Destination Chile. Katy Colins

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