Chapter 3
“Pardon?” I said.
Bridge had one arm on the railing, the other wrapped around herself. “The contractions are getting stronger.”
I stared at her in actual horror. “Are you giving birth on the Millennium Bridge at half past three in the morning?”
“No, I’m going into active labour on the Millennium Bridge at half past three in the morning. I’ll only give—ow—birth on the Millennium Bridge at half past three in the morning if you keep asking silly questions instead of getting me to hospital.”
For a brief, terrifying moment I forgot how everything worked. “Ambulance?” I suggested.
“Taxi,” growled Bridge.
“Oh. Right. Um.” The how-working-ness of everything was still…
not. My phone had gone from a piece of technology I used every day without thinking to a weird rock with flashing lights on it.
“Taxi,” I said aloud, because I remembered reading somewhere that saying things aloud helped you to focus on them.
“Ow,” said Bridge accusingly.
I finally figured out how to app. The results were not good. “It’ll be forty minutes.”
Bridge was still doubled over. “I can’t be in labour on the Millennium Bridge at half past three in the morning for forty minutes.”
“If it helps, at the end of those minutes it’ll be ten past four.”
“No, it doesn’t help.”
“Maybe Oliver or Tom could drive—”
“Tom’s in Finchley and Oliver’s in…wherever you live now. I can’t remember, because I’m in labour.”
“Havering.”
“I’m so glad I have you with me at this precious but difficult moment.”
“Maybe it should be an ambulance,” I said, watching the approaching-taxi dot on my screen failing to approach.
“Luc, no. There are people getting shot and stabbed and overdosing on ketamine who need those ambulances.”
“You need an ambulance,” I didn’t not yell.
“I don’t need an ambulance. I need a ride.”
The worst thing was that if we’d been about five years younger, we’d probably have known someone with their own transport and the kind of lifestyle that meant they’d be around in Central London at nonsense o’clock in the morning. “Oh, hang on,” I said. “I’ll call Priya.”
To my guilty relief, Bridge was too busy going into labour to have much of an opinion.
“Luc”—Priya picked up on the second ring—“if you’re bothering me at 3:41 on a Sunday morning because you’re having a panic attack over a puppy, I’ll never—”
“It’s Bridge. She’s kind of maybe slightly in labour?”
“Happy for her. I’ll send flowers tomorrow.”
She hung up. I rang back.
“Luc, what the fuck?” Priya had an ambient level of over it she very seldom deviated from. She was deviating.
“The fuck is,” I told her. “She’s in labour. She’s going into labour right now on a bridge.”
“What about Bridge?”
“On a bridge. On the Millennium Bridge.”
“Why,” asked Priya, “is Bridge on the Millennium Bridge at— This is your fault, isn’t it, Luc?”
“Yes. Obviously. But we can’t get a taxi, so if you’re anywhere nearby, can you please get here now because otherwise our friend will have to name her child A3211 after where they were born.”
Bridge gave a low cry. “Nooo. I am not calling my child A3211.”
From down the phone came the sound of an angry lesbian pulling on her boots. “I am on my way, you fucking, fucking dick.”
“I’m sor—”
She’d already gone.
“Okay.” I turned back to Bridge, doing my best impression of someone who knew what the fuck he was doing. “Priya’s on her way. Should I…I don’t know…get some towels or boil a kettle or something?”
“I want to say yes,” Bridge told me, “just to see what you’d do.”
“There’s probably a Tesco’s that’s open?”
“I don’t need towels, Luc. I need—fuck, I’ve forgotten. I had this written down. Probably it involved not being on a bridge.”
It would have been churlish to remind her that this had been her idea.
Even though it had totally been her idea.
Oh my God, I was the worst friend in the world.
“Don’t worry, we can google. This is just like that time at university when you were driving me back from that party in Slough and your tyre went out and neither of us had any idea how to replace it, but we looked it up and it was fine. ”
There was a long silence, partly because Bridge was in the middle of another contraction, and partly because she was mustering a particularly epic boggle.
“That wasn’t fine. We were in the middle of nowhere, so we were trying to learn how to change a tyre from a YouTube video that kept buffering on a phone with two percent battery and a cracked screen in the dark and none of the bits of the car looked like any of the bits on the video and then you freaked out because you saw a badger and you thought it might have rabies. ”
“I don’t remember that at all. I remember being really calm and collected.”
