Confessions of a Bad Mother Read Online Free PDF Page B

be fine.’
    ‘Go away before I hurt you.’
    Meanwhile we go to the Fetal Medicine Centre for the Nuchal Fold Scan.
As on the phone, we pepper the doctor with questions, and again she stands up
to the pressure rather well.
    She puts the cold jelly on my stomach and turns the monitor to show us a
grainy black and white film. It reminds me a bit of when I was eight, and we
stayed up to watch man’s first step on the moon.
    ‘That bean-shaped thing, floating there in space
…’
    ‘Is your baby inside you, yes.’
    My God: it’s really there.
    ‘It just seems so – unlikely!’
    I so wasn’t going to have children that for a moment I wonder if
this is a video they keep for fantasists. I’m glad Peter is in the room;
people won’t be able to say I’ve imagined it – except they
won’t say that anyway, because to everyone else this is completely
    normal , whereas for me it’s like Galileo telling the Vatican that the
earth went round the sun. Are you saying there is a Live Person inside my Body? Whom I haven’t even met? It must be
witchcraft.
    We take our scan photo, and go for coffee.
    ‘There’s a person inside your tummy,’ says Peter.
    ‘Oh my God!’ I say. ‘Bloody Hell!!!’
    ‘Give it a nice shot of caffeine, there you go. Help it bounce
around a bit more. And have a cake. You’re eating for two now.’
    I have an éclair, and some toast, and finish his strudel as
well.
    ‘I said eating for two, not six.’
    I kiss him goodbye and go for a swim. When I get there, it’s
Special Needs Day, and everyone in the changing room has Down’s syndrome.
What are the odds on that ?
    Afterwards I get back on the phone to University College Hospital. Have
they got my referral from the surgery?
    ‘No. Sorry,’ says the woman.
    ‘What can I do?’
    ‘Well … we don’t normally tell people this, but you
can self-refer.’ Bastards! I knew they were concealing something.
    I get the surgery to fax the letter they should have sent in the first
place, and I’m in.
    The receptionist in the UCH antenatal department is a glamorous black
girl who looks as though she should be processing nightclub tickets, not
patient notes. Her stylishness lifts the ambience of the whole place. She
memorizes my name on this first occasion, and remembers it ever afterwards. How
do people do that? Probably by not drinking four pina coladas.
    After all the questions about family illnesses, and taking my blood
pressure, and after I’ve weed all over one of those tiny little pots, the
midwife asks me how much alcohol I drink. People always lie about this, I bet.
I’ll be really honest, that’ll impress her.
    ‘Ooh, about … twenty-eight units a week. Three to four
glasses a day.’
    ‘Let’s just put down one glass of wine a day, shall
we?’
    She looks at me as if to say: ‘ I’m doing you a big
favour, you alcoholic old tart. ’ Why don’t you just come
out with it? ‘ Poisons fetus with entire contents of
    Oddbins .’ Put that on your bloody form. I decide not to mention the 2
for 1 pina coladas.
    Anyhow, you have to drink loads to give them Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome. My friend Kirsty’s sister, who’s a midwife, says you can
tell the ones who’ve got it – whose mothers drank a lot when they
were pregnant – because their heads are sort of oval. And in fact I have
seen one quite recently, walking past Somerfield. She was really weird-looking,
a grown-up, about thirty. Her face was sort of pointy; eyes almost round the
side instead of the front. Either that, or Somerfield is being used a landing
base for aliens. Yep, I thought: that’s a bit more than four pina
coladas. Which were mostly pineapple and coconut, by the way – did I
mention that?
    Leaving the house one evening, I am accosted – there is no other
word for it – by the American woman renting the house next door. She
looks at my tummy, and at the bottle of wine I’m taking to a dinner
party, and gasps