Any Way You Want Me

by Diamond, Lucy

  As he held me afterwards, he whispered, ‘I love you so much,’ into my ear, and even though I tried my damnedest not to listen – I did try, I really did – the words made my blood sing around my body. At least I didn’t say it back to him. I hadn’t quite forgiven him enough to say it back to him. Those three little words were still for Alex’s ears only.

  I had brought along the as-yet-unwrapped present he’d given me, originally intending to coolly return it to him without even opening it, but the passionate, gasping, I-love-you-so-much sex had changed my mind somewhat and I opened it, half-dressed, sitting on his knee. It was such a gorgeous silver bangle with such an elegant curve to it that I felt I simply had to show him my appreciation all over again.

  After that, I decided to forget about the whole ‘choosing Alex or choosing Mark’ decision for the time being. Yeah, Mark had been out of order. I had been angry with him, furious even, but the problem was, I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to him. He still made me feel so dizzy and euphoric. And anyway, he’d apologized and promised never to play games with me ever again. Hopefully the status quo was about to return.

  It was a similar story on Wednesday. We just stayed safely in his office and had a quick burst of rude and satisfying sex and a laugh about something stupid or other, before I went back home to my children and Alex, and he went back to his wife. It was OK again. In fact, it was more than OK again. We both knew where we stood. Or knelt. Or lay. Or . . . Well, whatever.

  I was feeling so much better about being able to juggle both men successfully without dropping either of them, and so happy that Mark had dropped his pantomime-villain stalker tendencies, that I even arranged for my mum to look after the kids on Thursday afternoon. Then I called Mark and persuaded him to skive work and take me to Richmond Park for a spontaneous date. It was exhilarating to be holding hands with him in the park, in the fresh air and sunshine, and I quite forgot I had a single care in the world.

  It wasn’t until Friday, when my period was a whole week late, that reality slammed up against me. Much as I was loath to do so, it was time to face facts. Actually, for the first time since the weekend, I felt confident about it. I had had a crampy feeling all morning and was sure that the late arrival was at last on its way. So I would do a test, just to confirm the happy news, and then, once I knew I was in the clear, I would devote myself to being the most careful contraceptive user in the world. This would never have to happen again.

  I took the kids shopping in the morning and, when I was sure that nobody I knew was within a half-mile radius of the chemist, or at least within view, I picked up a home pregnancy test kit and paid for it, with all the fake casualness of a virgin buying condoms for the first time. Hey. It was no big deal. I was probably going to get my period any moment now and I would have wasted a tenner. I’d be laughing about it with Anna in a couple of days’ time.

  For all that, though, the pregnancy test kit felt like a lead weight in my handbag; I was aware of its presence with every single step I took home. I rushed through making the kids’ lunch. Baked beans for Molly, bunged straight in the microwave – there you go, sweetheart. Defrosted veggie mush I’d made for Nathan the week before – spoonful, spoonful, spoonful, wipe faces and hands, time for a nap. Off you pop!

  When at last the house was quiet and all that I could hear was the sound of my own fast breathing, I walked quickly to my bag, took the test kit from it, stealthily, like a thief, and went straight up to the bathroom with it. No going back now. Oh God. This was the moment of reckoning, all right. Pregnancy test. Two of the most monumental words that had ever related to me. Apart from, perhaps, ‘Tena Lady’.

  Cat’s words echoed around my head, taunting me.

  Bought a test kit from Boots and . . . I was late, you see, you know me, never late. And anyway, I did that whole weeing on the white stick thing, and yeah, I’m pregnant! We’re going to have a baby!

  OK. Do it. Just do it. I opened the box and ripped off the foil wrapper, my fingers shaking so much I could hardly pull the stick out. I read the instructions. Like I didn’t know what I had to do.

  WITH THE TIP POINTING DOWNWARDS, HOLD THE ABSORBENT SAMPLER IN YOUR URINE STREAM FOR 5 SECONDS ONLY.

  Oh, bloody hell. I couldn’t believe I was doing this again. It had only been just over a year since the last time I’d had to do it. Why hadn’t I insisted on using condoms? Why had I been so half-arsed about the whole thing?

  I did what the instructions told me to do and waited for the result.