Bridge’s boggle became a…whatever was bigger than a boggle. An omniboggle. “You were drunk. You were so drunk.”
“Was I?”
“Yes. That’s why you don’t remember how drunk you were.”
This was piecing itself together in ways I didn’t like. On the plus side, it was keeping Bridge from either panicking or getting too angry at me. “Why would I have been drunk at a random party in Slough?”
“You’d had a fight with Miles over some play he was in.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
Bridge took another contraction-induced pause. “I think it was one of the Pratchett ones?”
I gave a bitter sigh of reminiscence. “Oh yeah. The ones where he always played Vetinari.” It was falling into place.
“That’s right. He’d been all ‘You have to come on Saturday night’ and I’d been all ‘It’s fine, I’ll catch the matinee’ and then he’d been like ‘You care more about our friends than you do about me’ and I’d been all ‘It’s just student theatre,’ and he hadn’t spoken to me for two days.
So when I went to the party anyway, he got super pissed off.
So I got super pissed, and I ended up talking to some guy in second year about infectious diseases, which is probably how the whole rabies thing got in my head.
” I was sure I’d had a point when I’d started, but fuck knew where it was now.
“Anyway,” I concluded valiantly, “what matters is we got in a mess and we got out of it together.”
“No, we didn’t. You called Priya. And she came to pick us up in her van.”
“Truck,” I said reflexively.
“Van. It was back when she had the transit.”
“And,” I continued, even more valiantly, “it worked then and it’s going to work now and I’m going to be with you the whole time.”
Bridge blinked at me tearfully. “I’m probably just having a lot of hormones right now, but that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
Riding the high of this positive moment, hoping it would eclipse the three different ways this was still all my fault, I unlocked my phone and googled my friend is in labour what do I do.
“Bridge,” I said, “you’re fucked. This website is telling me the most important thing is for me to be kind and offer support. ”
“But you are being kind and offering support.”
“It also says I should stay upbeat and keep negative commentary or snarky remarks to myself.”
She hummed thoughtfully. “You maybe shouldn’t have started off by telling me I’m fucked then.”
“Yeah, I fucked it.”
There was a brief pause to acknowledge the fuckedness of it. Then Bridge said, “Look, I really appreciate what you’re trying to do, and being kind and offering support is really nice. But is not one of the most important things perhaps don’t be in the middle of the Millennium Bridge?”
“Not according to the website?”
“Maybe we should let go of the website, Luc?”
“It’s also saying you should take a hot bath. Or play a calming hand of cards.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you trying to comfort me by being deliberately useless?”
“Is it working?”
“A bit, actually.”
I put my phone away. “Okay, not to ruin my brilliant strategy, but it does also say that walking around can help. And we do have to get off this bridge, and Priya’s coming from the South Bank so”—I offered her my arm in a way that I hoped was kind and supportive rather than downbeat and snarky—“shall we?”
“Certainly, kind sir,” trilled Bridge, who wasn’t going to let being in the early stages of labour get in the way of a bit. “Ow.”
We made our way slowly over the bridge, skirting round the sort of people who were out and about at this time of the night and/or morning, which was to say, people who were working way too hard and people who were working nowhere near hard enough.
I mean, like, because they had party lifestyles.
Not, like, because they were unemployed or homeless.
“This is all right, isn’t it?” I asked. “The walking,” I clarified quickly. “Obviously waking you up at three in the morning to have a puppy-related crisis was not all right.”
“The walking’s good,” Bridge declared loyally. “It said on the website. And I think it was on my list too.”
“And we’ve got…um…time?”
“I assume so. The midwife sounded very relaxed when we rang her this afternoon.”
I had a feeling if we rang her now she’d be much less relaxed. But, following the advice on the website, I kept that comment to myself.
“Besides,” Bridge went on, with the air of someone trying very hard to keep up their own spirits, “it’s not like babies just pop out with no warning. If they did that, it would definitely be on the website.”
Having friends who were better people than you fucking sucked.
I felt fucking terrible. I’d spent sizable chunks of my life developing new ways to feel terrible about new things and this, right here, topped the lot.
Took the tea cake. Spaffed on the biscuit.
“Bridge,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I’m…so, so sorry. ”
As ever, Bridge poured salt in the wound by being incredibly understanding. “I’m a big girl, Luc.” She paused. “Figuratively. You can’t actually make me do things I don’t want to do.”
“No, but I can… I’m… I shouldn’t help you do the things when they’re…when they’re bad.”