‘I always compare the cost of a year’s worth of nappies to how much travelling I could do instead.’

Katie, 29

3

2009

I was squatting down, in a sort of ‘twerk’ position, my knees creaking and trembling. I hadn’t done a squat since gym class at school in the late 1990s and it showed. ‘Dip’ the stick delicately in your ‘urine stream’, I whispered back to myself, as I held the (now soggy) fold-out instruction manual. Pee in a perfectly straight line? That was like a policeman asking someone to walk along a painted straight line after one too many tequilas. It was impossible to ‘dip’ anything neatly at this moment, mainly because I was a bag of nerves. I was terrified by the situation. The pregnancy test was tacky and flimsy, and I didn’t really trust it. It was purple and white and looked like it could easily snap in half. I was already worrying that it wouldn’t be accurate and that I’d have to go back to the store and do this whole shebang again and again. We bought two, Bea and I, in a ‘Buy One Get One Free’ deal. So here we were, doing it together, sitting side by side in the toilet cubicles in the loos at Foyle’s bookshop (of all places). We always joked that our wombs were ‘n sync’, Justin Timberlake style, but this time we really were. I felt so anxious, hovering awkwardly over an off-white stained loo seat that wasn’t my own. I had just peed all over my hand by accident. It was warm and looked syrupy. Quite disgusting really.

‘You all right in there?’ I shouted sideways to Bea. I didn’t hear anything, so I knocked on the partition.

‘Mmmm,’ she replied, unsurely. I could hear her heeled boots scuffling around on the tiles next to me.

I couldn’t even bring myself to wash the pee off my hand because I had to wait for the stupid plastic gadget to show me a result. Germs were lingering everywhere, I thought, bacteria probably climbing the walls. If I was a proper grown-up, I would have anti-bac in my bag – but I forgot. Hurry up, hurry up. On the cubicle wall someone had scribbled, ‘Life is beautiful’. And someone has replied ‘fuck off with these memes m8’ underneath. I shook the plastic stick (like a Polaroid picture?) but I wasn’t sure it was doing anything to hurry up the process. It was just flicking small specks of urine onto the floor tiles. Gross.

‘Bea?’

‘Yeah?’ she said, impatiently.

‘Remember one line means not pregnant, and two lines means you are pregnant,’ I yelled, hoping nobody else was in the toilets with us.

‘Keep your voice down, Ol. I know what the lines mean,’ she said.

I laughed. We’d done many lines together, in old skanky party toilets. Now look at us.