Stella
It’s been less than a week since I told Richard that I’d stop spending time with Dom, and he’s currently on his way over to my house.
Just as I’ve never been the kind of person to cheat on a partner, I’ve also never been the kind of person to lie.
To a fault, actually. If I went to dinner with my friends and one of their husbands had been fired or they were sporting new filler in their lips, I’d come home and tell Gavin straight away.
I always took the view that ‘don’t tell anyone’ didn’t include Gavin because he mostly didn’t care.
Only he was actually a huge gossip, so he very much did care and I shared secrets that, on balance, I probably shouldn’t have, including my own.
I told him what I’d bought him for his birthday before he’d even seen the wrapping paper, I ruined every surprise I ever tried to plan, I even told him that I knew he was going to propose because I’d seen a chunky charge on his credit card statement. Lying just isn’t my thing.
So this morning, when I saw three missed calls from Dom, I knew that I was going to have to lie to someone and I felt deeply, painfully ill-equipped to do so.
Rose was on the floor, playing with some tasteful wooden animals in a Noah’s Ark that one of my uni friends bought her.
I open my phone and I swear I’m about to message Dom to tell him that I can’t talk, when he calls again.
Four calls in a row is not nothing, so I answer.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi,’ he says, sounding absolutely dreadful. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine – what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ he says, once again sounding truly dreadful. ‘No, nothing. Just. . . Have you got a minute?’
I should say no, but I don’t know how, and it would be such a complete and utter lie.
If I was busy then I could say that I’m busy, but realistically, I don’t just have a minute, I have an entire day.
Richard and I are having dinner tomorrow night.
I’ve promised to make a roast because he said he misses a home-cooked roast so badly.
But until then, it’s just me, Rose and a booking for the slightly shit local zoo.
‘I’ve got ages,’ I say. ‘Do you want to come over?’
‘Yes, please,’ he says. I want to feel guilty but his tone is too strangled and I’m too worried about him.
What could it be? Maybe he and Florrie broke up, but he didn’t seem that attached to her so I doubt he’d be devastated about a split there.
Could be someone in his family, but surely he’s got closer people to call for that?
‘Florrie’s pregnant,’ he says the second he walks through the front door.
I nod. ‘I kind of thought that might be it. Tea?’
He nods and I make him a cup of tea because that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to do when someone’s having a crisis.
‘This tea is horrible,’ he says, sipping it.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I don’t drink tea; those teabags are probably three years old.’
He takes another gulp. ‘Fuck me,’ he says, sounding dazed. Then he looks at Rose, who is throwing all the balls out of the mini ball pit that I deeply regret buying her. ‘Sorry.’
‘I don’t want to ask an inappropriate question,’ I venture. ‘But she’s sleeping with other people, right? It’s an open relationship?’
Dom nods.
‘So if she were pregnant, would it be, you know. . . yours?’
He looks down at the mug. ‘I’m the only person she’s had that kind of sex with in the last month, apparently. She doesn’t always “do” penetration with her lovers.’
‘Bet that makes you feel special,’ I say, marvelling at how Florrie can be five years younger than us and yet from a different world.
He laughs. ‘Very.’
‘Does she know what she wants to do?’
He shakes his head. ‘She said she needed to be alone, and then she left, and she hasn’t replied to any of my messages.’
‘If she wants to be alone, then that’s fair,’ I say. ‘Finding out that you’re pregnant is terrifying, even if it’s on purpose and with someone you know really well. Finding out like this, it’s pretty much every woman’s worst nightmare.’
Dom looks blank. ‘I’ve been having sex for nearly twenty years and this hasn’t ever happened to me. We were being so careful, like, literally using-condoms-and-she’s-got-the-implant careful.’
I shrug. ‘These things happen sometimes.’ There’s a pause and then I say the thing that I know I really need to say. ‘You’ve told her that it’s her choice what she does, right?’
‘She knows that.’
‘Dom, seriously, it doesn’t matter if she knows it, she needs to hear it. From you. She needs to know that you’re not going to judge her if she decides to get an abortion.’
He looks over at Rose, horrified.
‘Dom, she’s one, she doesn’t know what the word “cow” means, let alone what “abortion” means.’
Dom sort of laughs. ‘I’ll send her another message and I’ll make sure she knows.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘Now what are you going to do for the rest of today?’
‘No idea,’ he says. ‘Wish it was a weekday so I could go to work and take my bad mood out on other people. Go home and wait for Florrie to call me and tell me whether we’re having a baby, I guess. Watch TikTok until my eyes bleed.’
I sigh, knowing that I’m about to turn my little lie into a much bigger lie, and not feeling great about it. ‘Come to the zoo with us.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely.’
He finishes the horrible tea and half a packet of Hobnobs while I pack an enormous bag of spare clothes, nappies, wipes, snacks, books, toys and a blanket, and shove it all under the pram. ‘How long are we going for?’ Dom snipes.
