That I did, with a little help from a friend. At least, I thought she was a friend. Earlier on in my pregnancy, Cathy was the one who’d chirped so gleefully that I was lucky I didn’t have to do PE anymore, since I had “an illegitimate reason”. Yeah, I know, I should have smacked her. I was so dumb I thought we were laughing together. We were most assuredly not laughing together – not even close. She was having a go at me and I was too stupid to realise it. I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next. But I was. Of course I was.

After saying goodbye to my other friends, I walked with her to the car, thinking I’d say hi to her mother. But as we approached the parking area, she started acting nervous, eyes darting back and forth – I thought she was scared of muggers or Nigerian drug dealers or something. Turns out she was just embarrassed to be seen with me.

I spotted her mother’s car and was about to wave, when she squealed, “Quick, out the way before she sees you!” With that, she unceremoniously shoved me behind an oleander bush. Centre of gravity not being what it was, I stumbled and almost fell head first into the traffic. What a barrel of laughs.

I was more shocked than angry at first. Once I’d regained my balance (which took a while), I marched off in a huff and never spoke to her again. I just don’t understand why some people have to be so damn nasty. And I couldn’t believe that a person who’d once called herself my friend would rather have me chewing mouths full of poisonous plant while being driven over by a school bus, than have her mother realise I wasn’t a virgin. I couldn’t fathom what was so bad about me. I was still me, still the same, nice person I’d always been. I just had a really big stomach – visible proof that I’d once had sex. And what did that say about me? As far as I was concerned, all it said was that I’d once had sex. Juicy bit of info, to be sure, but how much did it really matter? It said nothing about how I’m kind to animals and beggars, how much I love my family, how determined I was to be a good mother and make my child proud. Nothing about the person in my head. I just don’t get it.

I mean, how many other girls were bonking anything that moved, merrily and with reckless abandon, but just never got pregnant? Lots. Lots and lots of girls. And boys. The only difference was the lack of tangible evidence (if you didn’t count the stray condom wrappers, often dishevelled clothing and ominous silences from bedrooms – all quite easy to detect if parents didn’t have their heads so far up their butts). So parents could tell themselves this wasn’t true, their children had been brought up better than to screw around and get pregnant. They could paddle around in the muddy waters of Denial, blissfully unaware that their offspring were banging one another like wanton rabbits, but that they had been lucky. So far. They hadn’t yet spotted the Man-Eating Crocodile of Tragic Teenage Pregnancy floating silently, only its nostrils visible above the water, nor the Raging Hippo of Random Oozy Sexually Transmitted Diseases lurking there in the reeds.

It’s all great fun until someone loses a leg.

***

Picture this. The place: Maintenance Office at local Magistrate’s Court – a nightmare in dusty green-flecked lino and sound-proofed walls. The place existed in a time warp – a pristine example of early-eighties apartheid government institutional crapness.

The players: me, my giant belly (it was around the same time as the Oleander Bush Incident, so I was about seven months pregnant) and my grim-faced parents, David and his even more grim-faced mother, and lastly, an efficient, youngish, curly-haired social worker type.

We were here on a mission of grave consequence – to discuss David’s financial contribution. Maintenance.

If I’d thought the daggers were bad the night we all met… well, I was wrong. There was so much sharp-edged weaponry flying across that room I’m surprised anybody was left standing.

Waiting for our appointment was torture. We all had to sit together on these horrific, wobbly, wooden benches flanking the walls of the passage. Side by side we sat, staring at the walls, at the scuffed, sticky tiles. Staring at anything rather than each other. Somehow, since David and I had broken up, relations between our families had gone from tactful, UN-style civility to full-on, Level One terror alert. I don’t know how it happened, actually. I don’t think David and I even spoke that day, except to say hello. It was all terribly awkward. I wished I could have been anywhere else at all – undergoing anaesthetic-free root canal treatment at the hands of a drunk, Parkinson’s Disease-suffering dentist, for instance. Would have been a treat compared with this agony of bristling, embarrassed silence. The air crackled with dirty looks and bad vibes. As I watched, a fat fly buzzed slowly past us, straight into no-man’s land, where it was struck with the force of five people’s barely contained hostility. Death was instantaneous. The fly didn’t suffer. He just stopped buzzing in mid-air and plopped onto the lino. All that was surprising was that he didn’t burst into flame.

We were eventually called in, and after some uncomfortable musical chairs (You sit… No, really. I insist, you sit down – Somebody, somewhere, must know why there’s always one bum more than chair), we got started. I was surprised when the maintenance lady spoke directly to me, and not to my parents.

“Right, so Tracy, what expenses do you expect to have? What do you need to buy for baby?” she asked. She’d done this before and was treating me no different to any of the other mothers she saw every day.