The Yorkshire Pudding Club

by Milly Johnson

  George and Janey both took a day’s holiday off work and stayed in bed and talked. He looked more radiant than she was supposed to, and somewhere in the middle of all that rabbiting, they made love. On Janey’s part, it was not so much desire as diversion; on George’s part it was guilt and desperation. There did not seem much point in putting on a condom and their orgasms were a particularly intense escape for both of them.

  George stroked her hair afterwards and said, ‘It’ll all come right in the end, you know,’ which is the sort of thing George said and, more often than not, it usually did. Janey doubted it would this time, though. How could they live on his pitiful wage for thumping out bits of plastic moulded on a big machine day in, day out, whilst she was meant to give up the career chance of a lifetime? How could this mess ever ‘come right in the end’?

  Oh God!

  Somehow, Elizabeth got to sleep but she woke up at an unearthly hour and killed time with terrible television programmes until 9 a.m. She telephoned the clinic, made an appointment and then rang around some employment agencies, making arrangements to go and see them early the following week when it was all over, and for good this time. She was totally cool and calm and collected. It was surprisingly easy. So long as she didn’t think, it was easy.

  Chapter 11

  After putting the phone down, Elizabeth badly needed to get away from the house and despite it being a freezing, frosty morning, she grabbed her scarf, gloves, and big coat with the furry trim, and headed for the park. Just along from Janey’s house were the first lot of entry gates, but these were locked so she had to walk round to the other set on a road where infinitely more expensive houses than Janey’s enjoyed the park view. The grass was iced and crunchy underfoot, cobwebs shivered in the hedges like delicate, intricate necklaces and the air was just what she needed–cold, sharp and cleansing.

  She took herself along the path and down the twenty-six ‘alphabet’ steps to where the old stone lion had lived, before he was vandalized and replaced for the last time. This was her favourite bit of the park where, in summer, great banks of flowers flanked a winding path that led to a large, ornate fountain. It used to have water in it when she was a child and kids would paddle in it, but now it was full of soil and little sprouts of early spring flowers. She walked on past where the birdhouses used to be. They had been shabby pens, as she remembered, and it must have been a boring existence for the little things.

  The park café was closed, which was to be expected at this time of morning and of year, although its window in the month for opening had always been the same narrow gap as that for ovulation in the menstrual calendar–and about as difficult to catch, unless you were one of the lucky ones like she obviously was. She had a few nice memories of eating Funny Face ice creams bought from there by her Auntie Elsie as they took Sam for a walk. Elizabeth dropped onto an old damp park bench, the same one they would sit and rest on when they were throwing a ball or stick for him. They always got fed up of the game before he did because he would have let them play that until their arms wore off.

  There was a mum pushing a little girl on the baby swings nearby as their old terrier sniffed around tree trunks and overmarked them with his own scent. Elizabeth tried to put herself in the mother’s place but she couldn’t do it. She could imagine herself on a yacht in the Bahamas, or sitting behind a big executive desk with a power suit on, or holding an art exhibition in a top London gallery, but she couldn’t imagine herself pushing her baby in that swing in this park. The dog made her smile a little as he was a sturdy old gent with a serious expression, but she wasn’t looking at the woman with a soppy, ‘Aw, isn’t that sweet?’ face. There was no emotional content in the scene for her at all; she was seeing just a woman with just a baby. The little girl was holding her arms out for her mam to lift her out of the basket seat. She was a bonny little thing in her pink furry ensemble but there were no twangs going off in Elizabeth’s heart, not even when the little girl started kissing the woman’s face. Not one.

  Soon, the cold became uncomfortable, even though she was wrapped up like the Michelin Man on a Polar expedition. Her nose felt as if it had been frozen off, and there must have been a small hole in the bottom of her boot as her foot felt damp. She walked around the bowling green and wended her way back to the park exit. She didn’t feel any better for the fresh air, but neither did she feel any worse for sitting watching a nice mum-and-daughter thing going on, knowing it would not be her and a kid one day. Indifference was a preferable state.

  She planned to stay away from the known world until the end of the week, until her appointment, until it was done. Over the next couple of days, she fobbed both Helen and Janey off with the lie that she had caught a bug and so they must keep away from her in their respective conditions. She told Dean the same. He had a bit of a phobia about vomiting so she laid it on thick about how bad that particular aspect of the virus was, which nicely did the trick.

  Intending to keep busy during her self-imposed isolation period, she took out her artbox and sketched a few studies of Cleef, but the pictures were dark and she had him so out of perspective that he did not look like the benign animal that he was. She made him longer and dangerously sleek with predatory eyes, and she hated the look of the cat she had drawn, so she ripped the paper out and put her artbox back into the drawer. It frightened her sometimes, what darkness could conduct itself down her pencils. Instead, she watched crap television and read books and started stencilling a line of roses twisted up with ivy across her new pink bedroom walls whilst trying to ignore the answering machine messages from Janey and Helen saying that they were thinking about her, and that if she wanted anything getting from town shopping-wise, she was to ring them straight away…

  Two days later, as she pulled off the last stencil, she looked down at the clock on the little table at the side of her bed to check the time. In another twenty-four hours she would be back at home, the mess forgotten and dealt with, and then she could pick her life back up where she had left it at the beginning of the week, thank God. She would ring Janey and Helen and say she felt better and they would have an ordinary chat, about ordinary things–she so craved ‘ordinary’.

