39 Weeks (34 page)

Of course after I put the phone down I worried for the rest of the day that I had jinxed it, but when I got home Wednesday night Rob had finished giving the living room its final coat of paint and met me at the top of the stairs as eager to see me as I’d been to see him
all day
, and had ordered a takeaway for us both. Then we’d spent the evening watching a film, so
it turned out
there was no jinxing going on to worry about.

It was check-up week again, but this week it had been switched to a Friday instead of the usual Tuesday that I’d got used to, and it was a different nurse
which suited me fine, the Tuesday nurse had an uncanny resemblance to Mary Poppins about her that set my teeth on edge and made me feel about
five. Everything was fine, sample pee, blood pressure, weight, all the usual stuff. My ankles apparently were a bit swol
len but the Friday nurse said ‘a
t this stage it was only to be expected’. See what I mean
Mary Poppins
would have tutted and given me a lecture about putting my feet up and not resting enough, and made it sound like it was my fault, or that I’d managed to get swollen ankles on purpose.

All week everything was wonderful, only one small cloud on the horizon
of my otherwise perfect blue sky
,
and that was
the
immanent
visit from my mum
due today
. But I’d had a bit of a brainwave
on that score,
I phoned M
um Friday night and sa
id Rob had to go away again, more lies but needs must I justified to myself, and I was
fed up with staring at the same four walls
I said
and
feeling
a bit down,
so would it be alright if I came to hers this time instead, and anyway I said, I wanted to pick up a couple of my old teddy’s, including Care Bear, to put in the baby’s room. After some initial reluctance, it wasn’t that she didn’t want me at home it was more a case of she liked to check up on me, and
for her
there was still the issue of meeting Rob properly and being able to interrogate him
as only M
um could
, but
t
he teddy’s did it
. S
he switched
tack
from
disappointed reluctance to the bossy mother I knew and loved
and
being able to make sure I had a decent meal for once, and in my mother’s head that meant meat and two veg, probably liver, yuk, because it was full of the iron that I needed now I was pregnant, and no doubt a heap of broccoli, so good for you I could hear her saying in my head. 

Much as I
could have done without seeing her at all, never mind forci
ng down a dinner that was ‘good
for me
’
, I knew it was inevitable, and at least this way I’d manage to avoid her meeting Rob, or worse him meeting her. And I’
d rather cleverly side stepped
having to face the bi
g issue which had escalated
somewhat of
telling
M
um the truth about Rob. T
he need for inventing a reason for him leaving me having disappeared with the
event of us ‘seeing’ each other. It was either that
or
having to tell
Rob the truth that I’
d told Mum he was the father of my baby and the scary fact that now Mum expected us to get married. I cringed away from either option, but what choice did I have, it had to be one or the other. So rather than face it I buried my head in the sand again
and delayed choosing between the
inescapable rock and a hard place, and prolonged the lies I was telling Mum for another month.
 

All went well. I didn’t plan to stay too long, couple of hours I thought, mainly because Rob actually was going away tomorrow to do the Newcastle job and I wanted to spend time with him before he went, so I hadn’t really lied that much to Mum
,
just exaggerated the truth a bit. I was tempted when I got there to walk round my old home in a pompous manner criticising this and that and everything I set eyes on, just to get my own back on Mum and let her know what it felt like, but I didn’t.

Of course because we weren’t
at my place
I avoided the usual
should have done this, or why haven’t you done that lecture about my housekeeping skills, but I still got an ‘isn’t it about time you got your hair trimmed’ but that was about as bad as it got. I was right about the good for me lunch, but thankfully it wasn’t liver, we had homemade lasagne and a side salad with spinach leaves, so Mum still
managed to ge
t my iron intake boosted. And I still had to endure the ‘you don’t know how I suffer’ monologue
, there’s no way of avoiding that no matter what’s going on or who’s house we
were
meet
ing
at.

I told Mum about Rob’s trip to Newcastle, but she was less than impressed, I mean Newcastle’s hardly in the same league as Bangkok is it, so I did sort of see her point, even though I knew it was
a
fictitious one. And I said Rob had been painting the living room for me, to which she said don’t you
mean us, and I said guiltily ‘o
h yes us, of course I meant us’, anyway after that minor slip up I went on to say how nice it all looked now it was all cream.
Course being as it was my idea to have it all cream, and Mum being Mum, she wanted to know was I sure I wanted everything cream and wasn’t that a bit boring. I couldn’t win no matter what I did or said, don’t know why I still kept trying
really.

We retrieved the two teddy’s I’d wanted from the loft, Mum climbing the ladder with a non-stop diatribe about how it wasn’t good for her to be exerting herself like this and did I know she’d always suffered with the symptoms of vertigo
, and then we had another cup of tea while s
he presented me with the gift
she’d bought for the baby that was more baby clothes, I now had enough to open a shop of my own, but it was nice of her
to get me, or rather the baby something
,
and I knew that under that extremely annoying exterior she really did care about me in her own aggravating way.
 

I left soon after and we semi arranged the next visit
and Mum said
she’d phone me in the week. She was phoning more often now getting updates on my pregnant state, and I suspect the whole Rob scenario and whether I was going to be getting married anytime soon, preferably before the baby arrived, but I wasn’t complaining
,
a phone call was a lot easier to deal with than a visit.

