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CHAPTER TWO

‘The day we brought Jen and Ming home from China was the happiest day of our lives. I was forty-four. We’d been trying to become parents for almost two decades, and had travelled half way across the world to adopt a baby. Three months later, I had a routine scan about my polycystic ovaries. “Mrs Freed,” said the doctor his face waxy white. “Were you aware you were pregnant? With twins”?’

Jenny, 46, Southampton

So here I am again, fifth night out on the trot, in the Coach and Horses, Soho, a warm smoky pub that smells of damp coats and stale beer, with Vicky and Jim, my very best mates.

‘Wine for the lady, Stella for Sir in the corner,’ I say, passing Jim his pint.

‘Aw thanks, you’re a beauty.’ He downs half of it in one go. ‘Chaucer and fourteen-year-olds, I tell you, it does me in every time.’

‘So Jimbo,’ says Vicky, pouring herself a bowlful of wine. ‘How come your “loverrrr”, or is she your girlfriend?’ Jim groans at this. ‘How come she’s managed to drag you to Swan Lake? When we went to see Les Miserables you said – and I quote – “It was just a load of old women with massive jugs, bounding about the stage for what felt like days.”’

Jim looks up at me from his pint, a moustache of froth on his top lip. I raise an eyebrow.

‘Did I?’ he says, genuinely incredulous. ‘Sorry Vicks, what an absolute knob.’

‘Apology accepted – even though it was my birthday, if I remember rightly – but anyway, you still haven’t answered the question.’

‘What question?’

‘How come you’re going to the ballet when you don’t even like musicals?’

‘I don’t not like musicals,’ says Jim, nervously pulling on his jacket collar. ‘I just don’t like all of them that’s all.’

‘So exactly what musicals do you like?’ says Vicky. I can tell she is enjoying this line of questioning.

‘Chicago,’ Jim shrugs.

‘Chicago?’ Vicky splutters.

‘Yeah, Chicago. You know, the one that was made into a gangster film.’

‘The one with loads of chicks in suspenders and stockings, you mean?’ I cut in.

‘That’s the one,’ winks Jim.

Vicky nods her head sagely.

‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘I should imagine you like that one.’

Jim looks at us, gives a short laugh, then looks away, shaking his head.

This is his ‘teacher’ face. It says, ‘will you all just grow up’. And the thing is, annoyingly, it kind of becomes him. Whereas everyone else went through – and came out the other side of – the ‘I want to become a teacher’ stage (spurred on by fantasies of standing on tables making inspiring speeches like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society), Jim actually did it. And he was a natural too. So much so that in less than three years of teaching English to the little tyrants at Westminster City School he had been made Head of Department. Jim can talk about Shakespeare like he’s talking about Neighbours: he knows his stuff, is genuinely mad about the subject and yet manages to never sound like a pretentious wanker. Well, hardly ever…

‘Look,’ Jim says, wearily. ‘This girl’s quite nice, she happens to like ballet, she quite likes me and she wants me to go. Since when is it a crime for a man to indulge in some culture anyway, and what is this? The Spanish Inquisition?’

‘No, it’s just, it’s quite girlfriendy, going to the ballet just because “she likes it”.’ I poke his arm playfully. ‘Selflessness, I’d say, is the first sign of true love.’

Vicky folds her arms industriously.

‘Annalisa won’t be best pleased,’ she chips in.

Annalisa is that rare thing: a holiday fling that goes on being a holiday fling. Jim met her in Rimini on a lads’ holiday a few years ago and they’ve had an ‘understanding’ (basically to be each other’s bit of no-strings fun when he visits Italy or she visits London) ever since.

‘Give it a rest will you.’ Jim sinks back in his chair. ‘Annalisa wouldn’t care and anyway, Claire’s a lovely girl but she doesn’t want anything serious anymore than I do. You two are just jealous. I’ve got a date, I’m going somewhere interesting. Meanwhile, you’re in this rubbish pub talking about makeup and periods. Probably.’

