‘I think it’s coming. It’s early and I don’t know what to do.’
There are only two other people in the world who know I’m pregnant: the woman at the family planning clinic who confirmed it and who wouldn’t let me leave until I’d stopped hyperventilating, and Jon. And he only learned of it a few weeks ago.
I was lying on my back on a mattress at his friend’s house where we crashed after a party. My head was facing Jon when I awoke in the early hours. He was naked, sitting upright and smoking a cigarette. Sometimes I think he never sleeps or that he’s like a vampire who only comes alive at night. I watched his eyes making their way around my body. I thought I’d covered myself with a sheet, but I’d left a section of my stomach exposed. When I realised, I yanked it so it covered me completely, but it was too late. Jon was focusing on what I’d spent weeks hiding, the morning light capturing it perfectly. The game was up – he knew that I was pregnant.
I heard the crackling of the cigarette as he stubbed it out against the wall, red-hot ash falling to the floor. Then I felt his warm hand against my tummy. He made eye contact with me but I couldn’t hold his gaze.
This is it, I thought.This is where our story ends. Until recently, I’d been lucky, as I’d barely shown. Then, as I gradually expanded, I took to wearing thicker, baggier clothes everywhere. I always kept my clothes on during sex, especially my school uniform, something Jon found a massive turn-on.
I wasn’t ready to have this conversation with him because I knew it would drive him away, just like whatever Mum did to upset Dad that made him leave. That’s what men do, isn’t it? When something big happens that they can’t handle, they use it as an excuse to leave you and you never see them again. Like Dad. Over and over he’d tell me that I was his ‘only girl’, but I wasn’t enough to make him stay. Maybe that’s why I started sleeping around almost immediately after he left – I wanted someone to love me as much as he did. I just went about it the wrong way.
And I didn’t know how I was going to deal with Jon going next because he is everything to me. I can’t lose anyone else. So I closed my eyes and rolled on to my side.
‘You’re ... pregnant?’ Jon asked. ‘Is it mine?’
I turned my head sharply to shoot him a look. He knew it was the wrong thing to say.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s brilliant. I’m going to be a dad.’
I hesitated, convinced I’d misheard. ‘What?’
‘I’m going to be a dad,’ he repeated. ‘It’s amazing.’
‘Really?’ I gasped. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ He cupped my cheeks as he passionately kissed me. I didn’t want it to end. But when it did, he lit up a spliff and after a few drags, I moved my hand to take it from him and have a puff. He pushed it away. ‘You can’t be smoking this stuff with a baby inside you,’ he warned. ‘No smoking or drinking and no more pills, it’s all got to stop. They can damage it.’
Damage it, I said to myself.Damage it.
The reality check was crippling. I wanted so much to be happy that for a moment I’d forgotten about my condition; that this unborn baby was already damaged beyond repair. Even if I carried it to full term, it wouldn’t live. I’d already researched my condition in a library medical journal and seen a photo of a baby with estroprosencephaly. I wanted to be sick. I learned it won’t have a usable brain and its face will not really be a face but a bit of mouth here and nose somewhere else and an eye in the middle of its head like a Cyclops. And it’ll die within minutes of being born. So it doesn’t matter if I did all the Es and whizz and coke and smoked all the spliffs in the world, I can’t hurt my baby any more than my body has already.
But I couldn’t tell Jon any of this because I didn’t want to lose him. I started crying again.
‘It’s okay.’ He soothed and spooned me, his hand still cradling my stomach. ‘My Lolita is having a little Lolita of her own,’ he said softly.
Weeks passed and my body expanded. It was as if Jon’s awareness gave it permission to blow up like a bouncy castle. And instead of dwelling on the inevitable, I allowed myself to imagine a happy-ever-after for the three of us.
I started telling myself that Mum and the tests I had when I was a kid were wrong and that I wasn’t carrying a bunch of faulty chromosomes. I talked myself into believing that last year’s miscarriage wasn’t down to my broken insides, it was just bad luck. And when this baby came out, it would be healthy. The fantasy was a far better place to visit than the truth, and I kept returning to it.
‘What’s going to happen after I have it?’ I asked Jon one afternoon. We had met in a truckers’ cafe just outside the town centre. He was wearing his reflective sunglasses inside and his hair was scraped back with wet-look gel. He looked every inch the rock star. A spot of blood had seeped through the long sleeve of his white T-shirt and left a stain.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked. His voice was slurred as he stirred sugar into his coffee. I was too exhausted to see him play last night and I assumed he had a hangover.
‘I mean where are the three of us going to live? Can we come and stay with you?’
He yawned and slumped into his seat. ‘My flat is no place for a kid, you know that.’
‘I don’t because I’ve never been there.’
‘And you wouldn’t want to because it’s a shithole and it’s where the band rehearses. It’s no place for our child, that’s why I doss at mates’ houses. Why can’t you stay with your mum?’
‘Because she is going to go ballistic when she finds out I’m pregnant.’
‘Then put your name down for a council flat. They’re obliged to look after teenage mums.’
‘We could get one together,’ I offered hopefully.
‘You know I can’t do that.’
