The Single Mums' Secrets - Janet Hoggarth Page 0,7

baby. We had a blast and it acted as a buffer against heartbreak. I think if we’d gone through that separately, it would have been hell.’

I nodded in agreement.

Ali vigorously shook a salad dressing in a jam jar like a mixologist making a cocktail. She unscrewed the lid and dipped her index finger inside to taste test.

‘So what’s going on with you?’ she asked, drizzling the dressing over the salad and handing me my dinner, which looked Instagram worthy and the first thing I’d eaten for a week that wasn’t entirely beige or out of a packet.

‘Everything’s still the same. Tom came to the funeral.’

‘How was that? You see him at work every day though.’

‘I know, but it felt different. I had a fleeting panic that I’ve messed up my life. I’m so used to seeing him at the practice that he’s compartmentalised in a box labelled Work. But now I never see him outside of that and it hit me like a sledgehammer.’

‘You never said why you split up…’

Only Justine and Mia, my best friends, knew the gory details. Mum and Dad still lived in hope that we would have a reconciliation, and even Louise had seemed genuinely perplexed by the outcome. Though, knowing what she knew, she shouldn’t have been…

‘Was it your choice?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you said you were afraid you’d messed up your life.’ I sighed and picked up my wine, taking a large gulp, glancing at the display of picture frames dotted along the window ledge in Ali’s small kitchen. Grace grinned at me from one, her face painted like a tiger. Nick and Ali on a beach dressed in anoraks smiled from another heart-shaped one, arms entwined round each other evidently in the grip of the first flush of love. People I didn’t know so well posed in the others: an older lady who must have been her mum. I didn’t have any photos displayed over the road. I still felt suspended in aspic, my room as impersonal as a hotel suite.

‘Yeah, in an abstract way it was kind of my decision.’

Ali looked at me expectantly.

Maybe it was the lubricating wine, or the fact that we had just sent Nigel off to Valhalla to play golf for eternity, but my usually constricted tongue loosened. ‘I don’t want children.’

3

That Was Then This Is Now

‘Neither do I at the moment.’ Tom had laughed as I’d lain in his arms all those years ago on the night we’d finally got together after Geeta’s birthday drinks. Sweat dampened his chest hair and a post-coital glow spread across his torso. I’d felt the customary nosedive in my guts as once more I found myself crouching on the starting line of The Conversation.

‘I never want them, Tom.’

‘Never?’

I’d vehemently shaken my head. ‘Before you ask, I know I won’t change my mind. I’ve felt like this for ten years. It was always Louise playing with dolls, nursing them, carrying them round like a real baby – she was born broody. I used to amputate Sindy’s legs and fix them back together with staples. I wasn’t ever interested in babies like that. It never happened.’

‘But how do you know you won’t change your mind? You’re only thirty-one.’

‘I just do.’ No one ever seemed satisfied with my never wanting children story. Good job I had a supporting medical diagnosis. ‘I have polycystic ovaries and it was pretty severe when I was younger. Now I only have one vastly underperforming ovary with negligible eggs. The gynaecologist said it would be near impossible for me to conceive naturally.’

‘Do you feel like this because you can’t have children or because you don’t want them? There have been huge advances in the field of fertility in the last ten years. You of all people know that.’ Now he was sounding like Mum.

I pushed myself up on my elbows and looked at him in the half-light from his bedside lamp. We’d been skating round each other at work for months, ice dancers executing an elaborate routine, finally coming together for the grand finale’s strenuous Triple Salchow.

‘There’s a bit more to it than just that – things I’d rather not talk about if you don’t mind…’ I lay back down and disengaged, shuffling over to my side of the bed to stare at the ceiling. Ten years on and I could go for months without ever thinking about this, but then it would slide uninvited into my head, a dark magazine article or a distressing report on the