Sacking the Stork

by Kris Webb

  TWELVE

  A lull descended over the table as those with hangovers (which was everyone except Karen and me) tucked into their fry-ups the next morning. Even Anna, who normally worked the Friday night shift at the emergency ward, had been out the night before and was looking decidedly under the weather. Karen’s seven a.m. breakfast was a thing of distant memory and her eyes lit up as Ben set her flourless chocolate cake in front of her. The King Street Cafe cakes were sensational and Karen always had one while everyone else looked on in total amazement that anyone could eat anything sweet before lunchtime on the weekend.

  My multigrain toast and jam wasn’t quite as compelling as either the plates of bacon and eggs or Karen’s cake, and as the others attacked their plates, I looked up from the paper and gazed out the window across King Street. A short man in leather biker’s gear turned to cross the street revealing that the front of his outfit was in fact all of his outfit. What actually made the whole thing stay on didn’t bear thinking about and I pulled my eyes away from the bizarre sight back to the cafe, where I caught sight of a yellow packet sticking out of my bag.

  As I’d headed out the door the previous day, I’d picked up a parcel that had arrived in that morning’s mail and shoved it into the depths of my bag where it was still sitting unopened. Pulling it out, I turned it over to see the name of the sender.

  On seeing that it was from the woman who had lived next door to my father and me for years, my enthusiasm levels dropped. I loved Evelyn dearly but she had been charmingly dotty since I was a teenager and in thirty years of birthdays and Christmases I had never received anything vaguely useful or practical from her. I pulled out the present and unwrapped it. It was a baby record book.

  Sarah’s lack of a baby book was something I had felt vaguely guilty about. The only ones I could find looked like they were designed for a 1960s nuclear family – hardly the situation Sarah and I were in – and I’d given up in frustration.

  Opening the front cover of the book, which featured a pastel pink stork dangling a cherubic baby from its mouth, I saw that this book was similar to the ones I’d looked at. The first page was headed ‘Waiting for Baby’ and had a caption requiring me to insert a photo of ‘Mum and Dad just before Baby was born’. That wasn’t going to work without some serious photo doctoring, so I turned to the next page, which was headed ‘Baby’s Birth’ and had a section requiring me to complete ‘The weather on the day Baby was born was . . . ’

  I shook my head and turned back to my companions. ‘Anyone have any idea of what the weather was like the day Sarah was born?’ I asked.

  The initial hit of cholesterol was making its way into their bloodstreams and they were sufficiently revived to look up from their food. Everyone looked at me strangely, obviously wondering if I had finally lost my mind.

  ‘Ah, no, Sophie,’ Andrew said slowly. ‘Are you trying to decipher some bizarre astrological prediction for her?’

  I ignored him and tried again. ‘All right, how about the news headlines that day?’

  I received more blank looks and gestured to the book in my hands. ‘A friend sent me this baby book and I’m yet to find one section I can actually fill in.

  ‘Look at this,’ I said, holding up a page entitled ‘My Dad’. ‘What exactly can I put in here?’

  ‘How about scrawling “Gone to San Fran” across it in felt pen?’ Debbie asked helpfully, briefly looking up from the newspaper.

  Debbie’s concentration span (never very great on a Saturday morning) was broken as she spotted one of her ex-boyfriends in the social pages with a tall brunette. ‘Don’t do it!’ she bellowed at the page, as if saying it loudly enough would make the girl drop her handbag and run. ‘He’ll wine you, he’ll dine you, he’ll send you flowers, but get him into bed and you’ll die of boredom.’

  She looked at the rest of us sheepishly as if she’d forgotten we were there. ‘He’s just like a slice of takeaway pizza. Looks good, smells good but ultimately unsatisfying.’

  I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get in a dig. ‘If the noises coming out of your bedroom are any gauge of satisfaction, I have to agree. I had more sleep in the three weeks you were seeing him than I did in the rest of the time I was living with you.’

  Everyone except Debbie roared with laughter and Ben stopped on his way to deliver four breakfasts to the next table. Ignoring the desperate sounds from table five as they spotted their hangover cures hovering temptingly a few metres away, he asked, ‘What gossip am I missing out on this morning?’

  ‘Just talking about Debbie’s sex life,’ Anna said. ‘She spotted George Bailey in the social pages.’

  ‘Was he the guy Deb walked out on in Tahiti when she decided the resort he’d taken her to wasn’t up to scratch?’ Ben asked. ‘No, no,’ he corrected himself. ‘He’s the guy she was seeing at the same time as she picked up that male stripper.’

  ‘Wrong on both guesses,’ Andrew said. ‘He was the guy who couldn’t keep up with her between the sheets.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t exactly narrow the field,’ Ben remarked. ‘Half the straight men in Sydney, and for that matter some who were straight before they met her, fall into that category. Deb, you need to look closer to home, I’m sure one of the fellas here would be perfect.’ He gestured towards his burly staff members. ‘On second thought, stay way away from them, I wouldn’t get any work out of them for a week after you’d been near them.’

