One Thing Led to Another (16 page)

‘Aahh, you getting all sentimental?’

Jim walks into my room, all shower fresh and leaps onto my bed.

‘Do you remember what happened about half an hour after that picture was taken?’ he says, taking it from me to get a better look.

‘I drowned Bart in the Jacuzzi?’

‘Close. I got my finger stuck in the food mixer making mojitos and we all had to go to A&E, pissed as lords.’

I shake my head laughing.

‘You idiot, Ashcroft.’

‘This baby’s not got a chance with us two as parents, has it, poor bugger? Not a cat in hell’s chance of having any common sense.’

We sit, me on the floor, Jim on the bed, looking at photos until a fiery orange sunset envelops the room.

‘Hey, check this one out.’ I hand Jim another picture: me, Jim and Vicky stood in front of Jim’s old Polo on a day trip to Macclesfield. Vicky’s hair slapped to her face in the rain, mine’s a big frizz ball, blowing about in the wind. We often used to go on random day trips back then when we had two lectures a week and nothing better to do. How simple things were then, compared to now, sitting in this room! What will mine and Jim’s photo albums of the future look like? Sometimes it feels like my world is doing a seismic shift beneath my feet.

‘Jim?’

‘Yeah?’ He chuckles rather sweetly at the photo he’s holding.

‘You know we’re friends.’

‘Yes I know we’re friends.’

‘And you know we’re having a baby together.’

‘I had gathered that, yes, why, what’s bothering you?’

‘Well. Do you think we’ll always be friends?’

Jim looks at me and frowns.

‘What are you on about, why wouldn’t we be?’

‘Well, it’s just, you know what people say about your
relationship being really tested when you have a baby?’

‘What? Like, you can’t ever finish a conversation and want to kill each other due to sleep deprivation?’

‘Oh, you’ve heard that one too. Well, I suppose…’ I pick at the carpet. ‘I’m worried that since we’re not even married, or going out with each other…’

‘Our friendship’ll be next?’

‘Yes, if I’m honest.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ says Jim, going back to looking at the photos. ‘We’ve just got to make sure we make the effort that’s all.’

‘What, like as if we are actually married?’

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ says Jim. ‘This is a relationship after all. A bit of a funny one, true. But it’s the only one we’ve got so we’re just going to have to try our best to make it work.’

Ten minutes later, we are sitting on the lounge floor, Morrissey on the stereo and a huge piece of paper in front of us.

‘Nothing like a bit of Morrissey to make you want to jump off the nearest building on a Saturday evening I always find,’ says Jim, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Now, are you sure you want to do this?’

‘Yep, it’s definitely the way forward.’

‘Well as long as we put it somewhere nobody can see it. Awful would rip the piss no end at school if he saw this. I can’t have anyone think I’m running some sort of Christian Fundamentalist regime in my house.’

Jim lays down on his stomach on the black and white rug. I perch on the sofa, supervising.

He writes ‘THE HOUSE RULES’ in bright red marker pen, then he draws a line down the middle of the page and on one side he writes WE WILL and the other side he writes WE WILL NOT.

‘You go first then,’ I say, ‘it was your idea.’

‘OK, what sort of thing do you think should be on there?’ he says, stumped already.

I start: ‘Stuff that’s going to help us, I suppose. Help us not wind up wanting to kill one another before the baby’s even born. Oh, and boundaries.’

‘Boundaries?’ Jim wrinkles his nose.

‘Yeah you know, they’re the basis of all good behaviour and successful relationships. Our kid’s going to have to have plenty of them so we might as well start with ourselves. And this is a new set up, remember from the one we had before? We’re not two idiots falling into bed together drunk all the time. We’re responsible parents-to-be first and friends second. We have to navigate a whole new landscape, Jim.’

‘Woo! Look who’s gone all grown up and philosophical,’ Jim teases.

‘Well it’s true!’ I say, rather surprised myself at that little outburst, it’s usually Jim who’s all Victor Mature. ‘Oh for God’s sake just give me the pen,’ I bark, standing up and yanking it out of his hand. Then I sit down on the floor next to him and take the plunge, write the first RULE.

