Page 87 of Did My Love Life Shrink in the Wash?
‘Kels is just some social hanger-on. She likes the freebies. I think she’s leaked stories about Jethro to the press before.’
‘Oh.’ Surely you shouldn’t have lunch with people like that then? But now doesn’t feel like the time for a lecture.
‘Arewefriends then?’ I ask her. It feels ridiculous to ask this, like I’m seven years old and confirming that we might get to play together in the playground.
‘Well, yeah?’
‘I mean you have peed in front of me,’ I joke.
She looks at me strangely. ‘I pee in front of everyone. I’m a model. I have no inhibitions, I have to strip in front of strangers.’
‘Oh, well… It’s not what I usually do.’
It feels good to lay down the peeing boundaries now if we are going to proceed with this relationship.
‘Does Jethro not want the baby then?’ I ask.
Her eyes glaze over and she exhales, almost laughing. ‘It’s not Jethro’s.’
‘Oh.’
My eyes scan the room on receiving that information. That sucks. For Jethro. And for her. But it makes me piece together what I know, what I’ve seen.
‘Harry?’ I whisper.
She nods, staring into her lap. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for about eighteen months. I brought him to your party. He was Boba Fett.’
I pause to take that information in. Lucy said you did the fandango in Emma’s downstairs bathroom. We can officially put that party down as the worst party in the history of birthday celebrations.
‘So Jethro found out?’
She nods. ‘To be fair, we’d both been doing our own thing for a while. He’d been shagging some music exec on tour but the pregnancy was the final nail in the coffin.’
Momentarily, I think about how Instagram has always painted a very different picture. If you were to follow their feeds you’d see they were still taking pictures of their non-dairy low-fat coffees and happy faces in paid promotion work, and there was no mention of a separation, not even a cryptic meme referring to heartbreak.
‘Does Harry know?’ I ask.
‘I called him before you. I’ve been calling for a lifetime. Today, he told me I was making this up to get his attention. Told me not to ring him anymore. Or talk to him. And told me it was my responsibility to do the right thing and get rid of this baby,’ she says in a whisper.
The emotion, the raw fragility in Yasmin’s voice, destroys me.
‘And then I could only think to call you.’ She sits on the edge of the bed, cradling her head. ‘I just don’t know what he’s thinking. All that time we’ve been dating, he’s been telling me he’s going to leave his wife, that he loves me, and then as soon as this happens, he fucks off and tells me it’s over. He tells me he has a family, that I would be breaking it up.’
I’m doing a whole series of mental calculations in my head. This was not a one-off snog in a corridor or a rando shag at my least favourite birthday party ever. This was a whole affair. And I think about what Giles told me about Harry, about how he was a social climber, someone vying for work and attention and my heart twinges that Yasmin fell into that trap. Because her heart aches; she entered into that relationship with the intention of something greater. I am conflicted, too. Shouldn’t I be feeling angry with her for conducting an affair with a married man? Weirdly, I’m not. This girl, who I thought to be devoid of emotion, is revealing herself to me, peeling back the wrapper slowly. Before, I thought her barely human, some caricature of a girl I used to go to school with. But now, I’ve seen a baby growing inside her, its tiny heart beating. All the emotion that comes with this life-changing moment flows out of her. You can read it all over her perfect face. And I just want to hug her. I want to tell her it will all be alright. I’ve done this, I’ve been there, it’s not completely awful.
Joe gurgles in the corner and we both look down at him. That plum-sized baby in your stomach could one day grow into that. It’s amazing, if terrifying. Yasmin stares at Joe for a moment too long then gets her phone out, scanning numbers.
‘I’ll book an Uber. How are you and Joe getting home?’ she asks me, dabbing at her tears with her sleeves. I hand her a tissue. Oh God, me and my bleeding heart. Because I think of her returning to that empty house now, how it’s devoid of company and warmth and her tiny whizzing dog. I recall how I felt when Will first left and the crushing loneliness of him not being there. At least in that moment, I had a Joe. That feeling I know she’ll carry forces the words out of my mouth.
‘I’m driving. Come, I’ll give you a lift and you can come back to mine for a bit.’
Track Nineteen
‘Parklife’ – Blur (1994)
‘Yasmin King is living with you?’ asks Lucy, her words slow and enunciated. ‘You really are some stupid but very special saint, aren’t you?’
‘Not living, really. She kinda just pops by with food and coffees. Like nice food, too. Bento boxes, frittata and actual chimichangas from posh food places.’
