Destination Chile

‘Oh right. I’ll pop the kettle on shall I?’

‘Yep, great, fine, thanks!’

Eventually, as I heard his footsteps on the wooden floors head back towards the kitchen, I let out a sigh of relief. My hand had now turned a strange shade of yellow with angry-looking red blotches from the force of me fighting with this damn ring. With one final tug, and a female tennis player style grunt, it flew off and skittered over to the other corner of the room. I leant my head against the door and tried to control my breathing. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, wincing at my sore finger. I quickly pulled myself together and shoved the ring back in its box, stuffing it back in the pocket where I’d found it.

A moment later the bedroom door opened. Ben was stood there holding out a steaming mug for me. ‘Here you go.’ I was sure his eyes widened at the mess I’d made in the bedroom. ‘You okay, babe?’

‘Ah thanks, yeah, all good. Right, let’s see your masterpiece!’ I said, pecking him on the cheek and shooing him out of the stuffy room, rubbing my sore hand behind my back.

‘Well, like I said, you might need to manage your expectations.’ He coughed. ‘It is a little larger than I’d… well, you’ll see…’ Ben trailed off.

I stopped still as I walked into the lounge. All thoughts of rings and wedding plans vanishing from my mind as I saw what he’d assembled. ‘A little larger?’ I gasped.

The dining-room table that had seemed so stylish in the showroom was now taking up pretty much all of our floor space. It looked ridiculous. I couldn’t concentrate on what he was sheepishly explaining. As he rambled on about measurements, sizes and dimensions, I zoned out and self-consciously rubbed my sore ring finger. Was this an omen? A sign of things to come? Our first proper adult purchase as a couple and it didn’t fit, just like the engagement ring? If that was the case then what the hell did that mean for us?

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_4ede108a-66bc-5278-9b43-5deef64a0f9e)

Equanimity (n.) – Evenness of mind, especially under stress

You know how sometimes they say that when things are going well it is as if the stars are aligned and everything in the universe is exactly how it should be? But, the thing they don’t tell you is how precarious this configuration is, how it can all fall out of alignment at any second. Imagine a steel tightrope with everything perfectly balanced on this sturdy, but still pretty vulnerable wire; this was how my life seemed to me. Maybe I had been too smug, too content, but with the gift of hindsight I could see how a gust of wind, a heavy bird plonking its feathered butt on the high line, or even a slip of the tongue and a secret that was never meant to be shared, could cause all the elements that had previously been so perfectly positioned to tumble and free-fall from a dizzying height to the ground. How could I have known that the laws of physics – or whatever it was that had caused this chain of events – would be the start of the stars falling out of alignment, the start of everything going so very very wrong? How naïve I was.

*

Of course, these thoughts were far from my mind as I went to meet my best friend the next day to fill her in on the drama of discovering the ring, the upcoming proposal and the monstrous dining table taking over my lounge. With all that had happened yesterday – including Ben and me having a silly, bickering row over the sodding table and its elephantine dimensions, ending with me telling him that size does matter – I hadn’t given much thought to what discovering this engagement ring actually meant for us.

Of course, I’d be lying if I told you that I hadn’t, at various times since we met, imagined the wedding day that Ben and I might have. Him in a cool linen suit with his freckled nose, me in a simple but stunning long, floaty dress, both promising our vows as we stared adoringly at each other on an exotic, cashmere-soft, sandy beach. I’d imagined how he would be as a father: kind but fair, hands-on but not smothering.

As fun as these daydreams were – strangely I was always a slimmer, swishy-haired version of myself – we’d never really had deep discussions about babies and weddings. There had been light-hearted jokes at unusual baby names – Ben was on a one-man mission to bring back the name Roy, and I had laughed, but secretly hoped he’d been joking, just in case. But having children and marrying each other wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. I mean, we had successfully navigated working together as we ran our ever-growing travel and tour agency for broken-hearted singles, and so far living together had been a sickeningly easy breeze; but neither of us had spoken about marriage being on the cards. At least, not yet.

In a way I was grateful that I’d made the shocking ring discovery, to give me some time to get my head around the idea and figure out if I thought we were in the place Ben so obviously thought we were. Not that I didn’t want to marry my clever, kind, good-looking, amazing-in-the-bedroom boyfriend, of course, but because I’d been so badly burned after ending up a jilted bride before. I was meant to have married my ex, Alex; we’d had everything planned, paid for and organised but just before the big day he had revealed that he had been cheating on me and called the whole thing off. Him uttering those painful words ‘I can’t marry you’, had brought about the biggest change in my life.

I had gone backpacking, met Ben, fallen in love, started my own business and truly found that travel did heal a broken heart. I now believed that what Alex did was the best thing that ever happened to me. Not that it wasn’t heartbreaking and difficult – I mean, what girl wants to be told by someone they love and trust that actually they weren’t worthy enough to become their wife? But, over time, I felt like I’d healed myself and I had discovered that all those irritating clichés people harp on about, like time being the best healer, actually were true.

My life was so much better now than it had ever been, thanks in a large part to Ben and the success we’d made of our joint business. Maybe the non-wedding with Alex was all part of the plan – the rehearsal, if you will – for what would be the wedding of the year with Ben?

‘Will you take over pushing the buggy for a minute?’ Marie asked, breaking me from my bonkers bridal thoughts. ‘I’ve got cramp, another wonderful side effect of being with child,’ she grumbled.

