I didn’t sleep.
I’ve just been for a wee and something massive fell out of my vagina. I was both panicked and elated and thought maybe I had just given birth and experienced the easiest labour ever. No such luck. It was a huge blood clot. Literally the size of my fist. The fact that I nearly vomited when I saw it doesn’t bode well for when things get messier.
I am in a lot of pain now. The tightening in my tummy is very strong and when it happens I have to stop whatever I am doing and sit down. I have timed it on my alarm clock and it is happening every six minutes.
I have taken two paracetamol as is recommended.
It has done fuck all.
All the books say that I need to measure my cervix.
Not just my vagina. My cervix. I need to stick my fingers up myself and feel about to see how big the opening is. God, just writing that makes me want to throw up.
You’d think with the amount I have been wanking lately I’d be totally fine with having a good old rummage.
I am not.
My alarm clock says it is now 08.16.
I have been sick and have diarrhoea.
I don’t know if that is part of labour or just because I am panicking so badly.
I want to pace, but there is now an inch of water on the ground floor and so Lucky, Simon and I are cooped up on the mezzanine.
Lucky is anxious. He knows that something is wrong with me and keeps nuzzling in for cuddles and reassurance and then wriggling out of my arms when a contraction grips me and I squeeze him too hard. Simon is anxious because he doesn’t like the water. He paces at the edge of the mezzanine like an expectant father. I would laugh at him if I had the energy.
I’ve tried sleeping, reading, humming, meditating (sort of), and listening to music, but nothing is distracting me from the pain.
I need to do something else to pass the time and I need to tell the end of my story. In case something happens.
In case I die.
I need to write about the last night.
When I walked out of work for the very last time, I went straight to the pub with my work colleagues. As soon as we sat down, I called James. He was already on his way to his sister’s to see her and his nephews and said he might meet up with me later but would probably just go home. He sounded depressed. I asked if he wanted me to come home and was hugely relieved when he said no. I was, understandably, starting to panic and, for the first time, I thought having him with me might actually make it worse.
Following the destruction of the Channel Tunnel and the insane few weeks that had followed there had been an unspoken agreement between us that we would act like the past few months had never happened. We were united once more in our fear of this new unknown terror.
But, as much as I tried, I couldn’t help but be angry and disappointed that the end of the world had cheated me out of my chance at a new beginning. How ironic that now, after all this time, James needed me as much as I needed him.
I rang Ginny while downing my second glass of wine. There was no answer. I hoped this meant she was out of range, hidden with Alex and Radley in some mythical northern fortress.
Harry texted continuously, asking where I was, asking if we could meet. I ignored him.
By the end of my third glass of wine, I was lonely.
My workmates were perfectly nice people, but there was really only one person I wanted to spend ‘last night’ (as people had christened it) with.
I didn’t know where Xav was and even if I did he probably wouldn’t have wanted to come and spend the last night with me. And I wouldn’t have blamed him.
Despite everything that was happening, I still hadn’t called Xav. I was still too scared of what he might say.
But now it really was the end of the world.
Fuck the end of the world, fuck the past and fuck my fear.
I rang Xav.
He didn’t answer.
I persuaded my workmates to move on to my favourite bar. It was heaving. Everywhere was heaving.
I stood in the corner alone, closed my eyes, and remembered.
This had been the first bar Xav had taken me to after he had rescued me from my non-blind date. Nearly twenty years ago we had stood here and I had drunk half a pint of snake-bite and black and listened to this crazily exotic creature explain the best way to get served if you were underage. I had taken all his advice, gone to the bar … and been thrown out.
Xav had changed my life and, for a while, he had been my life.
I had to see him before the world ended.
I opened my eyes, searching for the easiest way to push through the throng of people in front of me.
And then I saw it. An unmistakeable flash of angelic blond hair.
I pushed through the crowd and we met in the middle.
He pointed to my wine.
‘They served you this time then?’
I laughed and then burst into tears.
We both cried. We both tried to say sorry. We both agreed it was too late to waste time on apologising.
We both knew we were going to die.
I begged him to come and stay with me, he told me he’d rather die of 6DM than be bored to death by James. I told him to go to my parents’ then, I was happy for him to go this time.
He shook his head.
‘Not this time. This time’s different. They deserve to just have each other to worry about at the end, not me as well.’
My eyes welled with tears again.
‘I don’t want you to be alone.’
He took my hand.
‘Sweetheart, I won’t be alone.’ He glanced over to a group of blokes who were standing in the other corner, openly admiring him.
Xav had never been keen on being the last one at any party, and the end of the world would be no different. He wasn’t going to stay at the bar until it closed, wasn’t going to wait patiently for the end of the world, he was going to meet the end of the world head on.
