Babies in Waiting (11 page)

When he came back, he was smiling. Hannah said good night and went into the bathroom. Ben sat down on the sofa and put his arm around Gemma. ‘Do you need to go home?’ he asked.

‘No, I can stay if you’d like me to,’ she said hesitantly. She didn’t know what she’d do if he said no . . . her parents thought she was sleeping at Lucy’s, so she could scarcely go home. What would she tell them?

‘Nah. Stay. You’re all right,’ he said. He pulled her nearer and started stroking her upper arm. Gemma knew what that meant. He wanted sex. That was fine with her – if he wanted to have sex with her, maybe he did want to be with her, and that was all she needed to know.

The sex was quick and urgent, and over quite soon. Afterwards, they lay quietly side by side in Ben’s bed. Gemma turned on her side and looked at Ben’s profile. He was staring up at the ceiling, and she could see his
jaw working as if he were grinding his teeth. Almost against her will, she said, ‘What are you thinking?’ and immediately regretted it. What if he were thinking he wanted to break up with her? But Ben turned on his side and smiled his devastating grin.

‘I was just thinking that was amazing and I’d like some more of the same, please. I’ve got a twelve-pack of condoms here, and the night is young!’

He started to pull her closer, but Gemma resisted. If there was a window when he was going to be nice to her, maybe they could talk, try and regain some of the easy intimacy that seemed to have leaked slowly away.

‘So Patti’s baby really likes you,’ she ventured.

‘Yeah . . . babies usually do like me. I’ve got loads of cousins, and lots of my mum’s friends have had babies. Babies are cool.’

‘Really? Don’t they just scream and stuff?’

‘I suppose sometimes they do, but if you play with them they’re usually okay. They giggle and it’s pretty cute.’

‘I don’t know anything about babies,’ said Gemma. ‘But Lily is so beautiful. All that blonde hair. Like a little fairy.’

‘She reminds me of you,’ said Ben. ‘I bet you were the most adorable baby. I looked like a bald frog.’

‘I bet you didn’t.’

‘I bet you I did. No hair, big goggle eyes . . . it’s amazing I’m as gorgeous as I am now.’

‘You
are
gorgeous,’ Gemma said shyly.

‘I am, aren’t I? And so are you,’ Ben said, stroking her back lightly. ‘We would have awesome babies.’

Gemma couldn’t work him out. One minute he was cold to her and ignoring her, the next, he was talking about having babies. He sent such mixed messages all the time. Tentatively, she said, ‘We used to talk about a little house, or a flat . . . just you and me and our six kids.’

He laughed lightly. ‘Did we? Six kids? Wow.’

It made Gemma sad, the way he said it, as if he hadn’t been there for the conversation. As if she’d had it with someone else. Another Ben. But then he said, ‘I can think of worse things than having babies with you.’

He kissed her then, and his tongue insistently nudged her lips apart. Clearly, the time for talking was over.

Much later, when Ben had gone to sleep, Gemma lay in the dark and allowed herself to imagine . . . to picture having Ben’s baby. Having a baby with someone tied you to them for life. She wouldn’t just be Ben’s girlfriend; she’d be the mother of his child. And on top of that, she’d have a baby. Her own little angel, like Lily. Someone who was all hers, who was her own family. She and Ben would laugh and joke again, and the perfect blonde baby, with her hair and Ben’s amazing eyes, would bring them closer together. They’d buy a little flat, like they’d talked about, and they’d eat dinner together every night. They’d take the baby to the park and have picnics. And when the baby got bigger, Gemma would be there to pick her up from school every day, and when Ben got home he could read her stories.

But of course it couldn’t happen. It was crazy. They were so young. And it wasn’t as if their relationship was going
all that well. When she thought about it she wanted to cry. It was like she’d had a perfect dream, and then someone had woken her up. She curled around Ben’s sleeping back. He sighed in his sleep and she put an arm over him and hugged him tight. She would give anything . . . anything at all, to be the mother of Ben’s baby.

She left Ben’s early because she was supposed to go to a ballet class, but in the end, she didn’t go after all. She went home, told her mum she’d eaten something dodgy at Lucy’s and got into bed. She needed to think about the night before and what it had meant. It seemed very significant, almost as if she’d had a vision, a glimpse of a possible future.

