Page 57 of Stella is Starting Over

‘Bollocks,’ I say. ‘You might be having one of these, whether you like it or not, and you’re in your thirties, you’ve got a good job, you own a nice flat, you’re perfectly capable, so you might as well at least try to see some of the positives of having a kid.’

We put our shoes on and walk towards the station.

‘Okay, tell me one thing that would be fun about having a baby,’ I demand.

He thinks about it for a minute. ‘Parking in the really good parking spaces, right near the big Sainsbury’s.’

‘Yes!’ I agree. ‘That’s a great one! What else?’

He thinks for a while longer. ‘Paternity leave? Like an extra holiday?’

I decide not to tell him that paternity leave is to holiday as prison is to hotel. ‘Sure!’

‘I could work on a kid-friendly house,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Like, I could try to work out what the absolute perfect house for a family would be. And design it, and maybe one day I could build it.’

I want to stop and hug him, but I settle for an encouraging nod. ‘Exactly!’

He helps carry the pram up the stairs at the station, saving me my least favourite step of dragging it backwards, filled with terror that I’m going to drop Rose. On the train we look out the window into other people’s gardens and I keep pointing out the benefits of child rearing. ‘Loads of snacks,’ I say. ‘There’s never not a digestive biscuit in my handbag.’

‘Nack,’ says Rose.

‘Snack!’ I yelp back. ‘Rosie! That’s a new word!’ I beam at her, soaking up her brilliance, drinking in the roundness of her face and her total bemusement at my excitement. I scramble to give her one of the squashed blueberries I’ve decanted into a tiny Tupperware, because I need her to understand how amazing I think she is and her love language is mostly just fruit at this stage of her life. ‘That’s another magic one, when they start talking and suddenly they’re people instead of really needy pets.’

‘Yeah,’ Dom admits. ‘That’s fun.’

We wander around the zoo, showing Rose the animals. Dom hoists Rose up so that she can see the lizard hiding in the rainforest section, and again standing behind a queue of boys violently shoving each other by the monkey cages. I try to not let myself think, even for a moment, how much more fun this is, how this was the plan, how this was exactly what I wanted life to look like. After Rose has lost her mind at seeing a real-life sheep (arguably not a zoo animal, but this place isn’t famed for its biological diversity) she then starts whining. I put her back into the pram and pull the visor down, and within seconds she’s snoring gently.

‘I’m desperate for a wee,’ I say. ‘But if she hears a hand dryer she’ll wake up, she’s a psycho about them.’

‘I can stay with her,’ says Dom haltingly, clearly not sure that this is a good idea. But I want a wee without an audience for the first time in several days, so I slip into the loos and leave him gripping onto the buggy handle. When I’ve finished washing my hands in the monkey-themed sink, I come out and find Dom talking to a similarly trendy thirty-something, also tall and handsome and also holding on to the exact same pram. They look like they came off the production line at the same Trendy Dad factory.

‘I met a pram twin.’ Dom smiles as I return.

‘Isn’t it amazing off-road?’ the man says earnestly.

I have never taken the pram outside of Zone 3 so I take his word for it. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Amazing.’

‘I’d better get on, my other half’s got our twins in the reptile house. Nice to meet you.’ He heads off and Dom looks at me, astounded. ‘That man thought that I was a parent.’

‘You’re holding a pram in a children’s zoo. If you’re not a parent, he should really have called security.’

‘But still!’ he says, and I don’t want to dent his excitement. ‘Okay, what next?’

‘Pub?’ I suggest.

He looks shocked. ‘With a baby?’

‘With a sleeping baby.’

Rose will reliably nap for another hour, so we walk slowly through the park and up to a pub by the river, looking out over the water. It’s warm and the light is sparkling, even through the river is sludge brown. I get a Pimm’s, the silliest drink imaginable, and eat all the fruit out of it with my fingers, getting sticky juice on my top.

I briefly look at my phone and realise that I haven’t messaged Richard all day, so fire him off a picture of me from the zoo, Rose cropped out. See you tomorrow, can’t wait, I add. It’s sort of true. I mean I can wait, but no one ever means ‘can’t wait’, it’s just a sort of thing you say, isn’t it?

‘Anything from Florrie?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘Nothing. I’m worried for her.’

‘Did she seem in a bad way?’