‘If you don’t have absolutely everything then you might as well have nothing, baby rule number one,’ I say.
‘I can’t think about babies right now.’
‘Bollocks,’ I say. ‘You might be having one of these, whether you like it or not, and you’re in your thirties, you’ve got a good job, you own a nice flat, you’re perfectly capable, so you might as well at least try to see some of the positives of having a kid.’
We put our shoes on and walk towards the station.
‘Okay, tell me one thing that would be fun about having a baby,’ I demand.
He thinks about it for a minute. ‘Parking in the really good parking spaces, right near the big Sainsbury’s.’
‘Yes!’ I agree. ‘That’s a great one! What else?’
He thinks for a while longer. ‘Paternity leave? Like an extra holiday?’
I decide not to tell him that paternity leave is to holiday as prison is to hotel. ‘Sure!’
‘I could work on a kid-friendly house,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Like, I could try to work out what the absolute perfect house for a family would be. And design it, and maybe one day I could build it.’
I want to stop and hug him, but I settle for an encouraging nod. ‘Exactly!’
He helps carry the pram up the stairs at the station, saving me my least favourite step of dragging it backwards, filled with terror that I’m going to drop Rose.
On the train we look out the window into other people’s gardens and I keep pointing out the benefits of child rearing.
‘Loads of snacks,’ I say. ‘There’s never not a digestive biscuit in my handbag. ’
‘Nack,’ says Rose.
‘Snack!’ I yelp back. ‘Rosie! That’s a new word!
’ I beam at her, soaking up her brilliance, drinking in the roundness of her face and her total bemusement at my excitement.
I scramble to give her one of the squashed blueberries I’ve decanted into a tiny Tupperware, because I need her to understand how amazing I think she is and her love language is mostly just fruit at this stage of her life.
‘That’s another magic one, when they start talking and suddenly they’re people instead of really needy pets. ’
‘Yeah,’ Dom admits. ‘That’s fun.’
We wander around the zoo, showing Rose the animals.
Dom hoists Rose up so that she can see the lizard hiding in the rainforest section, and again standing behind a queue of boys violently shoving each other by the monkey cages.
I try to not let myself think, even for a moment, how much more fun this is, how this was the plan, how this was exactly what I wanted life to look like.
After Rose has lost her mind at seeing a real-life sheep (arguably not a zoo animal, but this place isn’t famed for its biological diversity) she then starts whining.
I put her back into the pram and pull the visor down, and within seconds she’s snoring gently.
‘I’m desperate for a wee,’ I say. ‘But if she hears a hand dryer she’ll wake up, she’s a psycho about them.’
‘I can stay with her,’ says Dom haltingly, clearly not sure that this is a good idea.
But I want a wee without an audience for the first time in several days, so I slip into the loos and leave him gripping onto the buggy handle.
When I’ve finished washing my hands in the monkey-themed sink, I come out and find Dom talking to a similarly trendy thirty-something, also tall and handsome and also holding on to the exact same pram.
They look like they came off the production line at the same Trendy Dad factory.
‘I met a pram twin.’ Dom smiles as I return.
‘Isn’t it amazing off-road?’ the man says earnestly.
I have never taken the pram outside of Zone 3 so I take his word for it. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Amazing.’
‘I’d better get on, my other half’s got our twins in the reptile house. Nice to meet you.’ He heads off and Dom looks at me, astounded. ‘That man thought that I was a parent.’
‘You’re holding a pram in a children’s zoo. If you’re not a parent, he should really have called security.’
‘But still!’ he says, and I don’t want to dent his excitement. ‘Okay, what next?’
‘Pub?’ I suggest.
He looks shocked. ‘With a baby?’
‘With a sleeping baby.’
Rose will reliably nap for another hour, so we walk slowly through the park and up to a pub by the river, looking out over the water.
It’s warm and the light is sparkling, even through the river is sludge brown.
I get a Pimm’s, the silliest drink imaginable, and eat all the fruit out of it with my fingers, getting sticky juice on my top.
I briefly look at my phone and realise that I haven’t messaged Richard all day, so fire him off a picture of me from the zoo, Rose cropped out. See you tomorrow, can’t wait, I add. It’s sort of true. I mean I can wait, but no one ever means ‘can’t wait’, it’s just a sort of thing you say, isn’t it?
‘Anything from Florrie?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. ‘Nothing. I’m worried for her.’
‘Did she seem in a bad way?’
‘I mean, she was pretty cut up. She came over last night, when she first worked out that her period was late, and then we couldn’t even look at the test. We went to bed and we didn’t even look at it until the next morning.’
‘What?’ I say, a sunrise of hope starting in my chest. ‘You didn’t look at the test for eight hours?’
‘More like twelve,’ he says. ‘What? Why are you smiling?’
He is such an idiot.