I realised I was hanging around in the door of the bathroom and made myself go to the sink and pick up the test.
There were two pink positive lines in the plastic window.
12
‘Two Mr Tasty’s lunches in two weeks,’ Hugh commented, tucking into his watery green chicken curry. ‘This is a record, isn’t it?’
I stirred my Tom Yam Gai. Over the past ten days, in the moments that I wasn’t feeling nauseated, I’d had a craving for hot, spicy, citrusy soup. I figured it was my body’s way of telling me I had to haul Hugh to Mr Tasty’s and tell him about the positive pregnancy test.
But now that I was here, both the soup and the idea of telling Hugh made me feel sick.
‘It’s been quite a two weeks,’ I said.
‘So what do you have to tell me?’
I spooned up a piece of chicken and let it fall back into the bowl, scattering drops of spicy broth on the table. I took a paper serviette from the dispenser and wiped it up carefully.
‘Do you want me to guess?’ he asked.
‘You never will.’
‘Well, let’s see. You’ve been moody as hell for the past week.’
‘I haven’t been moody.’ In fact, I thought I’d done a pretty good job at concealing my worry: I’d shown up at the pub every night with a smile plastered on my face, and I’d tried to be breezy and normal with Hugh. Neither one easy when the smell of the Mouse and Duck made me want to retch.
‘You nagged Jerry so hard that he spent his day off scrubbing floors on his hands and knees, you grimaced all through Maud’s karaoke singing of “Careless Whisper”, and I actually heard you referring to Reading Football Club as “a bunch of weeds”.’
‘Well, the floors were disgusting,’ I defended myself. ‘And not one of Reading Football Club looks good in shorts.’
‘Most people judge a football team by other criteria,’ Hugh told me. ‘I had to remind Paul and Philip that you were female and therefore couldn’t be bodily thrown out of the pub on to the street.’
‘They should get a sense of humour. Or aesthetics.’
‘I found half a slice of my Victoria sponge in your kitchen bin when I made myself a cup of tea yesterday.’
That, I couldn’t deny.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I’ve been moody. It’s with good reason.’
‘What is it?’
A lock of Hugh’s thick hair fell over his forehead. His skin was fresh and smooth-shaven, his eyes bright, his brows raised. He looked so confident and so optimistic and so sexy that I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say the words.
I hadn’t told anyone yet. Speaking the words seemed too real. It was as if I thought that this little tiny foetus was sort of hovering outside my body, just waiting for me to tell someone about it, so it could attach itself to me and start growing into a baby.
‘I’ll guess, shall I?’ he said.
I nodded.
‘June has shown up again and has told you she had a sex change twenty years ago and she’s actually your father.’
I had to laugh at that one. ‘No. I haven’t heard from her since she packed up and left. I’ve got no idea where she went to.’
‘You’ve heard from your agent and they’re going to make
Cuffed and Collared
into a movie.’
‘No. I wish.’
‘Me too.’ He considered. ‘Okay, you’ve decided to stop fighting your feelings and you’re finally ready to tell me you’re desperately in love with me because I’m your perfect man.’
I laughed at that, too. A little bit forced, because, to be honest, I’d been looking at his mouth again when he’d said it.
‘I
am
your perfect man, you know,’ he said.
‘Uh huh.’ I tore my gaze from his face and toyed with my soup. ‘Any more guesses?’
Hugh took a deep breath and let it out.
‘I don’t know, Eleanor,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve proved that I can’t read your mind.’
He sounded so tired and fed up, suddenly, that I broke my staring competition with my soup and looked at him again. His face was angry as he forked up rice and curry and chewed it vigorously.
Fear spiked through me. Hugh angry was a new thing. I didn’t know what caused it, I didn’t know what would come of it. And I needed Hugh, the old familiar Hugh, my friend who knew me better than anyone, if I was going to deal with this.
‘You’re usually very good at reading my mind,’ I said lightly, trying to bring the mood back to what it had been five minutes before. ‘Remember all those nights playing drinking Pictionary instead of revising for exams?’
‘You know, I’ve always thought that was wrong,’ he said, and I was relieved that his voice was more cheerful, more Hugh-like. ‘We always won, but that meant we had to drink less. I think if you win a drinking game you should have to drink
more
.’ He ate another bite of curry. ‘You know, when I open my own restaurant, I’m going to shoot anyone who produces slop like this.’
‘You want to open your own restaurant?’
I’d never thought of Hugh as someone with ambitions beyond transient pleasure. He seemed to drift along, like me; over the years he’d had five or six jobs in various I.T. companies, till he’d packed it in to go back to college and train as a pastry chef. Although he was very good at being a pastry chef, I guess I’d assumed this was a new thing he’d get tired of sooner or later; probably after he’d amassed enough skills and recipes to produce enough cakes to seduce all the unattached (blonde or redheaded) females in Reading whom he hadn’t seduced already.