  CHECKING THAT THE TEST HAS WORKED:

  A BLUE LINE SHOULD APPEAR IN THE SMALL WINDOW, AS SHOWN IN PICTURE ONE. THIS INDICATES THAT THE TEST IS COMPLETE AND HAS WORKED CORRECTLY.

  IF THERE IS A BLUE LINE IN THE LARGE WINDOW, AS SHOWN IN PICTURE TWO, YOU ARE PREGNANT. EVEN IF THIS LINE IS FAINTER THAN THE ONE IN THE SMALL WINDOW, IT STILL MEANS THAT YOU ARE PREGNANT.

  IF THERE IS NO BLUE LINE IN THE LARGE WINDOW, AS SHOWN IN PICTURE THREE, YOU ARE NOT PREGNANT.

  I stared at the stick and watched a blue line appear in the small window. OK. Blue line in the small window was fine. That just meant the test had worked. Don’t panic.

  Then I stared and stared at the large window until my eyes ached in their sockets. Please don’t let a blue line appear. Oh please, God, please, please don’t let there be a blue line.

  I sat there on the edge of the bath and watched as, slowly but surely, a blue line appeared in the large window, pale and hardly there at first, so that I blinked and thought it was a trick of the light. I held my breath and watched as it darkened and thickened until there was absolutely no doubt left in my mind whatsoever.

  Sixteen

  I was five weeks pregnant. Things were happening inside me that were completely out of my control. Cells were splitting and multiplying, my uterus was thickening, extra blood was coursing around me as my body revved up to set the whole process in motion, all over again.

  A third baby.

  A mother of three.

  With every heartbeat, the secret hidden inside me was growing bigger and stronger. Bigger and stronger.

  I sat on the edge of the bath for a long time, trying not to cry. This was so, so wrong. It was so badly, painfully wrong for so many different reasons, I couldn’t even begin to think about them. Alex, Mark, me . . . The eternal triangle had become an eternal quadrilateral now that there was an extra character in the picture. The lines between us all had blurred and tangled without a chance of repair now. I had fucked everything up beyond all recognition, as somebody had once said.

  I stared at the white tester stick again. Could there be a mistake? Could there be something wrong with the test? I twisted the stick this way and that, hoping it was an optical illusion, but no. All I could see were the twin blue lines, accusing me in their symmetry. Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant.

  It was horribly ironic. I’d loved the discovery of both of my previous pregnancies, had rushed straight to consult the books by Miriam Stoppard and Sheila Kitzinger, and all the other childbirth gurus, as soon as I’d found out the wonderful news each time. I had devoured great volumes of information, charted my (our) development week by week, month by month, monitored everything I ate or drank or did with the solemnity of a religion. I revised for it harder than I had done for my A levels, thought of nothing else.

  Oh, and I’d simply sailed through the nine months confidently and easily both times, with none of the morning sickness or backache or diabetes that my friends complained of. It had made me feel important – quick, pregnant woman, get her a chair, let her sit down, can we get you anything, pet? – oh, I’d just loved all that. Loved the strangers coming up to me predicting the sex of my hidden babe, wanting to pat my proudly blooming belly.

  The difference was, they had been wanted pregnancies. Yearned-for, hoped-for, planned pregnancies.

  This one was a cuckoo in the wrong nest. The changeling in the womb. The child I wasn’t ready to bear, the child whose father’s identity I couldn’t even name with an
y certainty. Oh, God. It sounded so awful when I thought of it like that. It made me feel like someone from Trisha. Who’s the daddy? the strapline would read across the screen. Sadie’s pregnant – but who’s the daddy?

  Alex was going to kill me when I told him I was up the stick again. Or, if he managed not to kill me, he’d leave me. He was going to be totally and utterly pissed off when he heard the news. I could picture the look of horror that would spread across his face, could almost hear him blurting out, ‘Oh, no,’ when I told him. He had said, plain and simple, Two is enough for me, thanks, hadn’t he? I mean, how unequivocal could you get? He might even try to talk me into having an abortion, flushing the thing out of me before it had a chance to develop its vital organs.

  I shut my eyes and crossed my arms around myself protectively at the thought. No. Whatever the complications, I knew that I didn’t want that. But how the hell was I going to break the news to him?

