I nudge the person next to me to get her to budge up. She staggers slightly and I murmur an apology. She’s trying to eat a prawn-cocktail salad standing up and I think: that’s dedication, that is. That’s hungry.
Eventually, the doors close and we jolt into action; soon I’m hurtling through the dark.
I crane my neck to look at the Tube map above: fifteen stops to Archway, which is home, but only four till Leicester Square, when all the tourists will pile out. It’s not so bad when you break it down like that. A poster grabs my attention: something about match.com and ‘making love happen’ and, just below it, a woman wearing a badge in the design of a Tube stop that says BABY ON BOARD. My eyes drift automatically to her midriff: there’s no sign of a bump yet beneath her white, broderie-anglaise blouse. Probably in those first vulnerable months, I think. Maybe just found out, giddy with excitement. I watch her, imagining her life. I like this game – it comes with the territory of the job, I suppose. I think, here’s a woman who knows how to do pregnancy; this is no martyr, soldiering on. I imagine she will get home tonight to her Victorian conversion, where husband (Steve, thirty-four, civil servant) will be waiting with a vast shepherd’s pie and give her strict instructions not to lift a finger.
There will be a pile of pristine baby-grows already in the drawer; a basket filling daily with talcs and wipes and cotton-wool buds. I was obsessed with the baby basket when Mum was pregnant with Niamh. I would pull it from under her bed and pore over the baby-scented goods; count what new items she’d got that week, grilling her about names: Niamh or Sadie if it’s a girl, Richie if it’s a boy. (Richie King! What a name! He’d have got the ladies, if he’d ever made it into the world.)
I imagine this woman will call her baby Ben; Ben or Holly – something safe that will never go out of fashion. The train stops at Embankment and many get off, but the hordes get on. A woman listening to Daft Punk next to me disappears and is replaced by a man wearing white, stained overalls. He’s sweating and smells as if he’s had a few after work – as well as of something else, something heady, which hits you immediately between the eyes. Turps. Takes me a while to put a name to it. Must be a decorator, I think.
The train hisses on to Charing Cross. It’s becoming like a furnace in here now; I can feel the hand that’s gripping the bar above is clammy with sweat, and the straps of my rucksack are rubbing on my shoulders. The carriage sways and shudders along, the man who smells of turps accidentally puts his hand over mine and we exchange a shy smile. I can see the pearls of perspiration form on his shiny head, and then, before he can stop them with the handkerchief he is struggling to take from his pocket, run down to his ears and onto his eyebrows. I feel sorry for him; I think, I bet he can’t wait to get out of here.
Woman with the prawn-cocktail salad is hanging on with one arm in front of us now, wilting with the heat. She suddenly yawns, a huge, wide, doggy yawn, revealing bits of iceberg lettuce. When she eventually clamps her mouth shut, a gust of fishy breath envelops us. Man who smells of turps and I exchange an eyebrow raise. What a relief, someone else who has surpassed me in the bad-Tube-etiquette stakes. I love the nonverbal communication that goes on in the Tube, the humanness of it all, the fact we’re so often thinking the same.
It comes as I catch my reflection in the window: dark hair pulled back and badly in need of a wash; eyes always more smiley (and crinkled at the sides) than I expect. It starts, deep and penetrating, a heart-burn in my chest, then, travelling at speed, spreads down my limbs, up my neck, my face, into the palms of my hands, until I feel something has to happen to release me from this heat, or else I will combust, surely? I will pass out.
I cough, then swallow, or try to, but it feels like a bunch of dried leaves has been shoved in my mouth. God, I’m going to be sick, I think; I’m actually going to puke. And I panic – I think, I don’t have a bag. But then, as suddenly as the heat struck, an icy wave descends – the chills – and I gag, but nothing comes out. I am sweating buckets now. If I raise my shaking hand to my forehead, an actual droplet comes off on my finger. My heart pounds hard and fast, like a spray of bullets. I can’t get my breath and I think, my God, I am having a heart attack.
I blink back the sweat and open my eyes, but the Tube map in front of me is swerving so much that I have to close my eyes again in case I pass out. We stop at two, maybe three more stops and I tighten my fingers around the bar above me; reach out to a vertical pole in front of me, but my palms are so wet that it slides right off and I stumble, accidently standing on the man-who-smells-of-turps’s foot. I shake my head by way of apology, but I don’t look at him, although I am aware of him looking at me. It feels like a bag of wet sand is sitting on my ribs. No matter how much I try to expand my chest, I can’t get enough air, and I am consumed – overwhelmed – with a wave of terror that this is it: I am dying. But I’ve been lied to, cheated. Everyone said Mum died peacefully, that death is peaceful; but it isn’t, it’s horror.
The last thing I am aware of, someone is touching my arm. I say, ‘I think I am having a heart attack,’ and then there’s a screeching sound, the wail of an alarm. Then I am sitting on a bench on the Tube platform; the man in the white overalls who smells of turps is holding my hand. Another man in green overalls is asking, ‘Are you a diabetic?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not diabetic. But I’ve just found out I’m pregnant.’
Three months earlier
February 2013
Dear Lily
I’m going to end it with Andy. I’ve decided.
I’m sitting here, alone at a restaurant table for the second time this week, whilst he’s outside arguing with the Ex, and I’ve decided enough is enough. There’s only so much sitting alone in restaurants picking at olives a girl can take. I don’t even like olives!!
Andy’s a nice man and it’s been great to have the company, but I’ve realized that’s it: it’s just company, someone to watch telly with and go out for dinner with and cook with (though even that’s started to grate: How many hours has that man spent with a pestle and mortar? What’s wrong with a shop-bought curry sauce now and again?). I’ve started to wonder, what’s in it for me, you know? How did I ever think I could have a successful relationship with a man going through a messy divorce? He needs too much himself. He’s broken. And, as you and I know, I spend enough time with broken people in the day job. I can’t be the therapist outside of it too.
Oh, Lily, but I’ve started to wonder if I’m the broken one, if I’m the one who needs therapy. Am I to keep doing this? Is this to be the pattern my relationships take? Long periods of celibacy followed by unsuitable, emotionally unavailable men? It’s like I pick them out or something.
I worry that what happened all those years ago has scarred me forever, that I’m too scared to fall in love with anyone – because look what happened when I fell in love with Joe, look at the fallout then! Maybe going out with people like Andy, who I’m never going to fall in love with, let’s face it, is my way of dipping my toe in relationships, playing at having a boyfriend but never actually diving in with both feet. And that’s a bit tragic, isn’t it? That I might never fall in love again? That at thirty-two that’s it, game over?
I sneaked my notepad underneath some work notes and pretended to read them whilst really watching Andy arguing on the phone to his Ex, outside yet another Modern European brasserie in central London. It was something I’d grown very accustomed to during the past year.
From a purely psychological point of view, it made fascinating viewing. Andy was a confident man, very male in his behaviour and attitude, and yet he looked so weak when he was on the phone to Belinda (or Belinda Ballbreaker as I call her, since she means WAR in this divorce. She means war in life, generally, as far as I can tell …)
He had his back to me and was flexing alternate bum