It’s not the bored waitress that takes our soup bowls away and brings us our sticky toffee pudding, it’s the guy that was behind the bar when we first came in. I wonder what’s happened to her: is she sulking in a corner because He was so rude to her, or has she collapsed from exhaustion in a heap in the kitchen? Mine smells delicious and is dripping with custard. His has ice cream instead of cream and He sneers at it, but He says nothing to the guy that brings it over and says “enjoy!”, so wherever the bored waitress is, at least she’s been saved his sarcasm.
He checks his watch. It’s half past two. Twelve hours since I was lacing his toothbrush with bleach and here I am tucking into sticky toffee pudding with Him and discussing whether we’d be able to have an open fire in our house like the one in this pub.
“We’ve got another half an hour before we need to be there, d’you want another drink?”
This is a mostly rhetorical question: what He means is that He is going to the bar and will get me another drink while He’s there if I say I’d like one.
“D’you think they do coffee?”
He gives me the face but puts away the matching words and instead says, “I can ask.”
So He does ask, and He brings me a coffee and then goes back to the bar to collect his pint and chat to the barmaid with the not-even-trying-to-look-natural hair colour.
So I wait until He finally decides to come back to the table and I nip off to the ladies before surprise time.
The waitress is in there sobbing her heart out and sitting cross-legged on the floor. I want to ask her what’s the matter. I want to go over to her and put my arms around her and say it’s OK, whatever it is, it’ll all be fine. But maybe it won’t. Maybe she’ll be stuck taking orders for sticky toffee pudding from people who don’t give a shit whether she cries every day in the toilets for the rest of her life. I go for a wee, I wash my hands and I just leave her to it. She doesn’t even look up.
“Right then,” He says when I get back to the table, “we’d better get going or we’ll be late.”
And He bustles me out of the pub and back to the car. He’s had a couple of pints but He doesn’t ask me to drive and I’d rather risk a multiple pile up than risk suggesting that I should be the designated driver.
The engine’s barely warm when we stop again. It’s just a house. Not the house of anyone we know but they’re expecting us.
“Hello, hello, hello,” says the buxom woman that greets us on the drive. “Good journey? Traffic OK? Find us OK?” She doesn’t draw breath long enough for either of us to answer her. “Come in, come on in. I’ve got a nice fire going inside and the kettle’s on. I’ve got the little fella all ready for you. You’ll love him,” she says to me. “You’ll absolutely love him.”
I feel like we’ve just walked into some kind of horror film where the seemingly nice but clearly bonkers psycho sits us down in the living room of her cutesy middle-of-nowhere cottage, bumbles off to the kitchen to fetch a cup of tea and then comes back with a chainsaw and a menacing cackle. But actually it’s even crazier than that. She goes off to get us a cup of tea and comes back with a puppy, a fluffy little terrier that runs to the corner of the room and pees on a pile of newspaper as soon as she puts it on the floor.
“Milk and sugar?” she grins.
“No thanks,” He says for both of us. And off she trots again for the tea.
I think I may actually have my mouth wide open in a cartoon-like catching flies pose.
“Well,” He asks, “d’you like him?”
Failure to enthuse over the puppy could mean that the day takes a turn for the worse. On the other hand, it’s an actual real live animal which He is clearly expecting us to take home and I will then have to feed it, walk it and pick up its poo.
“Go and have a look at him then,” He says. And He nods towards the puppy, which has now given up peeing and is busy sniffing around the edges of the newspaper it’s just used as a toilet.
I kneel down next to the puppy and, as though he’s been trained to make my heart melt in an instant, he comes straight to me and crawls onto my lap and looks me straight in the eye. And that’s it, I forget all about scooping shit into a little plastic bag and going out for early morning walks in the pissing rain. Instead all I can see is me watching TV with this little dog snuggled up to me on the sofa.
“What’s his name?”
“Oh, we haven’t given the puppies names,” says the woman coming back in the room with three mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. “People usually like to choose their own names. Anyway, the kids get too attached to the puppies at the best of times and if we named them they’d think we were keeping them. You can call him whatever you like. I’ll put your tea down here.”
