“Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck!”

Her choice of words was ironic really, considering how that action was the whole problem in the first place. She glared at the little blue cross, hoping against hope that if she stared at it hard enough it would disappear and everything would be all right. It didn’t.

Then there was always the possibility that the test might be broken – it might be a dud batch or something. There was always that to cling onto. She glanced up at the row of three different brands of pregnancy tests lined up on the bathroom shelf all displaying their own version of positive: little pink circles and extra coloured lines. Okay, she probably couldn’t write off all of them as a dud batch.

Sue stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. She was thirty years old – surely beyond the age of accidentally getting up the duff. Of course, she had been using precautions, she wasn’t a complete ninny. She’d had a coil fitted for over a year now – that was supposed to be pretty reliable wasn’t it? So she couldn’t POSSIBLY be pregnant. Could she?

Conveniently ignoring the slight queasiness she’d had for the last couple of days, the constant tiredness and the slightly achy boobs she didn’t even particularly feel pregnant either. It must all be a big mistake. When was her last period anyway?

She wandered out of the bathroom, abandoning the little row of sticks and went to find her handbag. As usual it had been tossed casually behind the sofa on her entry to the apartment late the night before. Scrabbling around in the contents produced what she was looking for: her diary.

She flipped through the pages, looking for the little circle with the P written in it that she used to denote the “special” day. Hmm, that couldn’t be right… the last one was back in… that was over seven weeks ago! That was that then. It had to be true. She slumped defeated into the sofa.

Looking around her minimalist apartment she tried to imagine what it would be like living with children, tried to visualise playpens, teddies, and discarded duplo. She really had no idea what it would be like – it was not as if she had ever had much contact with kids at all. She tried to mentally scroll forward a few years and added some batman comics, Barbie, the TV permanently switched to some kids channel blaring exploding death robots or something equally inane. She idly wondered if she would have to exchange her immaculate cream sofa for one more suitably snot and vomit coloured.

No, this was RIDICULOUS! What was she thinking?! She couldn’t do this – didn’t have time for the sick and permanently exhausted stage, would look faintly ridiculous in the blooming and blobby stage and wanted to always be able to reach her feet to paint her toenails for the forseeable future, thank you very much! She wasn’t cut out to be a mother, wouldn’t know what to do with a teenager let alone a small crying wailing, vomiting thing. Hell, she didn’t even own a cat because it was too much responsibility. Oh, and she was allergic. Come to think of it, she was probably allergic to babies as well.

She had always loathed summer barbeques due mainly to those manic parents of new babies who seemed to think that any unmarried woman under the age of about sixty must be desperate to settle down and have children of their own and would insist that their saggy flesh of their flesh was dumped awkwardly on her knee in the vague hope that the little vomit bag would make her feel clucky. It always ended in disaster with her being completely unable to hold it correctly (“no, no, no … support the HEAD”), the child (quite rightly in her opinion) looking at her suspiciously before erupting in howls of indignation and exercising one of their many bodily functions on her.

Then there was her career. She’d worked damn hard to get where she was at Campbell, Martins & Biggleswick – a small, but established accountancy firm in the centre of the capital. She was well respected, fairly recompensed and in no way inclined to give it all up on account of being in the family way. Of course, the current “fashion” was to have it all – have both the career and the family, but she’d seen women trying to pull off a full-time, full-scale career together with having a baby. Some seemed to manage it, there were always some who were successful, but most burned out within the year and cut back severely on their hours. Campbell, Martins & Biggleswick wasn’t exactly part-timer friendly either.

The reality of the situation gradually started to sink in. It wasn’t some hypothetical situation she was working through for a friend, it was real and it was happening to her. She suddenly felt very small, alone and scared. Her first instinct was to phone Peter, to let him know what was going on so that he could come over and hold her hand, tell her that everything was going to be all right, that together they would sort it. However, Peter…. dear Peter… the father-to-be (GOD, that sounded so weird) had a family of his own. He wouldn’t be able to drop everything on a weekend to see her and it would be too risky phoning him, even to his mobile. He always said that his wife was never interested in looking at his mobile and wouldn’t even know how to check the phone logs, but in that respect she had always been more cautious than him. After all, she valued her freedom. The very last thing she wanted was for Mrs Marks to chuck him out the house and find him with all his worldly goods (about two suitcases worth) camped out on her doorstep with nowhere else to go. She shuddered.

