Someone Like You

by Cathy Kelly

  The test done, she shoved the apparatus back in her handbag and opened the door to the viewers, a fixed smile glued to her face. They wandered around the house for nearly half an hour, but it didn’t take nearly that long for the second blue line to appear in the pregnancy tester window.

  Alone in the house again, she looked at the tester and cursed Felix, condom manufacturers and herself, in that order. ‘Bloody, bloody pregnant!’ Hannah howled to the empty house.

  It was ironic. Poor Emma would kill to be in her position now, she thought gloomily. Emma longed for a baby with all her heart. And now Hannah, the most unmaternal of the three friends, was pregnant. Hannah imagined that creatures who ate their young were more maternal than she. She had no interest in babies or kids. Well, she conceded, her cousin Mary’s two were sweet enough. Krystle and Courtney were nice girls, but that didn’t mean she wanted them to live with her.

  As she drove back to the office, Hannah railed out loud, bitterly asking someone to tell her why she, of all people, had to get pregnant. Here she was with an exciting new job opportunity, a wonderful fiancé and a great life, and now it was all going to be ruined by some squalling, screaming brat. Bloody wonderful.

  Carrie, the receptionist, waved a sheaf of phone messages at her when she went in. ‘Felix just rang,’ said Carrie, her face flushing. She’d met Felix a few times when he’d come to meet Hannah after work and obviously had a thumping great crush on him. Which Felix didn’t do anything to neutralize, Hannah thought crossly, recalling the way he’d sit on the edge of Carrie’s desk and chat to her.

  ‘He says it’s important,’ Carrie added.

  Wait till he finds out what important news I’ve got for him, Hannah thought grimly.

  ‘Babes!’ yelled Felix jubilantly. ‘You’ll never believe it!’ He was obviously stuck into the drinks cabinet already, so it had to be good news. ‘I got A Moment in Time. I can’t believe it, the starring role. We’re made, it’s a career part. BAFTAs here I come! You wouldn’t believe the money I’ll be on. Bill says they really want me and I can name my price. Edwin Cohen, the director, is a huge star in the States. He never does TV – you can’t imagine what it means to be working with him.’

  ‘That’s fantastic, darling,’ Hannah said, pleased for him. But her joy was dimmed by the presence of a positive pregnancy test. ‘I’ve got something to tell you too. Hold on a mo, I’ve left something in my car,’ she lied. ‘I’ll phone you back.’

  Outside, she rang him on her mobile. ‘Felix, that’s the most incredible news ever, but I’m afraid I’ve got news too which may not be so good.’ There was no point beating around the bush. She had to tell him straight up: ‘I’m pregnant, Felix.’

  ‘Fantastic!’ he yelled.

  Hannah blinked. This was not the reaction she’d been expecting. She’d anticipated groans about how it wasn’t the right time in either of their careers and how a baby would interrupt his sleep and inhibit last-minute party-going. Instead, Felix whooped like a small boy who’d just won a conker match.

  ‘Darling, I’m so pleased! We’ll have to get married straight away – the Seychelles, I think. This is fabulous news. Bill is going to look for a house for us in London, I’ll have to tell her to make sure it’s got a nursery. And,’ she could practically hear him grinning, ‘Edwin Cohen is very much the family man. His wife is expecting their fifth kid and they’ll be leaving LA to live with him during shooting. You can make friends with her, it’ll be brilliant for my career. Gotta go, honey, there’s a call waiting. I’ll talk to you tonight about plans. Ciao.’

  Hannah pressed the end button on her mobile and stood stock-still, trying to absorb everything Felix had just said. Moving to London? Making friends with the director’s wife who just happened to be pregnant also? What about her job and her life and her friends, she thought helplessly. This was ridiculous, she was being swept along on some moving walkway, propelled in a direction she didn’t want to go.

  She loved Felix, obviously, but did she want a baby and to follow him to London? She didn’t know. A baby had never fitted into her plans before.

  She rang Leonie before lunch. ‘I’m going mad and I have to talk to someone,’ she said. ‘Have you got a free twenty minutes for a sandwich?’

