pandora’s box, it was an inconsequential piece of nothing: an irrelevance until opened and utilised. God knows what it would reveal once I’d plucked up the courage to release its contents.
Once home, I hid the blue box in my handbag and hoisted the rest of the shopping into the kitchen where a mountain of breakfast debris assured me that at least Kit and his friends were up and about even if they had assumed the maid would clear up after them.
A note from Grace on the kitchen table reminded me that she’d collected India from Sylvia’s part of the house and taken her, as arranged, for a birthday treat of cinema, shopping at Claire’s Accessories, and lunch at McDonald’s. Goodness, I’d been so preoccupied with other things I’d totally forgotten what had now become an annual tradition on Grace’s part. She took each of my children out for their birthday, letting them choose where they would like to go. Over the years she’d done everything from Manchester United to ice wall climbing. The only time I’d seen her lose her composure was when a pre-pubescent Liberty, obsessed with all things equine, had begged to be taken on a day’s pony trekking across the Moors. They’d returned with Libby even more desperate to own a horse of her own while Grace, saddle-sore, bow-legged and sneezing from a newly acquired allergy to horsehair wheezed that she’d never again get on a horse as long as she lived. ‘Have you seen how big the bloody things are?’ she’d asked. Never again. I tell you now Harriet. Never again!’
The steady thump of a bass guitar, fairly faint but nevertheless as insistent as a Chinese water torture, drifted down from the direction of Kit’s room echoing the rhythmic pulse that was beginning just above my right eye. Brilliant! For once I welcomed the headache that monthly proclaimed the imminent arrival of my period. I’d go upstairs right now with Pandora’s pregnancy box and put my mind at rest once and for all.
‘What’s for lunch, Mum?’ Kit, racing through the kitchen, stopped momentarily.
‘Lunch? Haven’t you just had breakfast?’
Kit looked at his watch. ‘That was over an hour ago. We’re starving.’
‘Well you’ll just have to starve. I’ve got a few things to do before I even think about food. What are you all doing anyway?’ I glanced over to where Kit was helping himself to an apple that even I had to admit had seen better days.
‘Setting challenges,’ he said, through a mouthful of apple.
‘Challenges? What sort of challenges?’
‘Oh you know, can you “down a bottle of vodka in half an hour?” sort of thing.’ And then, seeing my face, laughed, ‘Kidd-ing! We haven’t got any vodka. So, once I’ve eaten this –’ Kit looked at the apple in his hand – ‘prune, I’ve got to go back in there and do fifty sit-ups in a minute.’
‘Bit juvenile isn’t it, compared to what you were up to last night?’
Colouring slightly Kit sighed and said ‘That’s tight! I knew you’d go on and on about it.’
‘Have I said a word?’ I said, throwing up my hands in protest.
‘Yeah, you just did.’
Ignoring this, I said, ‘Why don’t you all go outside for a bit. Kick a ball or something?’ ‘It’s pouring down out there.’ Kit nodded towards the garden before tossing his apple core into the bin.
‘You big girl’s blouse,’ I jeered. ‘When I was your age I was out chumping during the October half-term holiday whatever the weather. Going off on raiding trips and seeing off the marauding enemy.’
‘Sounds like the bloody Vikings. Mind you, I suppose you’re old enough to be a Viking.’ And he was off.
Clutching my handbag to my chest, I hurried up to our bathroom, locked the door and without further ado attempted to divest the box of its cellophane wrapper. Jesus, I could have given birth and had it potty-trained in the time it took me to wrestle this off. I didn’t even bother reading the bumph. I knew the procedure: pants down, pee and pray.
Unlocking the bathroom door, I carried the stick over to our bed, laid it on the bedside table and, with myself prone on top of t
he duvet, steadfastly refused to acknowledge its presence until the allotted four minutes were up.
‘Oh Fuck! Oh Fuck! Oh My Godohmygodohmygod! No! No! No! FUCK!’
Hugh Grant’s ranting in the opening scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral had nothing on me as I clutched the smug-looking stick in one hand and attempted to beat the living daylights out of Nick’s pillow with the other.
