Heart of Glass (36 page)

“
Even if I am pregnant, it
won’t be like that. Ben and I love each other.” I
sniffed.

But he doesn’t want
children.

***

Three days later, I was
sitting on the toilet, a white packet in my hand, thinking about
what Prue had said. If I were pregnant, my relationship with Ben
would be inexplicably altered. He’d already told me he wasn’t ready
to be a father and I knew I wasn’t a candidate for Mother of the
Year. I'd only just learnt how to make pasta without stuffing it
up. The worst thing that could happen would be if I told Ben and he
only stayed with me out of some twisted sense of loyalty. If I were
pregnant, I had to be sure that he was with me for the right
reasons. I stared at the white tiles that ran across the floor and
up the wall. Fuck!

Why did this have to happen
to me, to Ben, to us? Why did it have to happen now? A tear dripped
down my cheek and plopped off the end of my nose and onto my leg.
It wasn’t fair. Every time I thought my life was sorting itself out
another drama happened. I tried to think rationally. There was no
point in jumping the gun and getting all worked up over nothing. I
wasn’t even pregnant, I told myself. Ben and I had used
precautions. Then again, that little voice inside me said, you
never could be one hundred percent sure. And that strange tummy bug
was lingering on day after day.

A knock at the door broke my
train of thought. A loud knock, Ben’s knock. Pulling up my jeans, I
picked up the box and stowed it in the back of the medicine
cabinet. There was plenty of time to do the test later. Knowing or
not knowing wasn’t going to make the problem disappear.

“
Why didn’t you use your
key?” I asked, smiling as I opened the door to let him
in.

“
You didn’t give me
one.”

I froze. It was those eyes,
those hooded black eyes.

“
Hi
Blondie
, long time no
see.”

“
Mark.”

I didn’t know what to say.
He looked exactly the same, devastatingly sexy. His dreadlocks
still hung over the heavy set of his eyes, which were glinting at
me.

“
Can I come in?”

“
Do you think that’s wise?
I’d still like to cut off your balls you know.”

It’d taken a long time
before the thought of inflicting grievous bodily harm on that
gorgeous torso had receded into the back of my mind. Seeing him
standing in my doorway rekindled it all over again. My face
twisted.

He stepped past me and went
into the lounge. “New furniture,” he remarked, looking around.
“Sweet. Looks like my little
Blondie’
s moved up in the
world.”

My heart was pounding
furiously but I ignored it. “I’m surprised you can remember my
furniture. You were always stoned when you were here.”

Mark sat down and looked up
at me with not so much as a flinch of guilt. “Still have that razor
like tongue, eh?”

“
What do you want Mark? You
made it perfectly clear how you felt about me that last time I saw
you.”

“
I didn’t come here to
cause trouble.”

“
Ha. That’s a joke.
Everywhere you go there’s trouble. Why’re you here? It’s been
nearly three years.”

I walked into the kitchen
and pulled out a bottle of wine from the fridge, pouring a glass.
If Mark was here, there was some important reason and it would mean
I’d need a lot of wine to digest it. His revelations had often had
that effect on me. They needed anaesthetic to soften the
blow.

“
Beer?” I
called.

“
No thanks. I don’t drink
anymore.”

The bottle in my hand fell
to the floor with a resounding crash but didn’t break and I looked
at him in disbelief. How could this be? Mark and alcohol were best
friends. He’d cut off his leg sooner than give up a bottle of
Captain Morgan and the possibility of him not drinking any more was
about as remote as me going on a Himalayan trekking
holiday.

Shaking my head, I picked
the bottle up and put it back in the fridge. “Did you come here to
tell me that or have you got some other little bombshell to
drop?”

I took my own glass and sat
in the chair opposite him, preparing myself for his next
revelation. “Why
are
you here?”

“
I came to tell you that
you need to be tested for HIV and Hep B. I was sick a while back
and after some tests I came up positive.”

I drained my glass and sat
it on the coffee table. Mark never delivered a simple blow. It
always had to be a complex series of jabs and hooks.

“
You have AIDS?”

“
No, I have HIV and Hep B.
Have for some time, apparently, and there’s a possibility that I’ve
infected you.”

“
How? We never shared
needles; I never even used a needle.”

“
It’s transferred through
bodily fluids and Hep B is a hundred times more contagious than
HIV. If you think back, you can’t honestly say we were careful
about our sexual practises. You were quite a dirty little girl back
then.”

I could have punched
him.

“
You bastard. How dare you!
I let you into my life and you got me hooked on speed. Now you tell
me that you’ve given me a life threatening disease because I was a
dirty little girl. You piece of slime.”

“
Sorry, Bella. Drugs make
you do weird shit, and you know it.” His face, for the first time
ever, looked genuinely sad and I wanted to hug him, to make it
better for him. It was the kind of face that would have brought
tears to my eyes, a face I had never seen when we were together, a
face that made me want to love him. That is, assuming I hadn’t
known the type of person he really was.

“
If this is meant to be
some sort of cleansing apology thing like they do at Alcoholics
Anonymous it’s backfired. I don’t want your apologies. I trusted
you and you spat all over me.” I held the door open. “Get
out.”

Mark stood in the doorway.
“It was how we were. You were partly to blame. I didn’t do it by
myself. You liked that kinky shit. Anyway, all I’m saying is, you
should be tested. You could have Hep B and not even know you’ve got
it.”

I calmed down. “I s’pose so.
Thanks. I hope it goes okay for you.”

“
You too.”