  As for Mark . . . he would know, he would just know if I told him I was pregnant. He wasn’t stupid, he could work out dates. And let’s face it, Mark was longing to have a child, wasn’t he? It was his great sorrow that Julia didn’t seem interested in starting a family. If I told Mark he was going to be a father, that we were going to have a baby, he would . . .

  I put my head in my hands. He would be over the moon. The most wonderful gift I could have given him. He would probably leave Julia for it, and . . .

  Hold on. Stop.

  Stop, stop, stop, stop, STOP.

  I didn’t want to get into thinking about that stuff. That was another thought for another day. I didn’t have to tell anybody anything just yet; I would work out what to do later. In the meantime, I would sit on my secret and wait for it to hatch. Right now, though, I needed lunch. Eating for two again, eh? No wonder I had been so hungry all the time lately.

  I went downstairs and made three rounds of thickly buttered toast. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and sobbed as if my heart was broken.

  Come Saturday, the thought of meeting up with Danny at his mum’s birthday party seemed just about the worst night out it was possible to have, short of a date with Jim Davidson.

  Incredibly, it was Alex who talked me into going. This was largely because I’d told him a teeny-weeny lie and said that it was my best school friend that I was meeting, rather than my first boyfriend. Which was kind of true, but also kind of deceptive. ‘Come on, Sade, if it’s been arranged for ages, it would be a bit crap of you to pull out now,’ he said.

  ‘But I’m so tired,’ I moaned. ‘Look at me. I look like something next door’s cat might have sicked up after a big night on the Whiskas.’

  ‘Put some make-up on, then,’ he ordered me heartlessly. ‘And wash your hair. Go on, you haven’t been out on the lash for ages. You know I’m right. I’m right about everything, remember? Did I mention that I was right about everything?’

  I looked away, ignoring his rambling. I was hardly going to be on the lash in my condition, as Miriam Stoppard might have said. Pickling a foetus, whether it was wanted or unwanted, was not my style.

  I turned back to Alex, my eyes narrowing accusingly as I thought of something. ‘Hang on a second. Why are you so keen for me to go out anyway? What have you got planned?’

  He did have the grace to look slightly shifty at the question. ‘Not a lot. Watch a bit of telly, you know,’ he blustered.

  ‘Anything else? Anything that you’re not telling me, perhaps?’

  He faltered under the fierceness of my gaze. I had my hands on my hips, head on one side, the lot. ‘Well, all right, I’ve asked a couple of the lads round for a bit of poker.’

  ‘Oh, ri-i-i-ight,’ I said, working at least four syllables into the word. I folded my arms across my chest. ‘And were you planning to tell me about this before I went out, or was I just going to wake up tomorrow morning to be told you’d betted our house away?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t be daft. You’ll be waking up to wads of money at the end of the bed, that’s what.’

  ‘Mmm, well, I’ll look forward to that, then,’ I said sarcastically, ‘when I see it.’

  He pulled a face. ‘Go on, chop-chop,’ he said. ‘What are you waiting for? Get in the shower and I’ll get the kids their milk. Go!’

  My mind had been such a blur of unanswered questions, ever since Friday and the pregnancy test of doom, that I hadn’t had the time or energy to formulate a watertight gameplan for Mrs Cooper’s party. Whether it was all psychological or not, I felt as if I had already plunged into no-brainer pregnancy mode where thinking about anything more taxing than Hollyoaks was instantly out of the window. The idea of having to concoct a whole wedge of lies about my job, lifestyle and home, and then carry them off plausibly to the entire Cooper clan all evening, seemed an acute impossibility.

  The alternative, though, wasn’t particularly appealing either: coming clean, telling Danny the truth, confessing that every email I’d sent him had been a pack of lies. But why? he would ask. I don’t get it. Why didn’t you tell me what you were really doing?

  And what the hell would I say to that? Oh, well, you see, Danny, I wanted to impress you. I was so bored with the real world that I escaped to a cosy little fantasy life. I invented this alter ego to dazzle you, make you wish you hadn’t dumped me. I was punishing you.

  It had been years and years since I had clapped eyes on him, but I could imagine exactly his response. Punishing me? Kidding yourself, you mean. You loser!

