Of course, I fell pregnant in October. I drank too many glasses of bad merlot at a dinner and we were rash and impassioned when we got home. The condom came out of me in the bath the day after, floating in the water like a jellyfish. I screamed but the damage was already done.
Back then I was addicted to those cheap stick pregnancy tests, three for a pound from the bargain shop. My cycle was irregular, so I took one a week as if it had been prescribed. One day you’ll get an answer you don’t want, my boyfriend said, but I ignored him.
The day I did get the result, I thought about how the ugliest feeling I had ever experienced was unexpectedly seeing a baby made by somebody I used to love, in the supermarket. I was buying milk. I left the milk. When I saw the baby I was split with grief.
But that’s my life that you have there, I had wanted to say.
I used to think it felt like an axe going into a tree, but as time went on I realised it was more like the movement in the air the moment before the axe’s hit. That second of displacement, of air itself being rearranged, molecule by molecule.
You can have another, I had said to myself at the time. One day.
I want to keep the baby, I told my boyfriend, who you could describe as long-suffering were you inclined to.
February, March and April teemed with birthdays. The heat of so many candles raised off the earth. They added a new national holiday directly preceding May Day and called it Birth Day. Birth Day was the good twin of May Day, which was dark and pungent with disaster.
