How Not to Fall in Love, Actually

by Catherine Bennetto

  GN TO GERRYS. WRKNG ON BUSINESS

  IDEA. NT HM 4 DINA. LV U. X

  I dialled his number. My fingers went to the groove forming between my brows.

  ‘Babe!’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ I said, my voice steely calm.

  ‘Wha’? What’ve I done now?’ Ned’s whine made me feel like his mother, not his girlfriend.

  ‘You nearly burned down the house – that’s what!’ I heard the unmistakable sound of a beer can cracking open. ‘Are you drinking?’

  ‘Babe, it’s a Saturday night.’

  ‘It’s Wednesday!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunday morning arrived at last, and I hustled through chilly Borough Market, meaty aromas wafting from the various mobile cooking devices. My best friend Helen was already in the café and had commandeered the pick of the tables.

  ‘Hi.’ She gave me a breast-mashing hug, a fragrant kiss on the cheek and stepped back to examine me from under her dark fringe. ‘You’ve put on weight.’

  Both Helen and my mother had an uncanny ability to detect a fluctuation in weight to the ounce. And were only too keen to point it out.

  ‘Most girls would find that comment insulting,’ I said, shrugging off my parka and pulling out a chair.

  ‘Yes, but most girls are fat cows. You were getting too skinny.’ She sat down opposite me and gained the attention of a waiter with a mere tilt of her chin.

  Despite her job ‘requiring’ her to be up all hours with burgeoning indie rock stars or political graffiti poets, she never had a mascara-coated eyelash out of place. She’d encased her voluptuous form in a snug scoop-neck sweater, body-hugging jeans and knee-high boots. Her half-exposed bosoms rested in their cashmere nest like two globes of rising pizza dough. She was the sexy side of plump. Even I was attracted to her. I, on the other hand, had on my customary jeans and hoodie with my wet hair piled in a bun on top of my head.

  ‘Dad is obsessed with Japanese game shows,’ she said to my enquiry about her parents. ‘He streams them on the internet all day long. I wish you’d never shown him how.’

  ‘It was Ned,’ I said, remembering Helen’s parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary barbecue, and how Ned had spent the entire afternoon inside teaching Helen’s father the wonders of the internet. I was pretty sure they still emailed each other.

  ‘He showed Mum an episode where a lady drank fermented squid guts. Mum vomited.’

  ‘Ew!’

  ‘Then the dog ate it.’

  I gagged.

  ‘Then the dog vomited.’

  ‘Oh my god!’

  We dissolved into laughter.

  A young waiter delivered our order and was barely able to remove his eyes from Helen’s semi exposed breasts. I wasn’t above using my boobs to advance my opportunities, but no one was interested in my grapefruits when Helen’s gala melons were around. She leant back and flung an arm over her chair, maximising the waiter’s view. The boy blushed a shade darker than plum and shuffled off. A man at the next table got a sharp look from his lady friend.

  Later, with a sense of contentment only bacon can offer, I pushed my plate away and looked out of the window.

  ‘You’re thinking about Ned, aren’t you?’ Helen clattered her cutlery on the plate. ‘You’ve got that woe is me, sad little deer face.’

  I sighed. ‘He treats me like his mother.’

  ‘That’s truly wrong.’

  ‘Not in that way.’ I winced. ‘I tell him when to shower. I buy his undies. I give him lists of things he needs to do around the house and scold him when he doesn’t do them.’ I sagged in my chair. ‘I’m one pair of dirty socks in the bottom of the bed away from grounding him.’

  Helen gave a pitying shake of her head.

  ‘Emma . . .’ She spoke in a way that let me know some serious counsel was about to be dispensed. ‘Know that what I’m about to say comes from a place of love and from having had it up to my tits with you and Ned and his goddamned muthafucking Jesus Christ socks.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said through grim lips.

  ‘You need to break up with him. I know he’s sweet and we all love his Lohan As A Llama routine, but sweet and funny only go so far.’

  I felt her scrutiny from across the table. I kept my eyes on my hands.