We were slowly meandering around the local park – and I mean slowly; even the ducks were waddling faster than us. Marie was on her ‘get this baby out of me’ mission, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to support her until she called me this morning. Her due date was still weeks away but she was determined to deliver precisely on time. She’d been exactly the same with her toddler, Cole, her firstborn. Marie was having this baby on her due date, come hell or high water.

‘I don’t feel like I did with Cole, so I need to be upping my game to get this baby out of me,’ she said, as I took over wheeling his pushchair for a while over fallen branches and skirted round piles of dog poo. Marie had a crazed look in her eyes as she spoke. It was a look I remembered seeing when we were both eighteen and she was determined to finish the line of shots in Waverley’s bar in order to win a free T-shirt. Those luminous shooters never stood a chance.

‘Marie, it’s a baby. I know I’m not a world expert on the subject matter but don’t they kind of come when they’re ready?’

She glared at me. The mood swings were clearly still going strong. ‘Georgia Green, I may have developed haemorrhoids, darker nipples, and lost the ability to hold in my pee when I sneeze or cough or laugh, but this, this is something I know I can control.’ She looked like a determined Michelin Man under the many layers swaddling her neat bump as she waddled around.

‘I still can’t believe that you haven’t found out what you’re having.’

‘We’re having a baby, Georgia. Did no one tell you?’ She stuck her tongue out playfully.

‘Ha, bloody, ha. I mean, how have you not been desperate to know if it’s a girl or a boy? I’d certainly need to know if a teeny, weeny penis was currently growing inside me.’ I shuddered.

‘Well, we all know there have been enough of them inside me.’ She laughed, blushing at the carefree memories of her single days. ‘Nah, seriously though, I don’t want to ruin the surprise. It will make it even more magical when he or she does finally make an appearance.’ She put on that drowsy hippy voice that she used to use to imitate Lorraine with the lazy eye. Lazy-Eye Lorraine. She was an earth-mother type woman who ran the antenatal classes and got right on Marie’s nerves by implying that basically she’d been a lousy mum to Cole and that nowadays they did things differently. Everything was magical in Lorraine’s world.

Marie didn’t do ‘magical’; she did practical, and right now the most practical thing she could do was try her hardest to get her baby safely into the world on her due date. It was a mini achievement but still one way to show bog-eyed Lorraine that mummy Marie wasn’t a failure.

‘If you don’t know what you’re having then what have you been buying for it? Isn’t there some unwritten code of motherhood that you go all out and splash the cash on anything and everything pink for a girl or blue for a boy?’

Marie rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘It’s all about gender-neutral clothes for babies nowadays, so he or she is going to have a wardrobe filled with yellows, greens and whites. I just hope people will be able to tell what sex it is by the look of him, or her.’

I scoffed. ‘Well, if it was me I’d dress my baby only in teeny tiny Halloween costumes. That’s one way to do the gender-neutral look.’

She let out a burst of laughter. ‘Thank the Lord you’re not expecting then. I’m not sure how the baby would like to look back at their first year of life to realise they were dressed as a pumpkin or a bat for most of it.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but how cute! God, Marie, it’s just mad to think that soon he or she will be here sharing this buggy with Cole.’ I felt this strange tingle in my chest as I said it. Everything was changing. My best friend’s life would never be the same again. When she was pregnant with Cole we had spent ages imagining what he would be like, how he would grow into an actual person with a personality, and what becoming a mum, rather than just being Marie, would be like. I guess a small and selfish part of me had worried that I’d be sidelined from our friendship once she had this other human who was the complete centre of her world. How could her best friend ever compete with that?

They say a mother’s love is like no other, but not having a child I could only understand that from a rational perspective. Now we were on the edge of her life changing again, but this time I was less concerned with how I was going to fit in, and instead focused on the fact that my life was about to change, too.

‘I know.’ She smiled tiredly. ‘And then Operation Skinny Jeans is back on.’

I frowned at her.

‘Don’t give me that look! I’m not going to be going all A-List celeb and ping straight back but I am desperate to feel like my body is my own again. Plus, if I’m going to meet my five-year plan then I need to be getting trim for the big day.’

‘This big day that Mike knows nothing about,’ I teased, then let out a deep sigh. ‘It’s amazing to think that a few years ago we were both in such different places – and yet somehow exactly the same – as where we are now. What with you popping out sproglets and me…about to get engaged…’

It took a few moments for this to click in.

‘Oh my God! What? You’re getting married!’ Marie’s squeals made a lone dog walker jump from the other side of the lake. My ring finger throbbed in memory of the torture it had been under as she mentioned the M word.

‘Shush! You’re going to wake Cole!’ I glanced down at her toddler son, wrapped up in blankets in his buggy. He remained fast asleep with just his pink nose and angel-bud lips peeking out of the many covers she had piled on him earlier.

‘Tell me everything!’ She’d stopped in her tracks and snatched up my hand to hunt for any sign of bling. ‘Wait – where’s the ring?’

‘Well, okay, so I’m not engaged yet. But I will be…’

She stared at me, blank faced, as if I’d totally lost the plot. ‘You what?’

I sighed and told her about the trip to Ikea, the unpacking, finding the ring and damaging the nerves in my finger from the force of trying to get it off before Ben caught me.

‘Wow, so what was it like?’

‘Dreamy.’ I hugged myself without realising it.

‘Better than the last one you got?’ She raised an eyebrow.

I pulled myself together. ‘Yes, actually.’

She nodded slowly, thinking of how to word the next question. ‘Are you ready to do all of that again? You know, with what happened last time?’ she eventually asked, leaving a whisper of breath hanging in the air.