39 Weeks Page 2

  I shook my head to dislodge the scary image I’d created and laughed to myself, but it was due more to hysteria than humour. And why, I thought, was she blonde, I don’t have blonde hair and neither did Matt . . . as far as I can remember, so what the hell was that all about.

  The kettle boiled and I was about to pour boiling water into my mug when it struck me that maybe I shouldn’t be drinking strong coffee in my condition. I was naive in the extreme as to the do’s and don’ts of pregnancy and had no idea if it would do any harm to the baby, or me come to that. But then I thought well what if I hadn’t found out yesterday, then I’d still be me, the old me, and would drink it without a seconds thought. The more I thought maybe I shouldn’t have coffee, the more I really needed it, craved it. Could this be my first craving? For as much as I didn’t know anything about having a baby, I did know that you got weird cravings and maybe this was one of them, or was it just me having a cup of coffee when I got to work like always, my usual pre starting work caffeine fix.

  ‘Are you going to be much longer?’

  ‘Oh hi Martin, sorry I was miles away.’ I said hastily making my coffee and stirring like mad before backing out of the cupboard kitchen to allow Martin room enough to get in.

  Martin Steepen, the other management accountant but for the wrapping paper side of Fishers, has been working here even longer than I have. He’s your stereotype accountant, nice enough bloke but not exactly what you’d call macho, or fanciable in any way. In fact it’s a wonder to me and most of the other girls here, how he managed to get married at all. But married he is with three children, and his wife Carol-Ann seems normal enough, vaguely attractive and not a complete idiot, so I suppose he must have something going for him.

  Now that everyone was starting to arrive for work it was beginning to feel a bit more like a normal working day, and I carried my potentially injurious mug of coffee back to my desk and got stuck into finishing off the sales figures spreadsheet, all thoughts pertaining to babies conveniently shelved for the time being.

  An hour later and mercifully baby-thought free, I’d finished the spreadsheet and e-mailed it to Norman Steadman only a quarter of an hour late. I sat back pleased with myself and took the last swig of my now cold coffee, as the dreaded P word began to reassert itself in my head.

  How long would I be able to carry on working? And what was I going to do afterwards when ‘it’ had arrived?

  I could get a childminder I suppose. Do childminders mind new born babies? Or a nanny . . . mm sounds good but I doubt I could afford a nanny, I’d need two jobs at least to pay her wages, not to mention a much bigger flat to accommodate an extra person, make that two extra people if you counted the baby as well.

  Maybe I could work from home . . . now there’s an idea. But I couldn’t work from home for the next fifteen or so years, and anyway I think it would drive me ever so slightly bonkers being at home all the time in my cramped flat.

  The phone rang and it was Norman. I called him Norman in my head, but it was Mr Steadman when I was actually in his company, face to face. I really should stop thinking about him as Norman because one of these days I was going to say it out loud and somehow I don’t think he’d be too pleased. He was definitely a ‘Mr . . yes sir, no sir’ kind of boss and not the ‘even though I’m in charge treat me as a friend’ type.

  ‘Ah Judy, just looking through those figures you sent me and something doesn’t seem quite right. When I was at school there were twelve months in a year.’

  ‘Um . . twelve yes.’ I said frantically trying to call up the spreadsheet again so I could try and figure out what he was talking about.

  ‘What happened to December?’

  ‘A . . December?’

  ‘Comes straight after November, every year, never misses, and usually generates the biggest sales what with Christmas being at the end of it.’

  Oh bugger! My first real bit of work in my new recently acquired job as management accountant for the new MD, and I’d screwed it up.

  ‘Oh . . how did that happen?’ I said involuntarily, as I spotted the glaringly obvious, couldn’t possibly miss it unless you were completely blind, or stupid, nonexistent month of December. ‘Sorry I’m not feeling myself today, think I must be coming down with something. I’ll fix it, I mean do it, I mean . . .’

