The Guest List(59)

It was halfway through the new term. I went to the uni doctor and took a pregnancy test with her, because I didn’t trust myself to do it properly. She told me it was positive. I sat there, staring at her, like I wasn’t going to fall for it, like I was waiting for her to tell me she was joking. I didn’t really believe it could be true. And then she started talking about what my options were, and did I have anyone I could talk to about it? I couldn’t say anything. I remember how I opened my mouth a couple of times and nothing came out, not even air, because again I could hardly breathe. I felt like I was suffocating. She sat there, looking sympathetic, but of course she couldn’t come and give me a hug because of all that legal stuff. And right then I really, really needed a hug.

I got out of there and I was all shaky and weird, I couldn’t walk properly – I felt like a car had slammed into me. My body didn’t feel like mine. All this time it had been doing this secret, strange thing … without me knowing about it.

I couldn’t even make my fingers work on my phone. But eventually I unlocked it. I WhatsApped him. I saw that he’d read it straight away. I saw the three little dots appear – it told me that he was ‘typing’, at the top. Then they disappeared. Then they appeared again, and he was ‘typing’ for about a minute. Then nothing again.

I called him, because clearly he had his phone right there, in his hand. He didn’t answer. I called him again, it rang out. The third time, it went straight to the voicemail message. He’d declined it. So I left him a voicemail – though I’m not sure he would have been able to work out what I was actually saying, my voice was wobbling so much.

Mum took me to the clinic to have it done. She drove all the way from London to Exeter, nearly four hours door to door, and waited for me while I had it done and then drove me home afterwards.

‘It’s the best thing,’ she told me. ‘It’s the best thing, Livvy darling. I had a baby when I was your age. I didn’t think I had any other choice. I was at the beginning of my life, of my career. It ruined everything.’

I knew Jules would like hearing that one. I heard an argument with them once, when Jules had screamed at Mum: ‘You never wanted me! I know I was your biggest mistake …’

It was the only thing I could have done. But it would have been so much easier if he’d answered, if he’d let me know he understood, felt it too. Just a line – that’s all it would have taken.

‘He’s a little bastard,’ Mum told me. ‘For leaving you to go through all of this on your own.’

‘Mum,’ I told her – in case through some freak chance she happened to bump into Callum and go off on a tirade against him, ‘he doesn’t know. I don’t want him to know.’

I don’t know why I didn’t tell her it wasn’t Callum. It’s not like Mum’s a prude, like she would judge me for the whole thing with Steven. But I suppose I knew how much worse it would make me feel, reliving it all, feeling that rejection all over again.

I remember everything about that drive back from the clinic. I remember how Mum seemed so different to usual, how I’d never really seen her like that before. I saw how her hands gripped the steering wheel, hard enough that skin went white. She kept swearing, under her breath. Her driving was even worse than normal.

She told me, when we got home, to go and lie on the sofa, and she brought me biscuits and made me tea and arranged a rug over me, even though it was pretty warm. Then she sat down next to me, with her own cup of tea, even though I’m not sure I’d ever seen her drink tea before. She didn’t drink it, actually, she just sat there with her hands clenched around her mug as tight as they had been on the steering wheel.

‘I could kill him,’ she said again. Her voice didn’t even sound like her own; it was low and rough. ‘He should have been there with you, today,’ she said, in that same strange voice. ‘It’s probably a good thing I don’t know his full name. The things I would do to him if I did.’

I stare out into the waves. I think being in the sea will make me feel better. I think it’s the only thing that will work, all of a sudden. It looks so clean and beautiful and flawless, like being inside it would be like being inside a precious stone. I stand up, brush the sand off my dress. Shit … it’s cold in the wind. But actually it’s kind of a good cold – not like the cold in the chapel. Like it’s blowing every other thought out of my head.

I leave my shoes in the wet sand. I don’t bother stepping out of my dress. I walk into the water and it’s ten degrees cooler than the air, absolutely freezing freezing cold, it makes my breath come all fast and I can only take in little gulps of air. I feel the sting of the cut on my leg as the salt gets in it. And I push further into it, so that the water comes up to my chest, then my shoulders and now I really can’t breathe properly, like I’m wearing a corset. I feel tiny fireworks explode in my head and on the surface of my skin and all the bad thoughts loosen, so I can look at them more easily.

I put my head under, shaking it to encourage the bad thoughts to float away. A wave comes, and the water fills my mouth. It’s so salty it makes me gag and when I gag I swallow more water and don’t manage to breathe and more water goes in, and it’s in my nose too and each time I open my mouth for air more water comes in instead, great big salty gulps of it. I can feel the movement of the water under my feet and it feels like it’s tugging me somewhere, trying to take me with it. It’s like my body knows something I don’t because it’s fighting for me, my arms and legs thrashing out. I wonder if this is a bit what drowning is like. Then I wonder if I am drowning.