I won’t admit it’s my first time

ON THE face of it, life is looking good for Sara-jayne. She’s a popular radio personality, a best-selling author and she’s recently been reunited with her long-lost father, nearly 40 years after being given up for adoption as a baby. Best of all, she’s just found out she’s about to become a mother, with Enver, the “love of her life”.

She’s convinced that she’s finally heading towards her “happily ever after”. But six weeks after discovering she’s pregnant, Enver relapses on heroin and disappears. Devastated, Sara-jayne checks herself into The Clinic and despite the little life growing inside her, she realises she’s never felt more alone.

In the much-anticipated follow-up to her best-selling memoir “Killing Karoline”, Sara-jayne is forced, for the sake of her unborn child, to find a way to save herself. But to do this, she has to work out why everyone always leaves her. Why, like that song, is she always looking for love in all the wrong places? And why can’t she seem to break free from mad, bad love?

EXCERPT

“You can open your eyes.”

I’m at the family-planning clinic. I’m 16 and I’m pregnant. Maybe. I believe there is a reasonably strong possibility that I could be because I’ve had sex. Actual sex. The full kind. It’s been five minutes since I hovered inelegantly above the toilet bowl, knickers around my ankles, hand thrust between my legs. It’s been three minutes since I handed an austere-looking NHS nurse a warm pot of my piss and waited, with (ironically) crossed legs, to check whether in my brief (very, very brief) and largely forgettable firsttime fumble I’ve ruined my life.

After years of being the Ugly Duckling to my older brother’s gorgeous Black Swan, I’ve inexplicably blossomed into something desired and desirable. I’ve also managed to acquire myself a sweet-natured but irritatingly doting Nigerian boyfriend, Ebi.

Hence the sex. It’s thanks to Ebi, my absolute disregard for myself and my body and my willingness to do absolutely anything and be absolutely anybody for “love” that I’ve finally managed to cast off the painfully uncool shackles of a burdensome virginity.

SYDNEY PAGE

IF YOU’VE ever mistakenly left a note or a to-do list or worse, a love letter, behind in a library book, and figured your personal item was tossed by the librarian, you might be wrong.

In her 20 years as a librarian, Sharon Mckellar has unearthed all kinds of left-behind personal items from doodles to recipes to old photographs nestled between the pages of returned library books. She carefully removes them and reads them, then she scans and uploads them to the library’s website after scrubbing any personal identifying information.

“Part of the magic is that they sort of just appear,” Mckellar said. “Sometimes, they may have been in a book for a really long time before we notice them there.”

Mckellar marvels at each memento, no matter how mundane. She chronicles them all. It’d really become an albatross around my c**t. Weighing me down and impeding my efforts to clamber, even by one precious, precarious rung, up the ladder of teenage social standing. When you’re 16 and trying to ingratiate yourself with the popular girls, hymens are so last season.

I’m thankfully not stupid enough to have believed the idiotic chatter circulated around school about not getting pregnant “on your first time”, but I’m also not smart enough to have stolen more than one condom from my brother’s sock drawer, and we’d done it twice that afternoon. Mum had been in court all day and would be back late. Ebi and I had left college early, both feigning sickness, and caught the train back to my house, holding hands the whole way.

It hadn’t been bad. Granted, it hadn’t been great either. There was no blood, as some of the girls at school (and three Jilly Cooper novels) had suggested there might be. That had been a relief. It wasn’t terribly painful either. I’d just felt … full. I’d made sure I’d made all the right noises and said all the right things. I’d talked about things being wet and tight and said “c**k” quite a bit too. It seemed to do the trick. The last thing I wanted was for him to think during my first time that it was my first time.

I like Ebi. I do, but as he’d entered me, I’d immediately closed my eyes and started humming the theme tune from Poirot in my head. It was only when I couldn’t remember how it ended that I realised he’d stopped moving.

“You can open your eyes.”

He’d pulled out and I felt empty again.

“You can open your eyes … ” “Sara-jayne, you can open your eyes!”

I do and I see the nurse peering at me from behind her disapproving brow.

“Well, I imagine that comes as a huge relief,” she says, her cat’s-bum mouth pursed into nothingness.

“What? I … I mean, pardon?” I say apologetically. I’m sorry, for her and me.

“The test is negative – you are not pregnant,” she sighs and pointedly peels off the disposable latex gloves.

“I suggest you take some of these.” She hands me two packets of government-issue condoms. “They’re free,” she adds. “I also suggest you tell all your sexual partners to wear one during intercourse.”

All? Partners, plural?

Thanking her profusely, I shove them into the front pocket of my bag (where they will later be discovered by my mother) and leave, back through the waiting room. There I see Sandra Jones from my old high school, sitting in the corner, reading a leaflet and looking worried. I put my head down and scuttle out before she spots me.

In bed later that night, I place my hand over my mercifully still-uninhabited womb and thank my lucky stars. Sex is all right, I think, but the last thing I’d ever, ever want to be is a single mother.

For years, I rejected outright the idea that I might one day have children. There were a few reasons. One – the one I offered when people asked – was that I didn’t much care for them. I didn’t relish years spent in their company, wiping eternally runny noses or dealing with the daily rigmarole of the school run, wet weekends spent shivering at the edge of muddy soccer fields or regularly having salt-and-vinegar chips and chicken nuggets stomped into my carpets. And even if mine were bearable, there was no guarantee their friends would be. Children move in packs. There’d be no way to avoid the mess, the chaos, the neediness, the responsibility.

Another reason why I didn’t want kids, and the one I least liked to admit to, was fear. I was absolutely terrified that I’d be a bad mother – and I had good reason to think I might be.

I was seven weeks old the first time I had my heart broken. It was a Tuesday afternoon in September. It happened on an inbreath, a whisper. Silent, but significant, under a cloud-heavy sky in a green pocket of London’s buzzing SE22.

While dust trucks cleared away the evidence of a long, lazy, end-ofsummer weekend in the capital, black girls in beaded braids and too-short school skirts skipped home, sucking gobstoppers and avoiding the cracks in the pavement in honour of their grandmothers’ superstitions. Despite the clouds, behind the door of the three-storey Victorian terrace at No. 160 Peckham Rye Road it was still warm enough for the sash windows to have been thrust upward, inviting in fat bluebottles and the hum of rushhour traffic.

Inside, a baby girl not yet even aware she was a separate creature to her mother, lay wrapped in a yellow blanket. She closed her tiny fist around the finger of the slight, shaking young woman she had belonged to for every second of her always for the last time. She could not know as she searched the anguished, crumpled face to find her own that the scent she inhaled softly at night, the breast on which she suckled and sought comfort and which she believed to be her home, her heart and heartbeat would soon leave her as if she had never even existed.

Despite the gravity of the moment, the foreverness of it all, there was nothing that happened to signify this as the end, the before to what would come after. There was nothing immediately tangible or notable that marked the exact point of severance. Not an almighty thunderclap, a tremor underfoot, the sounding of an alarm or the ringing of a bell, the death knell. Nobody jotted down the time of death on that brief chapter of my young life. There was nothing, except perhaps the shuddering shoulders and swallowed guilt of a young woman who had chosen against nature, who had betrayed the bond between mother and child and, in an instant, had torn from my infant chest a piece of me that I would spend the rest of my life trying to reclaim and slot back into place. There was nothing.

Nothing except the sound of footsteps leaving.

¡ Mad Bad Love is published by Melinda Ferguson Books, an imprint of NB Publishers and retails at R320.