What Happens Now. Sophia Money-Coutts
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in the box while sitting on the loo afterwards, musing that tampons looked like cocktail sausages with string, and when I finally succeeded getting one in there, it felt like a milestone. Not dissimilar to when I later passed my driving test. Just a bit messier.
It only took a few more periods for me to realize it wasn’t a great development. All those sanitary products, all that leaking, the pain, and all that paranoia about suddenly dying from Toxic Shock Syndrome if you slept with a tampon in.
It was now eighteen years on and, what’s eighteen times twelve? I did the sums in my head: 18 times 12 equals 216. I was now roughly 216 periods into my life but I couldn’t single any of them out. They’d all blended in my head, a boring hiccup that punctuated every month. Sometimes three days, sometimes five days. But mine were never late because I’d been on the pill for years. Ever since Jake and I started going out. Give or take a day, I knew when it would arrive. I knew when my stomach would bloat like a barrel and I’d start crying at adverts for donkey sanctuaries. I knew when to stock up on Feminax Express because the pain felt like my uterus was about to fall out of my vagina.
I’d thought about coming off the pill when Jake and I broke up, about giving my body a break, but decided to carry on just in case. So where was my freaking period?
I shook my head. ‘No, I’m always regular. I’m still taking the pill. But does that happen sometimes, that you sort of miss a period? If you’ve been taking it for years?’ I looked hopefully at Jess.
‘I don’t really know, love. Maybe?’ Jess didn’t believe in contraceptives. She insisted that she knew where she was in her cycle, then made them pull out and hoped for the best. ‘Or maybe it was so light you didn’t even notice it?’ she suggested.
That seemed unlikely. Quite hard to miss a whole period, right? I was always amazed at those headlines you sometimes saw: ‘Woman who didn’t know she was pregnant gives birth in a motorway service station!’
I put my right hand over my left boob, then my right one. They felt a tiny bit sensitive, like I was about to get my period. But it was so late. I wondered if I should google it, and then decided against it. Google would only tell me I was 100 per cent pregnant. Or I had some form of cancer. Then I looked at my coffee again.
‘I don’t feel great either this morning,’ I said to Jess. ‘Like, a bit sick. But I can’t be… can I? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ she said, reassuringly. And then slightly less reassuringly, ‘But maybe we should get a test just to make sure? So you don’t worry?’
I nodded and looked across at the man with his newspaper, who briefly met my eye and then looked back down. Poor man. He presumably thought he was catching a peaceful Saturday morning train with the paper only to find he was trapped in his very own live version of Loose Women.
We walked straight to Boots from King’s Lynn station, praying that I didn’t see anyone I knew. One of Mum’s t’ai chi women asking questions about my love life, that was all I needed. But we reached Boots unscathed, and I grabbed a £4.99 Boots own brand test despite Jess’s grumbling that I should get a more expensive one.
‘All I’m going to do is wee on it. I don’t think it matters whether I have the Rolls Royce test or the Skoda version,’ I told her. ‘Let’s just get it and go.’
‘Do you want a bag?’ asked the lady behind the till as I paid.
‘Nah, it’s all right thanks,’ I said, stuffing the box down the side of my overnight bag.
When we got home ten minutes later, I pushed open the front door to a familiar smell – the sweet, fruity tang of boiling jam. Mum was always making jam for local markets and selling it for good causes – women’s charities, animal charities, children’s charities. Distressed llamas of North Norfolk, that sort of thing. She loved a cause.
‘Hi,’ I shouted loudly into the hall, dropping my bag at the foot of the stairs and waving at Jess to follow me through to the kitchen.
Mum, standing with her back to us at the oven, whirled around with a wooden spoon in her hand. She was wearing her favourite apron – ‘There are no soggy bottoms in my kitchen’ slogan on the front – and a pair of glasses that had steamed up.
‘Hello, my ducks,’ she said, reaching for her glasses with her free hand and taking them off. ‘Give us a hug.’
She reached for me first, wooden spoon going over one shoulder, then Jess. Drops of jam fell to the lino.
‘How was the journey? Do you want a cup of tea? Dennis is at the football. Won’t be home till sixish, so I’m making a batch of this for the market tomorrow. Look, sit down, sit down.’ Mum always talked quickly, imparting information in bursts as if we only had a limited number of seconds left on this planet and she had to get it all out.
Mum met Dennis in the early 1990s while she was teaching students and working on her PhD (about the role of the Victorian prostitute) at Norwich University. She’d already had me by then since my biological father was a guitarist called Adrian, who Mum had a brief fling with while studying for her undergraduate degree at Manchester a few years before. Dennis appeared on the scene when I was four. He was a military historian in the same faculty at Norwich, and moved into our lives overnight. Sometimes, Mum would refer to a period of her life ‘BD’, which meant ‘Before Dennis’, but I didn’t remember that time. Dennis was the man who taught me to swim one summer off Holkham beach. Dennis was the man who taught me to recite the dates of famous battles – the Siege of Thessalonica, Verdun, Barbarossa – like other children reeled off nursery rhymes. Dennis was the man who smelled like his writing shed in our garden, of strong coffee and old history books.
Mum had explained the situation to me with a biology lesson not long after she met Dennis. As I sat in the bath one evening, she drew a picture in the fogged-up bathroom window of a pair of ovaries, a womb and a single sperm. She explained the facts of life with huge enthusiasm and talked about how she’d made me with another man, not Dennis.
‘But can Dennis be my daddy?’ I’d apparently asked her, having digested the drawing on the window in silence for some minutes.
I didn’t remember this conversation. It became one of those memories I formed in my head from Mum recounting it to me when I was older. She often used the story about the biological drawings to embarrass me as a teenager. But the upshot of that bath-time chat was Dennis became my father in everything but name. Not stepfather, because he and Mum never married, but also because calling Dennis a ‘step’ felt disloyal. He was more than that to me. He was everything. Adrian, a stranger I’d never met and knew nothing about, was technically my father, but Dennis was my dad.
He and Mum had bought the house in Castleton a couple of years on and had taught at Norwich ever since, combining academic life with their social crusades. These days, subjects they felt strongly about included but were not limited to: the demise of the Labour Party, the lack of education funding, the lack of NHS funding, Andrew Marr, the bus service in their area of Norfolk and the price of milk in the Tesco Express.
Both he and Mum were now sixty and retained the zeal and energy of Russian revolutionaries. That’s why I was called Lil, or Lilian technically, after one of Mum’s favourite suffragettes, Lilian Lenton. She was a flinty-eyed woman who, in a black and white picture taken in 1955, looked like a witch. But she’d been part of the suffragist movement during the pre-First World War years, committing arson, going on hunger strike and escaping prison so many times she was nicknamed the ‘tiny Pimpernel’.
Mum put the spoon down beside the cooker and gathered up a pile of papers in her hands, moving them from the table to the wooden dresser underneath the kitchen window. Gerald the tortoise was eating a piece of lettuce under a kitchen chair.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said. ‘Jess – tea?’
She nodded at me. ‘Yep, please. What you making?’