The Road Trip(77)

‘Or I could be pregnant.’

‘You could be pregnant.’ I give the pregnancy test a significant look. ‘If only there were some way to tell.’

‘You’re not being very supportive,’ Deb tells me.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just the suspense is killing me. Please look at the test. I can’t stand not knowing. We are basically one being, Deb. Your womb is my womb.’

Deb pauses in thought. ‘That’s very sweet of you to say,’ she says. ‘I think.’

There’s a long silence. I shift a little on our parents’ bathroom floor. It’s carpeted, a worn dark-blue carpet that’s always speckled with white flecks of toothpaste spittle and soap suds. I feel a sudden pang of homesickness. Everything’s so easy here.

‘If your womb is my womb,’ Deb says, ‘will you take this child, if there is one growing inside me?’

‘Wow, err . . .’

‘Oh,’ Deb says in a small voice. She’s shifted her hand and looked at the pregnancy test result.

I grab it off her. One line. Not pregnant.

‘Thank God,’ I say, clutching the pregnancy test to my chest, and then I remember that Deb just weed on it and chuck it across the floor.

I look at Deb. She’s crying quietly with her lips pressed together.

‘Oh, Deb, hey,’ I say, nudging her shoulder with mine. ‘Hey, it’s OK. You’re not pregnant, it’s OK.’

‘Yes,’ she says, wiping her cheeks. ‘Yes, it’s OK. It’s good. I’m just . . . Well. I’d imagined it, I suppose. That’s all.’

‘Imagined it? Like . . . imagined being pregnant?’

‘Yeah.’

I wait, a bit lost.

‘I’m never going to have a baby, am I?’ Deb says.

‘Do you . . . want to? I thought you didn’t?’

‘Me too. I don’t know, now. I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want a husband. But I sort of wanted this baby for a minute. In the abstract. Which makes me think maybe one day I might actually want one in the concrete.’

‘You don’t need a husband for a baby!’ I wave a hand towards the discarded pregnancy test. ‘Look! You nearly just got one, all on your own!’

Deb laughs wetly. ‘I guess. I’ve just always tried extremely hard not to. So it’s a bit strange to think that maybe I want to have one after all. Don’t I know myself at all?’

She looks genuinely perplexed.

‘Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you nearly have it,’ I say.

‘Well, that’s a terrible system,’ Deb says, scrubbing at her teary cheeks. ‘Right. Life crisis over. No baby. Do you want a drink?’

I glance at the time on my phone. I ought to go back to the pub. Dylan will be hoping for that, and Marcus won’t – all the more reason to go. But I want to stay here, at home, where everything smells of comfort and Mum’s favourite washing powder. I want to stay with Deb, who always makes me feel like enough.

‘Board game and wine?’ I say.

‘Perfect. Help me up, will you? My life crisis has made me weak.’





Dylan

Addie and I suit the summertime, I think – all the raw sunshine and long days, Pimms with strawberries and thick, velvet peach slices. As we adjust to living together, as we find new quiet patterns and learn who likes which mug best for their morning coffee, the thick dread feels far away from me, like someone I knew in another life.

We go up to London one weekend in Addie’s holidays, to see a play – she was initially reluctant, claiming that everything I like is ‘incomprehensible’, but I talked her around with promises of famous actors and ice cream in the interval. It becomes clear within minutes that I have chosen very poorly: the website claims that this modern interpretation of Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris is ‘as lurid and scintillating as an episode of Love Island’, but it turns out no amount of neon swimwear could make this play accessible. I sit here, teeth gritted as the Queen of Navarre takes a full five minutes of groaning to die, and wonder what the hell I was thinking dragging Addie to London to watch this absolute car crash.

As Addie shifts beside me, bored, frustrated, I reach for her hand.

‘Let’s go,’ I whisper in her ear.

‘What?’ She blinks at me in the half-darkness of the theatre.

‘This is drivel,’ I tell Addie, my lips against her ear. I feel her shiver at the contact and it makes me hot; I can never resist that shiver. ‘It’s dreadful, Addie. It’s . . . what would Deb say? It’s absolute toilet.’

Addie snorts with laughter and someone behind us shushes her; I tug on her hand and we make our way down the row with a chorus of excuse me, so sorry, excuse me. We fall out of the theatre, still hand in hand, and I do my best impression of the Queen of Navarre’s lengthy death and it makes Addie laugh so much she cries splodgy droplets of grey mascara on the soft, freckled skin below her eyes.

‘I need a pint,’ she says, wiping her cheeks.

I resist the urge to google the best bar in the area, and instead let her pull me into the darkly lit, sticky-floored pub on the street corner; she manages to nab us a table with Deb-like proficiency, getting to the chair just before a suited banker type and his date.