‘Of course I want to open my own restaurant. Why do you think I’ve saved up half of my paycheques for the past two years?’
This was also news to me, but, in case Hugh had told me this information at a time I hadn’t been listening to him, I kept my mouth shut about it.
‘Anyway. What do you have to tell me?’
The pause to discuss Pictionary and his future restaurant seemed to have restored him to his usual spirits. Of course, since I didn’t know what had made him angry in the first place, he could suffer a relapse at any time. So I should get in while I had the chance. No waiting for the perfect moment to drop the news, or creating a perfect moment, as I would in a story.
This was all the moment I was going to get.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.
Hugh’s reaction was extraordinary. I’d never seen anything like it.
His body jerked back, as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. For a moment the most intense pain crossed his features. He dropped his fork, half-laden with curry, and it clattered on the table.
‘Eleanor,’ he gasped, and the thought crossed my mind that maybe he was being poisoned by his lunch.
I jumped out of my chair, my hands outstretched to thump him on the back or something, but before I could reach him he stood up. His chair toppled over behind him.
‘You fucking idiot.’
His voice was harsh and angrier than I’d ever heard it before, even when he’d been joking. Cold fear seized me, because I didn’t know this man across the table from me at all, even though he was wearing the body of my best friend.
‘Hugh?’ I said.
‘Who’s the father?’
I looked around Mr Tasty’s. There were two men in yellow high-visibility jackets in the corner smoking fags over their bacon sandwiches, and the Thai cook and waitress. All four of them were watching us.
‘Hugh, can we—’
‘Who’s the father, Eleanor?’ He’d put his hands on the table and they were so tense that the fingers were white. ‘Was it that bloke I heard you with?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this here, let’s—’
‘Tell me.’
His face was not the kind of face that you messed with.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘Fucking hell,’ he muttered roughly and he stalked past me, through the restaurant and out the door, letting it bang behind him.
It took me a few seconds before I could get my head together enough to go to the till and pay for lunch and follow him out on to the street.
He was quite a way down the King’s Road already, recognisable from behind by his height and his ferocious gait. I ran after him.
By the time I caught up I was nearly out of breath. ‘Hugh,’ I gasped, and realised I had no idea what to say to him. All I knew was that I needed him.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I said weakly.
‘I should hope not.’ He kept on striding with his long legs and I had to jog to keep up with him.
‘Why are you so mad?’
‘Because you are without a doubt the stupidest female in the history of the planet. You have heard of condoms, Eleanor? They did give you sex education in school, didn’t they? You do know that sex wasn’t invented for fun and erotic novels and there’s a little thing called reproduction -’
I stopped jogging.
‘I know,’ I cried. ‘I know I was stupid, I know I should have used a condom, you’re not telling me anything new here and you’re certainly not helping!’
After half a step, he stopped too and whirled to face me.
‘You expect me to help you, you go and get yourself pregnant by a man you hardly know, who can’t know you, who can’t even know who he—’ He stopped, as if he were choking. ‘And I’m supposed to be the good little friend and pat your hand and tell you everything’s going to be okay?’
‘Oh, yeah, you’re right,’ I spat back. ‘How dare I get pregnant so your best friend can’t hang out with you in the pub any more? God, I might even ask you to change a nappy or two every now and then. What a bloody nightmare. I’m so selfish to go and get myself knocked up by a stranger, I should have thought of
you
first.’
‘What do you think I am, Eleanor?’ He nearly shouted it, but then he swallowed and lowered his voice. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘You’re my friend and I need you to talk to me about this, not yell at me in the street!’
For a long moment he didn’t say anything. I noticed, for the first time, that we were standing more or less exactly in the queue for the number seventeen bus and that people were stepping around us gingerly. I didn’t much care. My stomach was rolling and my eyes were watering and all I cared about was that my best friend was acting in a way I didn’t understand.
‘I don’t have anyone else,’ I said.
Stranger-Hugh gazed down at me, oblivious of the bus queue.
‘Let’s go to the Forbury,’ he said. He spun around and started walking again.
I tagged along behind him as he rounded the corner and threaded through office blocks to the iron railings of the park. The Forbury was a Victorian pleasure garden, recently restored, inhabited this clear autumn afternoon by women with prams, pensioners, and a small knot of teenage Gothabees with skateboards and cigarettes.
Hugh stalked past the flower beds to an empty bench near the bandstand. He sat on it, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat. I sat beside him and heard him take a long breath in and then let it out.
‘How are you?’ he asked me.
‘I’ve got a bit of morning sickness.’
‘I should have stopped this from happening,’ he said.
What an odd thing to say. ‘How?’
He looked at me and although he looked more like the Hugh I knew, I couldn’t read his face at all.
‘If I’d—’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You could have chained me up in your loft, I guess. That would have kept me out of trouble. Maybe you could do it now?’