The Ice Marathon Read Online Free PDF

notice. The humidity clung to my face, forming pools of water
on my brow. My eyes stung from the grass pollen lurking in the air. In fact,
the heat was getting to me so much that I found I had to pause before
continuing my walk up the stairs.
    I felt light-headed. Still, I was looking forward to seeing
Tina and doing our follow-up. Her baby was overdue, so this was almost
certainly the last time I’d see her before she became a mother. From what I’d
been able to glean on the phone, she was thriving. She loved her flat and had
even managed to find an affordable second hand car – something that thrilled her
to bits.
    Just as I was about to knock on the door to her flat, a wave
of heat spread across my head. I felt prickles all over my skin. I realised
that I was having difficulty seeing properly …
    The next thing I knew, everything seemed to be dark. I
didn’t feel that I’d been asleep, but something wasn’t right. I appeared to be
slumped on the floor of a corridor. The side of my ribs stung. I looked up and
saw a pair of intense green eyes looking down at me. As I began to focus, I
recognised Tina.
     “What happened?” I asked.
    “I think you must have fainted,” came the soft, soothing
tones of Tina’s voice.
    “I did?”
    I tried to sit up. This wasn’t right. I was supposed to be
supporting Tina, not the other way around. I noticed that her face had filled
out a little; her skin seemed smoother and radiant; even her hair was shinier.
    “You’re looking well,” I told her.
    “I wish I could say the same to you,” she said, looking
deeply concerned.
    “Thanks,” I replied, trying to laugh but finding that it
hurt.
    “Let’s get you to the doctor.”
    “It was just a faint,” I tried to reassure her.
    She replied firmly, “Do you usually faint?”
    * * *
    I had to get a lift home from the doctors; I felt too
flabbergasted to walk. How could I put one foot in front of the other having
heard what I’d just heard? I was so gobsmacked that it was as much as I could
do to remember to breathe. A blizzard of questions stormed through my mind.
    How the hell was I pregnant? I was on the pill and had been
for years. I never missed a single day – I knew this because I took it with my
other medications.
    How the hell could I have gotten to be twenty-three weeks pregnant without noticing? I mean sure, I knew I was putting on weight, but it
hadn’t even occurred to me that a baby might be in there building itself a
tent! My particular pill prescription meant that I only bled every three
months. Why hadn’t I noticed that three had become five ?
    How the hell was I going to tell the father? ‘Father’? The
word just sounded so wrong, so out of place. That man had screwed me on a
kitchen cabinet – there was nothing paternal about that. I could barely even
make small talk with him. How was I ever going to tell him that somehow that crazy, insane glitch in our otherwise flimsy and frosty association, had
resulted in the creation of a twenty-three-week-old mini-us?
    How the hell – how the hell – how the hell ?
    I stamped up and down on the spot. Then I thought of the
baby. Would he or she be happy about the aggressive wobbling? My body was no
longer my own. There was an uninvited guest at the party.
    However, accepting that I was pregnant, accepting that I was
nearly in my third trimester, and telling the father were all temporary problems
and relatively small in the overall scheme of things. There was something else,
something much bigger and much more crucial – something that could harm both me
and my baby, perhaps permanently. I withdrew a packet of little white pills
from my handbag and frowned.
    * * *
    I sat on the sofa surrounded by a spectrum of tissues – my
tears really brought out their colours. I looked at them – at least four
dozen.  I hadn’t expected to get through four dozen tissues when I awoke this
morning.
    It was at times like this that I wished I had a more
sympathetic