Growing Up Twice Read Online Free PDF Page B

the situation with Owen home to me. This time it was really finished. Something was different; something in the cycle had broken.
    I believed that it might be me.
    I got in maybe ten minutes before Rosie rang the bell. We didn’t tell each other the details that night, we just opened the bottle of vodka I had bought on the way home and then the bottle of gin that Rosie had brought with her and swore and wept and laughed. But in the following weeks we talked about nothing else. We followed each other from room to room, cups of coffee or tea or glasses of wine in hand, trying to explain our lives to each other.
    I’d sit on Rosie’s bed trying to understand how it had taken me three years and all those broken promises to finally see what he had done to me. I was angry with myself, and angry with Owen, three wasted years. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me that she couldn’t sleep. All she could think about was her wedding day, the speech he had made and the message he had written in a card on some flowers he had sent her on the eve of the wedding: ‘Yours always.’ In our own ways, both of us felt like fools but at least we were fools together.
    Selin would come over most evenings and sit quietly with a glass of wine in her hand as we talked it all out, nodding and agreeing, offering to get the Turkish mafia on the case for a small fee, making us laugh and letting us cry, just listening.
    Gradually the three of us created a kind of equilibrium. Mornings became less painful, Friday and Saturday nights became more fun and our years-old friendship, which had always been true, re-formed once again into the kind of closeness that we hadn’t really had since we’d left home for different colleges over ten years earlier.
    Soon after she moved in Rosie began to drink even more than we were used to, but we were all drinking a lot and it didn’t seem right to preach. Anyway, mentioning it was a sure-fire way to start a stream of denial that devolved into a fight. Selin was working too hard, still trying to prove to her dad that she was as good a partner in the family accountancy firm as her brother would have been if he hadn’t decided to become a starving artist instead. Still trying to prove it even though her dad had realised it years ago and was as proud of her as any father could be.
    I got used to not seeing Owen. I got over expecting to meet him around every corner or to hear his voice every time I picked up the phone. An intonation in someone’s voice, an advert or a carton of milk stopped making me cry and gradually I began to feel free. Things moved on and got better, and right now things are pretty good.
    Rosie couldn’t really be pregnant, could she?

Chapter Seven
    As I wait for Rosie outside the flat it occurs to me that in all the years the three of us have known each other we have never bought a pregnancy testing kit. I’m sure I must be infertile.
    ‘Christ almighty, I feel like I’ve been beaten up by a big fuck-off bastard,’ Rosie says articulately as she stumbles out of the doorway in a fake-fur coat and aviator shades that she really doesn’t need, considering the overcast sky. She makes me smile, for despite her situation she has managed to pull her hair up into a chic little topknot and apply some lip gloss. Whatever the morning will bring she is determined to look presentable.
    ‘Well, you can stay here if you like and I’ll go,’ I say kindly, taking my phone out of my coat pocket to check that the keypad is locked and that the battery is charged.
    ‘No, no, come on, fresh air and all that. Who are you waiting to call you?’ she says, nodding at my phone.
    ‘Are you going to ask for the kit or shall I?’ I digress nonchalantly.
    ‘Oh, you, you please. I can’t ask, he knows me.’ She lights up a cigarette.
    ‘Well, he knows me too, we both go in there all the time, remember?’ We are often in the small corner-shop chemist on a boring Saturday afternoon, rifling