  ‘He’s been to every fucking business course on offer,’ she continued. ‘And I see no business. You work your arse off, and I know he may “make the big time one day”, but I honestly don’t think that day will come before you hit the menopause and his pathetic amount of chest hair turns grey.’

  Helen stared me down while I folded the edges of my place mat. When Ned and I had first started dating I’d found his foibles endearing. I guess I’d enjoyed having someone to mother and fuss over. He was so affectionate, and he truly meant well. I’d been able to overlook his inability to cope with the more mundane aspects of being a functioning adult, like bill-paying and clothes-washing. But as the years ticked by and I’d had to assume all the responsibility in the relationship I’d found his unrealistic nature tiresome. I was a naggy cow, and I didn’t like who I’d become around him. I felt older than my years.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said in a feeble voice.

  ‘You need to break up with him,’ she declared. ‘Then you need to sleep with a lot of men. And women, if you want.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. You’ve already wasted most of your acceptable slut years with that noodle-armed dreamer. Dump him, and do it now – it’s frowned upon to slut around in your thirties.’ She gave me a pointed look, signalling it was her final word on the matter, and made a bill-summoning motion to a distant waiter.

  ‘Some people frown upon it in their twenties,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Some people are effing nuns.’

  Two weeks later I squeaked across the lino floors of St George’s antenatal unit, approached the counter and gave my name.

  ‘Take a seat, love. I’m afraid it’s quite a wait. People with problems get seen first so you may get bumped.’ The woman scanned her notes. ‘You don’t have any problems do you, love?’

  Barrel-loads. But instead I said, ‘No, not today,’ and sat down on a plastic seat beneath a wonky swathe of green tinsel. It was the day of my scan, and I was nervous. I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to do. My head had been firmly in the sand for the past two weeks. I’d gone about business as usual while Ned tried to make up for his baked bean incident. He’d cooked a special dinner, which contained both chicken and fish but tasted of neither. He’d done a load of washing and shrunk my favourite woolly jumper. He’d gone out, left the keys inside and the shower running, flooding the hallway. My frequent nauseous rushes to the bathroom heightened Ned’s guilt. He thought I was in the bathroom crying. I still hadn’t told him about the pregnancy because I didn’t know what I wanted from him. Until I did I was keeping it to myself, processing my thoughts at night as he lay snoring beside me. Uncle Mike had pointed out that I was on the skinny side and I’d need to up my calorie intake if I wanted a healthy pregnancy. I told him I wanted no pregnancy but ate extra carbonara anyway. My stomach rounded accordingly so I’d taken to wearing loose-fitting tops and strategically draped scarves. I hadn’t told my mother, but that was easy. I wasn’t hiding the truth – I just hadn’t seen her. She was in Tuscany turning the inside of a fifteenth-century villa into a homage to 1980s neon Miami for an Italian fashion designer. At work I’d barely been holding it together. I’d had to race off set to vomit during a take and was then accused of being drunk in the workplace (not my fault – the baby’s); I hadn’t booked enough extras for a hospital riot scene for the director’s ambitious plan (not my fault – the production manager gave me a minuscule budget); I’d been screamed at by a nasty actress for neglecting to read out her lines to her answer machine the night before (definitely was my fault – I just thought she could read her own friggin’ script for once) and had consequently received a formal warning. Alex had called, skype
d or texted every day. Sometimes from her sweaty office, sometimes from her sweaty apartment, sometimes giggly from a sweaty Bangladeshi bar. But always supportive. And sweaty.

  ‘Miss George?’ A nurse in a creased uniform stood in an open doorway, a file in her hands. She led me to a small room where a friendly-faced female sonographer sat waiting for me.

  ‘Just lie back and unbutton your jeans for me,’ the sonographer said after checking my file.

  Her gentle voice put me at ease. I wriggled my jeans down and lay on the semi-reclined bed. She snapped on some rubber gloves and pulled a trolley with a screen and keyboard towards her.

  ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  I’d spent the afternoon in Uncle Mike and Sinead’s kitchen eating Fortnum & Mason gingerbread people (Archie informing me that it wasn’t right to call them men as women were important too; Sinead informing me that Archie’s nursery teacher was a little ‘politically annoying’ and ‘lesbian-ish’) and watching my aunt and uncle bicker about my situation and what I ought to be doing. Archie had come home from nursery at lunchtime and when I’d asked him how his day was, he’d said, ‘Oh, I’ve had a vagina of a day,’ in an American accent, then asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Uncle Mike had glowered at Sinead when she explained he’d picked it up from her visiting American stockbroker friend. I’d spent the next hour with Uncle Mike as he tried to get the personal mobile number for Supernanny.

  ‘Feeling OK? Any nausea?’ The sonographer picked up a bottle with a nozzle on the end and shook the contents.

  ‘Oh, a bit sick, but all right. Really tired.’ I was tired. By two in the afternoon I was nearly face down in my hot chocolate.

  ‘Yes, that should start to ease in the next few weeks. Drink plenty of water and get plenty of sleep. And eat your vegetables.’ She smiled again.

  I didn’t want to tell her that this baby might not be here to stay.

  ‘I will. Thank you.’

  ‘OK then. Ready to see your baby?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘This will feel a bit cold.’ She held the bottle above my stomach and flicked the nozzle open. Cool blue gel landed on my skin. ‘OK . . .’ she brandished some apparatus like a barcode scanner at me ‘. . . there’ll be a slight pressure but it won’t hurt.’

  She lowered the scanner onto my stomach and moved it over the blue gel. A computerised heartbeat sounded through the room and the monitor by the bed sprang to life. I quickly turned my head away. If I didn’t see it, it wasn’t real and I could make a logical, emotionless decision. The right decision.

  The sonographer slid the scanner over my belly muttering positive expletives, ‘good, OK, yes, there we are’ and so on. She clicked at the keyboard and wrote in my notes while I concentrated on a poster of a cross-sectioned woman’s torso in various states of pregnancy. It looked to me as if the baby got bigger and bigger with no thought to the vital organs it was crushing. The size of a fully grown baby and the size of the canal it had to travel out of were wildly unsuited.

  ‘The nuchal measurement is good; the placenta is healthy and in the right place,’ she said, writing in my notes. She clicked her pen, placed it in her coat pocket and smiled. ‘You seem all set for a healthy pregnancy, Miss George.’

  I looked at her, willing my eyes not to move a foot to the left and view the screen.

  ‘Shall we see if we can get some photos of your baby to take home with you?’

  ‘Uh . . . oh, um . . .’

  Without waiting for my reply she slid the scanner across my lower abdomen with determination.

  ‘I think that’s a good one, just there.’

  I stared at the cross-section again.

  Big baby, small canal.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get this wee one to move. I want to get a nice profile shot.’ She dug the scanner in and clicked a few buttons.

  Really big baby. Really small canal.

  ‘There we go. That’s what we want. Stay there, little one.’

  Click. Click.

  Fucking big baby. Where’s that canal again?

  ‘Ah look, she’s waving!’

  Before I’d thought about what I was doing my head swung round and I was face to screen with my baby.

  ‘See that?’ She tapped a fingernail on the screen. ‘She’s got her hand up.’

  There it was. A tiny, bean-shaped baby. Its miniature upturned nose in profile, with one hand raised in a wave. Tiny fingers were visible and the beginnings of tiny toes. My throat constricted.

  ‘She’s almost fully formed now. All she has to do is get bigger.’

  ‘She? You know it’s a she?’ I strained to see the absence of male items but the tiny legs were too close together.

  The sonographer’s eyes creased as she smiled. She handed me a tissue.

  ‘No, dear, I call all babies “she” at this stage. We can’t determine the sex until around twenty weeks.’

  I tried to swallow but there was a dry brick blocking my throat.

  ‘Shall I give you a moment?’

  I nodded without taking my eyes from the screen.

  ‘I’ll get you some water.’ She left and pulled the door to after her.

  A baby . . .

  My baby.

  Two legs, two arms, a head and a butt. Perfectly formed without my instruction or permission.

