Break the Child: Chapter Two: OMFG!

                                                Chapter Two: OMFG

Oh My Flipping God! Oh my flipping God! Oh my flipping God! I am in total and utter discernable shock. I have never wanted to swear so badly in my life. But I won’t because it is the sign of an underdeveloped vocabulary.

                I almost daren’t tell. It’s a secret.

                My mother is pregnant!

                Can you believe that? My mum, pregnant.

                I’m going to take a great big deep breath, and then I’m going to go downstairs— if it’s safe down there, things have been tense— and get a drink and then I’m going to tell you all about it.

                Back now, that’s better. So, I gets in from school. I had loads of stuff to write about school today, but none of that’s important now, except for Davie Matheson’s flatulence—that means farting. I’m trying out lots of new words—it’s disgusting. So, my mum’s all flustered and distracted. She’s been acting proper weird lately, now I know why. So, she’s walking backwards and forwards picking things up and putting them down. She starts cleaning out the cutlery drawer, and that just shows that something’s going on. My dad comes in and takes her in his arms. Proper Gone with the Wind type stuff. Next thing is he tells me to go to my room and make sure that the door’s shut properly. C’mon and they expect me not to wonder what’s afoot, Sherlock Holmes says, ‘What’s afoot,’ Cool, isn’t it? As I’m going upstairs, I hear my Dad say, ‘Is it true? Are you sure?’ Then it all goes quiet for a bit.

                I try to concentrate on equilateral triangles, but it isn’t easy when you know something major’s going down. Next thing, I hear dad shouting.

                ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me? For Christ sake Annie, you’re not a bit of a kid. I’d be less surprised if Kate came home with a bombshell like that.’

                Well, he needn’t bring me into it, whatever it is. (‘cause I didn’t know at that point, see) I always get the blame for everything. Whatever goes wrong it’s always ‘Kate did this,’ and ‘Kate did that.’ That’s when I got scared. Dad was really mad. He doesn’t usually swear much but he was shouting and yelling and proper going off on one.

                ‘What the bloody hell are we going to do, Annie?’ I’m sorry for swearing, but it’s exactly what he said, just like that. And Mr Bates, that’s my English teacher, he lets us swear, as long as it’s in composition. Don’t know what Dad’d make of it though.  He carried on ranting at Mum. ‘Shit, I don’t know what to say. What are we going to do?’ I hope my parents never see this, but he can hardly have a go, can he?

                And my mum was crying, really sobbing loud. And then she started screaming back at him. ‘Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do Steve, you can do what you like, but I’m going to have a—’

                ‘Shush, she’ll hear you.’ Mum stopped shouting then and went back to crying.

                ‘We’re going to have to get her down and tell her.’ And then everything went quiet. I could hear them talking but I couldn’t catch what they were saying.

                ‘Kate, dinner’s ready,’ shouts dad, in this squeaky voice, like he’s trying to be normal, but his voice doesn’t believe him. I goes down and everything’s really quiet. He said that dinner’s ready. But it isn’t out yet. And then Mum comes in and she’s crying because she’s burned the chicken. Dad says not to worry about that, easy for him to say, he’s probably been out for lunch with clients. I’m starving and it was yucky strewed apples for pudding today. He says, ‘We’ll heat something up later,’ and he tells me to sit down.

                Now I’m really freaked out. Sitting at the dining table for a family meeting is never something to my benefit. I can feel tears stinging my eyes and I just know that I’m going to bawl like a baby. I know it; I just know that they’re going to tell me that they’re getting a divorce. I said in my last Diary, didn’t I? I said that my mum was having an affair. Only she isn’t, now I know what it is, I’m just grossed out. It’s worse than an affair, she’s been having sex with my dad and whichever way you look at it that’s just disgusting. I look up because the silence is killing me. I know that my mascara’s run down my face and I know I’m for it, ‘cause my dad doesn’t like me wearing make-up.

                ‘Sweetheart, we’ve got something to tell you, and, well to be honest, I don’t know how to start.’ He didn’t even mention the mascara. ‘The thing is, we’ve had a bit of a shock. But we’ve got some news for you. We think it’s wonderful and we’re just hoping that you’re going to be as happy about it as we are.’

                Mum sniffs and wipes her nose on her sleeve, something else that she can do, but I’d be grounded for life, for. If this is happy, I dread to think what they’d be like if we won a holiday at Disney World Florida—it’d have to be the one in Florida `cause Jenny Delaney says the one in Paris is pants and you have to queue, for like forever to get on the rides, unless you’re disabled and then you can just get on. It’s cool that they let disabled people go first, otherwise their wheels might seize up, but I wouldn’t want to be disabled just to get on a ride at Paris.

                ‘The thing is love, Mum’s having a baby.’

                ‘Oh yeah, whose baby? How long we having it for?’

                Mum let out another sob and dad coughed. ‘What I mean is, we, that’s your mum and me, we’re both having a baby, together, your mum’s pregnant.’

                My brain had caught up, God, I blurt out some stupid things, sometimes. I’d already got the gist of what he meant. But it was so out of this world that I couldn’t believe it. I mean you don’t expect it, do you? So, then I felt really stupid. It was a shock; I can tell you. ‘No, that’s my Mum, she can’t be pregnant.’

                ‘Tell me about it, that’s what I thought, but she is. I think I’ve got my head around it now, and I think it’s fantastic. You’re going to have a little brother or sister.’

                You don’t say, I thought, but I hadn’t a clue what to reply, the best I could come up with was, ‘Wow,’

                ‘Well what do you think?’

                ‘I don’t know,’ Mum hadn’t spoken a word, ‘What does Mum think?’

                ‘She’s as delighted about it as I am, aren’t you, love? He said, giving her hand a squeeze. She burst into floods of tears, which set me off, which made her worse. Dad kept talking about what a surprise it was, he’d changed that from shock, which is what he’d called it at first.

                And all this after they’d sat me at the table, at the last family meeting, in fact, mob handed, and me on my own without any backup. They gave me ‘The Talk’ and I had to sit there squirming and wishing for the floor to open up and swallow me. They had the audacity—that means cheek, proper big cheeks, like bum cheeks— to lecture me on safe sex, contraception, venereal disease, I sat through the excruciating lot of it. But it’s them that’s been having the unprotected sex. If I didn’t have to show respect to my parents, I’d have told Dad to put something on the end of it.

                And now I’m sitting in my room. We still haven’t had dinner but I’m not hungry anymore. How do I feel? Like, I really don’t know. We’re having a baby. That means I’m not the baby, anymore. I’m not going to be the spoilt, only child. I’ve got this knot in my stomach and I think its excitement. It’d be so sick to have a kid sister.

                But mainly I just want to ring Sal and tell her all about it. I can’t, I’ve been sworn to secrecy and it’s not like a Kelly secret where I can go straight to Sal and tell her, and then swear her to secrecy. You know? Like a double jeopardy type secret. It’s a real big, adult kind of secret. I think I might burst.              

                OMFG—Mother has just blown up the microwave. She put a family lasagne in on full power, complete with the metal tray. It’s an official fact, pregnancy in the over thirties should carry a public health warning, it drives you nuts.

Dad went ballistic. He yelled and shouted and called her stupid, which really peed me off. She’s my mum; he’s got no right to call her stupid.

                Ten minutes later I’m in my room crying because it’s been an emotional night, and I hear them downstairs giggling like a pair of kids. I hear dad say, ‘Boom!’ and off they go again, proper hysterical.

I think that there’s a strong possibility that I got knocked on the head on the way home from school today and, in my real life, I’m lying in hospital, in a coma, because this cannot be happening.