She rolled over on to her front and pressed her face into the pillow. There was an ache in her gut, like period pain, and a constant fluttering, like a million butterflies. Over and over, she thought about Ben saying, ‘I can think of worse things than having babies with you.’ Why would he have said that if he didn’t mean it? Could it work? Could it? Could she have found a way to be happy and complete, to have a life she’d never dreamed of imagining before?

When Samantha came home later, she seemed surprised to find Gemma downstairs, busy in the kitchen. ‘Hi, Mum!’ she said, her eyes sparkling and her cheeks pink. She’d spent the last hour making a big lasagne for dinner. Her mother stared at her, bemused. ‘Good grief, Gemma. You must be feeling better. My goodness . . . you cooked! I brought some stuff home from M&S . . . I didn’t expect—’

‘I know! But I finished my history course work, and I felt like cooking. Besides, I thought it would be nicer for us to have a real dinner. I knew you’d probably get in too late to cook. Did you buy any salad ingredients?’

‘Yes,’ said her mum. She looked suspicious. ‘This isn’t like you at all, Gemma. It’s all I can do to get you to eat, usually, let alone cook.’

‘I know. But I think that’s going to change now. I’m not going to study dance full-time or do the teacher’s exams, so that’s sort of it for my dancing.’

‘My,’ said her mother faintly. ‘I suppose I hadn’t thought of that. You shan’t be doing ballet all the time any more.’

‘No,’ said Gemma. ‘And with all my . . . studying . . . I’d like to start eating really healthy food.’

Samantha still didn’t seem convinced. ‘I’m sure it’s just another of your teenage fads, but I have to say I’m very pleased that you want to eat better. Even if it’s only this week.’

‘Is Dad coming home?’

‘He’ll be in any minute. He rang me from the golf club to say they’d finished and were just having a few drinks.’

‘Right. Well, I’ll set the table!’

Gemma bounced into the dining room and started laying out cutlery and table mats. She felt ridiculously happy. She had a plan now. If her parents knew what it was, they would be utterly horrified. Her friends at school would turn up their noses in disgust. Her teachers too. But she knew that it was the right answer for her.

For months, she’d been putting off thinking about finishing her A-levels. If she was completely honest with herself, she just couldn’t imagine going to university. She knew she wasn’t ready, that it was very likely she wasn’t cut out for it. Her parents were convinced she’d be taking up one of the offers she’d had to study English at a top university: St Andrew’s, or Durham. But she had no desire to. She just wasn’t excited about the idea of further study. There really wasn’t anything she wanted to learn more about. And most of all, she didn’t want to live far from home, away from Ben.

But now she didn’t have to. Because she was going to talk to Ben about starting a family – and doing it soon. If they had a baby together, they would never be apart again. Ben could still go to university, as long as he chose one in London. It was the perfect solution. She’d be a young mum. Even if she got pregnant really quickly, she’d still be eighteen before the baby was born, and that wasn’t embarrassingly young. It wasn’t chavvy young or anything. When her child was eighteen, she’d only be thirty-six. And the emptiness she’d always felt, the coldness in her centre would go away when she had a child to love. She was born to do this.

She set out wine glasses beside her parents’ places and put out a juice glass for herself. Her parents thought it looked good to let her have a glass of wine at dinner if they ate out: they always said it was how the Mediterranean people raised their children. But now she was planning to fall pregnant, there’d be no drinking. There’d be healthy
food, lots of sleep, and, as she’d learned from the internet that afternoon, folic acid. She planned to go down to Boots the next day to buy some. She’d make sure she’d been taking it for a few weeks before she and Ben . . . oh, it was all so exciting!

She heard her dad come in through the front door. ‘Samantha?’ he boomed, his voice echoing in the hall. She heard her mother’s heels clicking on the floor, and then she heard them talking to one another in low tones. She hoped it was just one of their standard rows, not a summit meeting about her making dinner.

Her father came into the dining room and absently kissed her hello. ‘Gosh! Look at all this!’ he said indulgently, as if she was six and had just done a finger painting. ‘Your mother tells me we’re all eating dinner together.’ He didn’t sound wildly enthusiastic, but Gemma gave him her brightest smile.

‘Nice for a change, isn’t it, Daddy?’

‘It is, sweetheart, it is,’ he said. ‘Let me go and wash my hands.’

