Chapter 2
I was not fine. I was the opposite of fine. I was cold, sweaty, nauseous, and, once again, phoning my friends at three in the morning.
Not Priya, though. This was not a Call me on my bullshit situation. This was a Lovingly pretend my bullshit is valuable fertiliser you need for your garden situation.
“Hi,” said Bridge sleepily. “What’s wrong?”
I remembered something I should have remembered two panics ago. “Oh shit, you’re pregnant.”
“I’ve been pregnant for nine months, Luc. Have you only just noticed?”
“No, I mean, you’re pregnant, so I shouldn’t be ringing at three in the morning.”
“Don’t worry,” yawned Bridge. “I was up anyway.”
“You were not up anyway.”
“I was about to be. I’m sure I was about to be. Are you all right?”
Okay, we were in the ethical weeds here.
On the one hand, it was wrong to lie to your friends.
On the other hand, it was wrong to offload your anxieties onto a pregnant woman.
On the other other hand, or perhaps just on more of the same hand, the wrongness had probably begun when I’d reflexively rung the pregnant woman up in the middle of the night. “Yes.”
“You’re calling me at”—there was a pause as she checked the time—“2:47 on a Sunday morning to tell me you’re all right.”
“Yes?”
“You’re a terrible liar, Luc,” said Bridge. And she sounded genuinely hurt. “Also, you shouldn’t lie to me.”
“I lie to you all the time.”
“Yes, but not about things like this. You don’t pretend you’re okay when you aren’t.”
I made a valiant effort to be lighthearted. “I do. Otherwise I’d be completely nonfunctional.”
“Not to me,” Bridge replied. And she was right about that. Bridge had never let me play the it’s fine card, and she wasn’t about to start now. “You’re trying to protect me because I’m pregnant and that’s…that’s dehumanising. It’s probably misogynistic too.”
“Probably?”
“I was giving you wiggle room to spare your feelings. Because I’m a good friend.”
She was. Although I wasn’t totally sure that this particular exchange had been a master class in good-friend-ness on either of our parts.
“Bridge, it’s not a big deal. You need to look after yourself, and you need to let me pretend I’m a vaguely decent human being who doesn’t bother people with his crap when they’re trying to have major life events. ”
“But”—Bridge gave a little wail—“it’s not fair to exclude me from your crap just because I’m having a life event. I can’t let my life events mess up life. And I’ve already missed the twins’ birthday because my water broke.”
At the time, I’d assumed that Bridge’s tendency to run late had pushed so hard against my tendency to bail early that we’d completely missed each other.
“Oh my God, Bridge, are you okay? Are you in hospital? Did I just call you up to whinge about my problems while you were, I don’t know, in labour? ”
“I’m not in active labour,” Bridge protested. “Your water breaking isn’t like the movies, where it’s all, ‘Whoosh, scream, woowoowoo, pant, baby.’”
This wasn’t the detail that mattered, but I couldn’t not. “Woowoowoo?”
“That was an ambulance. That was my amazing and accurate impersonation of an ambulance.”
Still not the detail that mattered. Still couldn’t not. “Wouldn’t that be more neenawneenaw?”
“Ambulances haven’t gone neenawneenaw in years. Anyway, the point is, once your water breaks, it’s usually a day or two before the actual…”
“Woowoowoo bit?”
“Yes.”
I still felt kind of crappy about ringing her. “I still feel kind of crappy about ringing you.”
“Well, don’t. I love that I’m still your person.”
“Isn’t Oliver supposed to be my person now?”
“Love is love, Luc,” she declared, “and persons are persons.”
It was becoming increasingly clear that I had made a profound and irrecoverable error with one of my persons.
Sadly, my other person was sleeping the sleep of the rational upstairs and probably wasn’t about to notice my absence and ride to my rescue.
This was my fault and my problem. “Seriously,” I tried again.
“It isn’t a big deal. I had a bit of a freak-out, it’s passed, I—”
“Not about tomorrow?” Bridge cried. “You’re not having second thoughts about tomorrow!”
“No.”
“That’s your lying monosyllable. Didn’t I just tell you not to lie to me?”
Toppling onto my side, I mashed my face into the sofa cushions. “You know I’m not good with…like, decisions, maturity, responsibility, the future, having tiny lives depending on me, that kind of thing.”
“Lucien Havelock O’Donnell, you—”
“Hang on.” I briefly unmashed my face. “Havelock?”
“Well, if you’re not going to have a middle name, then you…you…get given one.”
“No, you don’t. That’s not a thing. That’s never been a thing.”
In typical Bridge style, she ignored me. “Lucien Havelock O’Donnell, you are not going to mess this up for me.”