She supposed she did have to tell him? Could she just go deal with it so he would never have to know? Her mind skirted around the A word, unwilling to say it to herself, unwilling to admit that it really was her only choice, was going to be her decision no matter what. What if he wanted her to have the baby? Could he force her to do that? Would he really want two families on the go? Christ, she’d only been going out with him for six months (well… they didn’t often go out… sleeping with him for six months was more accurate and then only when he could fit her in between his busy schedule of work and home life) – it had seemed such a long while recently, but now she realised that she didn’t really know him that well at all.

Abortion.

There, she’d said it.

Thought it anyway.

She ought to be feeling guilty for thinking it. She ought to be feeling ashamed considering all the women in the world who were unable to conceive where she appeared to be so fertile that she’d got pregnant against the odds. But she didn’t. She felt relieved… for a little while anyway. Then she burst into tears.

After a few minutes she calmed herself down and forced herself to get up and walk into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Hot sweet tea for a shock, right? The kettle was filled and switched on; the cup was got out and tea-bagged. She reached for the sugar, then remembered her diet and took her hand away again. She acted mechanically, an automatic task she had performed so many times over the years, an act of self-calming.

An almighty bang broke through her reverie – yet another firework released by some juvenile cretin that didn’t have anything better to do on a Sunday night. The usual run up to Bonfire Night. She felt like leaning out the window and screaming “FUCK OFF, go take your pyrotechnics elsewhere, can’t you see that I’m having a crisis here?!” She restrained herself. Barely.

The tea made, she stood there cradling the warm mug in her hands, wondering what to do next. She wished she had someone to call, someone reassuring to talk to. Normally (if there was a normally in a situation like this) she would give her best friend Sarah a call. This weekend, however, Sarah had gone off to the Cotswolds with her new flame of the month and wouldn’t be back until very late. Sue didn’t think Sarah would appreciate a passionate embrace being interrupted by a call from even the most urgent of crises. And if one thing was for sure, this thing wasn’t going to go away in a hurry. She would still be pregnant on Monday.

And the next day, and the next…

She wondered what it would be like. Would she have to confess her foolishness to her GP or could she just walk into a clinic and half an hour later walk out a free woman? How would she feel after the event? Would she feel guilty? Would she always wonder what the little person would be like? Surely not! Anyway, she knew what it would be like – she had no illusions of cute angelic designer babies unlike some of her friends. No, she was going into this with eyes wide open and taking the only logical resource. It’s not like she could give any child of hers a decent life – she was not mother material.

She was mistress material.

There were no regrets. No desire to settle down and have a “man of her own”. She liked her own space, doing things the way she wanted when she wanted. She liked the fact that her apartment looked exactly the way she wanted it to with no external influence, no one else to please. Going out, no … sorry … shagging a married man was the ideal solution. Protestatons of love and declarations that they would leave their wives to be with her, it was just that the wife was going through such a tricky stage of life at the moment or the kids were approaching their GCSEs or the cat was at the vets and he didn’t want to put them through any more stress, but soon, soon they would be together – they washed over her, meaningless placatory lies that meant nothing to either of them. The truth was she liked it this way. She liked having a part-time lover with no complications and no expectations, and if he was sick it was his wife that would look after him. Peter was a very sweet man, but she didn’t want his babies.

But there were times when she wished he could be a bit more at her beck and call – like now. If only he was due to come over this evening, but she most times she only got to see him in the week unless he’d arranged to “go on a business trip” for the weekend, but that was always risky. Still, she would be seeing him early tomorrow evening after work. It wasn’t that far away. Then, she supposed, she would tell him.

She looked at the clock… 9pm. There was someone she could call. She picked up the phone and dialled the number carefully.

“Hello? Hi, it’s Sue Beresford here. Oh yes, can I have a number 32 and a number 17 … with egg fried rice and some prawn toasts please. Yep, that’s fine. Half an hour? Great.”

There. That was food sorted, now for the night’s entertainment. She didn’t feel up to reading at the moment, so what was on telly? Not much on normally on a Sunday night, but there was always the news to look forward to. She wouldn’t think too much about anything tonight – she would deal with it all in the morning.