Stand by Me (8 page)
All the same, she thought now, her heart hammering in her chest, if I
am
pregnant, if Brendan got it wrong, my mother will kill me. She knew that Evelyn’s reaction should really be the least of her worries, but it was what concerned her most of all. In her head she composed a quick prayer to St Jude (obviously she wasn’t a lost cause yet, so praying to the patron of lost causes might be a bit extreme, but better to be safe than sorry as far as saintly interventions went). Please let me not be up the spout, she asked mentally. I’ll go to the family planning clinic next week and go on the pill. It occurred to her, as she finished the prayer, that St Jude might not be in a receptive mood. After all, he was a saint and she was asking him to condone a sin. It was a tricky situation to be in.
am
pregnant, if Brendan got it wrong, my mother will kill me. She knew that Evelyn’s reaction should really be the least of her worries, but it was what concerned her most of all. In her head she composed a quick prayer to St Jude (obviously she wasn’t a lost cause yet, so praying to the patron of lost causes might be a bit extreme, but better to be safe than sorry as far as saintly interventions went). Please let me not be up the spout, she asked mentally. I’ll go to the family planning clinic next week and go on the pill. It occurred to her, as she finished the prayer, that St Jude might not be in a receptive mood. After all, he was a saint and she was asking him to condone a sin. It was a tricky situation to be in.
‘I don’t have a low opinion of you. But men aren’t like women,’ Evelyn was saying now. ‘They don’t always think with their heads and their hearts, you know.’
Dominique couldn’t quite believe that Evelyn was having this conversation with her, however obliquely. Her mother never discussed relationships and sex. When Dominique had turned thirteen, Evelyn had given her a copy of
Sex Education: Training in Chastity
, which hadn’t exactly been helpful. She’d learned more from the girls talking in school and from the teen magazines she liked to read than she had from Evelyn’s book. Dominique always thought that Evelyn found the whole business distasteful. She knew that children couldn’t imagine their parents ever having sex, but the idea of Evelyn and Seamus doing what she and Brendan had done was utterly impossible to comprehend, and the idea of them enjoying it was beyond imagining. Doing it at least twice, too! She shuddered.
Sex Education: Training in Chastity
, which hadn’t exactly been helpful. She’d learned more from the girls talking in school and from the teen magazines she liked to read than she had from Evelyn’s book. Dominique always thought that Evelyn found the whole business distasteful. She knew that children couldn’t imagine their parents ever having sex, but the idea of Evelyn and Seamus doing what she and Brendan had done was utterly impossible to comprehend, and the idea of them enjoying it was beyond imagining. Doing it at least twice, too! She shuddered.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ repeated her mother. ‘Remember everything I’ve ever told you. Remember the Church’s teaching. Remember that one day you’ll want to get married and have children and that you’ll want to have a good life with the right man.’
‘Yeah, right, I’ll remember all that,’ said Dominique. She got up and went to her bedroom. And remember, she told herself as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, that you’ve already met the man you want to marry. That you have made love to him and that it was wonderful And that he’s already said he loves you too.
He phoned the following evening while she was still at work, and so she didn’t get to talk to him till the day after that, when she called him back.
‘I forgot you were working late yesterday,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t busy,’ she told him. ‘I was going to try to ring you from the restaurant, but Melanie Lynch is nearly as bad as Kirsten for throwing her weight around and not letting you grab a minute here or there.’
‘I miss you,’ he said.
‘And I miss you.’
‘I had a great time on Friday.’
‘Me too.’
‘I have to see you again. Really soon.’
Dominique felt a rush of warmth flood the pit of her stomach.
‘Why’s that?’
‘You know why,’ he said. ‘You were amazing. And for your first time too . . . I didn’t think . . . You’re astonishing, Domino. You really are.’
She flushed with pleasure. ‘Everything about it was astonishing and amazing,’ she said. ‘And I loved every second.’
‘But we should do it properly,’ Brendan told her. ‘I had a plan, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I thought I’d be taking a shy little maiden somewhere great and initiating her into the secrets of fantastic sex. But you weren’t one bit shy, my little Domino. And you were fantastic.’