  ‘Thanks.’ He said cutting me short, and putting the phone down.

  Great, just what I need. Didn’t I read somewhere that pregnant women loose brain cells, they just die off or something and you never get them back. Looks like mine were having some sort of mass suicide party already.

  I fixed the spreadsheet and checked it again, and then again-again after that, and e-mailed it back with crossed fingers hoping that Norman wouldn’t find anything else wrong. I vacantly stared out of the window at the inspiring view of the brick wall and corner of the roof of the adjacent wrapping department, where the cards were individually wrapped in cellophane. Between no sleep and being stressed to the max I was totally exhausted and mused on the idea of how simple life would be if that were my job, just operating the press to cellophane wrap cards all day, no pressure, no Norman, no thinking. Right at this minute it sounded like heaven, boring heaven, but I could do with a bit of boring just now.

  Gill, the hen from the fatal hen night party, came over to my desk carrying her mug and asked if I wanted a coffee as she was making anyway. ‘You alright, you look awful?’ she said when I turned round and she saw my face.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No really, you don’t look right at all.’

  ‘I’m just tired.’

  ‘Ah you single girls, been out partying this weekend have you?’ Gill said with a simpering mock smirk as if she’d caught me out. Since she got back from her honeymoon a couple of weeks ago, she’d turned from your average fairly normal single girl in love with her steady boyfriend, to a married middle-aged supercilious know it all, looking down on us lesser un-married females, who only aspired to her status but probably weren’t going to make it.

  ‘No. I’m just not sleeping well.’

  ‘Any special reason you’re not sleeping? Something distracting you in bed to keep you from sleeping is there? What’s his name?’

  ‘His names insomnia.’

  ‘Oh. You sure that’s all it is you really do look pretty dread.’

  Well if everyone’s so determined I’m not well and I look so ghastly, I might as well cash in on it I thought, and skive off work for the rest of the day. I’ll catch up on my sleep and then maybe I can think rationally about what the bloody hell I’m going to do. ‘Yes I think you might be right.’ I said hamming it up a bit. ‘I’m going to go home and crawl back into bed. Hopefully that’ll fight off whatever it is and I won’t actually get it.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  No it’s not just a good idea, it’s great idea, the best one I’ve had since all that stick peeing.

  3

  27th June - 4 Weeks + 1 And A Half Days

  After making my excuses and letting Ted in personnel know I was going home for the rest of the day, I climbed back in my car with a sigh of relief. At least now I’d be able to concentrate on the immediate problem of what the hell I was going to do.

  But first things first, before being able to come up with a brilliant solution to the world crisis, my world anyway, I needed chocolate and I needed it now, in vast quantities, my chocolate consumption being directly related to my stress levels. And I needed to find out exactly what I was going to be in for, for the next nine months, no make that eight months because I must already be about four weeks gone to be able to do the test, or more accurately since having sex with what’s-his-name.

  Before I pulled out of the car park I vowed that if I ever managed to get myself out of this mess, I was never going to have sex again, ever, no matter how gorgeous the male specimen appeared to be, or how much Bacardi and Coke I’d consumed.

  I parked in town, a strangely un-busy town, unlike the bear-pit town I usually had
to fight my way through on a Saturday morning, and stopped off at Waterstone’s on my way to the supermarket. If anyone had reading material on being up the duff, and if I was very lucky how to stop being up the duff, although I didn’t hold out much hope on the latter, it was Waterstone’s.

  I perused the shelves, but it was all best sellers, chick-lit fiction of the kind I could no longer, given my present dilemma, identify with. You know the sort I mean, young single Suzy meets Damien and they hate each other from minute one, but after a series of humorous mishaps she realises she’s actually head over heels about him, and he turns out to be filthy rich and not the bastard she thought he was, and of course has been secretly in love with her all along.