It’s quite easy once we get started save for a few moments where the concentration goes a bit funny and we start putting stupid things like: THOU SHALT Recite Keats and Bring me Muffins on a silver platter at 5 p.m. every day (me) and THOU SHALT Bring Me Cold Beer, a Whore and a Newspaper at 5 p.m. every day (Jim).

The final, serious list, though, looks like this.

1) WE WILL NOT fall into the trap of becoming ‘just housemates’. We will actually venture out with friends or together on occasions too.

2) WE WILL take turns to cook for each other and have the decency to tell the other in advance if we’re going out.

3) WE WILL have one night a week when we actually
talk, about meaningful things, like the fact we’re about to have a baby and who will be the next American President rather than just watch telly all the time.

4) WE WILL give me a ten point head start when we play Scrabble as Jim’s an English teacher so that’s not fair.

5) WE WILL refer to each other as ‘partner’ in front of other people, for ease. ‘Father of child’ is too much of a mouthful.

6) WE WILL NOT allow Jim ever to go to Blockbuster alone after two disasters in the past month (
The Black Dahlia
– a lot of men in trilbies talking in very low voices for five hours. Followed by
Pirates of the Caribbean
– surely a cure for insomnia).

7) WE WILL both read books on babies and parenting. We don’t want to be the only parents who think it’s OK to feed cheese on toast to a three-week-old.

8) WE WILL NOT tell anyone at antenatal classes that we are not a couple. (Jim protests this point as he couldn’t give a shit what people think of him or us, but I’ve already been met with far too many raised eyebrows and awkward silences to have to go through that in a room of twenty strangers.)

9) WE WILL start flat-hunting for me as soon as possible after baby is born so that I don’t get too used to this cosy set up.

10) WE WILL NOT shag, snog or date other people whilst I am pregnant. It’s just a bit bad taste.

I physically twitch at the mention of this last one. ‘Where do you expect I’d find a date anyway?’ I say, alarmed how easy this stuff slips out. ‘The antenatal speed-dating night?!’

‘Throughout my twenties, I was obsessed with not getting pregnant. I never dreamt I’d spend my thirties obsessed with the opposite. It had become like a military operation. Every time that fertile window arrived, we’d be dragging ourselves upstairs. There’s nothing quite so likely to kill the romance as your husband seeing you standing on your head with your legs in the air for ten minutes afterwards, but fifteen months later and we’ve got our baby.’

Lucy, 37, Oxford

I come downstairs in the morning, the first of our co-habiting life, to find Jim perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, his dressing-gown belt trailing on the floor, his hair all separated like brunette bales of hay.

He’s flicking through my copy of
OK!
magazine.

‘I can’t believe you actually buy this stuff,’ he says. ‘Do you reckon when we have our baby, they’d do a shoot with us?’ He crunches into a spoonful of cornflakes, then looks whimsically into the middle distance. ‘“
Believe It!
journalist Tess Jarvis and dashing teacher James Ashcroft introduce their son, Caspian Ignatius Napoleon, whilst
reclining on their chaise-longue in their beautiful country home.”!’

I burst into a snigger.

‘Er,
no.
But I’m quite worried how easily those names just tripped off your tongue.’

I walk over to Jim and drag the magazine over so I can read it.

There’s a shoot with a pregnant Gwen Stefani and an accompanying feature about how she longed to start planning the second baby the minute she dropped the first.

My head runs away with me, something else to fixate on. ‘Mmm, I guess we won’t be able to plan a family like most people, will we? I guess we know already, that this baby will only ever have half-siblings, if it gets a sibling at all.’

Jim looks at me, incredulous. ‘And all this thinking at what? nine in the morning? God, girls are hilarious. Anyway, nobody knows what awaits them. Gwen Stefani’s a pop singer for God’s sake. She’ll probably be divorced in a week. Or in The Priory.’