Okay, I was officially feeling at least two percent less guilty. “Um, what do you mean, for you?”
“I’ve wanted you and Oliver to do this for years. And since you let us all down by not getting married—”
“Bridge, come on. We did what was right for us.”
“But I’ve always dreamed of going to your wedding.”
“You did go to my wedding,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but you didn’t.”
“And it was the happiest day of my life. Now please go back to sleep and—”
“It’s too late. I’m up now.”
“You told me you were already up.”
“I was lying.” It was amazing how sure of herself Bridge could sound even when she was admitting to having done something wrong.
“But it doesn’t count because it wasn’t about something huge like ‘I’m thinking of not doing something that my best friend has wanted me to do for years and now I’m trying to not even tell her and—’” I became uncomfortably aware that I could hear dragging, moving sounds.
“Bridge…are you putting your shoes on?”
“I’m coming to see you.”
I was going to say But you’re pregnant, but I shelved that particular objection for reasons of dehumanisation and probable misogyny. “Are you?”
“Yes. I’ll meet you on the Millennium Bridge.”
“You absolutely will not.”
“But it’s our thing. It’s what we do.”
“We did it once. Years ago.”
A confused silence briefly echoed down the line at me. “It wasn’t.”
“It was pre-pandemic. That’s years.”
“Fuck.” Bridge sounded genuinely distraught. “Oh my God, Luc, we’re old. We lost our youth to a virus.”
“I think we’d already lost our youth to not being young anymore.”
For the tiniest of moments, I’d thought I’d managed to say something that wasn’t horrendously counterproductive. “Then we have to do this,” Bridge exclaimed. “We have to do it for the people we used to be.”
“The person I used to be was an arsehole.”
“And I loved that arsehole. I want to see that arsehole again.”
“How about,” I offered desperately, “I show you that arsehole after you’ve had your baby.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“It will. Arseholes change very little. It’s their whole thing, figuratively and literally.”
“I’m calling a cab.”
“Don’t call a cab. Please don’t call a cab.”
“I’ve called a cab.”
There was no way this was going to end well. And there was no way it wasn’t going to be my fault. “But your water broke.”
“And if I start having a baby on the bridge, you can rush me across the city on a madcap drive to the hospital.”
“Tell me that’s not going to happen.”
“Of course it’s not going to happen.”
“Okay, now you’re making me feel like it’s definitely going to happen.”
“Then”—it was Bridge’s triumphant voice—“you’d better come meet me, or I’ll be giving birth alone on a bridge at 3:02 in the morning.”
“Look,” I said. “I know you’re an independent woman who can make her own decisions, but this seems like a really, really bad decision.”
“Tough. You owe me.”
“What do you mean, I owe you?”
“One, you dated Oliver by yourself despite my best attempts to get you together. Two, you flaked on your own wedding that I was really looking forward to. Three, you got a civil partnership for—and I quote—‘legal reasons’ and didn’t even let me be your witness.
Four, you’re putting the next step of my Luc and Oliver Eternal Happiness Plan in jeopardy. ”
“Wait,” I said. “What? What is this plan?”
“Cab’s here. Byeeee.”
* * *
It was only when I’d been sitting in a cab of my own for about twenty minutes, and had realised I was going to be in it for at least twenty minutes more, that it finally dawned on me that I was no longer in my leap spontaneously into a taxi like Carrie Bradshaw era and more in my live in the suburbs and have a lawn era.
And, thinking about it, the fact that Carrie Bradshaw was my icon of choice for youth, freedom, and troubled singleness meant I was squarely in my too old for this shit era.
As, ironically enough, was Carrie Bradshaw, if And Just Like That… was anything to go by.
After paying the full fifty quid (including tip) it took to get from Havering to Central London in a reasonable time at an unreasonable hour, I scrambled out the cab, mildly relieved that I’d at least got there first and hadn’t left my pregnant friend standing around on a windy London landmark when she should have been in bed resting.
While I waited, I stared at the Thames, which—much like me—looked a lot better at night.
When, instead of being the sludgy grey sewer of the nation, it became a brilliant mirror of coloured lights and reflected possibilities.
Okay. Not much like me at all, actually.
And, as I stared, I contemplated all the ways I could have handled this better.
I could have not panic-dialled Bridge over something I was beginning to remember was trivial.
I could have tried harder to dissuade her from this objectively terrible plan.
I could have told Oliver, except that would have been embarrassing, or Tom, except that would have been patriarchal.
I could just have been less of a fuckup in general. Always. Like, my whole life.
“Luuuuuc,” cried Bridge.
And I turned round to see her emerging, slowly and sideways, from a taxi.