I stood in line and drafted my message. My lie.

Won’t be able to hang out today sorry babe. Study avalanche.

The message sat there unsent. I had never lied to Nassim before. It was one of the things I’d vowed to myself, after that first guy, that I would never do again – lie or keep quiet about what I thought, what I needed, what I wanted. But that was before this day, this morning. Before sitting on the loo in the stinky public toilets and watching those two stripes appear, almost immediately, on the test.

I sat on that toilet for nearly an hour, slumped right forward, the wind knocked out of me. I was paralysed. I felt hijacked. I couldn’t move. It seemed unbelievable. It seemed unbelievable because it was unbelievable. It was a ridiculous and impossible outcome of an accident that I didn’t even know had happened.

And then my mind went a bit loopy. I started to think that if I sat there for too long, my belly would swell and grow right then and there as I sat on that toilet – my belly would become heavy, and worse: it would become obvious – and then when I left the cubicle other people would know and have things to say about it – my mother, my father, my school, Nassim, strangers on the street – telling me why I should keep it, or how I had been stupid, how I was unlovable now. At that moment my vow to myself never to lie, never to keep quiet, seemed thin and juvenile and ill-equipped to deal with such a situation.

And then I began to be more shocked by my own paralysis than by the test, and my body came back to itself and stirred into action. I had to do something, and now. Because if I sat there any longer, then, eventually, there would be a baby. A baby. A consequence beyond comprehension.

‘Next please,’ said the receptionist, perhaps not for the first time, and I looked up apologetically, my thumb still hovering over my phone.

‘Can I help you?’ the receptionist repeated. I hesitated and then at the same time as I stepped forward, I dropped my thumb down on the screen and pressed send.

And it felt like the beginning of something. An unravelling.

8

Bette had set out butter and jam and tea and coffee and toast and muesli on one end of the table. And I was hungry. I was starting to feel sick from the hunger. But I didn’t know how I was going to keep anything down that had been prepared in that kitchen. Even if I had been in tip-top physical shape it would have been a challenge, let alone . . . compromised, as I was. But when I steeled myself and sat down at the table, I noticed something I hadn’t before: the tabletop gleamed, despite the chaos around and on it. It had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life, by the looks of it. And the stovetop too. And the sink. Hessel sat with a newspaper and a steaming cup of coffee by his hand. It was bizarre – an island of civilised decorum cleared in the middle of a tip.