‘Is that all right?’ She worried suddenly that he thought she was too forward. Too tarty. Too slutty.
‘Oh yes,’ he assured her.
‘When can we meet?’ she asked.
‘Tonight? You can come back to my place. The other lads will be out.’
She realised that she was shaking thinking about it. Shaking because she wanted it so much.
‘OK.’
‘Usual place for a couple of drinks,’ said Brendan. ‘And afterwards . . .’
‘Yeah. Afterwards ...’ She replaced the phone. She couldn’t wait.
It was better the second time for a whole heap of reasons, but principally because this time she was lying on a bed, the rain wasn’t dripping down her collar and her feet weren’t crippled from shoes that were too tight. Brendan took more time, too, to kiss her and stroke her and do things to her that she liked, so that she was quivering with desire. (She’d read the phrase in one of the historical romances she liked to read and she’d often wondered what it really meant, but after that night with Brendan, she knew.) And this time he had asked if she was OK with condoms and she’d said of course because she’d read that they had a nearly ninety per cent success rate, which was pretty good. She wasn’t worried about the other ten per cent. Brendan had called her his lucky Domino. Lucky Dominos didn’t get caught out.
She was also able to freshen up in the bathroom afterwards, although she wasn’t sure how much of a bonus that actually was - she couldn’t help thinking that her idea of a clean bathroom clashed fairly fundamentally with how four single men saw it. She’d had to rinse out the sink before she could use it, and she opted not to take advantage of a bar of green Palmolive soap that was caked with stubble.
When she returned to the small kitchen, Brendan had made her a cup of tea. She was touched by the gesture, even though the tea was far too strong for her taste. She sipped it cautiously, determined to drink it all. Brendan himself was swigging from a bottle of beer, which he’d taken from the small fridge, and turning over the sports pages of the evening paper. He’d started to tell her about Cork’s great win in the all-Ireland hurling final, and she was trying to look interested, when the door opened and another man walked into the room. Brendan introduced him to her as Eamonn, who came from the same area of Cork as he did and who was an electrician.
‘You’re a fine-looking girl,’ Eamonn told her. ‘Jeez, Brendan, you get all the good ones, pal.’
Dominique flushed with pleasure. It seemed to her that her life was getting better every single day. She liked her job, she had a great boyfriend, they were having incredible sex and other men thought she was a fine-looking girl. Maybe she was becoming more attractive, she thought. Maybe she was one of those people who were late bloomers. She flicked her hair out of her eyes with the same gesture that Emma Walsh used to use, and laughed.
She fully intended to go to the family planning clinic and fulfil her promise to St Jude, but she was very nervous about it. What if someone she knew saw her? What if she actually met someone she knew? What if her mother got to hear about it? She told herself that she was an adult woman in a serious relationship taking sensible precautions. She knew that in most countries girls were having sex younger and younger these days - being a virgin past your early teens was practically shameful in some of them. So it was utterly ridiculous of her to feel like a naughty schoolgirl about such an important part of her life. But the problem was that thinking about family planning was admitting to herself that she was having sex for fun, and she hadn’t been brought up to think of sex as something you did for fun, no matter how the rest of the world viewed it. She hated Evelyn for having made her feel this way. She wished she could feel differently.
But she couldn’t. She decided to leave going to the family planning clinic a little longer. Brendan had the condoms, with their ninety per cent success rate, after all.
Gabriel came back to Ireland for a couple of weeks, much to Evelyn and Seamus’s delight. He was attending a conference in Maynooth but returned home each evening. Dominique told him that he was looking well on his time in Valladolid. He’d acquired a tan, which made him look even more handsome, especially when he wore white T-shirts and blue jeans. He didn’t, for one second, look like a priest. More than ever she wondered how any sane and rational God could have given Gabriel all the good-looking genes in the family. (Brendan’s constant assertion that she was a fine thing didn’t delude her into thinking that she actually was.)
