And Baby Makes Two

“Please, no … no more about breast-feeding.”

To my surprise, it was Shanee who was holding up her hand and looking pained.

“Am I being a breast-feeding bore?” I enquired. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

Amie and Gerri both looked at Shanee.

“Well, you do bang on about it,” she said defensively.

“Among other things,” mumbled Gerri.

Amie started humming “Rock-a-bye Baby” under her breath.

“But it’s important.” Now I was the one who sounded defensive. “It can mess up a kid for life if you get it wrong.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to talk about it all the time,” said Shanee. “Talk about something else.”

I couldn’t talk about something else. Most of my topics of conversation had dried up. I didn’t even see that many films any more. The cinema seats were too uncomfortable for more than a few minutes. And, in case you’re interested in irony, now that I had a free source of videos I always fell asleep on the couch before they were over.

“Like wha—” I began. But I didn’t get any further. Another bubble was rising in my throat. My mouth felt like a cup of half-finished hot chocolate that had been left under the bed for a couple of weeks.

“God!” I gasped, and jumped to my feet, scattering the rest of my lunch on the ground. “I’m going to be sick again.”

Gerri groaned. “You’d think you’d carry a stack of sick bags with you,” she said.

There was one person I never complained to, and that was Les. Not about all the regular general aches and pains, or the morning sickness, or the indigestion, or the sore tits, or anything like that. I didn’t want him to think I was a whingeing pregnant woman. If I felt like I was going to puke, I didn’t gag and choke and rush off with my hand clamped over my mouth the way I would’ve if I was with Hilary or Shanee. I excused myself with a smile and a vague grunt and just wafted away. I ran once I was out of his sight. And I always turned the tap on in the bath when I had to be sick, so he wouldn’t hear. I never talked about nappies or breast-feeding or anything like that with Les, either. I mean, Shanee complained and she was a girl, it should’ve been interesting to her. I didn’t want to bore Les or make him think I expected him to go shopping for stuff for the baby.

And there was one part of my life that pregnancy actually improved.

My sex life. I hadn’t realized before that certain men found pregnant women a real turn-on, but they did. Les said pregnant women were sort of exotic and exciting. He said none of his friends had ever made it with a pregnant woman. They were all really curious about it. And jealous.

“Imagine,” he said. “Me, the boy in my year voted most likely never to have sex. What a hoot.”

Hilary and Charley finally got back together around Easter, and, as soon as they did, Les started dropping round after work again.

At first he’d have a beer, eat a takeaway and watch the news or the football before we got into a clinch, but after a while he didn’t even bother to eat.

He thought my breasts and my bum were fantastic. “Now that’s what I call a real handful,” he’d say admiringly.

It was almost surprising that he actually understood I was pregnant. For all he ever said about it, he might have thought I was just putting on weight. We never talked about me being pregnant except in connection to the size of some of my external parts. It was a wonder, as my nan would say. A real wonder. I looked at myself and started counting the months before I could get into real clothes again, but Les looked at me and saw a sex goddess. A sex goddess who couldn’t get knocked up.

“Natural birth control,” is how Les put it. “Sex without fear.” He grinned. “And without condoms.” Les didn’t like condoms, he said it wasn’t the same. He obviously didn’t know from personal experience, but that was what his friends told him.

I was happy to be his sex goddess. Even if most of the time I felt more like hell’s plaything, it was great for my ego. For someone who’d been a little slow in getting started, Les was making up for lost time. He was always hugging and stroking me, and he’d have to be really tired or pissed not to want what he called “a quick roll in the hay”.

That’s why I thought that when Les started talking about his summer holiday he meant we were going away together. To somewhere romantic with room service where we could make love for hours instead of minutes just in case the Spiggs came home unexpectedly.

We even looked through the brochures together: Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Spain… To be honest, they all looked pretty much the same – a blue blob of water, a blob of sand dotted with bodies, and a hotel – but I didn’t care where we went. I knew wherever we went, we’d find a private lagoon with a palm tree and water the same blue as my good maternity dress.

Then one night Les turned up with a bottle of fizzy wine.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked as he unscrewed the top.

“You won’t believe it, but I’ve been sort of promoted. They’re transferring me to Finsbury Park.” He puffed out his chest. “Manager.” He laughed. “That makes me the youngest manager in the company.”

I forced a happy smile on to my face. This was good news. Les was a manager at only twenty-one. He’d be a director or something by thirty. We’d live in the suburbs and I’d have a four-wheel drive with tinted windows and lots of kids and dogs in the back. But I couldn’t be that happy about it now. It meant I could never just drop by the shop any more. It meant he had further to come.

“But that’s not all.” Les grinned. “They finally agreed my holiday time. I booked my package this morning.”

I didn’t hear “my”. I heard “our”.

“Really?” I couldn’t exactly bounce with excitement (not without knocking something over), but there was excitement in my voice. “Where are we going? When?”

Les stopped pouring.

“We?”

“I’m going with you, aren’t I?” I thought he was joking. “Remember we looked at the brochures?”

He thought I was joking.

He laughed. “Get real, Lana. I can’t take you to Greece. You know that.”

Did I?

“Do I?”

He rolled his eyes the way Charley does when Hilary can’t find her keys and has to take everything out of her handbag again.

“Of course you do. I’ve only got two weeks, you know.” His eyes moved from my face to my tummy, looming in the space between us like a giant balloon. “You can’t fly with a bun in the oven. Not when you’re as far gone as you are. Everybody knows that.” He laughed again. “And there’s no way I’m taking a bus to Greece.”

I laughed along, as though I really had been joking. I didn’t know about not being able to fly at the end of your pregnancy, but now that he said it, it sort of made sense. But it would never have occurred to me that Les would book his holiday for when I couldn’t go. If anything, I thought he’d have waited till after the baby was born and we could give him to my nan to look after while we went away. She had nothing else to do.

If Charley told Hilary he was going on holiday without her she’d have gone ballistic. She’d’ve made his life hell and never shut up till he gave in. But I wasn’t like her. I was understanding and tolerant. I knew that a man needs outside interests and friends of his own. I was tolerant of his need for space. I sucked back some tears.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, Greece sounds like it should be fun.”

“It sure as hell should be,” said Les. He took a large gulp of his wine. “I can’t wait.”

I took a tiny sip from my glass. I could tell by the smell that it was going to give me indigestion.

“So,” I said brightly. “When are you going?”

“End of August. That way I get an extra day with the bank holiday.”