Nothing could have prepared me for this. I really hadn’t expected the blue line of success to be standing smartly to attention in the second little window. I’d only done the test to put my mind at rest so that I could relax and enjoy my half-term holiday. This was a disaster; the worst thing that could have happened, our situation being what it was. There was no way on this planet that I could have another baby even if I’d wanted one, which I most certainly didn’t. If I didn’t work, we didn’t eat; we didn’t have a roof over our heads. Nick had thrown in his job, borrowed half of his mother’s entire savings to line the pockets of the already loaded Hendersons on a whim. And now this.
Fury at Nick’s stupidity welled up in me like a tsunami and came crashing down with another foul-mouthed invective.
‘You stupid man. You stupid, fucking, idiotic man.’
I think I’d have probably carried on blaspheming and berating my absent husband indefinitely had not a slight scratching movement under the bed brought me up short. Jesus, did we have rats now as well?
Cautiously I lifted the edge of the duvet away from its resting place on the floor and peered warily under the bed.
‘Hi Mrs Westmoreland.’ Richard, the relatively new friend of Kit’s whom I’d met for the first time only yesterday, crawled out from the dusty nether regions of my bed. ‘I think I must have won the challenge to “disappear for a minute.” Is it time for lunch yet?’
Following Richard down the stairs, I suddenly recalled the one thing that was left in Pandora’s Box once she’d unwittingly released the Evils of the World to all four corners of the earth. ‘Hope’ may have resided in Pandora’s box, but there was a distinct absence of its presence in the slim, rectangular receptacle now shoved under my knickers at the back of my underwear drawer.
Chapter 17
I know, I know. You’re asking, ‘How does a thirty-eight-year-old woman whose family is complete and who, because of her financial circumstances, cannot possibly have another baby end up pregnant?’
Well the thing is, I’d not used any regular form of contraception since Kit was a young child. Before you all faint clean away, I have to say that I am one of those incredibly lucky women whose body is, and always has been, regular as clockwork. I have my period every twenty-eight days and I know exactly when I’m ovulating. I’m aware of when I’m at my most fertile and just avoid sex on those days of the month. Gynaecology fascinates me – when I was pregnant with India I was actually asked by my consultant if I was ‘in the business’, I appeared to know so much about my own reproductive bits and pieces.
It wasn’t my intention to eschew all forms of contraception, but after years of trying every conceivable – perhaps inconceivable would be more appropriate – form of birth control I finally threw in the towel with the goddam lot of it.
I was fine with the pill until after Kit was born and then for some reason my own hormones seemed intent on doing battle with the chemical ones, regardless of the different types of pill my GP prescribed. The resulting acne, mood swings and loss of libido had Nick throwing the lot in the bin, saying he’d rather be celibate for the rest of his life than face this snarling Rottweiler just one more time across the breakfast table.
I went to have a Dutch cap fitted, and the doctor at the Family Planning Clinic – an imposing, and obviously over-worked young woman – offhandedly demonstrated the action needed to insert the appliance and then withdrew from the cubicle in order to let me try it for myself. Squatting on the floor, my skirt hitched up around my backside, I squeezed the cap into the required figure of eight shape whereupon the slippery little sucker flew out of my hand and over the cubicle door landing neatly at the feet of several women whose turn was still to come.
My giggles, as I emerged red-faced from the cubicle, could not be controlled even by a hard look from Dr Patel and, embarrassed by my typically juvenile reaction to anything funny, I beat a hasty retreat out of there, no further on in my quest for the perfect contraception.
The intrauterine coil I wouldn’t even entertain after Diana passed out with the sheer pain of having one inserted, and as for the Femidon – well what woman wants to inflate a balloon inside themselves before making love?
Once I’d come to the conclusion that, with a bit of restraint on occasions, I could be a contraception-free zone, it all worked perfectly well. When, with Nick’s business doing brilliantly, we decided we’d try for a third child we just reversed our game plan and, hey presto, within a month I was pregnant again. Not with India however. Between Kit and my youngest child there were two more pregnancies – both where the foetus never really got going. Something called ‘blighted ovum’ on both occasions. The experience of these two, both very early, miscarriages made me desperate for a baby that would go full term. My body didn’t let me down again: India was born, perfect, arriving two weeks late as if making up for the babies I’d lost so early in their formation.
