The Yorkshire Pudding Club (8 page)

First thing on Monday morning, the men arrived to deliver and fit Elizabeth’s carpet. They were nice blokes who helped her put the furniture back in its new formation and she slipped them an extra tenner for their trouble because she did not like owing anyone. Then, when they had gone, she collapsed on the bed, fell to sleep for two hours, and dreamed about Sam and Auntie Elsie looking around and admiring what she had done. She woke up with the wonderful sensation of Sam pawing at her face, only to find it was actually Cleef who had come to tell her that she was thirty seconds late with his food. As she was getting out his Whiskas, her eye fell on the large ‘P due’ on the calendar above the cat-food cupboard. Her period appeared to be over a week late, though usually she was a day or two early. At least it came last month, thank goodness, when she really needed to see the cleansing evidence of blood, although she had noticed it was distinctly on the light side.

She felt slightly sick but slotted a slice of bread in the toaster because her stomach was creaking like an old ship with lack of food. By the time it had popped
up out of the toaster, she would have thrown it up, had it so much as touched her lips.

What the hell is up with me? she thought, not even opening her mind to options other than a local virus.

When Barry Parrish rang to tell Janey that they were offering her the job, she would have danced on the desk had her head not been cluttered up with other stuff that needed dealing with first. There would be time for celebrations later. She had gone into Tesco the previous day specifically to get a pregnancy test but chickened out in the end because getting one had somehow made the potential nightmare more of a real possibility. She wandered around the store in a fog with all the other Sunday shoppers and bought fifty pounds’ worth of foodstuff she didn’t need instead.

Janey rang George on his mobile to tell him the good news about the job and he whooped enough for them both and promised to cook something special for tea from the provisions in the overflowing fridge. Janey did not feel like tea, she felt like staying close to a toilet with something nice and cool on her forehead. She went to Boots in her lunch-hour and picked up a test, stuffing it down into the bottom of her bag as if out of sight equalled out of mind. Then she got off early with a pretend migraine and went round to see Elizabeth, who looked worse than she did.

‘So what brings the pleasure of your unexpected company then?’ said Elizabeth, forcing herself to sound
jolly despite feeling like death warmed up to just below chilled.

‘Don’t ask,’ said Janey, sailing past her into the sunny kitchen and putting her bag down on the little circular dining-table in the middle of it.

‘Tea?’

‘Got any juice or something? I don’t feel like tea or coffee.’

‘Yeah, course,’ said Elizabeth, going to the fridge for the big carton of cranberry juice. ‘This do you?’

‘Yes, fine. Are you feeling okay? You’re very pale.’

‘Bit of a headache,’ said Elizabeth, rubbing her forehead. ‘Probably paint-induced.’

When she turned around, Janey was looking at something she had taken out of a paper bag.

‘What’s that?’

‘What’s it look like?’

Elizabeth took it out of her hand. ‘A pregnancy test?’

‘Yep.’

‘Who’s it for?’

‘Who do you think? My mam’s dog?’ said Janey impatiently and downed her juice in one, wishing it were a brandy.

Elizabeth didn’t know what face to present as instinct, on this occasion, did not encourage her to say ‘Wow!’ and dance around singing ‘Congratulations,’ like they had done for Helen.

‘You’re not, are you?’ she said finally.

‘I bloody hope not!’

‘Well, what made you buy it then?’

‘My boobs are getting bigger and I’ve been feeling a bit sick. It’s just a precaution. I’ll do this then I can put it out of my mind. I know I’m not pregnant–I can’t be,’ Janey said decisively.

They opened up the package; there were two tests in it.

‘What do you do with it?’ said Elizabeth, noseying over her shoulder.

‘I haven’t a clue–I’ll tell you in a minute,’ replied Janey, as she unfolded the leaflet inside. She read the instructions twice aloud to make sure she understood them, then she disappeared up the twisty narrow staircase into the bathroom whilst Elizabeth poured out some more juice. Soon after, Janey came back downstairs holding the pencilly thing as if it was something contaminated with the plague.

‘Right. Now, apparently, I wait for three minutes,’ said Janey. They sat at the table, propped the test up against the salt pot and watched it, Janey with her hands clasped as if in prayer, just wanting to get this nonsense over with so she could go back to normal life. They waited for hours, or so it felt.

‘Does a blue line in that box mean you’re pregnant or not pregnant?’ Elizabeth said as it materialized slowly in the second box. Janey didn’t answer; she was too busy going corpse-white and saying F words, which Janey only ever said in the most extreme of cases.

