39 Weeks (3 page)

An hour later and mercifully baby-thought free, I’d finished the spreadsheet and e-mailed it to Norman Steadman
only a quarter of an hour late
. I sat back pleased with myself and took the last swig of
my now cold
coffee, as the dreaded P word
began to reassert itself in my head.

How long would I be able to carry on working? And what was I going to do afterwards when ‘it’ had arrived?

I could get a childminder I
suppose. D
o childminders mind new born babies? Or a nanny . . . mm sounds good but I doubt I could afford a nanny, I’d need two jobs at least to pay her wages, not to mention a much bigger flat to accommodate an extra person, make that two extra people if you count
ed
the baby as well.

Maybe I could work from home . . . now there’s an idea. But I couldn’t work from home for the next fifteen
or so
years
,
a
nd anyway I think it would drive me ever so slightly bonkers being at home all the time
in my cramped flat
.

The phone rang and it was Norman. I called him Norman in my head
,
but it was Mr Steadman when I was actually in his company, face to face. I really should stop thinking about him as Norman because one of these days I was going to say it out loud and somehow I don’t think he’d be too pleased. He was definitely a ‘Mr
. . yes sir, no sir’
kind of boss and not the
‘
even though I’m in charge treat me as a
friend
’
type
.

‘Ah Judy, just looking through those figures you sent
me
and som
ething doesn’t seem quite right. When I
was at school
there were twelve months in a
year.’

‘Um . . twelve yes.’ I said frantically trying to call up the spreadsheet
again
so I could try and figure out what he was talking about.

‘What happened to December?’

‘
A . . December?
’

‘Comes straight after November,
every year, never misses, and
usually
generates
the
biggest sales what with Christmas being at the end of it.’

Oh bugger! My first real bit of work in my new recently acquired job as management a
ccountant for the new MD
,
and I’d
screwed it up.

‘Oh . . how did that happen?’ I said involuntarily, as I spotted the
glaringly obvious, couldn’t possibly miss it unless you were completely blind, or stupid, nonexistent month of December. ‘Sorry I’m not feeling myself today, think I must be coming down with something. I’ll fix it, I mean do it, I mean . . .’

‘Thanks.’ He said
cutting me short,
and put
ting
the phone down.

Great, just what I need. Didn’t I read somewhere that pregnant women loose brain cells, they just die off or something and you never get them back. Looks like min
e were
having some sort of mass suicide party already.

I fixed the spreadsheet and che
cked it again, and then again-
again after that, and e-mailed it back
with crossed fingers hoping that
Norman
wouldn’t find anything else wrong. I vacantly stared out of the window at the inspiring view of the brick wall and corner of the roof of the adjacent wrapping department
, where the cards were individually wrapped in cellophane.
Between no sleep and being stressed to
the
max I was totally exhausted
and mused on the idea of how simple life would be if that were my job, just operating the press to cellophane wrap cards all day, no pressure, no Norman, no thinking. Right at this minute it sounded like heaven, boring heaven
,
but I could do with a bit of boring just now.

Gill, the hen from the fatal hen night party, came over to my desk carrying her mug and asked if I wanted a coffee as she was making anyway.
‘You alright, you look awful?’ she said when I turned round and she saw my face.

‘Thanks.’

‘No really, you don’t look right at all.’

‘I’m just tired.’

‘Ah you single girls, been out partying this weekend have you?’ Gill said with a simpering mock smirk as if she’d caught me out. Since she got back from her honeymoon
a couple of weeks ago,
she’d turned from your average fairly normal single girl in love with her steady boyfriend, to a married middle-aged supercilious know it all, looking down on us lesser un-married females, who only aspired to her status but probably weren’t going to make it.

‘No. I’m just not sleeping well.’

‘Any special reason you’re not sleeping? Something distracting you in bed to keep you from sleeping is there? What’s his name?’

‘His names insomnia.’

‘Oh. You sure that’s all it is you really do look pretty dread.’

Well if everyone’s so determined I’m not well and I look so ghastly, I might as well cash in on it
I thought,
and skive off work for the rest of the day. I’ll catch up on my sleep and then maybe I can think rationally about what the bloody hell I’m going to do.
‘Yes I think you might be right.
’ I said hamming it up a bit.
‘
I’m going to go home and crawl back into bed. Hopefully that’ll fight off whatever it is and I won’t
actually
get it.
’

‘Good idea.’

No it’s not just a good idea,
it’s great idea
, the b
est one I’ve had since all that
stick peeing
.

27
th
June -
4 Weeks + 1 And A Half Days

After making my excuses and letting Ted in personnel know I was going home for the rest
o
f the day, I climbed back in my car with a sigh of relief. At least now I’d be able to concentrate on the im
mediate problem of what the hell
I was going to do.