This is what we do, us lot, wind each other up. Sometimes I forget I’ve had sex with Jim. I forget he has seen me naked in all sorts of compromising positions. I don’t remember how he’s caressed my boobs, taken baths with me and commented on my rather relaxed upkeep of hair removal. It’s like we are experts at compartmentalization. When we’re having sex, we’re tender and intimate. When we’re not, we’re mates. That’s all, nothing more, nothing less. Just mates.

I look at Jim.

‘So, what are you wearing for your “hot date”?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean when are you getting changed, you know, into your going-out clothes?’

Jim examines his attire. Then looks at Vicky. He actually looks a bit hurt. A little part of me wants to give him a hug.

‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is what I’m wearing.’

‘You are kidding,’ I say. Vicky erupts, spraying scampi fries everywhere. ‘This is the ballet, Jim. You’ll get chucked out looking like that.’

‘Like what? What’s the matter with me?’

‘Like an Austin Powers/raver cross breed?’

‘Aw, give over Tess. He looks alright, don’t you Jimbo?’ Vicky puts an arm around him, trying not to laugh.

Jim looks at me.

‘What?’ he says, a smile curling at the sides of his mouth. ‘It’s a bloody good jacket this, I’ll have you know. It’s Ellesse, not your Top Man bollocks. Top notch.’

Vicky and I are pissing ourselves now. Jim’s had that jacket since about 1991. Which was about the time Ellesse was last cool.

‘Where’s your whistle and your acid tabs?’ I joke. ‘And I bet it’s still got that fag burn in the back.’

Jim sticks his bottom lip out in a mock show of hurt.

‘Come ’ere, I’m only kidding,’ I say, getting his head and putting it into an affectionate head-lock. ‘You look cool. Honestly. You really do. Kind of…what would I say? Sports casual with a seventies twist.’

We all laugh but the fact is, he does look cool, in a Jim-eclectic kind of a way. It’s a mish-mash of decades, what with the Ellesse jacket, the seventies tank top and cords, but there’s something attractive about a man who doesn’t try too hard and Jim’s certainly not guilty of that. In fact Jim doesn’t so much ‘do’ fashion as happen upon it when by the laws of probability means he does, occasionally, pull something OK out of his wardrobe.

Jim stands up, zips up his jacket and announces he’s going. ‘Well, thank you, Fashion Police,’ he says. ‘But I’m now going to get myself some refined company. A woman who knows how to conduct herself, a woman who appreciates cutting-edge style when she sees it.’

Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’ comes onto the jukebox. Jim stands up and shimmies to the bar, his small bottom wiggling.

‘Nice moves, Ashcroft!’ I shout after him. ‘The girl won’t be able to resist!’

With this, he downs the rest of his pint, puts his glass on the bar, flashes us a V-sign and dashes out of the door. I watch him as he goes, bouncing along the pavement on his Reebok Classics, hands in pockets, head down.

When I turn back, Vicky’s staring at me.

‘What?’

‘You’re smiling,’ she says.

‘Am I?’

‘Yeah, you’re really smiling.’

Here we go again.

A night out with Vicky is a bit like that film Groundhog Day. From the moment I walk in to the moment she disappears into the night only just catching the last train to Beckenham by the skin of her teeth, I know exactly what’s coming: as many bottles of house red as we can fit in and the obligatory ‘but-you-are-really-secretly-in-love-with-Jim, aren’t you?’ conversation.

Vicky has a huge soft spot for Jim. ‘So, are you two like fuck buddies? I mean, is that how you’d define yourselves?’ she asks, looking at me over her wine glass.

She no doubt got this awful term from some sordid programme about weird peoples’ sex lives hosted by Jenny Éclair, but she has a point: ‘Friends who have sex’, that’s exactly what we are. But we’re not, either, not in my eyes anyway, because ‘fuck buddy’ suggests it’s all about the sex and not much about the friendship and Jim and I are the complete opposite to that. ‘Fuck buddies (if ever there were such a grim thing) are all about sex on tap without the emotional complications that come with actually caring about someone,’ I say to her. ‘And I do care about him, I love him to bits.’

‘I know you do,’ she says, over-enunciating the words as though I am deaf. ‘And he loves you – hello! – a lot.’

