by Jo Watson
* * *
I was feeling so excited and confident when I dropped the bags off at the shop at O.R. Tambo, although I kept trying to remind myself that I shouldn’t jump the gun just yet. Five bags was not a fashion empire. I was not Donatella yet. And they would probably take a long time to sell, but at least it was something. A step in the right direction. A direction that I was choosing.
In those early weeks after returning, I also decided to bite the bullet and find myself a therapist. It proved to be a great idea, and with each session I felt a little lighter and more self-assured than I had in a whole year.
I always pictured therapists as old, boring, gray-haired men that somewhat resembled Einstein and that made you lie down on old leather couches.
But Paula (we were on a first-name basis) was a young, witty blond woman that was really easy to talk to, fashionably dressed, and kept me upright on a comfortable pink chair. And what I liked most about her is that she wasn’t scared to call me on my bullshit. She was quick to help me discover my self-destructive behaviors and habits and help me to work through them.
Through therapy, I also came to realize that this past year I’d actually been depressed. Not sad, not a little grumpy or down, but properly antidepressant depressed. And she was right; I had been. Only I hadn’t really seen it at the time.
She helped me to set goals for myself, personal and professional. And that’s when things started to look just a little bit brighter.
I also looked forward to my Wednesday morning messages, and although we hadn’t spoken, I felt like Chris was still there, right next to me, cheerleading me on.
You’re strong and awesome and know what you know. And YOU, Annie-Anne, are the star of your show.
And he was right. I was finally deciding what to do with my life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
And then four weeks later, while out walking in the park with Stormy-Rain (our new regular Friday afternoon thing), I got a message from Zolani for ten more bags. I jumped for joy when I realized that people actually liked my silly little creations.
Stormy was just as over-the-moon excited. We’d been hanging out a lot lately; she’d been taking me to strange little thrift stores where I’d made some amazing finds for my bags. Vintage buttons, belt buckles, and even a genuine Chanel bag. For some strange reason the allure of the label held little meaning for me anymore, and I ended up dismantling the thing and incorporating it into an oversized tote of my own creation. Sacrilege, I know.
And then four weeks later another order came in. And then another, and another, until I could no longer keep up with the demand while working full-time.
I could barely believe it; it was all like some kind of strange multicolored dream. But it soon became a reality the day I saw someone carrying my bag on the street. I wanted to run up to her and point and shout, I made that.
“So, you know, you need a name for your label, babe. These things are selling like hotcakes and everyone keeps asking me who makes them,” Zolani had said one day.
“Um…crap, I have no idea.”
“Well it’s usually your name, you know. Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton…et cetera.”
“I know, but Annie Anderson sounds so pedestrian.”
“Well, you better think of something quick and get yourself a logo and sew a label in, because I have a feeling that your bags are going to be big.”
“I guess I could call my label Annie Anne.” I didn’t really think about it. It kind of just came tumbling out of my mouth—and when I heard it said out loud, it hurt.
Zolani stopped and seriously considered it for a moment, “Playful, cheeky, flirty, fun, and not serious. Yes. Annie Anne is perfect.” She swooshed her bangle-laden arm in the air and spoke in a posh accent, “Bags by Annie Anne…”
And then she threw herself at me to give me the first of many hugs we would share. “You and me, girl! This is it. It’s really happening.” We squealed like two kids at Christmas until people around us started to stare.
I went home feeling great, and decided to celebrate by cooking myself some real food and drinking a glass of real red wine (not out of a cheap box). Halfway through my meal the phone rang.
I glanced at the phone and the anonymous number, which had become my happy Wednesday morning companion, flashed at me. I shot out of my chair. He was calling. He was calling! I tried to compose myself to something that didn’t resemble a blithering idiot of nerves and anxiety and excitement and…apprehension. Should I even speak to him? I flapped around a little more in my state of uncertainty and then just, “Fuck it!”
I picked the phone up trying to be casual.
“Hello, Annie speaking.”
“Hey.”
The delicious twang of the American accent wafted through the phone, and my heart literally fluttered. No, pounded would be more apt.
“Hey.” Nice and neutral sounding on the outside, dying in the inside.
Pause. A seriously long one.
“So hey, hey?” Chris broke the silence.
“Hey!” (Less neutral, a lot more dying)
So far this was not the most successful conversation of my life. But if his heart was racing as much as mine was, if his mouth was as dry as mine and his hands shaking as hard as he held the receiver, I couldn’t blame him for the monosyllabic words.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine. You?”
“Cool,” he said, sounding anything but truly cool.
“Cool.”
Pause. Not as long as the first one, but still pretty painful. He broke it again.
“So, how’s Joburg?” he asked.
“The same. Hotter. How’s LA?”
“Horrible,” he said flatly.
“Why?”
“Because you’re not here.”
Pause.
Was he allowed to say things like that to me?
“Should I not have said that, Annie?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well…,” Chris said, “there’s no rule that says we can’t be friends. Is there? Besides, enough time has passed now, right?”