Gemma went back into the kitchen and got her lasagne out of the oven. Her mother was making a salad, and together they took the food through to the dining room. Gemma filled the wine glasses and, on impulse, put two candles on the table and lit them. Her mother smiled. ‘Looks lovely, darling.’

They both sat down and waited. There was no sign of her father. Gemma got up and went out into the hallway to call him. He was standing by the front door, talking on
his mobile. She heard him laugh softly. Then he heard her footsteps and turned. His face froze for a second, and then he turned away and spoke even more quietly into his phone. Gemma went back into the dining room. ‘He’s on the phone,’ she said flatly.

‘Well, we can’t let your lovely food get cold, dear. Let’s start without him.’ Her mother sounded completely unfazed, and her face registered no expression at all. But whether that was Botox or inner peace, Gemma had no idea. Her mum filled her wine glass, drained it and filled it again. Gemma felt nauseous and miserable. She had seen the expression on her father’s face: guilt and pride and shame and something else all mixed up. Whatever happened, she never wanted to see that expression on Ben’s face. Their life together was going to be different from this, that was for sure. She served herself a great lump of lasagne and began to eat.

Somehow, the moment to talk about having a baby just never seemed to arise. The more Gemma thought about it, the surer she was that it was what she wanted. Yet, somehow, the way things were with her and Ben, there just wasn’t ever a good time to bring it into the conversation. To be honest, they weren’t talking much anyway.

If she allowed herself to think about it, she might have thought that Ben was losing interest in her. If she texted him, he took ages to text back. When she went round to his, more often than not he’d sit playing some violent game on his X-Box for hours, and she’d just have to sit
beside him in silence. They hadn’t gone out anywhere together in weeks, but he never missed his Saturday nights out with his mates. He seemed to be getting bored with her, and the more sweet, easy-going and sexy she tried to be, the less interested he seemed to be.

She felt desperate. She wished she was one of those girls who could just walk away, play hard to get, refuse to take his calls, and turn him down when he finally put down his X-Box controller and pulled her to him. But she wasn’t that girl. Ben was her world, and he knew it. She knew that there were loads of girls who’d be ready to take her place as Ben’s girlfriend at a moment’s notice, and the thought of having to see him out somewhere with someone else made her feel sick.

Still, he always wanted to have sex, and it seemed to her that that was the only time they really connected. When they were in bed, he was passionate and focused only on her. She often thought that if they were going to have the conversation about starting a family, after sex would be the time to do it. But Ben either fell asleep very quickly, or got up because he had somewhere to be or something to do. The days of lying in bed and cuddling and talking were over.

One Friday evening, Ben had a gig at a bar in Islington. It was a chilly night, and an icy breeze cut through Gemma’s jeans and jacket. She wanted to cuddle up to Ben, but when she looked at his face, his expression was forbidding and she didn’t dare to. They stood side by side at the bus stop, shivering. Ben had no coat, and he
huddled inside his tracksuit top, leaning against the side of the bus shelter, staring at the corner shop opposite. Gemma felt nauseous. He looked as though he’d rather be anywhere but with her. She was too scared to say anything. Then the door of the shop opened and the short, dark-haired girl she had seen with Ben all those weeks ago came out carrying a pint of milk. She glanced up and saw Ben and Gemma. Her lip curled and she turned and walked quickly away. Gemma turned to look at Ben. His eyes followed the dark-haired girl, and a storm of emotions crossed his face. Before Gemma could pluck up the courage to ask him who the girl was, or what had happened between them, the bus came and they had to get on it. Ben’s mate Liam was on the bus and they sat at the back together. Ben and Liam chatted and ignored Gemma.

It was Ben’s best ever gig. There was a big crowd, and he got an amazing response. When he came off stage, the promoter came to him and congratulated him. ‘You did a great job,’ he said. ‘Here’s twenty quid. We’d love to have you here again.’

It was the first time Ben had been paid for a gig and he was jubilant. He’d borrowed an ID from someone who was at college and ordered drinks for himself, Liam and Gemma. It was a raucous, fun night, and Gemma was quite drunk. Liam’s mum came to pick them up and dropped Ben and Gemma off at Ben’s house.

Ben was all over her the moment they got out of the car. ‘Can you stay?’ he whispered, kissing her and sliding
his hands over her body. ‘My mum’s away on business. We’ve got the whole house.’