Impossible to Forget(41)

Angie lifted the little plastic stick and peered at the tiny window. One line for not pregnant. Two for . . .

Was it there? Could she see the faintest shadow of a thin blue line in the second window? She wouldn’t like to testify to its presence in court but, in her heart, she knew the answer with or without the line. She was closely enough in tune with her body’s energy to know when something was different, and this was most definitely different. Her heart rate was higher than usual and her breasts were sore for no reason that she could see. But even putting the meagre physical symptoms aside, Angie just knew that she was carrying a tiny little embryo inside her. She couldn’t explain why, but she was certain.

She examined the stick again. The second line was faint, there was no denying that, but it was most definitely there. She was pregnant.

Feeling slightly dazed, she began to wander around the flat, picking things up without purpose and then replacing them. Pregnant. With child. A bun in the oven. It didn’t matter which way you put it. In approximately eight months from now, all being well, she would be a mother. A mother!

The fact that she found herself here wasn’t a total surprise, however. She had stopped taking her pill a while ago. It had never sat well with her, pumping artificial hormones into her system. Taking it had begun as a matter of convenience around the time of the Newbury protests. Living up a tree was hard enough without having to worry about periods on top. Then she had met Jax and the pill had really come into its own. After that, continuing to take it had been more habit than anything else. But in recent years, as her interest in holistic healing had grown, she had become more uncomfortable with the idea of swallowing a chemical every day. And as she had sex so rarely, it hardly seemed necessary.

So, she had taken a chance, played fast and loose with Mother Nature; Russian roulette against the chances of everything being in alignment. And she had lost.

Or maybe she had won?

Angie would have been lying if she’d said that the chance of finding herself pregnant had not occurred to her. Of course, there was a risk that sex without contraception might lead her there. And yet she had proceeded exactly as before, making no attempt to reduce the risk, and this suggested to her that in her heart she thought a pregnancy would not be so disastrous. She was thirty-three years old and she had always fully intended to have a child at some point. It was just that that point had never arrived.

But it was here now, stomping down the street with a full ticker-tape parade and trumpets blaring. This was the moment when Angie Osborne was to meet her destiny and have her child.

She went to stand in front of the mirror and turned sideways, pulling her yoga pants down to her hips to reveal the place where the egg had lodged itself. There was nothing to see, no outward indication of the frantic multiplying and remultiplying of cells inside. She let her fingers trace across her skin with the lightest of touches, the wonder of it overwhelming her. It was like magic, an alchemy of sorts. From the least prepossessing components, her body had created a living thing. It was nothing short of miraculous.

A baby.

Jax. She would have to tell Jax and she knew that he would take a little longer to come round to the idea. Theirs was a very ‘in the moment’ kind of relationship, the future being something that rarely came up in conversation. They had floated happily from one encounter to the next as the years drifted on. From time to time, she had suggested that things might work better if they lived in the same county at least, even if not the same building. Her holistic health business was thriving and that tied her to York, but Jax moved from job to job as opportunities arose. He was, as he liked to tell her, location-independent, and yet there seemed to be a certain reluctance to head much further north than Birmingham.

‘Being apart is what keeps us together, babe,’ he had said the last time she suggested that he might want to look for something a little closer to her, and she had accepted that because she thought he probably had a point. There was a lot to be said for independence and Angie treasured hers. But if there was to be a baby? Well, that would change things, surely?

She wouldn’t tell him just yet, she decided. After all, it was very early days and she might set the cat amongst the pigeons for nothing. And they weren’t due to be seeing each other for a couple of months. He had only just been up to visit her – as her current state attested; this must be a Millennium Eve baby, or thereabouts, and January was barely two weeks in. There was no harm in keeping her news to herself for the time being, whilst she got her head around it.

Well, maybe not entirely to herself.

Later, after the last client of the day had gone home, Angie picked up the phone and dialled Maggie’s number.

‘Are you busy?’ she asked. ‘Do you fancy meeting up for a drink tonight? Or tomorrow?’

There was a slight hesitation before Maggie spoke that might have been interpreted as reluctance, but Angie knew was simply the sound of Maggie reconfiguring her plans for the evening.

‘That would be great. Usual place? Eight?’

They tried to meet once a month or so, although sometimes that stretched a little. Whilst Maggie had the fuller diary, it was actually Angie who cancelled the arrangement most often, usually because she was too tired after a day on her feet to make the trip back into town. Of course, Maggie would only cancel if the four horsemen of the apocalypse trit-trotted through her office, but then that was Maggie all over.

The ‘usual place’ was a wine bar on Goodramgate, more Maggie’s kind of place than Angie’s to be honest. It had a smug, self-satisfied air about it to Angie’s way of thinking, and seemed to be frequented by the type of people who wore a suit and tie to do their important job and then talked loudly about it in public. The stench of heady perfumes and aftershaves could sometimes be enough to floor a rhinoceros. Angie always made sure that she wore her brightest, least conventional outfits and then enjoyed the turned heads and elbow nudges as she made her way through the wall-to-wall Boss and Armani to join Maggie.