As it turned out I didn’t get to see much of Rob, there was some mix up about where he was going to be staying and he was on the phone for a lot of the evening trying to sort it out, and Mac was going away again tomorrow as well
,
so he came up to say goodbye
and ended up staying for half an hour, so one way and another I didn’t get to have the romantic evening I’d planned in my head. But I kept telling myself it was only going to be until Friday, and I could survive until Friday couldn’t I?

28
th
November – week 26 +
1 Day

Rob had stayed in Newcastle for a few days longer than he’d originally planned, apparently the lighting was all wrong or something, anyway the first lot of shots hadn’t come out quite as expected and he
’d
had to do them again but with a different shutter speed or something like that. So I’d spent the following weekend on my own, well not actually on my own, just Rob-less. What I actually did was spend Saturday night with Marsha, she was a bit down anyway what with it being Mac’s first weekend away, so we pooled our aloneness state and tried to cheer each other up, which we managed quite successfully with the help of
a thousand calories a slice chocolate fudge cake and a good old fashioned girly night in watching chick flicks
,
and moaning in general about how we never got to watch decent films when a bloke was around.

Marsha was getting a buzz at the thought of Rob and I being an item, and let slip that he’d mooned about for days after that night I’d met him at Zee Zee’s, which of course was balm to my love-sick soul
, and I let myself begin to think again in terms of ‘the one’. I was a-gonna and no two ways about it.

James came round on the Tuesday after Rob had gone
away
, just turned up on the off chance he said that I wasn
’t busy. Course I wasn’t busy
,
and
under the circumstances I thought it only fair that I tell him I was seeing Rob. He went very quiet and didn’t say much, I said
I was
sorry and I was in a way, but it really didn’t help
him
. He only stayed for about half an hour and left looking like a lost puppy
, and I felt terrible. Then on Wednesday he texted me he st
ill liked me and when Rob and I
split up I could call him, as a friend he added. Then I felt even more terrible.

At least I did until I got another text on the Thur
sday, and another on the Friday, a
nd a phone call on the Saturday morning, all chatty and my best friend and not mentioning Rob at all. It felt like I was being stalked, but I couldn’t really get angry with him, I mean he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, or said anything wrong
, except for that ‘Babe’ comment of course. What could I do, I wanted to let him down easy, so I was careful not to say anything that would encourage him, but apart from that I didn’t do anything much. By the time Rob came back, James was only texting or phoning every other day and I figured my lack of encouragement was working, and in time he’d just give up altogether.

With Rob back, the bottling plant
in Newcastle
pictures finally turning out okay, we’d spent most of this last weekend together. On Saturday morning he’d come with me to choose a pushchair.
Marsha had told me to go for one that wasn’t too hard to fold up with one hand, I couldn’t see why at first until she explained that
quite often
I’d have a baby in the other arm so I’d need to be able to fold it up with one hand, unless I wanted to put the baby on the floor, or always have a spare person with me to dump the baby on.

‘Those things can be difficult enough to manage at the best of times, and if you’re holding the baby
at the same time
well
.
. . t
he best thing is to practice in the shop, try them out while you’re holding a baby sized teddy or something, see if you can manage with just one hand.’ She said.

So that’s what I did, and she was right, som
e of them were downright pretty-
nigh impossible to fold up with two hands never mind if you were trying to hold
a
baby at the same time.
Rob was amused at first
,
w
atching me struggle in the shop
and inevitably dropping the teddy on its head a couple of times. But then his problem solving man brain kicked in and he got all serious and couldn’t rest until we’d found a pushchair that fitted the one handed criteria.

The one I chose in the end not only folded up easily, well relatively easily, but the actual chair bit could be unclipped to face either towards me or
away from me so the baby could see where it was going, and it could recline to
a virtually
laying down position.
I was feeling quit
e pleased with myself, course Rob had
helped a bit in the choosing, but still I’d been the one doing the actual testing if you see what I mean, and more than that I’d worked hard to earn the money to pay for it.
 
   

While we were having a
take-away coffee from MacDonald’s, well I had tea as usual, that we drank sitting in the car out of the wind, Rob said I should try it out.

‘I don’t think I could fit into it.’ I said all quipy.

‘No I mean push it somewhere, you know take it for a test run.’

‘Okay but won’t it look a bit stupid wheeling round an empty pushchair?’

‘Maybe a bit, but you could have just dropped the baby off somewhere and now you’re wheeling the empty pushchair home again, who’s gonna know?’

To tell the truth I really liked the idea and was itching to try the pushchair out and see what it felt like.
I mean after it had cost so much and everything I’d be crazy not to make sure it worked properly.

We drove to the park and Rob made me get it out of the boot and unf
old it all by myself and said ‘t
he more you do it the better you’ll get at it, and you should really get used to the mechanics of it before the baby arrives’, which was probably true.

I struggled a bit but managed it in the end, but hey it wasn’t all me being thumbs and pathetic, it was still a bit stiff and new. Rob wheeled it about two yards and said I needed a bit of weight in it
to get the real feel of it, so we checked in the car looking for something heavy to put in the seat. All we managed to find was his car manual that probably weighed two pounds at least, and a couple of heavy tools he had in the boot.