I go over to Jim’s Smeg fridge – second-hand from e-bay but still a Smeg fridge. There’s no magnets or pictures on it, just a Fantasy Football league table and a note that says ‘Dawn, social worker, Tuesday, 2 p.m.’. Nobody seems to bother with Dawn, Jim’s sister, as far as I can tell, except Jim. His mum can’t be doing with her, which is fair enough since she steals from her to fund her drug habit. But Dawn still lives with their mum in Stoke-on-Trent, which drives Jim’s mum crazy. Jim took me to see his mum once, a huge mound of a lady with eye bags like dead mice and the weight of the world hanging off the end of her ever-burning fag. She suffers from agoraphobia, something which started when Jim’s dad left. Not that Jim ever goes into a lot of detail, he’s fiercely private and protective about his family. But anyone can see that Rita Ashcroft has been paralysed by the shit life
has dealt her, so that she is now an immovable boulder onto which crashes a relentless array of bad news. The worst of which is Dawn.

‘What are you up to today?’ I ask, venturing inside the fridge. Inside is a huge salami; some black bean paste, four cans of Heineken and some parmesan cheese.

‘Awful’s asked a few lads round from school to watch football, maybe a cheeky pint or three – if her indoors approves that is.’

‘Jim.’ I slap down the salami on the worktop and hack off a four-inch hunk. ‘In my book, joking that we’re married is only two steps away from behaving like we actually are.’ I take a big bite of salami.

Anyone would think I’d bitten off a piece of my own arm, the look of horror on Jim’s face. ‘What are you doing?’ he says.

‘Eating salami.’

‘For breakfast?’

‘Yes, for breakfast, if that’s OK with you.’

‘And what are you up to today, Fraulein Schmitt? May I ask? Besides eating continental sausage?’

‘Shopping!’ I announce triumphantly. ‘I officially surrender! I feel like a heffer. I need some maternity wear.’

‘What, some of those weird jeans with a girdle that make you look like you might have a baby kangaroo in there?’

‘Maybe I’ll get some of those, yes, or maybe some vast dungarees.’

Jim grimaces, a spoonful of cornflakes just inches from his mouth. ‘Or maybe not.’

‘What’s it to you? It may be the only time I get to wear vast dungarees in my whole entire life.’

‘Let’s hope so. Although the rate you’re going with that salami may mean you’re in them for the rest of your life.’

‘Piss off!’

‘I’m only teasing.’ He slips off the stool. ‘I’m making eggs, do you fancy some?’

‘Yeah, why not.’

‘How do you like them?’ he says, and we both immediately start laughing at what I’m so obviously going to say next.

‘As long as they’re not fertilized, James Ashcroft, I’m really not bothered.’

I used to wonder how come there were so many people in the world. Now, I realize, it’s just that pregnant ladies do not tend to frequent Turnmills of a Friday night and then to bed to lie in the dark for the rest of the weekend. Now, I realize, they were here all the time. Here in Nappy Valley.

Everywhere I look, there they are: queuing up outside the Blue Mountain Café, bump-to-bump, spilling out of the overpriced boutiques of North Cross Road, buying baby grows with slogans like ‘If you think I’m a mess you should see my daddy’ – a bargain at twenty-two quid. If they’re not pregnant, they’re pushing a galactic looking pram that looks like it might take off any second it’s so high tech. And there’s a uniform too: for the girls, a sort of trendy granny look – all printed knee-length skirts and layers and orthopedic shoes. And for the boys, it’s heavy-framed glasses, Birkenstocks and a look that says, ‘I didn’t bargain for this when I snogged her pissed out of my head down the Red Star.’

If I was in denial before, there’s no chance of it now. I feel like a drug addict on day one of rehab, thrown into the deep end with the real hardcore set.

I cross Lordship Lane to the bus stop where a Dulwich Alpha-couple + Alpha baby in bugaboo stand in the sun, the man with his arm around the woman. She’s wearing a gorgeous yellow sundress that shows off her elegant collarbones and bejewelled sandals. Her face is hidden with enormous vintage
shades but I can tell she’s stunning, it’s all in the cheekbones. With his piercing blue eyes and sculpted physique, he is no less impressive. But I can’t help but think he’s strangely behind in the fashion stakes with his desert boots and eighties pale denim jacket.

He gives me one of those smiles that tells me he’s never had any difficulty with the ladies. I’m flattered, any attention is good attention these days.

