went quiet for a few seconds, then I heard her whistling from outside the door.
‘Why are you whistling?’
She stopped. ‘It makes horses pee when you’re riding them.’
‘I’m not a horse.’ Although it gave me an idea. With my left hand, I reached across for the bathroom sink and twisted the hot tap, then held my hand underneath the warm water.
It worked instantly. I started weeing and moved the stick into prime position, sort of between the front and the middle. Please could I not be pregnant, I thought, my eyes fixated on the stick as I felt warm wetness on my fingers. Brilliant, I’d weed on my own hand. Please, please, please could this not be positive. I was thirty-one, single, barely able to afford my rent. I had a life plan. Well, a vague life plan. This was not it.
I finished and jiggled up and down on the loo seat, trying not to drop the stick. Then I turned off the hot tap with my left hand and tugged off a few sheets of loo roll. I retrieved the stick, resisted the urge to tap it on the section of loo seat in front of me like a teaspoon on the side of a teacup – ting, ting, ting! – and wiped myself.
I looked at the test in my right hand, feeling as if I’d swallowed a jar of butterflies, before gently dropping it on a pile of Mum’s History Today magazines and pulling up my jeans. I picked up the stick without looking at it and unlocked the bathroom door.
Jess was standing there, picking at her cuticles like a nervous father outside the delivery room.
‘Show me,’ she said instantly, holding her hand out for the test. ‘What’s it say?’
Come on, Lil, I told myself, stomach still churning, look down. Get it over and done with and then you can go to the pub with Jess and have a drink to celebrate. After that, no more sex. Never again. Not worth it. Not worth the hassle and the drama and this panic attack over the infinitesimally small chance you might be pregnant. I’d take a vow of celibacy and get a cat. I’d become a priest. I’d move to somewhere in the Far East, become a Buddhist and renounce all physical desires. I’d convert to asexualism. Just please, please, please, God, if there is one, if you are there, I know I’m always asking you things and swearing I’ll never ask again, but this time I really mean it. I promise I’ll never ask anything trivial again if you grant me this one tiny wish: please can I not be pregnant.
I looked down at the stick.
‘Fuccccccccck,’ I said, looking at it, holding it out for Jess. No question about it, there were two little purple lines. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Chapter One
I’D RATHER HAVE EATEN my own foot than go on a date that night. The whole thing was Jess’s idea. She said I needed to ‘get back in the saddle’. Hateful expression. I didn’t feel like doing any sort of riding, thank you very much. But she’d insisted I download a dating app called Kindling, which is why I was now sitting on the bus, so nervous it felt like even my earlobes were sweating, on the way to some pub in Vauxhall to meet someone called Max. We hadn’t been messaging for very long so I knew almost nothing about him. Only that he was thirty-four, had dark curly hair and seemed less alarming than some of the other creatures I’d scrolled through – no, no, no, maybe, no, no, definitely not, you’re the sort of pervert who’d have a foot fetish, no, no, YES. Hello, handsome, stubbly man who looks like a cross between a Jane Austen hero and Jack Sparrow the pirate. That was Max.
He’d asked me out a couple of days after matching, saying he didn’t believe in ‘beating around the bush’. I liked his straightforwardness. No messing about. No dick pics. Just, ‘Fancy a drink?’ I figured it was better to meet and see whether you got on with someone rather than message for several weeks and paint a madly romantic picture of them in your head, then meet up and realize you’d got it wrong and in real life they were a psychopath.
So, even though Max’s question made me want to throw up with nerves, I’d agreed. A tiny, minuscule part of me knew Jess was right, knew that I had to make an effort.