Simply Irresistible

Pregnancy makes your skin glow, your hair shine and your breasts swell to hitherto unsuspected dimensions - we all know this. This is the good stuff about pregnancy. This is how we get through the first trimester - "I'm dry retching at 7 in the morning but damn, I have a glossy head of hair. And look at my nails! I'm like Edward-fricken-Scissorhands".
What I wasn't told is how attractive I would suddenly become to every eccentric individual whose path I happen to cross. Apparently I have turned into a freak magnet.
The first incident was on the train. I was sitting near the window when suddenly I felt something pushing at my upper hip.
"Best case scenario," I thought, "is that it's a can or a bottle that's been left behind and it's rocking into me with the movement of the carriage. Worst case scenario is that it's a rat in death throes. If it's a bottle fine, if it's a rat I'm going to have to scream or possibly vomit and generally make a tool out of myself. I won't look."
So, without glancing down, I moved slightly into the centre of the seat and sure enough this tapping/pressing stopped. For about five minutes. Then I felt it again. This time I knew I had to look. There was not a bottle. There was not a rat. Instead there were fingers. Nasty, grimy, broken finger nails were pressing themselves against my hip.
I should mention here that Spidermonkey thinks I should have grabbed the offending fingers then and there and broken a few for the hell of it. My argument is that I had no idea of the person who was behind me, what sort of state they were in or even if there was only one of them.
So I spun around prepared to give this person a mouthful and... stopped. The man behind me was the most broken, most pathetic, wreck of a man you could imagine. White hair, watery blue eyes, disheveled clothes and a look that let you know he wasn't really all there. I couldn't tell you if he was mentally disabled but he was definitely lost in some way that I can't describe. And I knew that whatever I had to say wouldn't have any effect on him - I couldn't help him and I certainly couldn't make his life any worse. So I finished my glare, turned back around and continued listening to my ipod. No more than 30 seconds later he fled the carriage. I still think about him. I'm not angry or indignant - just a little bit sad. I hope he's okay.
The other event happened on Tuesday evening, this time on the bus. (Could it be the heady mixture of pregnancy hormones combined with public transport which creates this aphrodisiac for the afflicted?) At some point a man sat down next to me. He was probably about my age, dressed in some sort of work uniform and not obviously broken in the way the other man had been. I was happily watching a TV series on my ipod and didn't pay much attention to him until I realized that he kept looking over at me. I thought he might have been trying to see what I was watching but it was a bit... odd. At some point he let his arm slip beside him so it was between his leg and my leg which again was odd but some people aren't as picky about personal space as I am.
We were a few minutes away from my stop when I felt his fingers rubbing against my leg and then he placed his hand so it was resting on my thigh. It was at this point that I knew my prenatal powers of freak baiting had once again been at work but by this stage we were less than a minute from my stop and I thought my best plan was to get off the bus, get home and scrub myself off under a shower.
The bus stopped, he made no move to go, I stood up, he made room for me, I walked off the bus and he followed me. I played a bit of a game at the intersection - which road will I cross? And sure enough, where ever I was standing he was there a meter or two behind me. I thought I lost him as I went into Woolworths. I wandered about the confectionery section for a little while before I went down the escalator to get some salad and just as I was reaching for a Mediterranean Rocket mix he appeared in front of me. He had followed me down the escalator and around the shopping center with out me seeing him at all.
At this point I started to get nervous. The most disconcerting aspect for me was that I was very aware of how fast my heart was beating. I swear I could feel every extra milliliter of my additional pregnancy blood being squeezed through my vena cava and, to quote Suzanne Vega - blood makes noise. The more conscious I was of how uneasy this man was making me the more uneasy I found myself becoming.
"What's your name?" he asked. I was so flustered I actually gave him my real name. In these situations I usually give one of my cousin's names. There are probably a few people who still think they spent the night talking to 'Kate' or 'Penny' or, if they were really drunk, 'Ben'.
"Is that Greek or Italian?" he wanted to know. Greek or Italian? I've been asked if my name is Jewish but you really have to see the spelling of it to make that connection. I told him that it was just a very boring Aussie name, said 'Good-bye' very firmly, turned my back on him and walked away. He followed. He stared at me as I paid at the cash registers and by the time I had made it out of the shop he was waiting for me in front of the train station.
"Well, bollocks," I thought.
There was no reason to think he had a train ticket to where I was going but if he was as determined as he seemed to be he could just as easily have jumped the barrier and followed me down to the trains. If he did that the only option I really had was to create a scene to prevent him spending another trip trying to inch his way up my leg or, even worse, attempting to following me home. The problem with 'The Scene Plan' is that it's not reliable. You have to be able to pick your ground with care. Ideally, you need some-one official nearby to intervene if things get out of hand or else you're relying on members of the public coming to your aid which is never something you'd want to bet your life on.
Again, it's the interesting conundrum of life with Trogdor. Without Trogdor I could have confronted this man. It may even have been a bit thrilling. It would certainly have made a great story to tell my friends. With Trogdor - if he reacted badly, if he pushed me and I fell or if he really became violent and punched me - I risked losing too much.
I want to stress that as nervous as I felt, I never really believed I was in any serious danger. I simply felt that I was in a situation which was being completely controlled by some-one I didn't know and certainly didn't trust.
I bolted up the steps and on to the road again, with him following closely behind me, and waited at the traffic lights as though I was going to cross the street. Luckily a taxi pulled up so I dived in, told the driver to take me to central station and left as my strange and nameless friend stared into the window from the side walk.
These are not the only times in my life I've had to deal with bizarre and unsolicited attention but all the other incidents have been separated by years. This has all occurred within a month! If we average 2 a month for the rest of my pregnancy I will have been accosted 12 more times before Trogdor joins us. No one mentioned this in the baby books.