We say ‘Hi’ and I gesture that their baby is gorgeous, which she is. She’s got her dad’s blue eyes and mum’s dark hair: a pedigree baby. I notice that the label on her blanket says Petit Bateau – that figures, since we are deep in the heartland of the chi-chi baby boutique.

The man says, ‘She may look pretty now but at four o’clock this morning I could have bloody strangled her!’ The woman laughs and I do too. Sweet, I think. Babies are like new lovers to their parents. Any excuse to mention them – a polite gesture from a stranger for example – and they’re away.

‘How old is she?’ I ask.

‘Three months,’ says the girl.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Matilda. Tilly.’

The man has his hand on the woman’s bottom as she talks. They look properly in love. Maybe it’s not true what people say after all.

‘She likes you,’ says the girl, as I smile at Tilly and she grins back.

‘Oh that’s good,’ I say, ‘I’ll have one of these come December, all going well. I’m pregnant you see.’

‘Really?!’ The girl gives me a beaming smile. ‘Congratulations, you don’t look it, not for four months, you’ll probably be one of these lucky people who’s really neat.’

‘Rachel was big as a house, weren’t you hon?’ says the
man. ‘I loved those gorgeous curves, myself, that belly and bum. She’s gone all skinny now.’ Rachel doesn’t say anything.

I say, ‘Well, I’m off to get some maternity clothes now, actually.’

‘And we’re off to get some post-maternity wear, aren’t we babe?’ says the guy. ‘I’m treating her.’

‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ I say, thinking Jim didn’t offer to treat me to maternity wear, did he? And it was him who got me in this state.

‘I’m Rachel by the way,’ says Rachel, ‘and this is Alan.’

‘Her husband,’ says Alan. Alan? I wouldn’t have put her with an Alan.

‘I’m Tess, nice to meet you. Do you live around here?’

Rachel looks to Alan to answer, he’s clearly the talker of the couple. ‘Bassano Street, warehouse flat, one of the ones with a roof terrace,’ he says.

Wow, architect, I think. I bet he’s an architect and she’s an interior designer.

‘And you?’ says Rachel.

‘Lacon Road just up there, just off North Cross Road.’

‘Have you and your husband just moved in then?’ she asks. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.’

And that’s it. I’m off. Maybe I needed to talk to someone about it all more than I thought. And this friendly couple seems as good as anyone: neutral, un-judging and actually, I decide, by the end of the bus journey, really, really nice.

It turns out I was wrong on the job front, Rachel’s a makeup artist – well when she’s not on maternity leave – and Alan’s a fireman, which explains the pecs.

‘It was great to chat to you,’ says Rachel as I get off the bus on Regent Street.

‘Yeah, you too,’ I say. ‘Perhaps if we bump into each other again, while you’re still on maternity leave, we could go for coffee?’

‘That would be lovely,’ she says. When I get off the bus and look behind me, Alan’s watching me. I wave, but he doesn’t wave back.

‘It looks a bit…baggy,’ I say, staring forlornly in the mirror at the vast, white hammock I appear to be wearing on my chest.

The Mothercare sales assistant pushes her bulk up against me and hoists the thick straps upwards, grunting with the effort.

‘Pregnancy is not a fashion parade, I’m afraid,’ she says, pursing her coral-stained lips. ‘You’re already a C and are likely to go up at least two cup sizes during your pregnancy so probably best to get used to it now.’

A C cup?! When the hell did that happen? I’ve never been more than a B in my life and now I’m likely to become an E?! Hello!? And nobody’s ever going to see them?! The one time in my life I have enormous tits and I am, to all intents and purposes, single. And have to wear a surgical bra.

‘Do you have anything slightly more attractive? Something with an underwire perhaps?’ I venture, tentatively.

‘An underwire?!’ she gasps, like I just asked for heroin. ‘Pregnant ladies do not wear underwired bras, my dear. I’m afraid it’s fashion selflessness from now on.’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘what’s wrong with underwires?’

‘They wreak havoc with the milk-ducts, which can reduce your chances of breastfeeding successfully and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that?’