‘I can’t understand it,’ she kept saying over and over and over. She looked as stunned as if she’d just been hit with a sledgehammer, which metaphorically she had. Elizabeth wafted herself with the instruction
leaflet; she was burning up whilst Janey was shivering.

‘How? I just don’t understand!’ said Janey tightly, shaking the indicator as if to make it admit it had made a mistake and erase the blue line. ‘We never took chances. Ever.’ Then she swore again as her head slumped forward into her hands.

‘Do the other test–that one might be faulty,’ encouraged Elizabeth.

‘What’s the point,’ said Janey. ‘It says they’re about three million per cent accurate. It’s right, I just feel it. Oh, bloody hell!’

‘What will you do?’ Elizabeth said eventually, taking her friend’s hand and gripping it hard.

‘What can I do but have it?’ Janey said with an unpleasant laugh. I’m totally trapped, she thought, wishing her conscience about abortion was not so strong. She did not want it but she couldn’t
not
have it. There was no way she was capable of killing it, for that’s what she would feel she had done if she went for an abortion. George certainly would never forgive her if she were to do that, and she could never keep it secret from him–the one secret she had kept from him was bad enough. How,
how
had this happened? It just did not make sense!

‘George will be happy,’ Elizabeth said tentatively, because she couldn’t tell if Janey was on the brink of going berserk like the Incredible Hulk or about to start sobbing.

She did neither; she just got slowly to her feet, lifted up her bag and her keys and said, ‘I best go tell him then, hadn’t I?’

‘Do you want me to drive you?’ Elizabeth said, thinking Janey didn’t look fit to drive.

‘I’m all right. I just need to be by myself for a while,’ Janey said, thinking that Elizabeth didn’t look fit to drive her even if she had wanted her to.

‘Will you ring me when you get home then?’

‘I’ll ring twice–don’t pick up and don’t panic if it’s not in the next five minutes. I need to circle the block and think for a bit.’

When it rang almost half an hour later, Elizabeth did not pick up. She was too busy drinking more juice and staring at the second testing kit in the bag on the table.

Janey’s house was only a couple of minutes up the road from Elizabeth’s, but it took her twenty more to pull up outside the substantial Victorian stone-built town villa with the front aspect overlooking the park. She walked up the path, collected herself and opened the door to the rich aroma of lamb cooking.

‘Hello there, Power Lady!’ George said, coming out of the kitchen in an apron with inflated pecs and six-pack that Elizabeth had bought him last Christmas. His welcoming smile slid as he studied her sad, pale face. ‘Ey, what’s up, love? I thought you’d come in bubbling over about your job.’

Janey wanted to be excited about her job, except the job was at the other side of a mountain in her head and she couldn’t see it at present.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said quietly.

George said nothing because he could not take it
in. He was hearing the words he had most wanted to hear in the world but it took him a while to accept that it was not his ears playing a great big fat trick on him. Then when his brain allowed the information entry, his face did not light up like 300 Bonfire Nights, nor did he leap up in the air or make any strange animal noises. He pulled her quietly towards him and cuddled her gently as if he was thanking her. Then he started crying. Then Janey started crying.

A baby, thought George. My baby. Our baby. He wanted to scream the house down. He wanted to lift Janey in the air and spin her round like couples on the telly did. But her face said it all. George’s stomach dropped like a stone and he said to himself,
‘What have I done?’

Elizabeth didn’t know how long she stared at that paper bag. All she knew was that it was showing light through the window when Janey had left and it was dark grey outside when she picked it up and took it upstairs into the bathroom. She sat for ages on the stool in the corner before she got a grip on herself. She needed to know if this was why she kept being sick and felt tired and irritable, and why every bra she had made her chest feel sore. Knowing would not change the facts, and at least if it was negative, she could finally and forever bury that night. And if it was positive…well, it needed dealing with, but hopefully she wouldn’t have to cross that bridge.

Remembering the instructions Janey had read out, she stuck the stick into her stream of urine then she
took it downstairs, as Janey had done, and sat on the kitchen chair, staring at it so hard that she thought she had imagined the blue line at first, but she hadn’t. It was definitely there, as she knew deep down that it would be.

‘Stupid STUPID bitch that I am!’
she screamed aloud at herself.
‘Why didn’t I go for the morning-after pill?’

Her brain mocked her:
‘Because it was all over in seconds. Because he didn’t come inside you and you can’t get pregnant if they don’t.’

How many times had she scoffed at the anonymous women on problem pages for believing they could not get pregnant during periods or if they did it standing up or if a man said he had only put it in an inch?

And then I go and beat them all into second place in the Miss Stupidest Cow World Contest by not sorting this out the morning after when I had the chance, she thought. Why didn’t I, just in case? Why didn’t I? Why had she–sensible, practical and old-enough-to-know-better Elizabeth Collier–stuffed this problem away like a cat in a box and not expected it to scratch and claw its way out?