  What I need is the non-fiction section, but which one. Mind and body? Could be. Health? Yes maybe. Do they have one called problems of the duff? Probably not. Childcare? God not yet, Blondie popped back in my head for a second but I shook her off and carried on looking.

  Right here we are. Who knew there’d be a whole section, all to itself, on pregnancy. Bloody hell there must be at least fifty books here to choose from. Now You’re Pregnant, a step by step guide to giving birth. Your Body And You, a step by step guide to pregnancy. So You’re Having A Baby, a step by step guide from conception to labour. Okay so where’s The Idiot’s Guide To Being Up The Duff, a step by step guide on how the hell to cope with all this without having a mental breakdown.

  I thumbed through the various tomes. Some had graphic pictures, actual photographs of an unborn baby, God knows how they managed that, and some had similar graphic pictures but of the hand drawn variety. Imagine doing that for a living, ‘and what do you do?’ ‘oh I draw the inside of a pregnant woman’s womb in minute detail’.

  I settled on So You’re Having A Baby, and Now You’re Pregnant, and took them to the counter to pay. There was no queue, that in itself was amazing and I made a note to myself that if at all possible I’d do all my shopping in future on a Monday morning. The woman at the till looked at the books as she was scanning them through the till, and was it my imagination or did she seem to be smiling benignly at me and just a bit too much for your normal customer service etiquette.

  ‘They’re a present for someone.’ I said and the sickly sweet smile on her face all but disappeared.

  ‘That’ll be twenty nine pounds thirty.’ She said matter of factly.

  Thirty quid! You’ve got to be joking, I thought, while I produced my credit card and punched in the number, all without a murmur and keeping the fixed plastic smile on my face as if thirty quid was nothing and she’d said two pounds fifty.

  She bagged the books and I lugged them out of the shop, they weighed a ton and it felt more like I’d just purchased a couple of volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica than two paperbacks, albeit two very glossy and expensive paperbacks, on how to get fat really quickly and screw up your life in the process.

  I trundled down to Sainsbury’s and stocked up on a few essentials, passing the ‘Feminine Care’ rows of tampons and panty liners with an ironic grin, grabbed several of the huge oversized normally only given as Christmas or birthday present chocolate bars, and too embarrassed to go through the normal tills went to the self checkout instead, only to get in a mess with it and fail to scan even the first chocolate bar successfully. This of course meant that having avoided the sneer of the girl at the checkout, I now had to call someone over for assistance who could scrutinise my abundance of chocolate in even more detail and with even more of a sneer. Finally I got back to the car and headed for home.

  When I got in I put away the fridge stuff, and put the kettle on to make myself a coffee, then turned it off again telling myself I’d better do a bit of research in my newly acquired, going to put me into overdrawn status at the bank at least until payday on Thursday, reference books, and check out if it’s safe first. I poured myself a glass of juice and took that and my hoard of chocolate through to the living room, kicked off my shoes and snuggled into the corner of the settee ready for the onslaught of unwelcome facts I was about to find out about.

  An hour and a half, and two chocolate bars later, I had all the facts I ever wanted to know about pregnancy, and I hadn’t even got more than a quarter of the way through either book yet. Except maybe to give in to the irresistible urge to sneak a look at the back of each book, and stare in horror at the photographs of the grossly deformed gotta be at least fourteen months pregnant, women, who smiled wistfully and resembled someone that had swallowed an inflated beach ball. Quite how Victorians could refer to pregnant women as being in a delicate condition I couldn’t even begin to imagine. The whole thing looked about as far from being ‘delicate’ as a butterfly is to a charging bull elephant.

  I hadn’t been brave enough to attempt reading the chapters on the actual giving birth bit, because to tell the truth I was absolutely terrified at even the thought of it, and the unremitting doom of exactly what was going to happen to my body just in the first three months already had a certain Tim Burton quality to it, without reading about the Stephen King ending.

