And after a list of missed calls:

Ignore those calls – if you’re deep in the zone you should stay there. But let me pitch you something: now, I know you didn’t want time off these holidays, but I do think it would be good for you (see what I did there? Good for you?) to see me at least once. So can I drag you away from study one afternoon? If not this week, then next week? I’ll totally make it worth your while . . .

Anyways, study good.

See you later gorgeous. Mmmmmmmmmwa!

7

It was while I was standing in the queue at the reception counter at Dr Honeycott’s office, only two days earlier, waiting to make an emergency appointment, that I told my first ever lie to Nassim.

My mother had left for New Zealand in the early hours. I had already decided not to go with her these school holidays; I didn’t fancy cooling my heels in her hotel room for two weeks while she got her corporate on – heels and pantsuits and a take-no-prisoners look in her eye, nonsense words pouring out of her mouth: Synergistic Networking, Microservice Utilisation, Strategic Matrices, Offline Stakeholders. It made me feel angry at the best of times. Oh, she was so high-functioning in the world of work – manically so. I’d also decided not to go to meet Dad in Germany, where he’d be for the next few months, looking after Opa.

I had panicked about my chances of getting into medicine – I had to achieve an intimidating ATAR score, not to mention the UCAT in a mere few weeks. A nothing-fear had grabbed me by the throat and it already felt unfair that my parents kept expecting me to drop everything and run all over the globe with them. So I was actually genuinely relishing the thought of staying home in my own little room for two weeks solid, running my days how I wanted, parent-free, in total study lockdown, keeping weird hours and, perhaps, allowing the occasional sex-food-and-hanging-out visit from Nassim. Nassim was all worded up on my plan, he knew that he would only have restricted access to me, that I was taking this time to hit the books without distraction and start next term well on top of my game.

That had been the plan, anyway.

Even Mum’s performance with Nassim hadn’t necessarily exploded it. I had blocked her last-night-at-home attempts to reinstate mother–daughter communications, and then I’d got up to an empty house, ready to take over, ready to commence Operation UCAT. But from then on the day had unfolded with shock and horror, culminating in peak shock and horror in the public toilet next to the chemist where I had bought the pregnancy test.

Dr Honeycott’s clinic was always busy. An inner-city doctor’s office, shared with a number of other doctors, there were multilingual posters on the wall, more patients than could be seated comfortably in the tiny waiting room and a pervasive air of hurriedness.