But first things first, before being able to come up with a brilliant solution to the world
crisis
, my world
anyway
,
I needed chocolate and I needed it now, in vast quantities, my chocolate consumption being directly related to my stress levels.
And I needed to find out
exactly
what I was going to be in for, for the next nine months, no make that eight months because I must already be
about
four weeks gone to be able to do the test, or more accurately since
having sex with
what’s-his-name
. 
  

Before I pulled out of the car park I vowed that if I
ever
managed to get myself out of this mess, I
was never going to
have sex
again, ever, no matter how gorgeous the
male
specimen appeared to be, or how much Bacardi and Coke I’d consumed.

I parked in town, a strangely un-busy town, unlike the bear-pit town I us
ually had to fight my way through
on a Saturday morning, and stopped off at
Waterstone’s on my way to the supermarket. If anyone had reading material on being up the duff, and if I was very lucky how to stop being up the duff, although I didn’t hold out much hope on the latter, it was Waterstone’s.

I perused the shelves, but it was all best sellers, chick-lit fiction of the kind I could no longer, given my present dilemma, identify with. You know the sort
I mean, young single Suzy meets Damien and they hate each other from minute one, but after a series of humorous mishaps she realises she’s actually head over heels about him, and he turns out to be filthy rich and not the bastard she thought he was, and of course has been secretly in love with her all along.

What I need is the non-fiction section, but which one. Mind and body? Could be. Health? Yes maybe. Do they have one called
problems of the duff? Probably not. Childcare? God not yet, Blondie popped back in my head for a second but I shook her off and carried on looking.

Right here we are. Who knew there’d be a whole section, all to itself, on pregnancy. Bloody hell there must be at least fifty books here to choose from.
Now You’re Pregnant, a step by step guide to giving birth.
Your Body And You, a step by step guide to pregnancy.
So You’re Having A Baby, a step by step guide from conception to labour.
Okay so where’s The Idiot’s Guide To Being Up T
he Duff, a step by step guide on
how the hell to cope
with all this
without having a mental breakdown.

I thumbed through the various tomes. Some had graphic pictures, actual photographs
of an unborn baby
, God knows how they managed that, and some had similar graphic pictures but of the hand drawn variety. Imagine doing that for a living, ‘and what do you do?’ ‘oh I draw the inside of a
pregnant
woman’s womb in minute detail’.

I settled on
So You’re Having A Baby
, and Now You’re Pregnant, and took them to the counter to pay.
There was no queue, that in itself was amazing and I made
a
note to myself
that if at all possible I’d
do all my shopping in future on a Monday morning
. The woman at the till looked at the books as she was scanning them through the till, and was it my imagination or did she seem to be smiling
benignly
at me
and
just a bit too much for your normal customer service etiquette.

‘They’re a present for someone.’ I said and the sickly sweet smile on her face all but disappeared.

‘That’ll be twenty nine pounds thirty.’ She said matter of factly.

Thirty quid! You’ve got to be joking
, I thought, while I produced my credit card and punched in the number, all without a murmur and keeping the fixed plastic smile on my fac
e as if thirty quid was nothing
and she’d said two pounds fifty.

She bagged the books and I lugged them out of the shop, they weighed a ton and it felt more like I’d just purchased a couple of volumes of the
Encyclopaedia
 
Britannica
than
two paperbacks, albeit two very glossy and expensive paperbacks, on how to get fat really quickly and screw up your life in the process.

I trundled down to Sainsbury’s and stocked up on a few essentials, passi
ng the ‘Feminine Care’ rows of tampons
and panty liners with an ironic grin, grabbed several
of the huge oversized normally only given as Christmas or birthday present
chocolate bars
, and too embarrassed to go through the normal tills went to the self checkout instead, only to get in a mess with it and fail to scan even the first chocolate bar successfully. This of course meant that having avoided the sneer of the girl at the checkout, I now had to call s
omeone over for assistance who c
ould scrutinise my abundance of chocolate in even more detail and with even more
of a sneer
.
Finally I got back to the car and headed for home.

When I got in I put away the fridge stuff, and put the kettle on to make myself a coffee, then turned it off again telling myself I’d better do a bit of research in my newly acquired, going to put me into overdrawn status at the bank
at least until payday on Thursday
, reference books, and check out if it’s safe first. I poured myself a glass of juice and took that and my hoard of chocolate through to the living room, kicked off my shoes
and
snuggled into the corner of the settee
ready for the onslaught of unwelcome facts
I was about to find out about.

An hour and a half, and two chocolate bars later, I had all the facts I ever wanted to know about pregnancy, and I hadn’t even got more than a quarter of the way through either book yet. Except maybe to give in to the irresistible urge to sneak a look at the back of each book, and stare in horror at the photographs of the grossly deformed
gotta be at least fourteen
months pregnant, women, who
smiled wistfully and
resembled someone that had swallowed an inflated beach ball
. Quite how Victorians could refer to pregnant women as being in a delicate condition I couldn’t even begin to imagine. The whole thing
looked about as far from
being
‘delicate’ as a
butterfly
is to a
charging bull elephant
.