This could not be allowed to happen: she couldn’t have a baby. She wasn’t like the others. Janey would come round to the idea of her pregnancy because her lovely family and in-laws would rally and her life would jiggle about, resettle and adjust. George would put her on a pedestal and bring her cups of tea every five minutes and love her…love
them
. But her? People like her shouldn’t have babies. People who never
learned what proper love is, whose mams buggered off and left them, whose dads took family to mean something different to what it should be. Only people with nice blokes at their side should be looking at that stick watching the blue line come out, then go off snuggling and laughing and discussing names and flicking through the Argos catalogue for ideas as to what they might need. It should not be like this; she had nothing to give a child.

She got the Yellow Pages and looked up
Abortion Advice
, shaking so much she nearly scribbled down the number of the abattoir, which was almost the same thing really.
See Clinics
, the entry said, so she saw
Clinics
, expecting it to say
See Abortion Advice
and land her in one of those circular living-nightmare dreams where you never get a straight answer until it’s too late. It didn’t though, and there was a number. She took it down. She would ring them in the morning and in a couple of days, it would all be done with. She held tight to that thought and kept it in her sights like a runner keeps the finishing line in his focus and nothing else. Nothing.

George and Janey both took a day’s holiday off work and stayed in bed and talked. He looked more radiant than she was supposed to, and somewhere in the middle of all that rabbiting, they made love. On Janey’s part, it was not so much desire as diversion; on George’s part it was guilt and desperation. There did not seem much point in putting on a condom and their orgasms were a particularly intense escape for both of them.

George stroked her hair afterwards and said, ‘It’ll all come right in the end, you know,’ which is the sort of thing George said and, more often than not, it usually did. Janey doubted it would this time, though. How could they live on his pitiful wage for thumping out bits of plastic moulded on a big machine day in, day out, whilst she was meant to give up the career chance of a lifetime? How could this mess ever ‘come right in the end’?

Oh God!

Somehow, Elizabeth got to sleep but she woke up at an unearthly hour and killed time with terrible television programmes until 9 a.m. She telephoned the clinic, made an appointment and then rang around some employment agencies, making arrangements to go and see them early the following week when it was all over, and for good this time. She was totally cool and calm and collected. It was surprisingly easy. So long as she didn’t think, it was easy.

After putting the phone down, Elizabeth badly needed to get away from the house and despite it being a freezing, frosty morning, she grabbed her scarf, gloves, and big coat with the furry trim, and headed for the park. Just along from Janey’s house were the first lot of entry gates, but these were locked so she had to walk round to the other set on a road where infinitely more expensive houses than Janey’s enjoyed the park view. The grass was iced and crunchy underfoot, cobwebs shivered in the hedges like delicate, intricate necklaces and the air was just what she needed–cold, sharp and cleansing.

She took herself along the path and down the twenty-six ‘alphabet’ steps to where the old stone lion had lived, before he was vandalized and replaced for the last time. This was her favourite bit of the park where, in summer, great banks of flowers flanked a winding path that led to a large, ornate fountain. It used to have water in it when she was a child and kids would paddle in it, but now it was full of soil and little sprouts of early spring flowers. She walked on past where the birdhouses used to be. They had
been shabby pens, as she remembered, and it must have been a boring existence for the little things.

The park café was closed, which was to be expected at this time of morning and of year, although its window in the month for opening had always been the same narrow gap as that for ovulation in the menstrual calendar–and about as difficult to catch, unless you were one of the lucky ones like she obviously was. She had a few nice memories of eating Funny Face ice creams bought from there by her Auntie Elsie as they took Sam for a walk. Elizabeth dropped onto an old damp park bench, the same one they would sit and rest on when they were throwing a ball or stick for him. They always got fed up of the game before he did because he would have let them play that until their arms wore off.

There was a mum pushing a little girl on the baby swings nearby as their old terrier sniffed around tree trunks and overmarked them with his own scent. Elizabeth tried to put herself in the mother’s place but she couldn’t do it. She could imagine herself on a yacht in the Bahamas, or sitting behind a big executive desk with a power suit on, or holding an art exhibition in a top London gallery, but she couldn’t imagine herself pushing
her
baby in
that
swing in
this
park. The dog made her smile a little as he was a sturdy old gent with a serious expression, but she wasn’t looking at the woman with a soppy, ‘Aw, isn’t that sweet?’ face. There was no emotional content in the scene for her at all; she was seeing just a woman with just a baby. The little girl was holding her arms out for her mam
to lift her out of the basket seat. She was a bonny little thing in her pink furry ensemble but there were no twangs going off in Elizabeth’s heart, not even when the little girl started kissing the woman’s face. Not one.

