Helen Fielding - Bridget Joness Diary

Not so with the Instants, which are very much a participation thing, with six cash figures to be scratched off – often quite a hard and skilled job – and never giving you the feeling that you didn't have a chance. Three amounts the same secures a win, and in my experience you always get very close, often with as many as two matching pairs for amounts as great as ?50,000.

Anyway, you can't deny yourself all pleasures in life. I'm only on about four or five a day and, besides, I'm going to stop soon.

Alcohol units 14, cigarettes 64, calories 8400 (v.g., though bad to have counted. Slimming obsession v. bad), Instants 0.

At 8:45 last night I was running a relaxing aromatherapy bath and sipping camomile tea when a car burglar alarm started up. I have been waging a campaign on our street against car burglar alarms which are intolerable and counterproductive since you are more likely to get your car broken into by an angry neighbor trying to silence the burglar alarm than by a burglar

This time, however, instead of raging and calling the police, I merely breathed in through flared nostrils and murmured, 'inner poise.' The doorbell rang. I picked up the intercom. A v. posh sheep-voice bleated, 'He's having a fucking affair.' Then there was hysterical sobbing. I rushed downstairs, where Magda was outside the flat in floods of tears fiddling under the steering wheel of Jeremy's Saab convertible, which was emitting a 'dowee-dowee-doowee' of indescribable loudness, all lights flashing, while the baby screamed as if being murdered by a domestic cat in the car seat.

'Turn it off!' somebody yelled from an upstairs window.

'I bloody well can't!' shrieked Magda, tugging at the car hood.

'Jerrers!' she yelled into the portable phone. 'Jerrers, you fucking adulterous bastard! How do you open the hood on the Saab!'

Magda is very posh. Our street is not very posh. It is of the kind which still has posters in the windows saying 'Free Nelson Mandela.'

'I'm not bloody coming back, you bastard!' Magda was yelling. 'Just tell me how to open the fucking bonnet.'

Magda and I were both in the car now, pulling every lever we could find, Magda swigging intermittently at a bottle of Laurent-Perrier. By this time an angry mob was gathering. Next thing, Jeremy roared up on his Harley-Davidson. But instead of turning off the alarm, he started trying to grab the baby out of the backseat with Magda screaming at him. Then the Australian guy, Dan, who lives below me, opened his window.

'Oy, Bridgid,' he shouted. 'There's water pouring through my ceiling.'

'Shit! The bath!'

I ran upstairs, but when I got to my door I realized I'd shut it behind me with the key inside. I started banging my head against it, yelling, 'Shit, shit!'

Then Dan appeared m the hall. 'Chrisd,' he said. 'You'd biddah have one of these.'

'Thanks,' I said, practically eating the proffered fag.

Several cigarettes and a lot of fiddling with a credit card later we were in, to find water flooding everywhere. We couldn't turn the taps off. Dan rushed downstairs, returning with a wrench and a bottle of Scotch. He managed to turn off the taps, and started helping me to mop up. Then the burglar alarm stopped and we rushed to the window just in time to see the Saab roar off, with the Harley-Davidson in hot pursuit.

We both started laughing – we'd had quite a lot of whisky by now. Then suddenly – I don't quite know how – he was kissing me. This was quite an awkward situation, etiquette-wise, because I had just flooded his flat and ruined his evening, so I didn't want to seem ungrateful. I know that didn't give him license to sexually harass me, but the complication was quite enjoyable, really, after all the dramas and inner poise and everything. Then suddenly a man in motorbike leathers appeared at the open door holding a pizza box.

'Oh shit,' said Dan. 'I forgod I ordered pizza.'

So we ate the pizza and had a bottle of wine and a few more cigarettes and some more Scotch and then he restarted trying to kiss me and I slurred, 'No, no, we mushn't,' at which point he went all funny and started muttering, 'Oh, Chrisd. Oh, Chrisd.'

'What is it?' I said.

'I'm married,' he said. 'But Bridged, I think I love you.'

When he'd finally gone I slumped on the floor, shaking, with my back to the front door, chain-smoking butt ends. 'Inner poise,' I said, halfheartedly. Then the doorbell rang. I ignored it. It rang again. Then it rang without stopping. I picked it up.

'Darling,' said a different drunken voice I recognized.

'Go away, Daniel,' I hissed.

'No. Lemme explain.'

'No.'

'Bridge . . . I wanna come in.'

Silence. Oh God. Why do I still fancy Daniel so much?

'I love you, Bridge.'

'Go away. You're drunk,' I said, with more conviction than I felt.

'Jones?

'What?'

'Can I use your toilet?'

Alcohol units 12, cigarettes 57, calories 8489 (excellent).

Twenty-two hours, four pizzas, one Indian takeaway, three packets of cigarettes and three bottles of champagne later, Daniel is still here. I am in love. I am also now between one and all of the following:

a) Back on thirty a day.

b) Engaged.

c) Stupid.

d) Pregnant.

11:45 p.m.Have just been sick, and as I slumped over the loo trying to do it quietly so Daniel wouldn't hear, he suddenly yelled out from the bedroom, 'There goes your inner poise, my plumptious. Best place for it, I say.'

Alcohol units 0, cigarettes 0, calories 4200 (eating for two).

I seriously think I am pregnant. How could we have been so stupid? Daniel and I were so carried away with euphoria at being back together again that reality seemed to go out of the window – and once you've . . . oh look, I don't want to talk about it. This morning I definitely felt the beginnings of morning sickness, but that could be because I was so hungover after Daniel finally left yesterday that I ate the following things to try to make myself feel better:

2 packets Emmenthal cheese slices.

1 litre freshly squeezed orange juice.

1 cold jacket potato.

2 pieces unbaked lemon cheesecake (very light; also possibly eating for two).

1 Milky Way (125 calories only. Body's enthusiastic response to cheesecake suggested baby needed sugar).

1 chocolate Viennoise dessert thing with cream on top (greedy baby incredibly demanding)

Steamed broccoli (attempt to nourish baby and stop it growing up spoilt).

4 cold Frankfurter sausages, (only available tin in cupboard too exhausted by pregnancy to go out to shop again).

Oh dear. Am starting to get carried away with idea of self as Calvin Klein-style mother figure, poss. wearing crop-top or throwing baby in the air, laughing fulfilledly in advert for designer gas cooker, feel-good movie or similar.

In the office today Perpetua was at her most obnoxious, spending 45 minutes on the phone to Desdemona, discussing whether yellow walls would look nice with pink-and-grey ruched blinds or whether she and Hugo should go for Blood Red with a floral freize. For one 15-minute interlude she said nothing whatsoever except, 'Absolutely . . . no, absolutely . . . absolutely,' then concluded, 'But of course, in a sense, one could make exactly the same argument for the red.'

Instead of wanting to staple things to her head, I merely smiled in a beatific sort of way, thinking how soon all these things were to be immaterial to me, alongside caring for another tiny human being. Next I discovered a whole new world of Daniel fantasies: Daniel carrying the baby in a sling, Daniel rushing home from work, thrilled to find the two of us pink and glowing in the bath, and, in years to come, being incredibly impressive at parent/teacher evenings.