Originally published on Medium.com

When I was 18, I had a boyfriend with pink hair. He was in a band, and lived in a magnolia-coloured bedsit that he’d wallpapered with Beatles posters and swirly portraits of Syd Barrett. I myself had purple hair, stayed over around five nights a week, and contributed nothing to the décor but coffee spillages.

Since neither of us was working, or had any money, I had assumed Valentine’s Day would go the way of the day before — me flicking through charity-shop Philip K Dick paperbacks, him noodling quietly on his guitar on the rug (18 was apparently my year of cliché), perhaps later, a Ginster’s pasty.

But instead we spent it at the VD clinic.

That I called it a ‘VD clinic’ should give you some idea of how streetwise I was. I was a very young 18, just two years out of boarding school, with a head full of books and films. Although I was nominally ‘all for’ family planning, the prospect of just strolling off the street into a place where they might stick things into your pudenda sent horrendous images of grinning Victorian backstreet abortionists spiralling through my mind.

I found the clinic in the A-Z (this was before Google Maps) and walked there on numb feet, holding my boyfriend’s hand.

“It’s just in case,” he was telling me. “We’re probably fine.” I nodded mutely, but my brain was hissing ‘Pregnantpregnantpregnant,’ at me. I couldn’t summon up any actual images or implications of pregnancy, just the skull-freezing certainty that there had been A Problem With The Condom and now I was in The Worst Trouble Of My Life.

The clinic itself was a bungalow on a suburban street. By the time we got there I was sailing close to hysteria, and the neat privet hedges and municipal parking signs jarred violently with all the drama in my head. My brain shivered with cognitive dissonance.

Stiffly I walked into the waiting room, ignoring the sea of gum-chewing TV hookers and murderous junkies, and disappeared behind a copy of Hello!Magazine from approximately 1882.

When I looked up again, the hookers and junkies had somehow resolved themselves into a benign pregnant woman reading a novel, another terrified-looking teenage couple and, inexplicably, a mixed group of twenty-somethings, joshing good-naturedly as though they were in a restaurant. I couldn’t figure out who they were or why they were there. Soon, three new people came along, carrying sandwiches, and the group greeted them with a cheery “weyyy”.

My boyfriend shot me a flummoxed look. Was it an orgy? I telepathised at him. Do you think they’ve got herpes?

Then the nurse was ready for me.

What had I been expecting? A lecture? Cold metal in my vagina? A curtain that whipped open to reveal my furious and disappointed mother? What I got was a tired-looking woman matter-of-factly asking me questions about my periods and my partners. There was an awkward three minutes when I had to undo my sixteen-hole lace-up boots in order to be weighed, and felt like a cretin, but other than that the whole process was painless.

I came away dazed, and with two pills: one to take now, and one to take exactly eight hours from now.

“I didn’t realise the morning-after pill came in twos,” I said, idiotically.

“You may experience some nausea,” the nurse told me.

Instead, I experienced intense relief and several mugs of sugary tea. I was sitting in a local café, reading the emergency cover leaflet over and over. Within 72 hours. Approximately 84% effectiveness, provided that you take the second pill, too.

I had six hours to go.

My boyfriend went off to play a gig. I went home, drew a bath and sat in it, reading A Scanner Darkly. That killed a couple of hours. Then I called a friend and told her all about it, which took roughly 45 minutes. If this had been today, I could probably have spent the rest of the time mooching about the internet, or writing this. But I didn’t have the internet, or even a computer, so I napped, read more, tried to improve our TV reception by fashioning the wire-coat-hanger-aerial into new and exciting shapes, sat through a snow-flecked showing of Jurassic Park, and took my second tablet.

Then two things happened:

  1. The familiar tinky-tink of the e.r. theme tune started, and I got excited because it was that episode I’d never seen, where Dr Ross (played by George Clooney) saves the boy in the storm drain (played by some boy in a storm drain).
  2. I started to experience nausea.

It began as a slow, thick tickle in the base of my skull, nothing really to do with my stomach, and the slight sensation that I was somehow seesawing up and down. I ignored it, and concentrated on being scandalised by Dr Ross going into private practice.

Soon, though, the jig was up. No matter how distracted I was by the angst tearing Dr Ross apart (man, he loved that e.r., but he just… couldn’t…takeitanymore), the nausea kept rising. I felt woozy and jellyish, my saliva glands were ramping up production, and my stomach was roiling like a washing machine. But I had to hold it in for a little while longer, otherwise I could throw up the pill, and then I could be pregnant.

So, I watched e.r.

Dr Ross get a flat tyre on the way to his fundraiser while I sat with my hand clamped over my mouth. He heroically pulled an injured child from a rain-swollen sewer while I did Lamaze breathing. I sipped water while Dr Benton rolled his eyes at Dr Carter, and a gelatinous pressure started to rise in my chest as news helicopters shone spotlights down on Dr Ross and he started to question whether private practice was for him.

Towards the end of the show none of these tricks were working. I was seeping cold sweat, and tears, and dry-heaving, then wet-heaving, and forcing it all back down. Only when the credits started to roll did I allow myself to sprint to the bathroom, where I was not discreet.

I am not a dainty vomiter. I would make a terrible bulimic. My stomach is loathe to let go its bounty, so firstly I have to sort of galvanically roar it up my oesophagus and bark “RALPH!” or “HUGH!” into the U-Bend, sounding for all the world as though I’m a demon mother calling my sons in for dinner from three miles away.

Then I always have a pathetic little post-vomit cry. Roar/whimper, roar/whimper. If you’re not looking, it sounds like the devil is eating a little girl.

And that’s what my boyfriend found when he came home. The front door was in direct line of sight from the bathroom, so he must have entered the flat with his bouquet of petrol station flowers and seen me — pale and shiny, and slumped halfway into the toilet, shouting boys’ names, making littlesploosh noises, and crying.

“Happy Valentine’s Day —” he said, hesitantly.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I replied. “RALPH.”

(His name wasn’t Ralph)

(Or Hugh)

(We are no longer together)

(I didn’t get pregnant)

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!