Wicked Game

  December 2003 We still haven't decided where to spend Christmas. My mum says we might go to my aunt. She lives just round the corner from where the hospital I was born in used to be.    Imagine, I think, if I go back to my place of birth on Christmas Day and then I go into labour early...    This is ridiculous. My baby is not the Messiah and I am definitely no Virgin Mary. Steve has lost his passport somewhere in New Zealand. He's having a stressful time sorting out a replacement. His tenants are moving out of his house and he doesn't know how long it'll be till he can get new ones. Not till after Christmas at least.    I feel guilty that I've added to his stress with my pregnancy.  At work there is a sort of secret Santa. We pull little gifts out of a large stocking.    'There's some children's toys somewhere in there,' a woman in my team says as she holds it out to me to choose something.    I hope I don't get one of them. ...

  December 2003 I'm in the kitchen making toast. I open the drawer to get a knife to spread the margarine. The sharp knives are nestling in the tray. An urge comes over me to grab one and carve an X over my stomach, to cross that baby out.    I can't. I'm a mother. Even if I don't keep this baby I'm still a mother. I have to act like one. I have to be sensible. I can't just do whatever I want.    When I was fifteen I had a fantasy that I was the singer in an insanely popular alternative band. Every man was in love with me of course. The fantasy constantly altered but one strand included a storyline where I got pregnant at twenty three. It made a dramatic plot but then I couldn't make a baby fit in with the rest of the story so I imagined it being taken from me at birth because the scars on my arm made everyone think I was unfit to be a mother.     It's easy to imagine traumatic situations when you think they'll never happen to you.    No...