  I pushed the books away from me, and feeling slightly sick after all that chocolate pushed the rest of that away as well. Two big fat tears rolled down my cheek as I thought about the nightmare I’d unwittingly blundered into, and before I knew it I was crying my eyes out and wailing like a banshee at the awfulness and injustice of it all.

  I couldn’t do it. I quite simply could not, would not, do it. I wasn’t ready to have a baby, I was at a point in my life where I was just beginning to enjoy myself and get a grip on taking care of me, never mind a small helpless baby. I’d have to get rid of the baby, no other choice really. Lots of women do it and I’d be one of them.

  I padded barefoot and still sniffing out to the kitchen and switched the kettle on. At least now I could have a cup of coffee.

  I took my decadent cup of coffee and a streamers length of kitchen towel, grabbed en route, back to the living room and opened up my laptop. I blew my nose and moped up the last of my tears determined to be aloof and as detached as possible from the whole thing. If I could just think about it as some kind of illness to be treated, and not think about the baby side of it I could do this, I had to do this. I logged on to the internet and resolutely typed abortion into the search engine.

  I sort of knew, from God knows where, that you could quite legitimately go to your own doctor and demand a termination. Termination yes, I liked how that sounded, much better than abortion. From now on I’d refer to it as a termination.

  I was mildly surprised to see there were about a thousand different websites to choose from. Okay all I need to know is can you really just demand an abortion, I mean termination, from your own doctor, and how pregnant do you have to be before they tell you they can’t do it. I clicked on the first listed website to be confronted with all the reasons why you shouldn’t have an abortion, I mean termination, and a chronological list of a baby’s development from the time of conception. I clicked the back button as quickly as I could but not before reading that the baby’s heart starts beating at around 21 days. Twenty one days, not weeks, DAYS.

  I paused and tried to erase this information from my mind. Aloof, detached remember. This is an illness, nothing more than something gone a bit wrong with my body that needs fixing.

  I clicked on the next website, and there it all was again. Different layout, but pretty much the same thing. I clicked on a few different pages, trying to read everything to find the information I needed, while not reading it because I didn’t want to know what it was telling me. It was too real, much too real.

  I tentatively clicked on ‘Facts You Need To Know’ hoping against hope that it was the facts I needed to know. A list of explicit details on exactly what happens when they perform an abortion appeared. I read in fascinated horror, unable to turn away or click on anything else until I literally was not able to read anymore.

  Oh why did I have to read all that? Why didn’t I just look for clinics that would do the job
, instead of reading the medical procedure of exactly how they did it. Did I mention that I was exceptionally squeamish? I couldn’t have an abortion, or a termination now, not now I knew. No matter how dreadful the alternative of having a baby was, I knew I was never going to be able to have an abortion.

  I turned off the computer and sat curled up on the settee, ironically in a foetus position, cradling my coffee. My brain had a certain numbness to it and I could almost feel the cells jumping lemming like off the edge of the cliff of sanity. Like it or not in approximately eight months time I was going to have a baby.

  I put down my coffee and started counting off months on my fingers. It would be born on the 28th of February. Nine months to the day since my official up the duffness was incurred by what’s-his-name.

  After I’d sat motionless for an eon or two, and mourned the passing of freedom, size 10 dresses, sleep, alcohol, and general good times to be had, I eventually crawled back to bed and slept as they say like a new born baby. Although I strongly suspect that a real new born baby doesn’t actually do much sleeping, but anyway I slept like the hypothetical ones and didn’t stir for several hours.

  4

  3rd July - Week 5

  It had been a week since P day, as in the day I found out I was pregnant, maybe that should be S for stick day, or even O for ostrich day as since I’d done all that research I had become decidedly ostrich like and was burying my head in the sand, subconsciously reasoning that if I didn’t think about it, it wasn’t happening and I could cling on to normality. Stupid eh? I know, but the enormity of it all was just too great and my brain had a numb quality to it that I just couldn’t seem to resuscitate. The rationality brain cells were obviously the first to go.