Acrobat

I walk along beside the train to the front, so that I can alight near the steps that take me over the bridge. When I reach the second carriage, I press the door button, and it pauses agonisingly before deciding to open and let me in. In that second, I look through the glass and see a girl struggling with a pushchair, but it’s too late; I’m already committed to that carriage. And anyway, it’s like picking a scab; I get some sort of perverse comfort from checking that it still hurts all the way through.

I choose the empty set of four seats, assuming that she will take over the empty set of six, but she doesn’t; she sits down opposite me, and her roly-poly baby fixes me with a stare. The girl is younger than me, wearing lots of black eyeliner, slim and pretty. The baby is wearing jeans and a pink t-shirt, and has a most engaging smile. The baby burps loudly and the mum excuses her. I watch them tussle with a mobile phone, try various sitting positions out for their degree of suitability, stand – with support – with arms and legs outstretched like a brave little star wearing only one sock because the other wriggled off her foot a moment before.

I jam the earphones of my iPod into my ears and turn up the volume to block the burbles of baby conversation, and I try to sink into my book, but I can’t stop my eyes from sliding up from the page, a surreptitious glance, a stab of envy. If I count on my fingers I can guess that I should have been nearly 24 weeks by now. I should be sitting here with a big pregnant glow, and we would exchange knowing smiles, and I would be in the same club as her. I would be included. My arms ache with emptiness, but I don’t want to hold that baby, I want it to be mine.

As the train stops, the guard comes out of his cubby hole to be solicitous, and another passenger picks up the discarded dummy and hands it to the mum. Someone else helps to lift the pushchair down from the train, and advises her to hurry before the rain starts. I get off on my own, unnoticed, unspecial, and cross the road to my house. When I shut the door, I see another pregnant woman come out of the station, her t-shirt stretched tight over a bump like a swollen pumpkin.

I didn’t eat cakes in the canteen today, where everyone was waving off a woman on her last day before maternity leave. I didn’t answer an email from my friend, stuck at home with her 8-week old child. Last week I read an article in the Guardian about women leaving it too late, and looked in my diary to see if I would be ovulating yet. I’m running out of time.

I don’t want to be obsessed with ovulation and folic acid; and I don’t want to have sex under pressure, restricted and regulated for optimal chance of conception. I want the same happy accident, without the unhappy part; to close my eyes and forget about it, and open them to find that my wish has come true, unplanned but wanted. I never, ever thought that I could feel like this.