‘But not like that,’ I say, staring into my glass. I always feel uncomfortable when she starts on this one. ‘As disappointing as that is – and believe me, I’m disappointed too, it’s not like that. Jim and I are just mates. Mates who occasionally shag and probably shouldn’t, I know, I know; but we’re still just mates.’

Vicky shakes her head, defeated.

‘Pretty weird ones if you ask me.’

And on we went. Until I found myself stumbling out of the pub, at almost midnight, into the crisp ring of night air and no hope of getting home before one a.m.

I decide to pass on the cab and walk through Soho, to catch a bus on Oxford Street.

There’s nowhere quite like Soho at night. It’s like the set of a West End show itself, alive with movement, light and noise. As I walk down Old Compton Street, the gay guys sit outside French patisseries with one leg snaked around the other, scarves wrapped tight around their necks, sipping their espressos. Steam from the last washing up of the evening rises from the basements and bar workers settle in for their end of shift beer.

I cut across Dean Street towards Wardour Street, snaking through the crowds of people queuing for late-night bars, members’ clubs and restaurants.

This part of London, it’s the playground of the free. A zone for those who don’t have to make any decisions yet, the circumstances of their lives still unravelling, for those still playing.

And just for now, I’m playing too. But I’ve got a funny feeling that for me, the game’s almost over, the final whistle is nearly up and I have to make some decisions and sort out what I actually want from life.

It’s ludicrous to think I could have been pregnant with Jim’s baby last week. Besides anything else, as I held that test in my hand, the potential father of the potential baby was on a date, just as he is tonight, and that can’t be right, can it?

I had been tempted to send a text. HELLO, DADDY-TO-BE would have served him right, out gallivanting while I was in a self-cleaning toilet having a near nervous breakdown.

But I couldn’t do it in the end. ‘It’s negative,’ I texted. ‘You’re off the hook.’

I didn’t even get his reply until I was standing at the bar in the Camden Head an hour later: ‘Thank fuck for that. And you had me believing that paunch was all baby.’

Cheeky git! So much for sharing the weight of responsibility.

I turn into Wardour Street where a herd of twenty-somethings, the boys all moulded hair and skinny jeans, the girls with sultry, smoky eyes, are careering across the street, singing and laughing. One of the girls is sat on what must be her boyfriend’s shoulders, lanky arms in the air, swigging a bottle of beer. Still high on the buzz of London, I think: we were like that; that would, once, have been me, Jim, Gina and Vicky, strutting our way from one late bar to the next, back to someone’s place, more beer, maybe some drugs, not caring about the next day, masters at navigating a day’s work on no sleep.

We still give it our best shot (even Vicky, who I sometimes think would sell an organ for a good night out). It’s just, sometimes I get the feeling that I’ve accelerated through most of my twenties in a beer-fuelled haze, only to arrive at almost thirty still accelerating in a beer-fuelled haze, when really I should be putting the brakes on, or at least starting to look where I’m going.

‘Next question,’ says Gina, adjusting her bikini top. Her boobs jostle about in the water, like dumplings in a boiling pan. ‘Marcus?’

Marcus licks the spliff he’s holding and sticks it down, then gestures to Gina for the lighter.

‘OK,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a good one. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said in an interview?’

Jasper cracks open a beer with a fizz.

‘I once asked an interviewer when the baby was due,’ he mumbles from beneath his trilby.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ I ask.

‘She wasn’t pregnant.’

I almost wet myself laughing at this one. I don’t know why, it’s just the thought of Jasper attending an interview – like, ever – is suddenly hilarious. Jasper is an artist. He does ‘installations’. This is absolutely no disrespect to people who are actually artists, who do, actually do installations. But in Jasper’s case, it roughly translates as ‘on the dole’.

Ooops, so much for the contemplative mood brought on by my life-affirming walk through Soho. It’s now two a.m. and I am in the Jacuzzi with Gina (now my flatmate) her current shag Jasper and a man I have never met before in my life. This is all too often the case these days; I don’t plan to have a large one, it just sort of happens. It’s one of the perils of having a Jacuzzi in the basement of your house.

