I was happy.
Until one cold morning in early March, when I was sitting in the library reading about marine hermaphrodites, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a period in a long time.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It’ll be OK, I thought, sitting on the lip of our mildewed shower. It’ll somehow be OK.
I was nineteen years old, a blue line was forming on a screen but still I felt there must be a solution. I might be broke and orphaned, but I was an educated, middle-class woman: I had choices. This was the privilege into which I was lucky enough to have been born.
Wasn’t it?
Jill knocked on the door. ‘Are you doing what I think you’re doing?’ We’d been into town to buy the test that morning.
I nodded, taking in our tiny bathroom; the cracked floor tiles, the over-mirror light that had never worked. A can of hair removal cream with gruesome pink foam around the rusting collar, an empty bottle of shampoo covered in long black hairs.
My precious, hard-won student life.
‘Emily?’
‘Sorry,’ I called. ‘Yes. And yes.’
A pause.
‘You’re pregnant?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
Another pause.
‘Right. Well, we need to . . . Let’s – oh Em, let me in.’
Jill came and sat on the floor next to me.
‘We used a condom,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Who was in charge of condoms? Him or you?’
‘Him.’
‘Well. He was very drunk.’
We stayed there as the winter day darkened, then Jill got up to make toasted cheese sandwiches.
‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, as she went. ‘We’re in this together.’
It was not OK. By the time I’d thought to take a pregnancy test, I was fifteen weeks and a day: termination was still possible, but when I read about what would be involved this far into the pregnancy, I couldn’t face it.
Yet the idea of having a child felt no more real than a moon landing. Where would I go? Who would help; where would I live? How would I afford it? （I couldn’t possibly afford it.） How could I finish my degree? （I couldn’t possibly finish my degree.） And my friends. My cherished new friends. Dad and I had never lived anywhere for more than a few years, and even then I’d had to stay at Granny’s when he was away with the Marines. My student friends were the first solid group I’d had. Whether they knew it or not, they were front and centre of the life I’d always dreamed of; the life that began when I arrived here as a fresher.
The wind blew and the North Sea hulked around the land, indifferent and vast. I took to walking along the shore every morning before lectures, singing loudly to keep my thoughts at bay, watching the sea change minute by minute. It could be sleek as steel when I arrived but furious and rolling by the time I left, and I found some comfort in that: no state was permanent. But for all its changes and its rising and flattening and booming and sparkling, it never gave me any answers.
Can I do this? I asked it, each morning, and each morning it said nothing.
There was an expanding layer of fat around my middle, and my face was bloated with hormones and worry. I didn’t feel sick, but the exhaustion was like being trapped underwater, my thoughts oily and slow. In desperation, I finally visited a clinic to discuss termination, but left before my name was called.
My short time in the world of average was over: I would be a mother by the age of twenty.
‘If you’re going to keep this baby, you’re going to need help,’ Jill said. ‘Financial help, logistical help, the works. You need to get in touch with him.’