  My eyes stung with half-formed tears at the thought. I put my make-up on in front of the bedroom mirror, feeling panicky. Oh God, what was I going to say? And, more pressingly, what was I going to wear?

  The door creaked and Molly came in, just as I’d flung open the wardrobe doors. She was wearing her pyjamas and clutching Fizz. ‘Mummy, we singing “Pump Up” downstairs,’ she confided, walking over and cuddling my bare legs.

  ‘“Pump Up?”What’s that, darling?’ I asked distractedly. Gap black trousers or French Connection black trousers or Next black trousers? I was thinking.

  Molly started pogoing around the room like a badly coordinated, gambolling chimp. ‘“Pump up! You feel it! Pump up!”’ she started yelling.

  The words sounded vaguely familiar, but her yells were so tuneless, I couldn’t put my finger on precisely what she was meant to be singing. ‘Is it one of Daddy’s songs?’ I asked, skimming through the clothes for another look. Ahh. Perhaps these black trousers from Warehouse. They were a bit more forgiving on the waist. Even though the cells in my womb were still only microscopically tiny, my belly seemed to have slumped outwards already, admitted defeat before the growth thing had even started.

  ‘Yeah, Daddy sing it downstairs,’ Molly said. ‘Daddy sing, “Pump up! You feel it! Pump up!”’

  ‘Ahh, right,’ I said, nodding.

  Alex was on a mission to musically educate our children whenever possible, which meant scornfully tossing aside their Nursery Collection CDs and their ‘Wheels on the Bus’ tape for car journeys, and playing them his favourite albums instead. He had proudly informed me that Molly was into ska before she was even crawling, with The Beat being her particular favourites, he reckoned. He was also convinced she was well into The Specials and The Pogues for dancing purposes, plus Massive Attack and Portishead for chilled-out pre-bedtime moods.

  The music from downstairs suddenly got louder – no doubt he was trying to educate Nathan now – and a snatch of the bass line made everything click. ‘Pump It Up’ by Elvis Costello. Of course.

  ‘Mummy, you wear THIS.’

  Pogoing temporarily on hold, Molly had come to inspect the contents of my wardrobe. Of course, being Molly, she had ignored the swathe of blackness that was my usual going-out wear and had pulled out a plum-coloured, halterneck, knee-length, office-Christmas-party-type dress instead.

  ‘What, this?’ I hadn’t worn it for years. Not since the Christmas party just before I’d conceived Molly, in fact. It belonged to a different age and, with it,
a different, carefree me.

  ‘This. I like this one.’ She clutched it adamantly, swung it on the hanger.

  I touched the satiny material myself, pulled it out for a closer look. ‘I don’t know, Molls. I’m not sure it’ll fit any more.’

  The look on her face was so beseeching and keen that I relented. Oh, whatever. I’d put it on just to show her, then I’d get back to choosing which pair of black trousers was the right one to wear for a sixty-year-old’s birthday party.

  I pulled the dress over my arms and shoulders; the material was silky-smooth and slipped down over me in one flowing movement. Good God, it still fitted. A little tight on the chest maybe, but fine on the hips. I’d forgotten the way that the skirt flipped out if I twirled around, how weightless the material was, and how it shone almost two-tone under the light.

  ‘Mummy, you PRETTY. That your party dress.’

  I hugged my fashion critic daughter. Who needed Trinny and Susannah when you had the complimentary Molly advising you on your outfits? ‘Thanks, sweetpea.’ I had danced all night in this dress, arsed around with Jo and Bernadette from the marketing department, necking free drinks and trying to resist boss-eyed Matt from the post room’s drunken advances. God, it was like a lifetime ago.

  Satisfied that she’d made the right choice for me, Molly trotted back downstairs. ‘Daddy! I want you dance again!’ I could hear her instructing.

  I eyed my reflection critically. Was it going to be too much for Mrs Cooper’s party? Would I turn up to see everyone else in jeans and trainers?

  I twirled around, watching the flippy skirt fan out around my knees. Yet if I didn’t wear it tonight, when would I ever put it on again? The dress was loose on my tummy now, but give it a couple of months and it could be gathering dust on its hanger again when I . . . if I . . .

  Sod it. Where were my strappy sandals? This might be my last chance to be the belle of the ball for a while. So belle of the ball I would be, for one final night only.