Gina and I didn’t plan to live together this long; that just ‘sort of happened’ too. In our second and third university years, all four of us shacked up in a house in Rusholme. Then when we graduated, we all moved down to London together. Jim did his PGCE and then because he was now officially one of London’s ‘key workers’, got a ‘part-ownership’ deal and put down a deposit on a flat with money he’d saved from his weekend job selling padded cards in boxes with messages like ‘To the One I Love’. Gina, Vicky and I moved into 21 Linton Street in upmarket Islington, and that was it.

At that point I, having spent an awful lot of time watching tragic documentaries about people with ten-stone tumours, was doing a diploma in magazine journalism, with a view to interviewing people about stuff like that all the time. I thought I’d made it living in N1, a career in the media at my fingertips. Trouble was, with its crumbly black steps and security grating, our house looked like the Hammer House of Horrors on an otherwise elegant row of white Georgian townhouses. But we loved it. And we loved our landlady almost as much. Mrs Broke-Snell had her hair blow-dried every other day and only ever shopped in Harrods Food Hall. It’s a shame she didn’t pay as much attention to the upkeep of her properties as she did to herself but at least she had the genius idea (and a sufficient level of insanity) to install DA-DA-DAR!! THE JACUZZI.

Doubtless the most ingenious popularity device ever known to man, the Jacuzzi comes complete with wooden surround, massage jets, and a film of mould growing around the outside. 21 Linton Street has always been THE back-to-mine post-party house, scores of people padding their soap-sudded feet from the hall to the basement and vice versa, to shrivel up in our Jacuzzi and have drunken conversations about where we’ll all be in five years time. The trouble is, those five years are up now. You’d think that the novelty of having deep and meaningfuls in our swimwear would have somewhat worn off but we’re still at it.

Though Jim took my room when I went travelling in 2002 – he rented his flat out for some much needed cash – it was always very much a single girls’ pad. Then Vicky committed the ultimate crime (in Gina’s eyes anyway) which was to not only marry Richard, but have his babies. It was, of course, totally predictable but still, Gina and I didn’t expect to be here nearly a decade later. In fact Gina was so convinced that whatever bloke she was shagging at the time was about to ask her to move in with him, she didn’t buy a bed for two years.

And I thought I’d be long gone by now, married, living in a garden flat, but we’re both still here, maxing up the rent so we don’t have to get in a third person. Gina continues to go out with tossers (the sort who talk about moving in together by week three, and who have dumped her by week five). And I just coast along quite happily, cheered by the odd shag with Jim, wondering how I wound up, twenty-eight and a half, living like an ageing student.

When I eventually recover from my laughing fit I realize Gina’s glaring at me. Gina doesn’t like people laughing at her boyfriends, even when they offer up the jokes themselves.

‘Tess can do better than that, can’t you Tess?’ she says, playfully. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said in an interview?’

Here we go, Gina loves to wheel this one out at every social occasion. ‘Do I have to?’ I groan.

‘Yes, you have to. It’s genius. Go on.’

‘I once told the Head of a PR company that I was fluent in Italian,’ I sigh. ‘Which would have been fine, if I hadn’t failed GCSE.’ Everyone waits for the punch-line. ‘And she hadn’t been Italian.’

Gina claps her hand with glee. ‘Love it! Cracks me up every time! I wouldn’t mind,’ she continues, hardly able to talk she’s laughing so much, ‘but her name was fucking Luisa Vincenzi!!’

And I have to admit. It is quite funny.

It is only when Marcus starts to get fresh, playing footsie in the water, I come to my senses, realize I am shrivelled like a prune, and am utterly and totally shit-faced. When I eventually make it to the sanctuary of my bedroom it’s gone three a.m. I climb into bed, sink back into the coolness of my pillow and exhale, slowly, deeply. Outside I can still hear cars whizzing past, the faint sound of engines revving, London still alive and throbbing. I don’t know how I’m going to get up tomorrow, or make it through the day on four hours’ sleep.

The other thing I don’t know, is that somewhere deep inside of me, cells are multiplying, life is just beginning.