Soon, the cold became uncomfortable, even though she was wrapped up like the Michelin Man on a Polar expedition. Her nose felt as if it had been frozen off, and there must have been a small hole in the bottom of her boot as her foot felt damp. She walked around the bowling green and wended her way back to the park exit. She didn’t feel any better for the fresh air, but neither did she feel any worse for sitting watching a nice mum-and-daughter thing going on, knowing it would not be her and a kid one day. Indifference was a preferable state.

She planned to stay away from the known world until the end of the week, until her appointment, until it was done. Over the next couple of days, she fobbed both Helen and Janey off with the lie that she had caught a bug and so they must keep away from her in their respective conditions. She told Dean the same. He had a bit of a phobia about vomiting so she laid it on thick about how bad that particular aspect of the virus was, which nicely did the trick.

Intending to keep busy during her self-imposed isolation period, she took out her artbox and sketched a few studies of Cleef, but the pictures were dark and she had him so out of perspective that he did not look like the benign animal that he was. She made him longer and dangerously sleek with predatory eyes,
and she hated the look of the cat she had drawn, so she ripped the paper out and put her artbox back into the drawer. It frightened her sometimes, what darkness could conduct itself down her pencils. Instead, she watched crap television and read books and started stencilling a line of roses twisted up with ivy across her new pink bedroom walls whilst trying to ignore the answering machine messages from Janey and Helen saying that they were thinking about her, and that if she wanted anything getting from town shopping-wise, she was to ring them straight away…

Two days later, as she pulled off the last stencil, she looked down at the clock on the little table at the side of her bed to check the time. In another twenty-four hours she would be back at home, the mess forgotten and dealt with, and then she could pick her life back up where she had left it at the beginning of the week, thank God. She would ring Janey and Helen and say she felt better and they would have an ordinary chat, about ordinary things–she so craved ‘ordinary’.

Elizabeth ran herself a deep bath before bed and lit a cigarette–her first for ages because she had totally lost the taste for them with all the changes that had been going on in her body. She slipped into the perfumed water and propped her book up on the wire frame that rested across the bath and which held her soap and flannel and the hard sandy thing that she used to attack the ruthless advance of cellulite. As she took a long drag of the cigarette, guilt blindsided her, hitting her hard as she imagined
it
drawing the cool
smoke into its tiny lungs. She batted the picture away but it came back at her with revenge force.

‘Bugger,’ she said in defeat, and dipped the lighted end of the cigarette into the bath where it fizzled. She was hardly going to enjoy it with those sorts of images flashing in her head, even if it wasn’t a formed thing yet anyway but just an unfeeling mass of cells, something tadpoley that would not even be in there the same time tomorrow. Millions of them were lost or taken out every day; it was no big deal in the great scheme of things. Besides, she was doing it a favour in the end.

The water was so hot it was turning her skin pink. Gin and hot baths–that’s what they used to do in the old days, wasn’t it? If she lost
it
, that would be perfect–problem solved, end of story. She could forget the whole sorry saga without any residue of guilt from having forced the issue at a clinic.

It was then she saw the red blob bobbing and dipping elusively under the surface of the water and she went rigid; surprisingly, it was fear that gripped her, not relief, when she saw more red blobs dancing with it under the Radox bubbles. It
knew
she didn’t want it–it was dying, slipping away from her before it was forcibly removed.
Unloved.
She gulped, then leaned slowly forward, wafting a parting in the suds and cupped her hand under the red clots, delicately draining away the water by slightly opening her fingers.
She should get out of the water. Ring an ambulance.
But she remained, statue-still, looking at the red in her hand. It didn’t look like blood at close scrutiny, but what
the hell else could it be? It seemed to have some sort of fibres. She poked tentatively at them.

What the…?
Not clots, but threads from the new bedroom carpet. Just threads. Her feet must have picked them up when she got undressed in her room.

‘You stupid, stupid cow!’ She laughed hard at herself as cold relief washed over her. Her bairn wasn’t dying.
Her bairn.
She did not want to think of this.
Half mine as well as half his.
Stop–STOP.
More than half, because it was growing in her, feeding off her, living in her.
Her laugh at mistaking threads for a miscarriage grew hard and hysterical, and slid without warning into a sob. A long, shoulder-shaking, snot-making, face-reddening, eye-puckering sob–for suddenly, ridiculously, because of a red carpet, her life had been hijacked and locked onto a different course and there was not a single damned thing she could do about it.