  Elizabeth ran herself a deep bath before bed and lit a cigarette–her first for ages because she had totally lost the taste for them with all the changes that had been going on in her body. She slipped into the perfumed water and propped her book up on the wire frame that rested across the bath and which held her soap and flannel and the hard sandy thing that she used to attack the ruthless advance of cellulite. As she took a long drag of the cigarette, guilt blindsided her, hitting her hard as she imagined it drawing the cool smoke into its tiny lungs. She batted the picture away but it came back at her with revenge force.

  ‘Bugger,’ she said in defeat, and dipped the lighted end of the cigarette into the bath where it fizzled. She was hardly going to enjoy it with those sorts of images flashing in her head, even if it wasn’t a formed thing yet anyway but just an unfeeling mass of cells, something tadpoley that would not even be in there the same time tomorrow. Millions of them were lost or taken out every day; it was no big deal in the great scheme of things. Besides, she was doing it a favour in the end.

  The water was so hot it was turning her skin pink. Gin and hot baths–that’s what they used to do in the old days, wasn’t it? If she lost it, that would be perfect–problem solved, end of story. She could forget the whole sorry saga without any residue of guilt from having forced the issue at a clinic.

  It was then she saw the red blob bobbing and dipping elusively under the surface of the water and she went rigid; surprisingly, it was fear that gripped her, not relief, when she saw more red blobs dancing with it under the Radox bubbles. It knew she didn’t want it–it was dying, slipping away from her before it was forcibly removed. Unloved. She gulped, then leaned slowly forward, wafting a parting in the suds and cupped her hand under the red clots, delicately draining away the water by slightly opening her fingers. She sh
ould get out of the water. Ring an ambulance. But she remained, statue-still, looking at the red in her hand. It didn’t look like blood at close scrutiny, but what the hell else could it be? It seemed to have some sort of fibres. She poked tentatively at them.

  What the…? Not clots, but threads from the new bedroom carpet. Just threads. Her feet must have picked them up when she got undressed in her room.

  ‘You stupid, stupid cow!’ She laughed hard at herself as cold relief washed over her. Her bairn wasn’t dying. Her bairn. She did not want to think of this. Half mine as well as half his. Stop–STOP. More than half, because it was growing in her, feeding off her, living in her. Her laugh at mistaking threads for a miscarriage grew hard and hysterical, and slid without warning into a sob. A long, shoulder-shaking, snot-making, face-reddening, eye-puckering sob–for suddenly, ridiculously, because of a red carpet, her life had been hijacked and locked onto a different course and there was not a single damned thing she could do about it.

  Chapter 12

  Dean came round the following night with a bottle of rubbish wine that still had the £1.99 price label on. Elizabeth had not expected him and did not want to see him but now he was here she was determined not to delay the Big Goodbye any longer. He was randy as hell and tried to kiss her on the mouth with yeasty, beery breath. Elizabeth did not kiss. She shook him off three times but he still kept trying it on.

  ‘Gerroff,’ she said, pushing him hard but he came back at her as if her reticence was exciting him.

  ‘Why should I? Why don’t you want to shag any more?’ he said, trying to kiss her neck and squeeze at her breasts.

  ‘Because I just don’t.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘Okay, try this one then–Because I’m pregnant, that’s why!’

  She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, she just wanted him to stop. Stop he most certainly did. In fact, what she said sobered him up enough to drive a Sherman tank along a tightrope.

  ‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said, his face blanched with shock.

  He slumped on her sofa and started scratching his head through his number three haircut.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he said eventually.

  ‘I’m keeping it,’ she said, and her hand unconsciously curled round over her stomach as she heard her intentions aloud for the first time.

  ‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said again.

  Words were gravitating to his head at an alarming pace: paternity, maintenance, CSA…Elizabeth just wished he would go; she did not want to see him again.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ he said, almost apologizing.

  Elizabeth’s eyes rounded in shock. Stupidly, it hadn’t occurred to her that he might think it was his. She nearly laughed; the idea of having his baby was almost worse than the reality of having this one.

  ‘“I don’t want it”?’ she quoted him in disbelief. ‘It’s not yours to want!’

  ‘Eh?’ he said.

  ‘I said it’s not yours.’

  ‘Not mine?’ He got to his feet. ‘What do you mean, it’s not mine?’

  ‘I mean you’re safe. As in, “Who’s the daddy?” You aren’t!’

  He didn’t want to be the daddy, but his testosterone levels reacted to this information with affront rather than relief.

  ‘Not mine? It’s not mine? Well, whose bloody sprog is it then?’

  ‘Dean, just go,’ she said, walking to the door to open it for him, but he gripped her arm and pulled her back roughly.