Oh yes, I’d love that. In fact do you sell gaffer tape because I’d quite like to bind my boobs down for the rest of my pregnancy just to make sure, you know, I eradicate every glimmer of hope of ever breastfeeding. No you stupid cow, of course I wouldn’t want that! This is the first time I’ve had a baby,
and in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m doing!

This is what I think, but of course I just pay for the hammock-bra I’m wearing, buy another two and shuffle out of the shop feeling like a total failure of a pregnant person.

‘Selflessness’. The word really sticks. Perhaps I need to learn some. It’s not very selfless of me to have been fantasizing about Laurence Cane all week, is it? To have been imagining cavorting naked with him, being his girlfriend, him proposing to me on Battersea Park Bandstand (not that I’ve considered the details at all) when I should have been reading books on why underwired bras are the devil’s work. Since re-meeting Laurence, my libido has perked up no end. I get this recurring dream – it’s mainly an office-based theme with us going at it like the clappers over my desk whilst Blanche Jewell gives a seminar around the corner. It gets to the good bit, where Laurence is moaning he’s about to come, then the foetus starts talking, like that film,
Look Who’s Talking
and says, ‘Hey! That’s my head! Watch out you’re nudging my head!’ Probably my conscience talking…

Perhaps it would be a good thing if Laurence never called. At least then I wouldn’t have the humiliation of ever revealing the hammock-bra. Or telling him I’m pregnant.

Something about this whole prospect scares me. It leaves me wanting to phone my dad. I stand outside River Island and call his mobile.

‘Hi love, how are you? Are you on the motorway, it’s ever so noisy?’

‘No dad, I’m on Oxford Street.’

‘Right. And are you OK? Do you want to borrow some money?’

‘No dad. I do earn a salary these days you know, a pittance though it is. I just wanted to speak to you that’s all.’

And so we do, we chat and he doesn’t ask any annoying
questions about the Jim situation (except that mum wants to know if he has a smoke alarm. With batteries in it) or about what I’m going to do, or the FUTURE which has become a dirty word since I feel like I cannot plan beyond next week. He just tells me how exhausted he is, how my brother’s not pulling his weight at work. He tells me about his plants and how mum is rationing him to half an hour per evening in the greenhouse because she’s worried he talks to his tomatoes more than her, and he soothes and he calms and he’s just my dad, who I love. And then he tells me to go off shopping and treat myself to some ‘really posh togs’ which makes me laugh because only my dad would say ‘posh togs’ and then I say, ‘Dad, thanks for the pep talk it’s just nice to hear your voice.’ I hang up and it’s only when I do that it occurs to me that that voice was not quite right. It was not my dad’s voice at all.

I decide to follow his advice anyway and head to Mamas and Papas on Regent Street. Then, I don’t know what comes over me, maybe it’s in a bid to feel this, that by doing things a pregnant woman does I might, eventually, feel like one – like method acting. But as if in a retail-induced hypoglycaemic fit, I shop. For England. I buy bootees and baby-grows and a quilted sleeping bag with little animals all over it. I buy a bump-enhancing wrap dress even though I don’t have a bump to put in it yet, spend ages in the changing room fancying myself as a model in Jojo Madam whatserface magazine. I buy a pair of ‘baby kangaroo jeans’, and text Jim ‘if these don’t turn you on, nothing will’. I wander around the nursery department actually feeling something when I look at the blown up pictures of tiny sleeping babies. And I buy a sheepskin throw, a sterilizer and a big, fluffy snail called Sebastian Snail that when you press a button, speaks in a voice like Prince Charles and says, ‘Good morning! I’m Sebastian Snail.
And how do you do?’ And then, eventually, when I think I have sufficiently immersed myself in babyness I go to the cash desk where the woman behind it asks me when the baby’s due, and I cave in and buy another baby-grow on her suggestion, one that says ‘Born to be Wild’. Oh dear. Then she says, ‘That will be £176.50 please,’ and I flinch, momentarily, but really I don’t care. Because for half an hour I am like everyone else. I am like those women in Dulwich. I am like the women in Mothercare. I am what the sales assistant said I should be. I am Tess Jarvis, I am selfless earth mother. I am going to be a mother. Someone’s mum! How amazing is that!