Chapter 25

ALREADY ONE

‘
Cause we’re already
one

Already one

Now only time can come
between us

Neil Young

How had this happened? How
could I have been so stupid? Those crusty old nuns at school had
warned me. Sex makes you pregnant. You must stay celibate until
marriage. Drugs and alcohol are bad and can kill you. You must
abstain. If you sleep around you will be branded a slut. You will
pay. But I hadn’t listened. I was too busy having fun. It was time
to pay up. Pay up and grow up. The devil had knocked at my door,
looking dark and sexy, and handed me the bill for all the fun I'd
had. My body had turned into a walking time bomb and I had no way
of knowing how to rid myself of the explosives without blowing
myself, and everyone around me, to smithereens. Reality, which I'd
been blissfully ignoring since my teens, was alive and well and boy
was she antsy with me.

I looked at Dr Carter.
Hopefully, he had the answer. He snuffled over the paper and
coughed into his hand asthmatically. “As the saying goes, there’s
some good news and some bad news.”

Let me have it, I thought.
Stop it with the bedside manner and give me the worst. I can take
it. I gripped the sides of the office chair and swallowed, “Give me
the bad news.”

“
The tests are positive. On
both counts.” He waited, pausing for me comprehend the full weight
of his statement. What did that mean? Was I going to die or
not?

I breathed deeply and
swallowed again.

“
So what are the
implications?” I might as well know now if I was going to die. I’d
have to start planning the funeral so that Mum wouldn’t fill the
church with hymns from the fifties.

My funeral was to be a
celebration of my life not a regurgitation of all the God songs I'd
hated at school.

Come on, old guy, I thought.
Hit me, see if I fall.

“
Firstly, you’ve contracted
Hepatitis B, so your friend was right to suggest at
test.”

“
He’s not my friend
anymore.”

And if I never see him
again, it will be too soon.

“
Ahem, right.” He cleared
his throat and shuffled the papers around his desk. “Secondly, I’d
say you’ve had it for quite a while and the symptoms you’ve
experienced lately- nausea, fatigue, itchiness, loss of appetite-
are what we would call a ‘flare up’. It can happen occasionally and
last for differing periods of time. Have you experienced severe flu
like symptoms in the past?”

I looked at the wall,
thinking. How was I supposed to remember that? Most of my brain
cells had drowned in alcohol way back in 1983.

“
I had a bad flu about
three years ago, when I was at Uni. The symptoms were the same and
it took me months to get over it.” I didn’t add, that at the time
I’d thought it a side effect of the drugs I was doing. Add to the
mix, the fact that I didn’t eat for months and had survived on a
cocktail of alcohol and menthol cigarettes and it was a wonder that
I was actually alive to tell the tale. Being the popular
life-of-the-party girl that I had moulded myself into meant that
illness was out of the question, I had simply taken more ‘speed’ to
counteract the effects.

“
And you never sought a
medical opinion?”

“
I thought it was the flu,
you know.”

And going to the family
doctor to get something for your drug addiction wasn’t an option,
especially since he’d known me since he’d slapped my bottom at
birth.

He nodded. “My guess is that
it was the onset of the virus. It takes some weeks after exposure
before symptoms appear. Sometimes they never do. That’s why we call
it the ‘silent killer’. Would this have been about the time you
were friendly with the person who asked you to be
tested?”

“
Yes.”

The bastard. I wished I had
a kitchen knife right about then. Mark’s head was looking good on a
plate next to his balls.

“
Right.” He scribbled
something in my file in that hieroglyphic scratching only doctors
can understand.

At last, he turned back to
face me again. “The pregnancy test is also positive.”

Oh, sweet Jesus! I burst
into tears, sobbing with my hands over my eyes, the likes of which
I was sure he would never have experienced before. A life
threatening illness I could cope with but a baby? There was no way
on this earth I was ready for a baby.

“
Would you like a glass of
water?”

“
Y...Yes please,” I
blubbered, blowing my nose. He rose to the door and went out,
reappearing seconds later with a plastic cup half filled with
filtered water. He handed it to me and I took a sip.

“
Better?”

“
Thank you. What does all
this mean?” There had to be some good in all this. My life couldn’t
just be one big pile of crap.

“
Right.” He shuffled his
papers again. “The good news is that hepatitis B is treatable. Your
case is what we term ‘Chronic Persistent’, which means that you
have one of two options. You can let it run it’s natural course and
hope that it goes away of it’s own accord but you will be
contagious and you may experience flare ups like the one you’re
having now. It may also be that you never have another flare up
again. However, you’re a carrier and will need to inform all
previous and future sexual partners of this to prevent spreading of
the virus. You’ll need to alter your diet and lifestyle. Alcohol
and cigarettes are out, because in the worst case scenario you may
have suffered liver damage or even contract liver cancer somewhere
down the track. Now that we know about the virus, we can monitor
your situation and test for any damage. You could also undergo a
course of treatment, which lasts between four and six months. It
won’t cure the virus but may help reduce the symptoms and could
change the status of your infection.”

“
I’m not going to
die?”

He smiled at that. “No and
you can still lead a normal healthy life, provided you take the
necessary steps and precautions and because of the pregnancy you’ll
need to be even more vigilant.”

“
What do you
mean?”

He swung around on his chair
and took some pamphlets from a file on the corner of his desk. “You
should know that there is a very high risk that your baby will be
born with Hepatitis, due to the blood and fluids naturally involved
in the birth itself. Take these home and read them. They should
give you some perspective into the type of problems you may
encounter and the lifestyle changes required.”

I began to cry again. I was
having Ben’s baby.