Free One Thing Led to Another by Katy Regan Page B

Vicky had Dylan eighteen months ago and ‘de-camped to the other side’ as Gina sees it, their relationship has definitely suffered. Gina treats Vicks like she’s holding a bomb when she’s holding Dylan and when Vicky relayed the story of her horrific birth (which to be fair involved full stitching details and the way her placenta ‘slid across the floor’, it came out with such force) Gina was sick in her mouth.
    So, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest at her reaction to the book. It was only when her face fell and she said…‘Oh my God, is this yours?’ that I went a deathly shade of pale.
    ‘I’m doing a health piece on pregnancy, it’s for research,’ I lied, sticking my head inside the fridge and blaspheming at the cheese.
    As if. The only ‘health’ features Believe It! magazine ever ran were ones on Chlamydia, the ‘Silent Epidemic’, and another, best forgotten, on ‘excessive sweating’.
    This was the weekend I was to spill the beans, but so far, it’s not looking good. When things don’t work out between Gina and men, which tends to be the norm rather than the exception, there’s a set process, a series of ‘modes’ to be gone through, each one having to be exhausted before the next can begin.
    Up until this point, for example, she’s been very much in hurt mode. I got home from the cinema to find her chain-smoking in the garden, looking like she’d suffered some kind of anaphylactic shock her face was so swollen from crying.
    My first thought, selfishly, was that I could do without a grief-stricken flatmate what with everything else going on. But she was so upset – distraught enough to accept a hug and that’s saying something – that there was only one thing for it: A night in watching the entire box-set of The Office , eating oven chips and planning Jasper’s downfall.
    The café’s emptying now, half-eaten breakfasts and bean-smeared plates left on its round mahogany tables with their retro gingham tablecloths. Used coffee cups are piled high on the original 1950s serving kiosk. The whole place seems to ooze with bacon fat.
    I zone back to Gina, her fighter mode’s at full throttle now, her mind churning over the last few weeks’ events, scouring for evidence of when the demise began.
    ‘I wouldn’t fucking mind,’ she says, downing an espresso, ‘but only last week he was going on about how he was really falling for me. How I was “the most intelligent woman he’d ever met”. Ha! What a load of bollocks. So intelligent I can’t see what’s right in front of my eyes half the time. A total, A grade twat.’
    I bite my lip and stare at the floor. It’s always slightly embarrassing when Gina starts on one like this, especially in a public place. Very audibly.
    ‘Don’t torture yourself, it’s best you found out now that he was a shit. Imagine if you were really into him and then found out. You’d be well pissed off.’
    ‘Guess so,’ she mumbles. ‘His loss not mine and all that. Anyway, I’ve had it up to here with wankers, I reckon I’m better off single. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Do I have “I only date losers” written across my forehead?’
    ‘No, of course not, you moron,’ I say, getting up to give her a hug but she brushes me off.
    The sad fact is, Gina’s always gone for men who are destined to let her down. She did have a decent boyfriend once, Mark Trelforth, all the way through university. But Mark’s doting just did her head in the end, she had to put him out of his misery – the morning after the graduation ball just to add insult to injury, poor bastard.
    Ever since then she’s been in search of someone ‘more exciting’, someone ‘edgy’. Mr so-called Perfect.
    The problem is (as I’ve reminded her today) that if a thirty-five-year-old man’s key qualities are that he is edgy and exciting, that he models himself on Pete Doherty, just for example, then chances are commitment and unconditional love are not likely to be his