  ‘All this time you’ve been making me shove a johnny on and you’ve been shagging somebody else without one? You…’ He pulled his other hand back and it hovered trembling in the air.

  ‘Don’t you dare EVER try and hit me,’ said Elizabeth, with a force behind it that made her shake as she delivered it. He shoved her back against the wall instead of hitting her and snapped open one of the plastic carrier bags she kept stored behind the kitchen door.

  ‘You fucking slag,’ he said.

  Her heart was booming and her hands moved to cover up her stomach as if to shield the baby’s ears from the shower of expletives he rained on her as he loaded up several carriers with his detritus: trainers, socks, his CDs that were spread all over the downstairs, all the while working his way through the Roget’s Thesaurus entry for ‘whore’.

  ‘Here, you can keep the Supertramp,’ he said, throwing the CD case at her.

  The plastic corner of it caught the bone above her eye and she yelped in pain. By the time her hand had come to it to check for blood, it had already started to swell up to a small egg. Then something spiralled up inside her and she launched herself at him, tiny as she was. No one hits me in this house. In her Auntie Elsie’s house, she was safe, always had been and always would be.

  He was quite a bit heavier than she was, but he was half-drunk and she had the advantage of surprise. She pushed him out onto the street, and the force of it propelled him forward right across to the houses at the other side, where he tripped and fell over the corsey edge, which bought her extra time to throw out his carrier bags after him and deadlock that big strong door behind her before he had the chance to get up. She heard him chuntering on outside for a bit, for the benefit of the neighbours, but he couldn’t touch her behind the door that had kept her safe from the evils of the world that lay outside it for twenty odd years. She would not let it in again.

  She stood there, eye throbbing, lungs panting, as if she’d run a marathon, when he started banging on the door, those same chaotic feelings coursing through her as they were on that day long ago, when she ran away from home to her Auntie Elsie. Auntie Elsie, who had her every Tuesday for tea and gave her boiled ham and over-diluted orange juice and was strict and stern and was always telling her off about her manners and who told her to sit up straight and to pull her socks up. Auntie Elsie, whom she only visited because she had a huge Alsatian that was as soft as a black sheep. Auntie Elsie, whom she hated. Auntie Elsie, at whom she screamed that day to lock the big door behind her as she crawled into the dog-basket with Sam. To keep her dad away from her.

  All three women sat in Janey’s big spacious farmhouse kitchen with a Saturday-morning fruit tea and biscuit untouched on the table in front of them. All three of them pregnant. Janey’s mouth was open more than Helen’s was at the news Elizabeth had just delivered, but only just.

  After all these years and all those men, the daft cow gets caught on now, Janey was thinking, her head unconsciously moving from side to side. At this age, and her with no job, and no man.

  Helen said nothing; she just sat there stunned into silence.

  ‘I’m keeping it, before you ask,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth, have you thought this through?’ said Helen.

  ‘Just a bit,’ said Elizabeth with a hard laugh. ‘I thought about…getting shut, even booked an appointment, but I couldn’t do it in the end.’

  The inevitable question came from Janey.

  ‘What about that Dean? What’s he said?’

  ‘It’s not Dean’s.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You don’t know the bloke,’ Elizabeth said, heading off the questions before the big flow started. ‘I was supposed to meet Dean at that party at New Year,’ she went on, not looking directly at either of them. ‘He didn’t turn up and I was angry and drank too much and things just went too far with someone. I’m not proud of it, but it happened and I don’t really want to talk about it because it’s done now. I can’t even remember what he looks like, and he was from somewhere down south anyway so there’s not much chance of tracing him even if there was any point in me doing that, which there isn’t. Okay?’

  She exhaled and it felt like an extra big full stop on the speech. Janey nodded although something about the story didn’t fit but she said no more then because Elizabeth looked so little and pale and she noticed that her friend’s eye was swollen and purple, when she nudged her long fringe out of her eyes.
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  ‘What happened to your eye?’

  ‘Oh, er…Dean threw his Supertramp CD at me,’ she said, half-laughing. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Eh? How can it be an accident if he threw it at you?’ Janey said, puffing up with anger on her friend’s behalf.

  ‘He threw it at me intending to miss. I think,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Bastard!’ said Janey.

  ‘I never liked him!’ said Helen.

  ‘Neither did I,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘So why on earth didn’t you tell him to bugger off before now?’

  ‘I dunno. You know how thick I am where blokes are concerned.’

  The other two did not need to acknowledge that. For an intelligent woman, Elizabeth would have failed her Key Stage One in Men.

  ‘He’s gone now though,’ Elizabeth added.

  ‘Good riddance. I never liked him either,’ said Janey.

  ‘You never liked any of the fellas I went with.’

  ‘I liked one of them,’ said Janey. Elizabeth didn’t need to ask her which one that was. ‘Are you sure it isn’t that Dean’s?’

  ‘One hundred per cent positive.’

  ‘Well! I don’t know what to say, which is a first,’ said Janey, shaking her head.