Now, after years of playing what I considered to be a foolproof version of Russian Roulette, here I was up the proverbial creek without a paddle, and all I could think of was Grace. Grace, who would give her right arm – probably her left as well – to be pregnant. How could I possibly tell Grace that I was having a baby and that I wasn’t going to keep it?
Switching to auto-pilot I fed bread into the toaster and heated up a veritable mountain of baked beans for Kit and his friends hearing, but not listening to, their fourteen-year-old banter as they sat at the kitchen table awaiting food.
‘You alright, Mum?’ Liberty, home from her sleepover, dropped her bag by the kitchen door and joined me at the hob.
‘Umm? Alright? Yes, fine why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Well those beans will be dizzy if you stir them any longer.’
Beaten almost to a pulp, the beans could have passed for tomato soup. I hastily buttered the last of the toast, added the liquidised beans and handed them to Liberty who, for once, didn’t seem averse to serving her brother and his mates.
By the time the boys had eaten, various mothers and grannies had arrived to carry them home and I offloaded them thankfully into the cars parked on the drive. The need to erase every toast crumb, every squashed baked bean, and every smear no matter how tiny from my granite kitchen surfaces was frantic. I swept, washed and polished with increasing circles until I was exhausted. Anything to take my mind off this new problem I’d just added to my apparently ever-increasing repertoire.
Desperate for some peace and quiet, I walked down the garden to the potting shed. Abandoned pizza cartons and coke cans from Kit’s little supper party lay in the middle of the floor, but apart from that, the place was neat and welcoming. Bill, the electrician from Wells Trading, had been as good as his word and had spent all morning bringing power to the shed. He nodded, but said nothing as he drove home the final couple of screws into the sole power point on the wall. I didn’t dare ask who was paying his bill – I certainly couldn’t – and just prayed that it was being covered in the insurance pay out.
Determined to stamp my authority on the place, I went back indoors and up to the attic that Nick had christened Death Row – anything incarcerated up there was fated never to see the light of day again. After much rummaging under the dusty beams, I found what I was looking for: a couple of rugs and a squashy settee that had been booted up there soon after we bought the house. It certainly smelt a bit, and tufts of brown innards resembling the ear of a particularly hairy mammal sprouted from its top corner, but I knew this settee to be one of the most comfortable I’d ever lain down on and I wanted it for my shed.
When pregnant with Liberty, Kit and, partic
ularly after the two miscarriages, with India, I’d studiously avoided doing anything strenuous but, as I certainly hadn’t come to terms with the fact that I was actually pregnant, and perhaps even subconsciously saw the humping of a settee down the steps single-handed as a means of not being pregnant, I manoeuvred it to the top of the flight of steps and blithely launched it downhill.
‘I name this sofa, “The Hairy Mammal,” I intoned in what I felt to be a particularly good impression of the Queen. ‘May God bless her and all who sit on her.’
‘For God’s sake, Mum. What the hell are you doing?’ Both Liberty and Kit dashed from their respective rooms on the first floor as the settee shot down the uncarpeted wooden stairs amazingly quickly.
‘Getting in some practice for when I’m Queen,’ I said, following the settee down the steps. ‘Like greased-lightening,’ I added with satisfaction.
‘What are you doing? Liberty repeated, looking with some disdain at both the ‘hairy mammal,’ which had lodged itself at an acute angle at the bottom of the attic steps, and my cobweb-embellished hair and clothes.
With both kids press-ganged into service as removal men, I soon had the few bits and pieces I required in situ in the shed. A couple of throws and some rather moth-eaten cushions were draped artistically over the ‘hairy mammal’ which, in turn, presided over a low table bearing books I’d been meaning to read for ages, and magazines.
I plugged in the old filter-coffee machine I’d had since my student days and which I’d ferreted out from behind the Christmas decorations in the attic, and was delighted when its red light instantly glowed as I flicked the switch.
‘So, lass, is this place for t’tools or for thissen?’ Bill, gathering his own tools and bits of wire, glanced round doubtfully as I stretched out on the ‘hairy mammal’ and gazed down the valley at the same view I’d made my own when I was in what was now Sylvia’s flat.
Goodness, Grace and Me Page 21