Chapter Fifty One

 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. I rummage until I find something that feels like a chocolate bar.

   'You can put that back and try again, if you want,' she says.

   I shake my head.

   'Have you thought of any names yet?' someone asks me.

   'I like Bethan,' I say. A character from The Snow Spider by Jenny Nimmo, my favourite book as a child. I wish I could rewind time, go back to my eight year old self reading that book and have my whole life still in front of me. I would do things differently if I had the chance again. I wouldn't end up like this.

   'You can't call a boy Bethan,' she says.

   'No.' I'm sure it's a boy but I can't think of the right name.

   'Jess can work for a boy or a girl,' my colleague Jess says.

Lucy is back visiting her mum for a weekend. She and Erin have been living with her new boyfriend in one room in his shared house. Erin has had to start school mid-term because in that town children all start at the beginning of the school year, not in the term they turn five.

   She seems tired.

   'It's been hard,' she says, 'but it was the right thing. I needed a new start.'

   I watch Erin practising phonics, tracing letters in the air, sounding them out. 'Kitten kuh.'

   I'll never teach this baby to read.

I dream I'm chasing a car down a narrow road. I can see Steve inside driving. I push the car as it goes over a bridge and it starts to tumble towards the edge. I wake.

   What did the dream mean, I wonder. Is this what I've done to Steve's life, thrown it off a bridge? Derailed him forever?

   He emails. He nearly drove his hire car off a bridge, he says. It was hanging over the edge. Luckily there were people around to help.

   Did I do that? My dream... What if it wasn't just a dream?

   Of course it was just a dream. It's a coincidence. 

   But Steve used to say I was a witch...

We spend Christmas Day at home in the end. Mad World is the Christmas number one. Does the whole country feel as sad as I do this year?

   Steve says he had a good Christmas with a bunch of randoms at a hostel.