Hearing that Gabriel was in the country again, Emma Walsh called around. Dominique, who hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, realised that Emma had clearly raided the beauty counter before coming around to the house. She looked like she’d stepped off the cover of a glossy magazine, with her heavily kohled eyes, her dramatic eyelashes and her highly glossed lips. Her chestnut hair had been teased and moussed into studied messiness and was held back on one side by a diamanté clip. She wore two chunky diamanté crucifixes in her ears and a large crucifix with a long string of beads around her neck; she was dressed in a short denim skirt over black lace leggings, a cropped black T-shirt and a faded denim jacket covered in sequins. On her feet were black ankle boots. On her hands, black lace fingerless gloves.
When she opened the door and let Emma in, Dominique couldn’t help thinking that the Madonna look was wildly inappropriate for anyone trying to attract her brother, but Gabriel smiled at Emma and said that it was nice to see her again. Emma sat down in the armchair opposite him, crossed her legs, and asked a litany of questions about Valladolid and his life there. Every so often she recrossed her legs and ran her fingers through her hair, which Dominique found extremely funny. But she grew bored listening to Emma’s inane questions and Gabriel’s polite answers, and eventually left them alone and went up to her room, where she filed her nails and painted them with pearly pink varnish. (She was very proud of her nails. She’d stopped biting them shortly after meeting Brendan, and they were now a neat, even length.) When she came downstairs again, Emma had left. Dominique hadn’t heard her go, and she was peeved at her friend for not even bothering to say goodbye.
‘When did she leave?’ she asked Gabriel, who was still in the living room although now reading the newspaper.
‘About ten minutes ago,’ he replied.
‘And did she swear undying love to you?’
He smiled. ‘It’s just a crush,’ he said. ‘She’ll find someone else.’
‘So you’d think.’ Dominique shook her head. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what she sees in you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Gabriel.
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Dominique said. ‘She’s really pretty and everything and at school she had all the guys panting after her, but she’s got it into her head that you’re her one true love or something.’
‘She’s lacking in self-confidence,’ said Gabriel. ‘Telling herself she’s in love with me means she doesn’t have to risk getting hurt in a real relationship.’
‘That’s a load of shite,’ Dominique told him baldly. ‘She’s not in the slightest bit lacking in self-confidence. She knows she’s gorgeous. She’s always had half a dozen different boyfriends on the go at any one time.’
‘Quantity and quality aren’t the same thing.’
‘I know that,’ said Dominique. ‘But you’re wrong about Mizz Walsh. I think she’s superconfident.’
‘You’re very naïve.’
‘No I’m not.’ Dominique made a face at him. ‘She’s my friend, not yours. And I know what she’s like.’
She went out of the house and pulled the door closed behind her. She was luckier than Emma. She had a real boyfriend who was the love of her life. And later that night she’d be having great sex with him, which at the moment was something Emma Walsh could only dream about.
It was actually easier to find pregnancy tests in the chemist’s than condoms, which had only recently become more freely available over the counter in Ireland. There was quite a choice of tests, but she just grabbed the first one off the shelf. She didn’t really believe she was pregnant. She reckoned she was just stressed because she’d chickened out of the family planning clinic again. She couldn’t understand why she was so nervous about it. It was the sensible thing to do, after all. But she hadn’t gone, and now she was late; but being pregnant simply wasn’t possible. Brendan had promised her, and he always kept his promises.
They’d made love half a dozen times altogether and only once without a condom. So it must have been that one time, against the tree in the rain, that had been the one to leave her staring at the two pink lines in front of her and realising that she was going to have a baby.
There was a part of her that didn’t believe the test, a part of her that said that it was impossible, simply impossible, for her to be pregnant. She wasn’t the right sort of person. She didn’t go to loads of parties and have flings with different boyfriends. She didn’t live the kind of life girls she thought would get pregnant lived. Girls like the Nikkis and Cara and Emma. They were the party girls. They were the ones who gambled with their futures. Not her. There had to be a mistake. She did the test again. And again. And then she did it one more time, just to be sure.
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