Free One Thing Led to Another by Katy Regan Page A

don’t do this, Jim. Have a baby with their friend. We’re not a couple, are we?’
    Jim closes his eyes and groans.
    ‘We were never actually an item. You’re a grown man, ateacher, a responsible person, apparently. ’ I hate myself now, it’s not his fault. ‘What sort of thirty-year-old man doesn’t even have a condom?’
    Jim snorts. ‘What?’
    ‘A condom Jim, you know, a contraceptive?’
    He blinks and splutters, incredulous at this last comment.
    ‘It takes two to tango Tess and anyway, you were drunk.’
    ‘We both were!’
    ‘And you were wearing those knickers. Those frilly black things. I mean, they were hardly a contraceptive.’
    He’s gone mad.
    ‘And there’s the driving issue,’ he says.
    ‘ Driving issue?!’ I stare at him stunned.
    ‘The fact you can’t. And you’re always putting off learning. And the fact you always miss the last tube and hate night buses and so you end up staying at mine and…’
    ‘And what?! So this was bound to happen? The fact I can’t drive and favour vaguely attractive underwear over enormous belly-warmers was one day destined to get me knocked up? In case you’ve forgotten, you were in bed with another woman when I called to tell you I was pregnant.’
    ‘You’ve never said that bothered you,’ Jim says. ‘If you had…’
    ‘It doesn’t bother me. That’s the problem!’ I say, throwing my hands in the air. ‘Don’t you think it should? Don’t you think it should bother me, just a bit, that the father of my baby is shagging someone else?!’
    The barman clears his throat, loudly. A party of businessmen have just gathered at the bar.
    Jim’s got his head in his hands now.
    ‘But don’t you understand, this isn’t about us anymore,’ he says quietly. ‘It’s about this baby, a baby that needs us, more than anything now. There’s thousands of women who can’t even get pregnant, have you thought about that?’
    I had, actually, and despised myself for being so ungrateful but I couldn’t help myself.
    ‘Forgive me,’ I say. ‘But I’m not feeling my most charitable right now.’
    ‘I can see that,’ says Jim, standing up and getting his coat.
    We leave, go home. Our separate homes.

CHAPTER SIX
    ‘I came out of the bathroom in my knickers screaming, “Look! It’s positive, we’re having a baby!” Neil didn’t say anything at first and I thought, oh God, he hates it. Then he dived over to the wardrobe, took out his Polaroid camera, and took a picture of me, there and then, holding the positive test. Even now, I look at that picture, stuck up on our fridge and I want to cry. I look so damn young and thin!’
    Fiona, 38, Edinburgh
    Gina leans back on the window of the café, folds her arms and groans.
    ‘I suppose you’re thinking, “told you so”?’ she says, through half-shut eyes. ‘I suppose everyone saw it coming but me.’
    I put my hand on her arm. ‘No,’ I say, but I don’t say anything else. I know the drill.
    It’s been almost a fortnight since Jasper dumped her – in spectacularly cruel form – by text, half an hour before she was due to meet him at a party – and she’s still in self-loathing mode. This means she doesn’t want my sympathy or my analysis of what went wrong, she just wants me to be her punch-bag whilst she lets it all out.
    It’s Sunday and this was the day I was going to tell Gina about the baby. I intended to wait until the scan like I promised Jim, but she already knows, I swear. She found my book, the Bundle of Joy book, you don’t get much more incriminating than that. I came home from work to find her reading it in the kitchen, scoffing at all the schmaltzy pictures of women cradling their bumps.
    ‘Check it out, how smug and tedious are this lot?’ she said, pretending to stick her fingers down her throat. Gina is not what you’d call baby-friendly. In fact to be perfectly honest, she’s actively Anti Baby. She and Vicky used to be the best of mates – we all did. But since