  I reached up and put my fingertip to its little waving hand.

  I swallowed down my dry brick.

  I loved it.

  The front door slammed. I heard Ned kicking off his smelly trainers and hitting the same spot on the wall they always did. There was a permanent dirty smudge no amount of scrubbing would get off.

  ‘Babe?’

  ‘In here.’ I sat in the living room, warming my hands on a third cup of tea. I’d been waiting for Ned to get home from Gerry’s for two hours.

  ‘Gerry and I have come up with a new business idea,’ his voice travelled up the hall.

  I rolled my eyes.

  ‘You know Ben and Jerry’s?’ He rounded the door, his face flushed with excitement.

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, what do you think of Ned and Gerry’s?’

  ‘Ned and Gerry’s what?’

  He looked at me like I was slow.

  ‘Ice cream? Duh.’ He flopped next to me, an expectant expression on his freckled face.

  I paused, my mouth opening and closing trying to find the right words.

  ‘I think it’s a stupid idea.’

  ‘What?! It’s brilliant!’ He stood and paced the floor. ‘Think about it. You see Ben and Jerry’s on the shelf with its chocolate dunky-monkey or whatever and right next to it, Ned and Gerry’s.’ He stopped pacing. ‘Now which one are you going to go for? The same boring one you’ve always had or the exciting new one sitting right there in front of you?’ He raised his palms in a question.

  I kneaded my temple.

  ‘We’ll start with ice cream vans, hit the summer festivals.’ He commenced pacing again, his arms waving about, infused with zeal. ‘We’ll invent our own flavours. Gerry wants a Bloody Mary one. I’d triple our savings—’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘You are not touching that money again. I’ve worked too hard to build it back up.’

  Ned paused at the end of the sofa.

  ‘Emma, this is a no-brainer. By the end of summer we could have enough for a deposit on a flat! Or a trip to New York.’ He extended his palms towards me, fingers splayed.

  His pale ginger eyebrows were elevated convincingly. I’d adored those enthusiastic eyebrows once.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Ned blinked at me. I blinked at him.

  ‘Twelve weeks.’

  He stood motionless, hands still extended.

  I took a deep breath, got off the sofa and faced him. ‘I’m keeping the baby.’

  Fear shot across Ned’s face.

  ‘I won’t stop you being part of our life but I think . . . I think we should break up.’<
br />
  Ned’s hands dropped to his sides. He arranged his mouth as if to speak but nothing came out. His eyes darted round the room as if searching for the origin of my words.

  ‘I . . . I don’t think I love you any more and . . .’ My eyes filled with tears and I faltered. ‘I . . . I don’t think you love me.’

  His eyes stopped zipping around and settled on me, a probing look on his face.

  ‘Em . . .’ He took a step towards me and reached for my hand but stopped at my involuntary flinch.

  We stood, Ned with his hand outstretched and me with my arms folded across my chest, looking at my toes. After a moment Ned pulled his hand back. I could hear the neighbours banging away at the adjoining wall.

  I sniffed back a tear.

  ‘Babe?’ Ned reached for me again.

  ‘Please don’t.’ I stepped back, keeping my eyes on my fluffy socks. ‘I know what I want and it’s to give this baby the best life that I can.’

  ‘And I’m not part of that?’ Ned’s voice cracked.

  ‘No,’ I said to my feet. ‘A baby needs stability.’

  Ned’s eyes watered. He twisted his mouth, a sign he was trying not to cry.

  ‘I don’t want to be a father.’

  ‘I know.’ I swallowed thickly.

  ‘Not yet, I mean.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you sure you can’t just get rid—’

  ‘Stop. Don’t say it.’ I wanted to forget the similar thoughts I’d been entertaining only a few hours ago.

  Ned stepped forward and grabbed my hand in both of his, squeezing urgently. ‘I don’t want to break up.’ His eyes searched mine.

  ‘But I do.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘So he’s all moved out then?’

  The omnipresent sound of 1970s fans flick-flicked in the background. I’d rung Alex as soon as the front door closed behind Ned.