He decided to throw an impromptu ‘End of Days’ party at his house. He wanted me to go to his party, spend one last night with him there.
Unlike Xav, I was almost always the last one at all of the parties we went to, including his.
I was the one who found people’s coats, ordered Ubers, kicked people out when they wouldn’t leave.
I was the one left in charge, the one who cleared up afterwards, tidying away other people’s forgotten leftovers and memories.
I didn’t want to be the last one at his party this time. It would be too sad.
I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak without crying again.
Xav touched his hand gently to my cheek and stood up. I gripped his hand.
‘Don’t go!’
He smiled the sweetest smile.
‘I love you.’
He pulled me to him, enveloped me in a hug that smelt of Tom Ford, cigarettes and a thousand memories, and whispered in my ear.
‘You’re stronger than you think. Try to remember that.’
He was wrong.
I wasn’t strong at all.
As soon as he walked away I texted Harry back.
We were at a club and I was dancing when Harry arrived.
He walked straight onto the dance floor and started dancing with us. No stopping for a drink, no lurking at the bar, no bopping by the fringes of the floor; straight in and on it.
He was awful. Really, truly a terrible dancer. Worse than my dad.
I stopped and stared.
He didn’t even notice for a while, he was just happy. Happy dancing.
When he saw me he stopped, held his hand out for me to take, and then pulled me to him.
He span me around, and there, on the dance floor, in front of everyone we worked with and everyone we had spent months hiding our affair from, I kissed him.
Maybe if I hadn’t just said a final goodbye to my best friend, who I had wasted months not talking to, maybe if Harry hadn’t been such an awful dancer, maybe if I hadn’t been lookin
g for a distraction from my encroaching panic attack, maybe if it hadn’t been the end of the world …
Maybe then I wouldn’t have chosen that moment to finally have sex with Harry.
But all of that was happening, so I did.
I kissed Harry on the dance floor and then dragged him into the disabled toilets and we fucked against the wall.
It wasn’t great.
Not his fault – if you can have an orgasm in a disabled toilet on the last night of the world while trying to ward off a massive panic attack and struggling not to let your knickers fall onto the filthy floor – then you are a better woman than I.
Harry didn’t have the same problem.
He is potential Daddy number one.
After the disabled toilet interlude I went back to the dance floor and spent the next hour dancing and drinking the tequila shots that were frequently offered to me.
Harry kept trying to get me to stop dancing and start talking, and I kept ignoring him.
Finally, he picked me up and carried me off the dance floor. I was in hysterics. The hero was carrying me off into the sunset! Here we go Mum – end of the world, and I did it! I was the heroine in my own romantic movie!
Harry put me down.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
I was drunk and laughing.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I want to be with you. I want to be with you at the end. I love you.’
I laughed again. Uproariously.
Not the reaction you want when you have just told someone you love them.
‘You don’t love me! You don’t even know me. Come and dance!’
I grabbed his hand and tried to yank him back to the dance floor, but he pulled me to him.
‘I do know you. I just want to be with you.’
I stopped laughing.
‘Well, that’s not what I want.’
‘What do you want then?’
I didn’t think, I just snapped back …
‘I just want to be left alone.’
It was a drunkenly impulsive comment.
But the moment it was out of my mouth I knew it was true
I had never been alone, never stood by myself and handled things for myself. I had left it up to other people in my life to make things better for me – my mum and dad, Xav, James, Ginny, and even Harry.
I’d used them all as an excuse never to become who I really wanted to be.
That was what I should have said to James, that’s what I should have told him.
But James wasn’t there, Harry was.
So it was Harry who looked at me with eyes full of confusion.
‘I’m sorry, I have to go,’ I mumbled, pulling away from him and rushing out of the club.
I didn’t know where I was going, didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew that I had to have some space to think, to work out what this revelation meant.
But, as I stepped outside the club I was pulled into a cab by well-meaning workmates intent on one last hurrah, given a bottle of vodka to swig from, and laughingly persuaded to go to the lap dancing club ‘just for one’.
My previous resolve, the urgency I had felt and the very epiphany that I had just experienced, slipped away into the drunken haze of the night.
When I woke in bed late the next morning I really didn’t remember the night before.
But two days later, when my head had stopped pounding, and my vision cleared enough to read the sixty-two texts that Harry had sent me, my memory began to come back.
Of course, it was Harry I met in my favourite bar after my fateful visit to the hospital when James was sick.
Harry was clearly ill too, but only just – in the first part of 6DM where it only feels like a cold. I didn’t tell him what was going to come next.
I thought he was going to ask to be with me at the end again, but he didn’t.
He had something else to tell me.
He coughed, took a large swig of whisky and coughed again.
‘I know you better than you think. I know you used to write. I read your stuff when you were with the music paper.’
This was news to me. I’d never met anyone who had recognised me from my previous career.