  ‘I’ve got an hour,’ Leonie said. ‘Is everything all right, Hannah?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’

  ‘It’s not Felix, is it?’ Leonie asked anxiously as they met outside the coffee shop they liked that was equidistant from both places of work.

  ‘Sort of.’ Hannah groaned. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news!’ squealed Leonie, before realizing that Hannah wasn’t smiling. ‘Isn’t it?’ she asked. Hannah was silent. ‘You mean, you don’t want it,’ Leonie said slowly.

  Her friend bit her lip. ‘I don’t know what I want, Leonie. I’ve never thought about children, as such. I never felt my biological clock ticking like a bomb or anything. And I know,’ she raised her eyes, ‘that makes me unnatural and strange. But that’s genuinely how I felt. Some people are really into kids but I wasn’t, I’m not.’

  ‘So it’s unplanned?’ Leonie asked gently.

  Hannah laughed sourly. ‘Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?’

  ‘What does Felix say?’

  ‘He’s over the moon, curiously enough. I thought he’d be bundling me on to the first ferry to Harley Street to get an abortion, but he’s actually thrilled.’ She didn’t add that, being Felix, he had instantly spotted how useful a pregnant missus would be for making pals with his new director. ‘He wants us to get married immediately too,’ she pointed out.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ Leonie said.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s not the one who has to spend nine months looking like a whale, and he’s not the one who has to give up her job and hightail it off to London to be a bloody earth mother while he’s got an interesting career.’

  ‘You don’t have to give up work just because you’re pregnant! It’s a baby, not a disease,’ Leonie said in exasperation.

  ‘That’s the other thing,’ Hannah said gloomily. ‘Felix has landed this wonderful new part in London and we’ve got to move.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They ate their sandwiches and discussed the notion of Hannah leaving Ireland and her burgeoning career to be with her fiancé. Finally, Hannah said that she just wished it hadn’t all happened now.

  ‘I did think about an abortion, but I don’t know, Leonie,’ she said, toying with her coffee. ‘Could I go through with it? I remember when I was a teenager growing up, I would have had an abortion like a shot if I’d got pregnant. Mind you, then, I wouldn’t have known how to go about it. There was such a veil of secrecy over the whole thing and “taking the boat to England” was this big, secret shame. But that was then and it seems selfish to do it now just because it’s inconvenient.’

  ‘I can’t advise you, Hannah. It’s up to you.’

  ‘I know.’

  By the time she got home that evening, she was weary from thinking about her pregnancy and what she was going to do.

  ‘Darling!’ whooped Felix, sweeping her into his arms as she opened the flat door. ‘The mother of my unborn child!’

  She sighed and pushed him away. ‘Oh, Felix, I don’t know. Is this the right time for a baby? We’re not prepared, we’ve never discussed it and I don’t even know if I want it.’

  ‘You mean, you’re thinking about an abortion!’ Felix looked at her coldly. ‘I can’t believe you’d even suggest that, Hannah,’ he said. ‘You can’t do that to our child. I thought you loved me?’

  ‘I do,’ she said miserably. ‘I just feel as if I have no choices left. Yesterday, I was a woman with promotion looming and a great future ahead of me. We were going to buy a house here…and today, I’m this brood mare who has to follow you wherever you want to go.’

  Felix got up and opened a packet of cigarettes. Then he put them down again and turned to her, his expressive eyes bright with
enthusiasm.

  ‘Hannah, I know women’s hormones go bananas when they’re pregnant and everything, but this is ridiculous. Yeah, you’re upset and emotional at the thought of leaving your job, but they’ve got estate agents in London too, you know. It’s not an end – it’s a beginning. With the money I’m earning, we can get a nanny and you can go back to work. You’ll have a life, you’ll have independence.’ He pulled her down to the couch with him. ‘You’ll have me and our baby, Hannah. Won’t that be wonderful?’

  She let herself see their future through his eyes.

  ‘Imagine, Hannah, a lovely Georgian house with a garden – we could do it up together, a cute nursery. Dinner parties. You’d be the perfect hostess. And we’d make a great couple. When I saw that smug bastard Harry with you, I just knew. I had to have you, to marry you, if needs be. Well, I didn’t want Harry to get you,’ he said.