“Who says?”
“I read it in Cosmopolitan. They made it quite clear that four months, one week, two days and…”
There was a pause.
“And twelve hours is enough time to strike up a friendship with your ex. Not that I’m counting the seconds or anything.”
“Of course not,” I said. I didn’t tell him that I knew exactly how long it had been, too.
“So how are you, Annie? Are you riding high and ready for anything under the sky?”
“I love those texts!” I lost all coolness and just gushed. “I love them, thanks. They make my Wednesday mornings.”
I heard a small chuckle over the phone. “It’s my pleasure.”
Another pause. The kind of pause that was so damn loud and loaded.
“So, can we be friends?” Chris finally broke it.
I thought about this for a moment. I would love nothing more than to be friends with him. I’d missed him. I’d missed his stupid sense of humor and that smile, God, I missed that smile. And I especially missed the way he made me feel about myself. But wouldn’t being friends just prolong the suffering and hinder any chance of getting over him?
“I’m not sure, I’m just only now getting—” I stopped midsentence and swallowed. Why did this feel so hard to say? “Getting over you.”
“What! You’re—you’re over me?” He sounded like someone had just stabbed him in the heart.
I bit my lip, trying to be strong. I didn’t want to be pulled into this kind of conversation with Chris right now. Everything logical in my mind was telling me to stop this immediately, but the other side was urging me to continue even though I knew what a dangerous path this could lead us down.
“Well, aren’t you?” I asked.
“No,” he said quickly as if he didn’t even need to think about it, “I’m not over you, Annie. I can’t just snap my fin
gers and be over the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. The only woman I’ve ever been in love with.”
I thought I could actually hear the loud chorus of voices singing in my heart. But then my brain intervened.
“But that means we can’t be friends, if you still…and I still.”
“You still?” It sounded like he had a smile in his voice. And with that, we had officially crossed over and were walking down the dangerous path now, despite all the warning lights I could see blinking at me.
“Yes. And that’s probably why we can’t be friends, Chris,” I said, even though it went against everything my heart was busy screeching at me.
“So we have to take some more time to get over each other?”
“I guess.” My stomach tightened and I felt such a sense of loss and sadness all over again.
“Okay. Bye, Annie.” And just like that, he hung up. A part of me couldn’t believe it. I was just about to move away from it when it rang again. Same number.
“Chris?”
“Done. I’ve taken some time and I’m totally over you now.”
“You got over me in a few seconds?”
“Yeah, I really think those extra seconds made all the difference.”
I laughed.
“So can we be friends now?”
This was the worst idea in the world. This was the worst idea in the world. This was the…“Okay, we’ll try. But we can’t talk to each other every day.”
“Every second day?”
“No!”
“Once a week?”
“Maybe. Maybe once every two weeks. Let’s see how this one goes first…”
“Deal, Annie. I’m going to make this the best phone conversation of your entire life. It’s going to be so good, you’ll never want to hang up. You’ll want to have the phone surgically attached to your ear so you can always speak to me.”
I laughed. As always, he made me laugh.
“Will you still send me my hump day motivation?” I asked.
“I’ll send you whatever you want, Annie. All you have to do is ask.” He deliberately said it in the voice that he knew would have an effect on me.
“All righty then…,” I said, totally ignoring the fact that my skin was currently on fire. “Bye.”
And that’s kind of how it started between Chris and me again. The odd phone conversation. Sometimes it was once a week, sometimes less, sometimes more. We never spoke about what happened between us, about T-Squared, or our wedding or the ah-mazing sex. We also never spoke about what was going on for us; frankly, I didn’t want to know if he was having an awesome time in LA and starting to date again and shagging up a celebrity storm. And he never asked me, either, probably for the same reason. In fact, all we did was get to know each other. And it soon became very obvious that we knew absolutely nothing about each other, other than what we’d gleaned from those few days together.
I learned that he had a pug named Chopstick, because he likes Chinese food. That his mother was an opera singer, his dad was a poet, his brother was a professor of philosophy at an Ivy League university, and his sister ran a nonprofit organization for women’s rights and had published a book on the role of feminism in the 2000s.
“Very fancy, cultured upbringing and family…in fact, I’m sure I’m adopted. Messy screenwriter living in equally messy bachelor pad with no deep and meaningful art hanging on his walls. I’m the black sheep of the family.”
I also learned that he actually did play sports and was just lying to Trevv. I learned that he hadn’t set out to write romantic comedies, he’d just stumbled into it.
He told me that he’d studied to be a journalist, but when he realized he had absolutely no interest in current affairs, or news of any kind, he came to the realization that he was in the wrong job. And so it went on like that.
At some stage I kind of resigned myself to the fact that even if we weren’t going to get back together—it was physically impossible anyway, we lived on opposite sides of the world—that I think I’d found a real friend in Chris.