‘It was good. I liked it and I liked you. I didn’t recognise you at first, in the office, you seemed so different. I was going to say something, but I didn’t think you’d want to be reminded. Cool music journalist to, well, this.’
Thanks.
‘But I watched you. I watched you at work, and it was still there. The way you talk to people and are with people and the way you write, even just updates. They’re funny. That’s why I wanted to be with you, to get to know you better. I wanted the woman who called me a shit, who cried in the lift and who leant on me.’
I think this is the point where I started to cry.
‘But you weren’t her with me. You were different. You weren’t the person I had thought you were, you weren’t the one I really wanted to be with. I saw flashes of her, but it felt like you were pretending to be someone else. Like you don’t even like who you really are, which is fucking ridiculous.’
He coughed again, and this time his hands had flecks of blood on them when he took them away from his mouth.
‘So, you’re right. I don’t know you, I never got the chance. You never let me. And I tried. I really fucking tried. And if you’d just let me be with you and not some fucking pretend version, then I think I would have really liked you … and maybe you might have liked you as well. But, I suppose, neither of us will ever know now.’
He kissed me on the forehead and left.
I never heard from him again.
I went back to James, cared for him, had sex with him (potential Daddy number two) and then watched him die.
Then I began my new life. On my own.
Last one at the party.
The final party this time.
It turns out both Xav and Harry were right.
The real me is stronger than I thought.
And I like her.
I hurt.
Not just my tummy. All of me hurts. I can’t even explain what it feels like because it doesn’t feel like anything I have ever experienced before.
When a contraction happens now, I can’t think or move. My body is frozen in a rigor mortis of pain that means I can only groan incomprehensibly until it passes. It drives all rational thought from me and I would do anything to stop it. Anything.
I have no idea how other women summon the energy or wherewithal to scream; I can barely manage to breathe.
I know it sounds like I am being dramatic, but if you’ve never felt it you don’t know what it is like so SHUT THE FUCK UP.
I wish there was someone here I could shout at.
Or hold the hand of.
Or kill.
The contractions are coming every three minutes. I don’t have time to relax in between as the books say I should, I don’t have time to start breathing properly again before the next one comes, I don’t have time to think.
I can’t have a baby like this.
I can’t write any more.
I can’t hold the pen properly.
INSERT: ITEM #6294/2
Dictaphone Recording (Tape 2 / Recording 1)
(Transcribed)
(Heavy breathing and rhythmic panting.)
The … contractions are now two minutes apart.
They’re so painful. I don’t think I can cope much more. I am so tired.
(Sobs.)
So, I have two minutes to talk, to do this, while I still can talk.
Oh God, not yet …
(Long, low groan, panting, crying, deep breath.)
It … it is still raining.
The water is deep. I don’t know how deep. Nothing is floating yet, but I think it would be up to my ankles. I don’t know what will happen if it doesn’t stop soon.
Why is this happening?
Is this God? Maybe 6DM was sent by God. Maybe he wanted e
veryone to die but I didn’t, and so now he is sending other things to kill me. Did he trap me in the snow? Did he send the beast to eat me, but Lucky saved me? Is Lucky my angel? How will Lucky save me from the flood?
Oh God, that’s insane. Am I finally going insane? Is this it?
What if my baby isn’t immune? What if my baby isn’t immune to 6DM and gets it and dies as soon as it is born? What if this has all been for nothing?
Oh God, another one …
(Deep, prolonged groaning, crying and panting.)
Oh God, oh God, how much more? I can’t do it. I can’t do it.
I’m so tired. I’m so alone.
I want my mum. Please, I really want my mum.
(Sobbing and crying.)
Okay … okay.
(Deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling. There is a long pause.)
So, this is for you little one. This is your message.
I love you. I haven’t said that before I don’t think, and I should have, because I do, I really do. I love you.
I don’t care if you are a boy or a girl. I will love you. I don’t care if you are straight or gay or happy or sad or good or naughty or quiet or loud. You never need have to try and make me happy, or pretend to be better or different or who you think I want you to be. I will always love you just the way you are. And it doesn’t matter that I don’t know who your dad is and it doesn’t matter that your dad isn’t here. We can be happy. I will make a life for both of us that we will both be happy in, I promise.
I love you.
Please come out of me.
(Sobs.)
Recording ends.
INSERT: ITEM #6294/2
Dictaphone Recording (Tape 2 / Recording 2)
(Transcribed)
(Panting and crying.)
It’s been two hours. I’ve been pushing for two hours. I thought it would have been over by now.
It hurts so much, it hurts so much.
(Panting and groaning.)
I’m scared. I don’t want to do this on my own. I want my mum. I miss her so much. Please help me …
(Groaning.)
I have to push, I have to push …
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