I look round to see where she’s putting my tea and I can see Him grinning from ear to ear. It turns out He arranged all this two weeks ago. Someone He knows from work has had a puppy from this lady before, so He called her and she had some that weren’t quite ready to leave their mum yet, so He’d arranged for us to come today and kept it as a surprise. It was definitely a surprise.
I put the dog down to go and pick up my tea and the daft thing follows me. It sits by my feet playing with my shoes while I drink my tea and the lady chats on and on about the puppy, and its mother and father and the other litters they’ve had before and the other dogs they used to have that are now dead. And I must do a good job of looking interested because, as soon as I put my mug down, she takes me into the hall and shows me photographs hung in frames on the wall of all the dead dogs she used to have. I get a bit of the horror film anxiety back.
“So, shall we keep him?” He says, standing in the doorway with the puppy in his arms.
“Of course we’re going to keep him,” I smile. And I reach out and take the little dog and hold him on my lap all the way home, tickling him behind the ear until he falls asleep.
24
When I was little I always wanted a dog. Not just a dog: I wanted an Afghan hound and a chinchilla and a seahorse. Dad said no-one had seahorses as pets. Mum said no-one in our family had pets. I got my best friend to get me a goldfish as a ‘surprise’ for my fifteenth birthday and it died four days later. That’s my only previous experience as an animal lover and now here I am walking a dog in the park at the crack of dawn before I go to work and willing it to poo while we’re out, even though I know I’ll have to pick up the poo using only the Sainsbury’s bag that I’ve brought along for the purpose. But if it doesn’t poo now, it’s bound to poo on the carpet while I’m out and no supermarket carrier bag will save me then.
I’m not sure He’s thought it through, the whole dog-owning thing. It was a nice thought, but we’re not exactly a romantic walk in the park kind of couple.
I try to get some reassurance on all of this from Mandy when I eventually make it into work. She’s always enthusiastic about everything; she’ll make me believe that having the puppy will be great. But when I tell her all about the mystery trip to the countryside and the bonkers woman and her gallery of dead dogs she just nods at me blankly as though she’s reciting her times tables in her head while I’m babbling on, and then when I say: “Obviously, He’s just got me the puppy as a baby substitute which is a nice thought but He doesn’t really get it,” she starts crying.
It’s a funny way of crying. She not sobbing, she’s not making any real noise and she’s rooted to the spot but there are tears and snot and she’s breaking her heart.
“Let’s go to the ladies,” I say. I’m not used to other people crying but the loo is a far better place for all of that than the middle of the office.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
I put my arm around her and she hugs me like her life depends on it but she still says nothing.
“What is it? Is it Guy? Has something happened?”
And then she starts sobbing and she’s trying to speak but
I can’t understand anything of what she’s saying.
“You’ll need to calm down and slow down a bit,” I tell her and she looks at me like I’m all wise and grown up and we take a few deep breaths together and she tries again.
“It’s not Guy,” she says, “Guy’s lovely. Guy’s wonderful. Guy’s much too good for me.”
“Nonsense.”
“It’s true,” she says.
“Because?”
“Because I’m pregnant and I can’t keep it.”
Silence. What am I supposed to say now? I don’t know what to say. It doesn’t matter, because Mandy’s on a roll now. Maybe it’s something on my face, or maybe she just knows what I’m thinking, but she just keeps talking.
“I’ve only known him for two months,” she says. And she tells me that he’s wonderful, he’s amazing. She couldn’t have found anyone more perfect if she’d written a job description and ticked off every last thing on the list before she’d taken him on. Apart from he doesn’t want kids, she says. She tells me how he thinks we need to reduce the birth rate to preserve the earth’s resources and how he says we in the West should be the ones to take action against overpopulation because we have the easiest access to contraception and the biggest carbon footprint.
“Bullshit,” I say when she tells me that last bit. Maybe not the most useful comment, but surely one baby wouldn’t make that much of a difference? And it’d be a vegan baby, let’s face it.
