There were black and white drawings to help. Take the tip off. Wee mid-stream. Wait five minutes. Didn’t look too difficult. It needed a final sketch of a woman with a big smile – either ecstatic to be pregnant or overwhelmingly relieved not to be.

Shannon had been taught from a young age to hover in public lavatories so as not to make contact with the potential diseases on the seat, but that was far too difficult to manage at the same time as urinating on a plastic stick. A bout of VD was the least of her worries right now. She sent a silent apology to her mother and sat down on the toilet.

The wee wouldn’t come. What with the throwing up and the three kilos of ginger biscuits, her bladder was drier than the damn Sahara. She took a deep breath and breathed out slowly. Just relax. Think about a stream of water. A bubbling brook. The soda siphon at a frat party. There you go.

Now she needed to put the stick in mid-stream. How mid was mid? Did it have to be exactly halfway through? How would she know? Shit, it was starting to slow down. She needed to get it in there. Was it in the right place? Was she weeing in the right place? Dammit. She’d peed all over her hand. Nice.

Now she had to wait. Patience did not come easily to Shannon. Especially when her whole life was in the balance. Outside the cubicle, the queue of annoyed shoppers was mumbling and shuffling their feet. Let them use one of the other cubicles; she needed to get this done. After laying the test on the back of the cistern on a folded square of toilet tissue – she had some standards – she turned her back on it. How could her whole life be decided by a thin strip of plastic and a chemical reaction? Please be negative. Please.

The test took five minutes. She set the timer on her phone. Do not look at it until the timer beeps. But she couldn’t just stand here. Doing nothing.