Page 50 of Days You Were Mine

The band are putting the finishing touches to their album with the producer Brian Eno. If all goes to plan, the record will be mastered next month and released in February, timed to coincide with my show.

Brian thinks there are four definite hits on the album, one a ballad called ‘Cassiopeia’, written after our night on the beach stargazing. It’s bittersweet, a song not about our love, Jake’s and mine, but about Rick and Tom, their shame at the vitriol of passers-by. Every time I hear the refrain, ‘They built each other up but you tore them back down’, it pierces my heart.

Our lives fall into a routine as September leans into October. We wake at eight and go for breakfast, always together, always Bar Italia. The owner, Luigi, is our friend and he brings our cappuccino and croissants without us having to ask for them. More often than not he won’t let us pay.

‘It’s my gift,’ he says, ‘to the musician and artist who will soon be very rich. You can look after me when I’m old.’

I leave for the Slade half an hour later and Jake walks me partway there. We kiss goodbye on Wellington Street, sometimes for a long time, long enough to draw wolf whistles from people passing, sometimes with his tongue searching my mouth, my hands drawing his hips towards me.

‘And you think I can concentrate now?’ he says, every time.

Once at college, though, my focus is absolute, and I’ve barely looked up from my canvas, it seems, when Rick comes in at lunchtime and suggests going out for a sandwich. And it happens that on this lunchtime in early October, the leaves on the trees beginning their dramatic burn of yellow, gold and crimson, I am overcome by a sudden feeling of nausea, so that I sit down in the middle of the street, hand clamped against my sweating forehead.

‘Alice?’

Rick squats down beside me.

‘I’m going to be …’ The last word gets lost as I retch the watery contents of my stomach onto the pavement.

‘Something you ate?’ Rick says, pulling me up and skilfully sidestepping us away from the pile of puke.

‘I’ve barely eaten in the past few days. Maybe that’s the problem.’

But when we get to our favourite sandwich shop, as I hold my standard tuna and cucumber order in my hands, I find I must vomit again, lurching out onto the pavement. The moment I’ve been sick, I feel a little better.

‘I’m not ill,’ I say to Rick.

He looks at me, head on one side, taking bites out of his ham and cheese bap.

‘Well you look a bit green. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, like you’ve put on weight. You’re such a skinny thing normally.’

‘That’s what Jake says. Says he likes his women with meat on their bones.’

The evidence is there, swirling all around us, but it still takes time to piece the facts together.

‘I’m exhausted, that’s all it is. We’ve both been working so hard.’

Rick looks at me again.

‘What?’

‘Alice, my love, do you think you might be pregnant?’

‘I’m on the pill. How could I be pregnant?’

‘Sweetheart, I’m a gay man. How on earth would I know? But let’s go and find out.’

Rick, who has had his fair share of transitory sexual diseases, is a face around the Marie Stopes Clinic on Tottenham Court Road. The receptionist recognises him instantly. ‘Oh no, Richard, not you again,’ she says, though she is smiling.

‘Actually,’ his voice is low, conspiratorial, ‘it’s my friend. With an altogether different, er, dilemma.’

There’s an hour’s wait for the results, and rather than goingback to college, Rick and I sit in the pub with a half of beer that I cannot force down.

‘I’m pregnant,’ I tell him. ‘I know I am.’

There’s the new curve to my stomach, the heavier, fuller breasts, which are painful at times, the complete absence of a period, which should have been signal enough. If I hadn’t been so absorbed in my work, I might have noticed.

‘Not such a big deal these days,’ Rick says.

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