Free One Thing Led to Another by Katy Regan

night away.
    But I don’t want to go now. Frankie’s won’t make this any better.
    ‘I dunno,’ I say, as we glide down the escalator, ‘I’m just not sure I’m in the mood.’
    We go anyway – after all I’m not in the mood for anything. It’s only just gone 6.30 p.m. by the time we arrive and thankfully it’s almost empty.
    We sit at the bar sipping on virgin pina coladas which makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Laugh because Jim is sipping on a drink with a cherry and an umbrella in it, as a show of solidarity, when really he’d kill for a beer, and cry because why did we have drinks with umbrellas and cherries in anyway? It didn’t feel like we were celebrating.
    My chin starts to go again.
    ‘Sorry, I’m a mess, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I say, forcing a smile.
    ‘Hey, come on,’ says Jim, dragging his stool closer, ‘Look at me.’
    ‘I’m scared too you know.’ He takes my hands in his, trying to ignore the snail trail of snot up one side where I’ve wiped my nose. ‘I’m scared shitless to be honest.’
    ‘But you seem…you’re amazing…you’re just handling this so well, so much better than me. It’s like you’re, I don’t know, happy about it all,’ I say.
    He thinks about this, clears his throat. ‘Well, I’m definitely not unhappy about it. I’m thirty Tess. I don’t want to end up some sad old bachelor boy, no children, no life, answering the door in my underpants.’
    ‘You do that already.’
    ‘Oh. So I do.’
    The barman places a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts on the bar which only makes me want to blub some more. Mainly because I can’t even have one. No peanuts, Dr Cork said. I can’t even have a goddamn peanut.
    ‘Give it time,’ Jim says, ‘it’s so early.’
    ‘I know, it’s just, I can’t help feeling this has fucked everything up. You could have met someone else, got married, done it properly, we both could have. But things are going to be so much more complicated now.’
    I lean back in my chair and squeeze my eyes shut. Every time I think of one consequence of all this, another rears its head, a can of worms.
    ‘But I was never after a wife, Tess, you know that,’ says Jim, making me look at him. ‘All that wedding, two point four kids conventional thing was never something I dreamt of.’
    I look at the floor.
    ‘But I did, Jim,’ I say, looking up at him. ‘I did dream of that.’
    A horrid silence. Jim stares at his drink. It’s only as the words leave my mouth that I realize how true they are. I had it all planned. I don’t mean planned like Vicky planned things – a subscription to You and Your Wedding at twenty, married and pregnant by twenty-seven. I don’t mean planning your child so meticulously its birthday coincides with school holidays. The point I’m making, and the problem with me I suppose, is that I didn’t realize I needed to ‘plan’ anything. I had it all filed under ‘goes without saying’. Meeting ‘The One’, the white wedding, the joint mortgage and ceremonious last pill as we give up binge-drinking in preparation of our forthcoming child. The shagging – oh the shagging! – as we’d take to our bed on sun-drenched afternoons, giggling at the decadence of it all. The leaping into each other’s arms with joy at the positive test and the first scan on dad-to-be’s phone. And who is that dad-to-be in my mind’s eye? Not Jim, my friend, the man I love platonically but hadn’t even considered casting for this role. No, that man I imagined, before this whole ‘life plan’ went utterly tits up was Laurence. But I let him slip through my hands, just like fine golden sand, like clay on a potter’s wheel, like a brand new slippery baby. Like life itself.
    ‘This is so ridiculous,’ I say suddenly.
    ‘What is?’
    ‘This. Us.’
    My cheeks burn. I don’t want to go on like this, but I’ve opened the floodgates now and it’s all coming out.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘People