Babies in Waiting (18 page)

When she got in, her parents were sitting together in the living room. Her dad was reading the paper and her mother was watching some home-decor show on the television. It was a rare show of family togetherness. Her dad
looked up when she walked in. ‘Hello, pumpkin,’ he said vaguely. ‘It’s a bit late. Did Lucy’s mum give you a lift home?’

‘I’m pregnant,’ Gemma said. For the second time that day, there was an awful, unending silence. She kept standing in the middle of the living room rug, with both of her parents staring at her. Finally, her mother said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ in the faint, polite voice she used when she thought shop staff were being rude to her.

Gemma said it again.

‘You can’t be!’ her father exploded. ‘That’s insane. You’re a child!’ Then his face darkened. ‘Is it that little bastard Ben? I’ll cut his bloody balls off, so help me.’

There was a lot of yelling then. Gemma tried to tell them that everything would be all right, but when her father asked if Ben knew she was pregnant, she had to admit that she’d told him and he’d walked away. Then her father blustered some more, and yelled about how never mind the balls, he’d bloody kill Ben when he got his hands on him, and Gemma’s mother burst into tears and went and poured herself an enormous drink. It all felt like an episode of some horrible soap opera and Gemma wished very much that it would all be over. She’d known what they would say and how they would shout. She’d always known it would be like this. But they couldn’t make her have an abortion. She was eighteen. Ben would come to terms with it and everything would be fine. She just knew she had to stay calm through the screaming stage.

In the days that followed, it got uglier. Her father got
hold of Ben’s mum, and they both came round to the house for a ‘meeting’. It all started with icy politeness, but soon there was mud-slinging from both sides. Gemma’s dad barked at Ben, who stayed sullenly silent, Hannah got defensive and told David to shut up. David had never been told to shut up by a woman, so he yelled at her and she yelled back. She was a lawyer after all, so she did some good yelling. Throughout all of this, Gemma’s mother drank and cried, and Ben sat on the sofa, his arms folded and his handsome face crumpled like a sulky child’s.

Things really weren’t turning out the way Gemma had imagined. Ben had said he wanted to have babies with her. But now he’d just become a six-year-old who hid behind his mum’s skirts. He hadn’t spoken to her at all since she told him – all conversations seemed to happen between their parents. She’d wanted to take him up to her room to talk, but her father had started yelling again and said he forbade it. Gemma said, ‘Why? I can’t get any more pregnant, can I?’ But apparently it wasn’t a good time for a joke.

The next day, Ben texted her. ‘Meet me at mine this afternoon’, it said. No kisses or any of his usual silly banter. Gemma knew it wasn’t going to be good news. She caught the bus after school and went to his house. He opened the door when she rang the doorbell and walked back into the house without saying anything. She followed him into the living room, where he sat down on the sofa. She sat on an upright chair opposite. It felt like a job interview, or going to see the headteacher at school.

‘I’m not going to ask you if you did this on purpose,’ Ben said, and Gemma was shocked to hear his voice shaking, like he was going to cry. It made her furious.

‘Did this on
purpose
? You were there too, you know. Remember the night of your Islington gig? When we had sex right there?’ She pointed at the Persian rug.

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘I said we didn’t have a condom, and I asked you if you wanted to make a baby and you said yes . . .’

‘I was drunk!’ yelled Ben, red-faced. ‘I wanted to have bareback sex. I would have said yes to anything!’

Gemma stared and stared at him. She couldn’t speak. In the long silence Ben finally started to look ashamed. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, but still angry. ‘I’m not going to say I want you to get an abortion, because I hate the idea of a baby dying. But this . . . this thing is not fair. This is my
life
.’

‘It’s my life too . . .’ Gemma began.

‘But you had some choice about this. I’ve got none.’

What a whiny brat he was. There seemed no point in yelling about how unfair that statement was, so Gemma waited.

‘I’m eighteen years old and now I’m going to be a dad, and that’s all there is to it. My mum says I have to face up to my responsibilities, so now, even if I get to go to uni, I can only go to one in London. And I have to get a job so I can give money towards the baby.’

‘You don’t need to worry about money . . . I’ve got my inheritance . . .’

‘That’s what I said, but my mum says it’s my baby, and it would be wrong not to support it.’ He sounded so bitter and angry, it made Gemma feel quite ill.

‘Anyway, I just want you to know that I’ll do what I have to do, but what I said before you sprung this on me still stands. I don’t want to be with you. As far as I’m concerned, we’re broken up.’

‘Fine,’ said Gemma. She got up to leave. Ben didn’t stop her, and she walked out calmly, and went straight to the bus stop. Fortunately, a bus came almost immediately, and she was on her way home ten minutes after she had got to Ben’s house.

It was odd. She had thought that that would be the worst moment of her life, breaking up with Ben. But it wasn’t. She really didn’t like the bitter, selfish little boy he’d turned out to be. If Ben grew up and turned into a halfway decent man, maybe there’d be a future for them. If not, well . . . she’d manage without him. She had her baby, and she’d be fine. The tiny little person inside her womb had become her strength and her purpose. She was amazed at how calm and together she felt. After years of feeling unsure of herself, of feeling invisible, like she didn’t have a place in the world, it was novel to feel so strong, so independent. Maybe becoming a mum was all it took to grow up. She wished she had someone she could explain it to, but as there was no one, she spent hours in her bedroom, hand on her stomach, talking quietly to her baby, her best friend-to-be.

In the next few weeks, her mum’s drinking really got out of hand. Gemma came down one morning to find her mum sitting at the table with a glass of red wine next to her bowl of muesli. When Gemma walked in and glanced at the glass, Samantha laughed harshly and said, ‘Yes, sweetheart, this is your fault.’ Then raised the glass and drank deeply. It was a day or two after that that her father drove Samantha off to the ‘spa’ in Cheltenham.

Word got out at school that she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure how . . . she didn’t tell anyone. But someone heard that her mother was in a drying-out clinic, and someone else heard why, and within days people were whispering as she walked past them. She knew that at other schools, there were lots of teenage mums. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that happened at Lady Grey’s. Girls from Lady Grey’s went to Cambridge or Oxford. It was a bit sensational if someone opted for Durham. They didn’t get pregnant at eighteen and skip university altogether.

Looking from the outside, things really couldn’t be worse. Her mother was a drunk, Ben was a king-sized wimp, and her dad was crashing around shouting and looking like he was brewing a stroke or a heart attack. But Gemma didn’t care. All she cared about was the tiny light she felt glowing inside her. She was going to be a mother, a real, loving, caring mother. This baby would be hers and hers alone (seeing as Ben didn’t look like he was going to be much of a father), and Gemma would never, ever feel empty or alone again.

So, somehow, all the yelling and ugliness just passed her by. She floated through her days at school, wrote her exams and did her work in a happy haze. She thought she’d better finish her A-levels . . . naturally she wouldn’t be going to university that year, if ever, but she would probably need to have some qualifications to be able to support her baby in the years to come. Her granny’s money wasn’t going to last forever. As the baby was only due in late September she had plenty of time after she’d finished to get ready for the birth.

There was another strange and unexpected bonus – with her mother gone, her father seemed to think he shouldn’t leave her alone, so he seemed to have cut back, or maybe even stopped his extra-curricular love life. She hadn’t seen him sneaking off to make mobile phone calls for weeks. He came home at a reasonable time after work every evening and was home for the whole weekend.

He didn’t have a clue what to do with her . . . he didn’t know what to talk about, or what she liked to do. She’d decided to give up tennis, so her weekends were really quite free. They went to the cinema a few times, but if he picked the film, it was usually some blockbuster violent thing and she was bored, and if she picked a romantic comedy or a drama, he spent the film restlessly shifting in his seat and looking at his phone. He took her out for a few insanely expensive dinners at very posh restaurants in London. She enjoyed that, especially because she got to dress up, but they had nothing to talk about, so they would end up picking at their food in silence.

One weekend, about two weeks after her mother had gone to the clinic, her father knocked on her door. It was Saturday morning. ‘Listen,’ he said abruptly, ‘we’ve been invited for tea by a work colleague of mine. Tomorrow.’

‘Okay . . .’ Gemma said dubiously. That didn’t sound like fun at all, sitting in a room sipping tea with a sweaty, red-faced banker huffing and talking about the FTSE. Still, she didn’t want to say no and make her father angry when they were living in a state of relative peace. He saw her indecision though. He gave a tight smile. ‘Relax. They’re not old fogies like me,’ he said. (Who says ‘fogies’ any more? Gemma thought.) ‘Richard works for me and he’s quite young, and his wife’s even younger. Rachel. Lovely girl.’ Oh no, thought Gemma. She was being dragged off to see one of her father’s tarts. They were going to play happy families at tea while her father played footsie under the table. She’s rather go and see the sweaty banker she’d imagined . . . rather FTSE than footsie, any day.

But she’d said yes, and she’d have to go. Well, there was no reason to make it easy for him. She got dressed with care the next day. She chose low-rise jeans that just skimmed her hipbones, then put on a very sheer white jumper. Her bump was very small, but because she was so slim it was unmistakable. Let’s see that strumpet Rachel get sexy with her dad while his pregnant teenage daughter looked on.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. They arrived at Richard and Rachel’s place just after three. There were two silver 4-by-4s in the driveway, and parked behind them, a shiny little red hatchback. When Rachel opened the door,
Gemma was surprised to see that she looked just like a younger version of Gemma’s mother . . . a little too thin, with carefully styled and coloured blonde hair and subtle make-up. She smiled brightly and said, ‘Hi! You must be Gemma!’ She used a cutesy voice, as if Gemma were six, or mentally retarded. That was when Gemma knew this was a pity visit, and that Rachel already knew she was pregnant. Richard came to the door too, and greeted Gemma’s dad like an enthusiastic puppy. What an idiot, Gemma thought. She knew how much her father hated people sucking up to him. He’d told her over dinner about how he hated the toadying little twits in his office. This was going to be a disaster of an afternoon.

But there was another surprise to come. They walked into the living room, and Rachel said, ‘Gemma, this is my sister, Louise.’ She said it in a special tone, as if she was giving Gemma a gift. Sister Louise was sitting on the sofa with her back to them, and when she stood up and turned Gemma saw she was pregnant, not hugely so, but a little further along than Gemma herself was. Louise was tall, much taller than her sister, with a slim, muscular build. She had dark, reddish hair which she wore cropped short, and she had a lovely wide mouth that looked like she smiled and laughed a lot. Gemma glanced quickly at Louise’s left hand. She wasn’t wearing any rings. So that was the point of the tea. They’d found her another single pregnant woman to talk to. The only difference was that Louise looked old enough to be her mother.

Dear God, she’s a child! Louise thought. She’s barely into puberty! Little Gemma Hamilton was about five foot two and fine-boned, with long, straight blonde hair. She had no figure to speak of . . . Rachel had told her Gemma was a dancer, and she had the straight waist and flat chest that comes from years of ballet training. Because she was so tiny, the bump under her white jumper was already very visible. Gemma was staring at her coolly. She’s not stupid, Louise thought. She’s worked out that we’ve been set up. Rachel, Richard and David were all standing around the room, watching them warily, like zookeepers who’d put two animals in a cage together and were worried they’d tear each other to pieces. Nobody spoke, and as the silence got longer and more embarrassing, Louise realised she had to do something. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on,’ she announced abruptly and headed for the kitchen.

Annoyingly, Rachel, ever the perfect hostess, had already laid out the tea tray and put beautiful homemade cakes and sandwiches on plates. There was nothing
other than boiling the kettle to keep Louise in the kitchen. She wished fervently for a sink full of dishes to wash, or for any other fiddly domestic task that would save her having to go back into that living room to talk to that poor, sullen child. She spent ages running the tap and rinsing out Rachel’s spotless, limescale-free kettle, before filling it with water from the water-filter jug. She contemplated ducking out of the kitchen door, crawling past the living-room window and getting into her car to speed off back to the calm oasis that was Simon’s flat. But then she remembered that her handbag, with her car keys, was next to the sofa in the living room. She’d be willing to abandon the bag . . . she could get new credit cards and things, but without the keys, she was screwed. She didn’t know how to hot-wire a car. She laughed quietly to herself at the thought and turned back from the sink to put the kettle on its stand, then jumped and almost dropped it. Gemma was standing silently in the kitchen doorway, watching her. ‘I said I’d come to help you,’ she said. She had a very soft, breathy voice, and an accent that came from thirteen years of achingly posh private schooling.