Dear Nobody by Berlie Doherty Page A

in edgeways.’
    I shrugged. The pub was full of noisy people, laughing, talking too loud, pushing against each other. It reminded me of a cattle stall over at Hope market. If you thought about it too much, it even smelt like it.
    â€˜I’m going cycling in France this summer,’ Tom said. ‘Don’t fancy coming, do you?’
    I shook my head.
    â€˜We always said we’d do it after the As. You’re fit enough, aren’t you?’
    â€˜Haven’t done any long distance since we did the Dales.’
    â€˜Plenty of time to work up to it. Do a long run every weekend.’
    I sighed and shook my head. It would mean four weeks away from Helen.
    â€˜France, though!’ Tom leaned forward, raising his glass a little like a toast. ‘ La belle France! Baguettes at dawn! Say you’ll come! It’ll be miserable on my own. I’ll go anyway, but it won’t be the same.’
    I leaned back in my bench. France! We’d always said we’d do it, he was right, before we went off to university.
    â€˜You were dead keen before the mocks, Chris.’
    â€˜I’ve gone off it, that’s all.’
    Maybe Helen would come out with Ruthlyn and camp in Brittany and we could travel there and back with them. What’s it like, camping when you’re six months’ pregnant? What’s it like, being pregnant?
    â€˜Wake up,’ said Tom.
    â€˜I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘What if Hamlet had got Ophelia pregnant?’
    â€˜Bloody hell!’ said Tom. He drained back his glass of beer and stared at me, froth clinging like a moustache to his top lip. ‘Bloody hell, Chris!’

    March 22nd
    Dear Nobody,
    I bought a home pregnancy test today. I was sick again this morning. You are an alien growth in me. You are a disease. I want you not to exist.
    I have to know.
    I stayed off school till mid-morning. Mum and Dad were both out at work. I wish I could have asked Ruthlyn to buy the kit for me but I just didn’t have the courage. I went to Boots in town where I wouldn’t be recognized, and stood dithering by the counter and looking away and wondering about buying throat pastilles instead, and then, of all things, I was served by a male assistant. He didn’t even look at me. Maybe he was embarrassed too, or maybe he’s bored stiff of selling these things to scared school girls. I wore make-up, which I never do because it makes my face itch. I pinched it out of Mum’s room. Iwanted to look grown-up, but when I saw myself in the mirror in Boots I looked ghastly, deathly white under orange daubs. I went home on the bus clutching my little parcel as if I was scared that someone was going to mug me and run off with it.
    The house was so quiet. I took the parcel up to my room and drew the curtain. The kit consisted of a tray and a plastic stopper with some liquid in and a little test tube and a dipper thing that looked like a swizzle stick for a cocktail. It should have had one of those paper umbrellas on the top. Everything was in miniature, like a child’s toy chemistry set. I had to pour the liquid from the plastic bag thing into the test tube and immediately it went bright purple. Something like giggles kept popping out of me, only I don’t think I was laughing. Actually, I think I was crying. Aloud, you know, in little loud hiccupping bursts. My hands were dithering so much that it’s a wonder I didn’t spill everything over the carpet. But I did it, somehow I managed to read the instructions and hold things the right way up and do it. Then I had to wait five minutes.
    Have you any idea how long five minutes last? The silence in the house while I sat looking at my watch was like that deathly quiet you get in a three-hour exam, I swear it. Three hours when you read and read the questions and you don’t know any of the answers. I tried to think of all the things people would be doing during that time. Mum would be typing