Chapter 4

It was the day of my GP visit and I was in London, on my own, in a bedsit, thirty-seven years old, single; pregnant.

I looked around my small place from the faded wallpaper to the scratched wood floor, the flyspecked windows and a damp patch on the ceiling where cracks ran along the ceiling like crazy spider webs.

It was no good; no way around it. I was good and truly… I stopped that thought and took a deep breath.

"I am alright – everything is alright," I said aloud. "Got everything I need." I touched my belly, where nothing showed just yet. "Perfectly normal; all normal," I said more to reassure myself than anything else.

Of course throwing up my breakfast every morning and feeling like a walking gut-busting explosion about to happen the last weeks was normal as well. "Perfectly," I muttered as I looked over the pamphlets I'd been given. "Six weeks on," I read, "nausea in the morning affects 90% of mothers, especially those who are pregnant for the first time."

My GP figured I was about ten and a half weeks along so it was late October, had to be, that rainy Sunday a week before we didn't get married.

I ran a finger around the periphery of my belly button. "So what you think? Shall we discuss this with your father? How to work things out?"

I shook my head side to side when I didn't hear an answer. "No?"

I looked down at my lap, for I still had a lap. "I even sold my car," I said sadly. Considering that money had paid for my move plus the deposit on the bedsit, and a hundred other things that just seemed needed in the capital. An oyster card, new clothes for school, and the shoes I got the other day which were definitely pinching my toes, and food.

Food is always expensive, and I really had to stop eating out or getting takeaway, for down the road this little one will be out and need things; lotsa things. I stopped rubbing my belly. "Like a daddy."

"What would you say, Martin?" I sighed and wrinkled my nose. "Abortion? Your choice Louisa, uhm, if you don't want it."

I had no illusions either that he would bustling up here to drag me back to Portwenn or shift himself up here to be with me.

Or he'd sigh over the mobile, "How will you manage? On your own?" And just the way he would say it would be oh so judgmental with a nearly audible sneer. "Ahm, studies have shown children of single mothers lag in early childhood development, especially when they work from their children's early age," I imagined him telling me.

I shook my head again. "Yeah, just like that. That's the way he will sound; sure of it."

Did I want to be with him? "Well I didn't marry him for lots of reasons," I told my baby, for somehow it was MY baby now, not our baby.

I wondered what changes were going on in there? Cells dividing and growing; changing form. It was a miracle and I did not mean getting pregnant, or having a baby, but the thought of two little cells getting together and starting the whole thing.

But of course, it took some doing to get those two little cells together.

If I invited Martin to come to my house, I could usually convince him to stay over, unless he had an emergency call.

He'd look from me to the clock, or his watch, and then puzzle over it for a few seconds. "I have a lot of patients in the morning," he might protest.

"And I have kids to teach," I'd counter. "Don't you want to stay?" I'd have to prod some nights.

But if I had gone to his house for dinner, or if I'd managed to get him to eat out and we went back to his place, I might drop some broad hints. "So… busy schedule tomorrow?"

He'd sigh. "Always."

Once or twice Martin had asked, "Are you staying?" his nervous eyes peering at the floor. I would smile and glance at the spot where my handbag rested next to a satchel which held my overnight things and clothing for the morning for I had planned ahead.

I might give him a smile, or cross the room and kiss him gently, but not too gently or too hungrily for Martin seemed like a timid little rabbit at times about to bolt.

Being too forward with him made him skittish but usually I could get him to, how to say it? Acquiesce, a word he actually used once when I asked him to stay over.

But when we did get into bed… I giggled at the memory; there was usually no stopping him as he adored me with his eyes and loved me to pieces with those big hands and tall body. That is after I put an adhesive strip across the bridge of my nose to decrease my snoring.

I almost missed those things.

My right hand had crept down to my belly button again. "Have to think about how to tell Martin," I whispered. "And that's how those two little cells got together," I said to my baby, "how you got started, on a rainy Sunday morning or afternoon, when winds made the house shake."

My fingers tapped slowly then began to rub in circles. "That's how it went, see?"

I used the toilet and stared at the mirror, into my eyes which looked shocked, and upset, yet also satisfied. "No Louisa, you surely can't be thinking you can do this on your own, are you?"

My reflected eyes looked back at me with no answer.