  Hannah’s heart missed a beat.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  Felix raised his eyebrows. ‘When you left that night, he had the nerve to say he was going to ask you to marry him, the little bastard.’

  She blinked. ‘Harry said that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Felix unconcerned. ‘Imagine him thinking that you’d prefer him to me. I ask you! I told him where to get off, I said we were already engaged and were having a row, so he could bugger off if he knew what was good for him.’

  ‘But we weren’t engaged,’ she said evenly. ‘You’d left me, Felix. You had no right to say that to Harry.’

  Felix’s response to this was to slide one warm hand up under her top, long fingers burrowing into the lace of her bra. ‘We’ve all got a past, love,’ he said. ‘Harry was your past and I’ve got mine. But that’s what they are: the past. Forget him, you’re with me now.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Emma sat at her desk and opened the second drawer. Like everything else in her pristine office it was scrupulously tidy, with a box of spare staples, another of spare paperclips and several pens and post-its neatly arranged on top of a couple of ring notebooks. Emma reached into the back of the drawer and took out a small toiletry bag. Her emergency kit, as she called it, contained tampons, a spare pair of knickers, a pair of barely black tights, an old foundation compact and some make-up in case she ever needed to go anywhere after work and forgot her make-up, and painkillers.

  She needed them now. Her period had only just started but already she could feel the agonizing cramps she suffered from every three to four months. She’d barely popped the pills in her mouth when Colin Mulhall appeared at the door with an ‘I’m bored and want to chat’ expression on his face.

  Emma took a swig of water and swallowed, mentally cursing the fact that Colin was the one to catch her self-medicating. By lunchtime, it’d be round the office that poor Emma had a headache/period ache/brain haemorrhage/ whatever. Colin liked to exaggerate. When the receptionist was off for three months with glandular fever, Colin had had her diagnosed as dying with cancer, until she came back and quickly scotched the rumours by appearing healthy. Whoever said that women were the worst gossips had obviously never met Colin, Emma thought grimly.

  ‘Not well?’ Colin enquired silkily, perching on Emma’s spare chair. He was wearing a red spotted bow-tie today. It looked ridiculous.

  ‘Headache,’ Emma said sharply.

  ‘I find meditation really helps,’ Colin said. A devotee of anything New Age, he never stopped telling everyone exactly how they could improve their life the way he had. All you needed was time and an open mind, he’d say piously, as though he was open-minded and the rest of the office were cretinous oiks.

  ‘I find paracetamol helps,’ snapped Emma. ‘Was there something you wanted, Colin?’

  ‘Yes. Finn isn’t in and Edward came to me about the plans for the conference.’

  Emma bridled. Finn was the charity’s press officer. He and Emma often worked closely together planning the yearly conferences. If Finn wasn’t in, the last person Emma expected Edward to approach about it was the odious Colin, who couldn’t type four lines without making eight errors. Imagine asking him about the forthcoming conference on child safety. The words ‘piss-up’ and ‘brewery’ came to mind.

  ‘Did he?’ was all she said. Her head ached with the desire to tell Colin he was a jumped-up little idiot who wouldn’t do himself any favours trying to leapfrog over her to a senior managerial position in the company. But being a bit sharp with Colin was about as forceful as Emma had ever been, so she held her tongue.

  ‘He wanted to see what we’d been planning publicity-wise and I took the opportunity of putting my oar in with regards to how long the conference will last,’ Colin said smugly.

  Irrationally, Emma found herself taking offence. Working out how long conferences lasted and organizing every detail was her job. Helping Finn as publicity officer was Colin’s job. Not that he did that very well, Emma thought crossly.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit beyond your remit?’ she said.

