Wicked Game

  October 2003 I don't know what to expect at the Brook Clinic. I imagine myself bursting through the door and dramatically announcing I'm five months pregnant and I can't have this baby in front of a group of tense young women and girls in a waiting room.    In the event I walk into an empty room, carefully closing the door behind me. A member of staff appears. I tell her I think I'm pregnant and I need to do a test.    'How old are you?'    'Twenty three.'     She tells me Brook Clinics are for women up to twenty five, so I can have a free test.    I get the feeling she disapproves of me using the service. I'm an adult. I'm wearing my smart office clothes. I don't look like someone who needs a free test. I don't look like someone whose life is in crisis.    I go to the toilet with the test.    As we wait for the result to appear she asks me how far along I think I am.    'Maybe five months.' ...

  September 2003 My parents are waiting at the barriers at Heathrow.    'She doesn't look fat,' my dad says. 'Everyone says people come back fatter from a year in Australia but, she doesn't.'    See? I'm not pregnant. I would look fat if I was.      But what about-    Don't think about it.     My friends seem to be mostly on holiday but Lucy tells me Becky's having an Ann Summers party next week. This seems completely out of character for Becky. I feel lost. Has everyone changed while I've been away? I don't think I've changed. Except-     No. Nothing's changed.     I go to the employment agency I got my job at the bank with. In a couple of days I've been offered my old job back.    I'm back in the same rut I ran away from.    But it's different now. This is only temporary. In a few months I'll be in Asia with Steve.    He emails. He's still lonely in Broome. Soon he'll go back ...

  August 2003 I'm staying in a hostel in Los Angeles. It claims to be right by Venice Beach but I can't find the beach. Instead I find the internet cafe Global Gossip.    I haven't checked my email since the north shore of Oahu. There is a message from Steve telling me I should find a rich "scetic tank" to buy me drinks in Waikiki. I assume he means "septic tank." I frown at the words till I work out it's rhyming slang for "yank." I tell him about the free tours I went on with the hostel. I don't tell him about Justice. I don't tell him any of the things I wrote in French in Waikiki.    I find the beach, a vast expanse of sand. The sea seems a million miles away. I take off my flip flops and trudge across it, feeling the damp sand between my toes.    The sea is cold. I didn't expect this. It's the Pacific Ocean, it's LA, isn't it meant to always be warm here?    I sit on the beach, writing in French again.     Je ne ...

  August 2003 I go to Waikiki for my last week in Hawaii. I check into the hostel and am put into an empty dorm. I go for a walk in the evening. It's different here from the north shore. Busier, more built up. I think maybe I should have stayed in the tranquility of the north.    I sit on a bench, looking out to sea. A man sits next to me. He is tall and thin with dark skin. He looks like he's in his late thirties. He talks about how he's struggling to find work, how it's hard for native Hawaiians. I awkwardly make sympathetic noises. He asks me where I'm from.    'England,' I say.    He frowns at me. 'You don't look English.'     I shrug. I don't know what to say. I don't know what it is about me that doesn't look English.    He asks me if I want to go and eat with him.    I shake my head.    ''Please,' he says. He tries to persuade me but I tell him I have to go. Back in my dorm a man has moved in. He's sh...

  August 2003 I arrive in Hawaii the day before I left New Zealand. In my head I pretend I've travelled back in time rather than crossed the international dateline.     I wish I could travel back in time to before I met Steve, then I could tell myself never to approach him in that bar in Cairns. Or to walk away when Brandon told me he was an asshole, walk away the first time he bit me, walk away when I realised he wasn't going to use contraception, walk away when he dumped me in Darwin, walk away that night in Perth when he made me bleed.    But that would have been too late, in Perth. I was already pregnant by then.     No. I wasn't. I'm not. I've bled since then so I can't be. I go to the north shore of Oahu. I'm feeling better, that fluey feeling leaving me. It's peaceful here. I lie on the beach. I swim. I snorkel, watching bright fish dart beneath me in the clear water.    Looking at the sunshine coloured yellow tang I wonder w...

  July/ August 2003 I hike on the Franz Josef Glacier. I am told that the Maori name for it means "tears of the avalanche girl." I feel like an avalanche girl right now, my life tumbling down a mountain with a force and momentum that will destroy anything in its path.     I have no tears though. My feelings remain locked inside me, refusing to flow from my eyes     I struggle to keep up on the hike. I am tired and fluey and unbalanced. My stomach, once so small, so flat I was barely aware of it is now pushing at the waistband of my jeans. It's heavy, weighing me down.    I always pictured glaciers as smooth, flat blocks of ice floating in the sea, but this is white with snow and full of crevasses and ridges.    As I trudge through a crevice, legs aching from carrying the extra weight of my stomach, from forcing my feet through the snow, the icy walls seem to close in on me. This is how it feels to be loved by Steve, I think, to be t...