Maybe this whole thing had happened between us for a reason. So we could become friends? Maybe we would be at each other’s real weddings one day as best buddies, pals, besties. Maybe he would make a speech at my wedding and tell the weird crazy story of how we became friends with a fake wedding of our own. Maybe he would be my future child’s godfather. Maybe we would slap each other on the back and say, “What up, dude?”
Or maybe I was just fooling myself.
Because I was pretty sure that the second either of us got into a romantic relationship, these little phone calls would definitely stop.
And that would be the end of it.
No more Chris. It was only a matter of time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I was already in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for Chris’s message to come through when Jane rang. The other thing about his messages is that they’d turned me into Annie the early bird.
The phone rang and I grabbed it, thinking it might be him. But it wasn’t.
“Have you seen the latest issue of Glamorous Girl magazine? It’s just arrived at our office,” Jane said.
“What are you doing at work so early?”
“Avoiding my mother. She’s taken up early morning yoga and was threatening to come round this morning and fetch me for it.”
“Trying to set you up with the instructor?”
“Apparently he’s very spiritually enlightened and apparently yoga makes a man very virile,” she said in a mocking tone. “And my mother also added that the pants he wears are tight enough to tell his religion and that he seems blessed in that department, too.”
“Eeewww.” I sipped my coffee trying to get the image of a yoga instructor’s crotch bulge out of my head.
“Right, brace yourself, Annie…” She cleared her throat and put on a refined-sounding voice. “Winter Trends: beat the gloom this winter by getting your hands on the latest trend making a colorful splash. Bags by Annie Anne. They are fun, flirty, and colorful, and Sonja S. gives them the thumbs-up as the must-have item for every fashionista’s arm this season.”
I almost spat my coffee out. “WHAT? You’re kidding!”
“Nope. In black and white, with a photo of one of them.”
“Which one?”
“Uhhh…I don’t know, it’s kind of got pink things hanging from it, with those buttons, and it’s patchwork-y.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll go grab one myself.” Jane didn’t really have an eye for fashion.
“Wait!” Jane shouted just as I was about to hang up. “Well done, babe. This is amazing.”
“Oh my God! Thank you for calling me. I’m going out now to get one. I can’t believe this!” We squealed some more, I thanked her some more, and then I hung up.
I quickly put a hoodie and slippers on and jumped into my car. As soon as I’d started the engine, I saw my phone light up with Chris’s message. I almost didn’t read it I was so excited, but something compelled me to. And when I did, my eyes blurred with tears.
Annie-Annie, you’ll be famous, as famous as can be.
More famous than the Kardashians on terrible reality TV.
I sat in the car for a moment and let it all sink in. My dreams were actually coming true, right before my eyes. I’d managed to turn my whole life around in a matter of months. I tried to imagine the Annie I was a year ago, and I just couldn’t recognize her. Who was that girl?
I wiped a small, happy tear away as it rolled down my cheek, and pulled out of my driveway. Within minutes I was at the gas station and inside the convenience store. I grabbed the magazine and there it was. I had to read it at least ten times before it finally sank in. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream and shout and…so I hugged the guy behind the counter that I always buy chocolates from. I felt such a sense of pride and achievement that it was almost too much to contain. My phone rang again and I answered.
“Have you seen it?” Zolani squealed in my
ear.
“I’m standing in my slippers in a shop right now!”
“Oh my God!”
“I know!”
“And as for your ex–bitch boss Sonja, she is finally going to realize she made the biggest mistake of her life when she fired you. And then she’s going to come crawling back and begging and you can throw an expensive shoe at her—which you will be able to afford—because we’re going to have your own fashion empire!”
“Wait, Zee. Slow down, it’s hardly a fashion empire.”
“But it could be,” she said.
“I can’t afford to leave my job at Patel’s and do this full-time. How will I afford to feed myself?”
“An investor, Annie.”
“And who is going to invest in me?” I asked.
“Me,” she said quickly and confidently.
“No, I can’t take money from you.”
“Stop it. Just listen, I have such a good feeling about this, Annie. We can do this together, we’ll be business partners.”
“Wait, I need to think about this,” I said.
“But don’t you want to see your bags gracing the runways and the glossy pages of magazines?” She certainly was painting a nice picture.
“I doubt they will ever be on runways,” I quickly corrected.
“Why not? We won’t know unless we try.”
“True,” I said, still shocked at her proposition.
“Great! Then we will need to ramp up production, and we need to get fully stocked. Then we need to get them into some other shops for you, at some point maybe we can have our own tiny shop, and maybe get a website going so people can buy them online, a Facebook page obviously…”
“Wait, wait, this is all moving a bit fast.”
“Annie, babe, you have to move fast, because we both know your bags will be out next season.”
She was right. This was my window of opportunity and I needed to grab it.
I sat at my breakfast table reviewing things; and to think the bags had been born out of hatred for Sonja, and now she was praising them. Oh, how this world works in mysterious ways.
I thought about the Patels; they’d been so good to me, and I didn’t want to stop working for them, but if I set up a studio in the back room of the shop, and bought materials from them, it would be mutually beneficial.