When I finally stumble home around 1 a.m., I have a terrible, drunken urge to text Jacob. I type out a message and instantly make a typo. A reminder of how much wine I have consumed.
No. No. I can’t.
Maybe I should?
Maybe he’d want to hear from me?
No. Olive. Stop it.
Standing by my front door, trying to fish my keys out of my bag, I notice that Dorothy Gray’s light is still on. Dorothy is my eighty-eight-year-old neighbour. Everything else is dark but I can see her fuzzy TV screen; it looks as if a black-and-white film is playing. I’ve met her a couple of times at the local residents’ meet-up or while taking out the bins. She lives in a big house directly opposite my block of flats, and we have a nice old chinwag if we’re ever going inside or leaving home at the same time. Her house is ginormous, with its own driveway. She never seems to sleep or, at least, turn out her lights. I hope she’s all right. Maybe she just watches TV all night (like me). Each to their own. My curtains are not quite closed, and there is a thin stream of bright light coming from her house into my bedroom. Perhaps it should be annoying, but I feel some warmth from it. Perhaps I’m not alone.
‘I always compare the cost of a year’s worth of nappies to how much travelling I could do instead.’
Katie, 29
3
2009
I was squatting down, in a sort of ‘twerk’ position, my knees creaking and trembling. I hadn’t done a squat since gym class at school in the late 1990s and it showed. ‘Dip’ the stick delicately in your ‘urine stream’, I whispered back to myself, as I held the (now soggy) fold-out instruction manual. Pee in a perfectly straight line? That was like a policeman asking someone to walk along a painted straight line after one too many tequilas. Like that scene in Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig and Chris O’Dowd. It was impossible to ‘dip’ anything neatly at this moment, mainly because I was a bag of nerves. I was terrified by the situation. The pregnancy test was tacky and flimsy, and I didn’t really trust it. It was purple and white and looked like it could easily snap in half. I was already worrying that it wouldn’t be accurate and that I’d have to go back to the store and do this whole shebang again and again. We bought two, Bea and I, in a ‘Buy One Get One Free’ deal. So here we were, doing it together, sitting side by side in the toilet cubicles in the loos at Foyle’s bookshop (of all places). We always joked that our wombs were ‘n sync’, Justin Timberlake style, but this time we really were. I felt so anxious, hovering awkwardly over an off-white stained loo seat that wasn’t my own. I had just peed all over my hand by accident. It was warm and looked syrupy. Quite disgusting really.
‘You all right in there?’ I shouted sideways to Bea. I didn’t hear anything, so I knocked on the partition.
‘Mmmm,’ she replied, unsurely. I could hear her heeled boots scuffling around on the tiles next to me.
I couldn’t even bring myself to wash the pee off my hand because I had to wait for the stupid plastic gadget to show me a result. Germs were lingering everywhere, I thought, bacteria probably climbing the walls. If I was a proper grown-up, I would have anti-bac in my bag – but I forgot. Hurry up, hurry up. On the cubicle wall someone had scribbled, ‘Life is beautiful’. And someone has replied ‘fuck off m8 this isn’t Tumblr’ underneath. I shook the plastic stick (like a Polaroid picture?) but I wasn’t sure it was doing anything to hurry up the process. It was just flicking small specks of urine onto the floor tiles. Gross.
‘Bea?’
‘Yeah?’ she said, impatiently.
‘Remember one line means not pregnant, and two lines means you are pregnant,’ I yelled, hoping nobody else was in the toilets with us.
‘Keep your voice down, Ol. I know what the lines mean,’ she said.
I laughed. We’d done many lines together, in old skanky party toilets. Now look at us.
Rewind a couple of hours, and Bea and I were having lunch at Fall & Well, a little coffee shop on Denmark Street run by three hot brothers, catching up on life as we normally did on any other Hump Day Wednesday. It was our thing. We used this midweek session to sit and bitch about our jobs (and our bosses) for an hour. I was interning at a celebrity gossip magazine and Bea was a gallery assistant. Both our bosses were similar in their contempt and behaviour towards us: for some reason they wanted to make our lives hell. My boss was called Amie (a pretentious way of spelling Amy, if you ask me). Her nickname behind her back was Amie Hammer because she was as hard as nails. She wore these tasselled, heeled shoes to work, and every time she marched towards you to tell you off, you heard the tassels swishing first. It was a warning sign to get ready for a bollocking. My job was to get ‘scoops’, to find out if so-and-so was pregnant so we could ‘break’ the news first. I basically sat on Perez Hilton’s website and made sure we copied (paraphrased) the hottest (or grimmest) American news stories onto our site – and I hated it. I wanted to be a writer, and this seemed like the logical first step in ‘getting my foot in the door’, according to all the career advisers at university. Just go for any old job, they said, as long as you can publish something! Writing horrible stories about reality TV stars really wasn’t what I had imagined for myself, even if I did seem to have a knack for it.
‘It feels like the better I perform at work, the more Amie Hammer hates me,’ I sighed, drinking from my coffee cup.
‘Oh Ol, don’t worry. It’s not you. I guess we just have to suck it up during these early years. The older women up the chain seem to have been told that the only way to “get ahead” is to scream at everyone.’
‘You’re right. Being the intern is just so hard sometimes.’
‘You can’t take it personally. They grew up in the “one seat at the table for women” era. Amie Hammer is threatened by you.’
‘Ha! I highly doubt that, Bea.’
‘She is. You’re young. You’ll take her job one day,’ Bea said confidently, piling more sugar into her coffee.
Mine and Bea’s lives have always paralleled, almost exactly. The four of us in the friendship group have gone through most things together, but Bea and I are something else. Our birthdays are just a few days apart, we started our periods at the same summer camp together, we both tried to insert our first tampon in the same bathroom together, we started our very first jobs years later in the same local pub pulling pints; and now we both had jobs that made us cry in our respective company toilets. For so long, we’d moved up the same ladder and our friendship had become more and more solidified on this basis. But today we’d found something brand new in common! Sitting in Fall & Well, we were both complaining about the same bodily annoyances: change in appetite, sore boobs, being grouchier than normal, having annoying headaches and a little bit of nausea thrown in for fun. Oh, and (er, most importantly) a very late period. Upon announcing this, we looked at each other through gritted teeth and realized we should probably check it out, together. We didn’t really have time to discuss how we felt about it emotionally – never mind what our boyfriends would think – as we had less than half an hour before we needed to traipse back to the office, aka our prison cells. So, we walked in silence to quickly find some answers. And the answers to modern life’s big questions were normally found in Boots.