  ‘Well, you see,’ Colin’s beady little eyes looked earnest, ‘I’ve been talking to journalists and they say if we want to really get the message across that we’re a serious agency concerned with children, then we should be having week-long conferences, maybe outside of Dublin, you know. So people can go away for a week and concentrate on them.’ He was getting into his stride now. ‘It’d be a wonderful idea, maybe go to Limerick or Galway and take over a small hotel where we can have guest speakers…’

  ‘Go away for a week?’ Emma was incredulous. ‘How is KrisisKids supposed to finance that sort of conference? The costs would be ruinous. And I don’t know which journalists you’ve been talking to, but it’s difficult enough to get one full day out of most of them because they’ve so many other events to cover. Only a small percentage will make the second day of the conference this time – and you want them to go away for a week! You’ve no idea, Colin, really you don’t.’

  Colin sniffed and got to his feet, tossing his head back in pique. ‘Edward thought it was a wonderful idea,’ he said. ‘He said he’d talk to you about it, but I thought I’d mention it first so you wouldn’t be surprised. I wish I hadn’t bothered. I remember when you were a nice person, Emma. I don’t know why you’ve changed, but you have – and not for the better, either! You’ve turned into a jealous bitch.’ With that, he swept out of Emma’s office.

  Emma stared at the door open-mouthed. Had she been awful to Colin? Had she been professionally sharp or merely unprofessionally bitchy because she felt threatened? Was Colin right – had she changed so much? It was hard not to when life was so difficult, she reasoned. Everyone and their granny had what they wanted and she didn’t. One baby, just one small baby, that’s all. Was that so much to ask for? How could anyone expect her to be serene and happy when this crippling need for a child was taking over her whole damn life! Crack. Emma looked down and saw that she’d broken one of the pale green KrisisKids pencils. Snapped it right in two.

  Horrified, she realized she’d just gone off on to another baby rant in her head. Thinking about her baby was taking over her entire life. Work, home, play, sex: you name it, longing for a baby drowned every other emotion and overwhelmed all other parts of her life. Now it was affecting her at work to the point where she had lost her temper with a junior member of staff who was doing nothing more than trying to come up with new ideas. Colin was a terrible gossip, for sure, but he wasn’t a bad person. Perhaps he did have a problem with Emma being his superior, but it was up to her to make sure that her subordinates worked with her and not against her. If Colin didn’t like having a woman boss, or if he was genuinely trying to make her look foolish, Emma should have dealt with it in a professional way and not by snapping his head off. It had to stop, she decided.

  Edward was on the phone when she knocked on his door but he motioned her to come in anyway.

  When he had finished the call, he smiled at her a tad nervously and said he was glad she’d come in because there was something he wante
d to discuss.

  ‘Colin Mulhall came up with quite a good suggestion earlier and I wanted to talk it over with you,’ he said hesitantly. He was never usually hesitant. Edward was the most direct and uncompromising person she’d ever met. But she instinctively knew he was wary of telling her this because he was afraid she’d go ballistic. How awful that she’d changed so much and nobody had told her.

  ‘I know you see the conference as solely your baby,’ Edward said.

  She winced at his choice of words.

  ‘And for that reason, I don’t want you to get upset at this, but we must consider all ideas, you understand?’

  Emma put him out of his misery. ‘Edward, I know what you’re going to say because Colin told me a few minutes ago – and I’m ashamed to say I was angry with him. I blew his suggestion out of the water because I was jealous and felt threatened, and I’m on my way to apologize to him. I just wanted to drop in to ask if you think I haven’t been doing my job properly lately, or if I’ve been difficult to work with…’ It was a tough question to ask but Emma’s high standards demanded it.

  Edward’s momentary hesitation told her everything.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said before he could speak. ‘There really is no excuse, Edward. I’m going to see Colin now, then I’m going home. When I come in tomorrow, I’ll be my old self again.’

  ‘Promise?’ Edward said.

  She nodded.

  Colin was sulking and immediately picked up his phone to make a call when Emma walked slowly to his desk. However, when Emma began to apologize profusely and explain that she was under a lot of strain about something entirely unrelated to work, he cheered up.

  ‘I thought you must be stressed out about something,’ he said. ‘I said to Finn only the other morning that you weren’t your lovely, smiling self and we couldn’t imagine what it was. We all know what it’s like to be under strain too, and if you ever feel like an old chat over a cappuccino, talk to me. You know I’d never breathe a word about anyone’s personal business.’