“The thing is, that’s what he believes. So I could have the baby and wreck everything with Guy or not have the baby and then...”
Mandy and Julie are my best friends. I haven’t had best friends for years and years. But I realise that I don’t know Mandy very well at all. I don’t really know either of them. But just because we’ve never had long chats about babies and abortion and boyfriends and politics doesn’t mean that we don’t think the same way. While she stares at me blankly, hoping I’ll have a magic answer for her, I know that her response to this is exactly what mine would be in her shoes. Except I’m not in her shoes, I’m in mine, and my baby has gone and I didn’t want it to go but I couldn’t stop it.
Suddenly I find myself crying too. Not very helpful. I feel sorry for Mandy, I do, and I’m upset for her but that’s not it. I try to make a proper thought out of the stomach-churning feeling that’s making me cry and when I do it’s so ridiculous that I can’t say it to her, so I just say: “You can’t get rid of your baby. That’s your baby!”
But what I mean is, that’s my baby. My baby that couldn’t stay with me has come to you instead.
She’s blowing her nose on a piece of toilet paper that’s disintegrating. It’s time for me to be all grown up and take charge of the situation like she’s been waiting for me to.
“Have you told Guy yet?”
“No,” she says. “I only found out myself yesterday. I haven’t told anyone yet. Only you.”
“Right then,” I say. “You need to take the day off sick and arrange to meet Guy and tell him. You need to tell him how you’ve been breaking your heart about how he’s going to take the news. You’re going to tell him that you know there’s lots of big reasons why you shouldn’t have the baby and that you’ve thought about them all. And then you’re going to tell him that you love him and that you’ll love the baby and that you hope he will too. And then you’ll just have to keep your fingers crossed and see what he says.”
“And what if he says to get rid of it?”
“Then he’s clearly not quite as lovely and amazing as you think he is. But I think he is pretty special and I think you’ll need to let him prove it to you.”
She gets a paper towel and gives her nose an enormous blow and then gives me a massive hug. Heidi puts her head round the door.
“There are phones ringing out here and not enough people answering them,” she says. “D’you think you two could have your bonding session some other time?”
“Actually,” I say before Mandy can get a word in. “Mandy’s grandma has just died and she’s pretty cut up about it, I think we’d best just let her go home. She can’t even string a sentence together without crying.”
I’ve always thought of myself as a rubbish liar but Heidi just takes my word for it and tells Mandy to take the rest of the day off.
“And just let me know when the funeral is, won’t you Mandy?” Heidi says as she holds the door open for Mandy and me. “Obviously you’ll need to take that day off too and there won’t be a problem with that. She must have been very special.”
“Very special,” Mandy agrees and squeezes my hand. Then I head off to my desk and she lets Heidi walk her to the coats.
Funny that Mandy should be crying because she’s pregnant when I’ve spent so much time crying because I’m not. I wonder if anyone’s life ever really goes to plan. Probably most people’s goes to plan at some point, possibly more often than mine. But maybe I was over-ambitious. My plan was to elope with Michael Lowther, the most gorgeous boy at my sixth form. He had a leather jacket and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jeans with genuine, threadbare rips in them in the days before shops starting selling jeans with ready-made tears. Thanks to him I went on an anti-fascist march and nearly got arrested for shouting ‘Pigs go home’ at a policeman. Thanks to him I read A Farewell to Arms and To Kill a Mockingbird during endless hours spent hanging around in the library hoping he’d wander in and find me there being all intellectual. Thanks to him I got an E in my geography ‘A’ level because I spent the night before the second exam sobbing my heart out because I’d seen him snogging Lisa Glancy after the first geography exam. I wonder where Michael Lowther is now. Maybe he’s married with kids and a detached house with a double garage. Maybe he’s divorced with a couple of kids and two mortgages and a big flabby belly from eating too many microwave meals for one.
I can’t help thinking that plan A (Michael Lowther) would surely have turned out better than plans B, C, D, E and F. But maybe the planning bit is the problem. Maybe I should stop trying to make things go to plan and start learning from the complete shambles I’ve left in my wake.
