‘Delicious,’ said Jess.
‘Mmmm,’ said Mum, still peering into the pan, before she spun around again. ‘But forget the jam. How are you both?’
‘Jess has exciting news actually,’ I said, keen to deflect attention from me.
‘Oh yes?’ said Mum.
‘I think I’m in love,’ said Jess, a faraway smile on her face.
‘Oh that is exciting,’ said Mum, stirring the plums. ‘Who with?’ Mum loved a romance. If I ever came home from school when I was younger and even mentioned a boy’s name, she’d start asking about who he was and did he want to come over for tea.
‘He’s a Russian art collector, called Alexi. I only met him recently. Lil was there, actually, so it’s super quick but we spent all last night together and just…’ Jess exhaled loudly, ‘I think he’s the dream.’
I’d gone through this process several times with Jess. Complete and utter obsession with a man for a few weeks, couldn’t think about anything else, mentioned his name every other sentence, fantasized about their future life and how many children they’d have until it was nearly intolerable for the rest of us. If falling in love was like being high, it was as if Jess had taken several drugs simultaneously.
I’d felt that high briefly when I started going out with Jake, but then it mellowed into something more sedate, less manic. I longed for that thrill again. That buzz of clicking with someone and wanting to spend every minute with them, of dreading the moment you had to leave them even if it was for a night. Of falling into a gloom if you weren’t going to see them for a few days. That was love, right? It made idiots of us all, but it was also the most intoxicating feeling in the world.
Which is why whenever Jess declared she’d fallen in love, part of me felt jealous. How did she manage it? How did she fall in love and find someone who fell in love with her back, when I couldn’t even get a reply on WhatsApp? I didn’t want to feel bitter towards my best friend, but it seemed a tiny bit unfair. Although her latest story kept Mum distracted for half an hour, before she said she had to nip into town to drop off the jam at the village hall for the market in the morning.
That’s how I ended up standing outside Mum and Dennis’s bathroom, having handed the damp, positive pregnancy stick to Jess. I didn’t do the second test. We’ve all seen films where the woman has the bladder of a horse and does 193 pregnancy tests, simply unable to believe that it’s positive. But firstly, I didn’t have any wee left, and secondly, it was like I kind of knew.
I didn’t know know. I wasn’t telepathic. But from the moment on the train when I realized I was late, I suspected. I still hoped I wasn’t pregnant with a strange man’s baby, but a little voice inside my brain told me I was. I put a hand on my stomach. I was pregnant with the baby of a man I’d met once. I was carrying a bundle of cells, half of which technically belonged to someone else. It felt freakishly intimate. What was one normally left with after a first date? A bad case of thrush? A string of embarrassing, flirty WhatsApp messages which stop immediately the morning after when you both realize it wasn’t meant to be? I remembered Jimmy Day in biology lessons at school once asking Mrs Martin if it was true that semen survived for three days. Mrs Martin had looked at him with the unfazed expression of a long-serving biology teacher and said yes, spermatozoa could indeed survive for up to seventy-two hours, or even longer in the correct, ‘hospitable environment’.
Jimmy had sniggered and gone round for weeks afterwards asking confused girls if their stomachs were ‘hospitable environments’. I don’t know what happened to Jimmy. I suspect he hadn’t gone off to work in Silicon Valley or find the solution to world peace.
While leaning against the bathroom doorframe, I felt Jess’s hand on my arm.
‘You all right?’
I nodded slowly and looked at the test in her hand. ‘Yeah, but shall we get rid of that and go for a walk before they get back?’
‘Good plan,’ said Jess.
I took the stick back from Jess and went to the kitchen, where I grabbed a Co-op bag from under the sink and bundled it in there.
We walked for five minutes, straight to the pub, via a bin just outside the village shop where I chucked the plastic bag.
‘What d’you want?’ said Jess, once inside the Fox and Cushion, as I looked around for a table.
I opened my mouth to say ‘vodka and tonic’ and then stopped.
Jess read my mind. ‘I think you need one.’
I shook my head. ‘Nope. Just… lemonade?’
I found a table in the corner, bench along the back, rickety wooden chair on the other side of it. I sat. My brain was flitting about like a sparrow, unable to settle on any thought for more than a few seconds.
In your twenties, maybe in your teens, did you ever play that game with your girlfriends: what would you do if you got pregnant? Jess and I would discuss it at uni from time to time, together with our three flatmates – Nats, Lucy and Bells – as we lay on the sofa watching Ready, Steady, Cook, still in our tracksuit bottoms, still hung-over from the night before. Probably one of us had had a scare, or forgotten to take our pill, and the answer had always seemed obvious. ‘Get rid of it,’ we would agree, before discussing whether it was a red tomato or green pepper day. We could just about afford to keep ourselves in pasta and have enough money left over for tequila in Edinburgh nightclubs. The thought of a baby was laughable. Not for us. We had plans. We were going to graduate, get jobs, work and have children at a blurry date in the future. That was how it would go.
When we got to our mid-twenties, nearer thirty, the question came up again in cheap Italian restaurants in London where we met for catch-up dinners. Breadsticks. Bottles of chianti that made your teeth furry. Bowls of spaghetti, or tricolore salads for the ones who were on diets. By that point, I’d been going out with Jake for a few years. The others had boyfriends too. Apart from Jess, who always had someone but was about to move on to a different victim.
The game had become trickier by this stage, more of a moral maze. If we’d got pregnant with our boyfriends, what would we do? There were still dozens of reasons not to: lack of money, I wanted to spend more years teaching, I remained too young, I wanted to get married first, I wasn’t even sure that I could keep a baby alive. What if I dropped my imaginary baby on its head and it fell on that soft bit where its skull hasn’t fused yet? That seemed like the kind of thing I would do.
But the idea of being pregnant was less terrifying than it had been at uni. I was in a long-term relationship with Jake, I wanted to have children with him one day anyway, he had a job which could just about support us. Plus, what if I got pregnant, then aborted it, then found out I couldn’t have any more? We decided at these dinners that it would depend on the circumstances and we wouldn’t necessarily ‘get rid of it’. Then we’d order another bottle of wine and merrily move on to another topic – some new TV drama, our mothers, how much we hated our bosses, whether one of us should get a pixie cut or would it make our face look fat?
A few years on, people started getting married and having babies anyway and the game was forgotten. Everyone started changing their Facebook profile pictures to them on their wedding day, like a badge of honour. There was Nats being showered with confetti as she came out of church. Lucy sitting in the back of a posh car, beaming through the window. Bells on her new husband’s shoulders, the dress bunched up around her hips, while we all waved sparklers around her. My profile picture remained just me, on the beach in Norfolk, a picture taken by Dennis a few years ago.
Jess came back from the bar, a white wine in one hand, lemonade in the other.
‘Right,’ she said, sitting down and raising her