“Is that your phone ringing?” asks Phoebe, the girl sitting behind me. “You should have it on silent in here.”
Mandy’s only been gone five minutes and I’m missing her already. That’s the rule, that you have your phone on silent if you leave it on in the office, but no-one actually sticks to the rule. Not even me, and I’m Goody Two-shoes. Anyway, I’ve already had to deal with death, pregnancy and dog shit this morning. I turn round and smile at her with my best ‘don’t mess with me’ grimace, but she clearly doesn’t feel even slightly threatened because she just sneers at me and turns round again. Work’s just like school, except this time it’s a life sentence. No parole.
I check my phone. Missed call from Julie. I can’t ring her now so I put my phone in my pocket and text her from the ladies. ‘Will call at lunch. Weekend was crap. Got dog!’ I’m about to press send and realise what a whinger I must seem to Julie. I delete the last couple of things. ‘Will call at lunch’. Send.
The morning drags. I’m itching to call Mandy and find out whether she’s spoken to Guy and what’s going to happen. I can’t let her get rid of the baby. She doesn’t really want to. I can tell. She couldn’t do that. I’m itching to call her but I realise that I don’t even have her number. I’ve been to her flat, I know her secrets and she pretty much knows mine but we haven’t been friends long enough for me to have her number. How crazy is that? I can hear my mum’s voice at the back of my mind saying ‘What do you know about this Mandy girl, Marion? What makes you think you can trust her? For all you know she could be blabbing everything you tell her all around everywhere. She could be stringing you along, just trying to see what she can get out of you.’ That’s what she said about Him when I first started going out with Him. When we’d been together for two years and there was no sign of an engagement ring she wen
t into a blind panic, but we made it all official in the end. But the thing is, it’s my mum that’s a bad judge of people, not me. That’s why she worries about me mixing with the wrong sort and being gullible and being taken for a ride, because she’s a monumentally bad judge of people. She gets taken in by people who are rotten to the core and dismisses people who are great just because they look a bit odd or act a bit funny or have strange dress sense. I don’t think she’d like Mandy. She’d think she’s a floozy. Maybe she is a floozy but she’s far and away the nicest floozy I know and her baby has been sent to replace the baby that I lost. I want to call her and say that her baby is there for a reason. But I don’t have her number and it’s probably a good job.
I take my lunch break early and call Julie from outside the sandwich shop. It goes straight to voicemail so I go in and get myself a ham salad baguette and a Kit Kat and try again. It goes straight to voicemail again so I leave a message this time. “Julie, hi, it’s me Marion. Just thought I’d call while I’m on my lunch break. Had a pretty full-on weekend and He’s gone and bought me a dog and now my friend Mandy is pregnant. Anyway, if I don’t hear from you before maybe we can meet up again after swimming tonight. Let me know. Hope everything’s OK with you.” The tone sounds before I get to the end of ‘you’: her voicemail clearly likes you to keep the message short and sweet.
Since it’s sunny I decide to go and sit in the park to eat my lunch. Everyone calls it the park but it’s more of a big garden. Just four benches, a couple of flowerbeds and some trees around the outside. They keep it nice, though – whoever ‘they’ are – and it’s not the office, which is a big plus in its favour. I sit down on Moira’s bench: it has a plaque on it that says ‘For Moira, who always took time out to smell the flowers’. I wonder whether Moira requested these words on her memorial bench. I think if I were Moira I might feel a bit cross that the abiding message about me to a bunch of strangers as they sat eating their lunch would be that I ambled through life smelling flowers instead of getting stuff done. I wonder what they’d put on a bench in memory of me. ‘For Marion, she made great pastry’, ‘For Marion, she often sat eating her lunch here wishing she didn’t have to go back to work’, ‘For Marion, with love.’ That would be the one I’d want. That should be the only one anyone should have. If it’s not with love then why bother? But then, if your grand gesture of love is going to be a bench in a crappy little park littered with coffee cups, why bother at all?
The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING Page 16