  Debbie couldn’t maintain her angry expression and a reluctant smile spread across her face. She pushed her black sunglasses up on her head (Debbie wore sunglasses from the moment she got out of bed on weekend mornings until at least an hour after the sun had gone down). ‘One of us has to maintain the strike rate for the group. Three of you are married; Andrew keeps going for fitness freaks who look great but are asleep by nine p.m. after having expended ten zillion calories during the day; and Sophie – well, she’s going to be out of action for at least another six months.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I bristled. ‘I’m not exactly ready to jump back into the dating scene yet, but I haven’t contracted leprosy.’

  ‘Sophie, I’m talking about sex, not dating,’ Debbie retorted.

  Andrew sniggered. ‘Interesting to hear that you actually distinguish between the activities, Debs. I thought the two words would have been interchangeable for you.’

  Debbie ignored Andrew’s interjection and continued. ‘You can’t tell me sex has featured in your thoughts since a certain little someone was born,’ she said, gesturing towards Sarah, who was asleep in the pram beside me.

  My eyes glazed over at the thought, but this was a matter of principle. ‘Maybe not this weekend, but I’m definitely not giving up sex for good.’

  Sarah stirred in her pram and I was relieved to see her settle back into a deeper sleep. The cafe was full of people looking rather tender from the previous night’s activities and I didn’t think that baby noises, regardless of whether they were happy, would be very well received.

  Karen picked up the baby record book and tactfully changed the subject. ‘I agree with you about the book, Sophie. It’s not just that the books all expect everyone to have the standard family unit, they don’t seem to accept that times have moved on and that we don’t all do the things our grandmothers did when our parents were born. I’ll bet you there’s a page for the christening and another one for the birth announcement.’

  Flicking a couple more pages, she turned the book around to show that she was right. ‘See! None of our kids have been christened and I don’t know anyone who’s ever put a birth announcement in the newspaper. Somehow I don’t think baby book authors have made it into the twenty-first century to realise that we now have email. I ended up just buying a big scrapbook for each of my kids and putting in the stuff that seemed relevant to me.’

  Andrew took the book from Karen and rifled through it. ‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered. ‘They don’t even have a section for pictures of the baby’s head-wetting! Where are
you going to put the photos of Sarah’s King Street Cafe coming-out party?’

  Ever since Sarah was born, I had been paranoid that I would turn into a mother who couldn’t maintain a decent conversation that didn’t involve Sarah or her bodily functions, and I felt that a ten-minute discussion about baby books on Saturday morning was probably enough.

  ‘You’re both right,’ I said, shoving the book back into my bag. ‘I think this can go into the cupboard with all Evelyn’s other presents. So tell me what you all got up to last night while I was trying to master the third verse of “Mary Had A Little Lamb”?’

  ‘Does it have more than one verse?’ asked Andrew doubtfully.

  ‘Trust me, it does,’ I said. ‘Would you like a rendition?’

  ‘No thanks,’ he answered hurriedly, obviously recalling a drunken karaoke effort of mine from a couple of years before.

  ‘Well, Jeffrey and I have split up,’ Debbie announced.

  ‘Debbie, you can’t split up from a relationship that lasts less than a week,’ said Andrew. ‘Anything that lasts for less than seven days definitely falls into the category of casual sex and by definition can’t be broken up.’

  ‘Thank you for enlightening me on the finer points of dating, Andrew,’ Debbie said sarcastically. ‘And how was your reunion date with Helena? Did you manage to get her to stay up past nine p.m. or to lash out and have more than two standard drinks?’

  She had obviously hit a sore point, because Andrew looked away.

  ‘I knew it,’ Debbie screeched, sensing victory. ‘What time did you take her home?’

  Sheepishly, Andrew just shook his head.

  ‘All right, I’ll guess. I’ll bet it was before ten. Am I right?’

  Andrew nodded.

  ‘Just tell me it wasn’t before nine? Nobody goes home on a Friday night before nine.’

  Realising that Debbie wasn’t going to let up, he finally confessed. ‘All right, I dropped Helena home at eight forty-five because she needed to work on her aerobics routine for a class this morning, and it’s definitely over. Happy now?’

  Debbie nodded vehemently. ‘I have just two words for you,’ she said gleefully. ‘Gym bimbos. You should know by now they’re all as boring as batshit. Next time you find yourself interested in someone, take a good look at her abs. If you can see any muscle tone at all, save us all a lot of grief and give her a miss.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for the big tip, cupid,’ Andrew said. ‘Speaking of muscle tone, does anyone want to come and see the new Bruce Willis movie tonight? One of my clients is handing out free tickets like lollies. My theory is that it’s a crappy movie and they need to fill the cinemas to give it any chance of survival. Still, you gotta love a freebie.’

  Karen and I both passed on the invitation and I tried to convince myself that I’d rather be at home with my baby and a bad video on Saturday night. The sad thing was that an early movie session at the local cinema seemed as exciting a prospect as a cocktail party would have in my previous life.

  I sighed. If a Saturday morning coffee session was as thrilling as my social life was going to get, I might as well make the most of it. Defiantly I ordered another coffee, ignoring the sneaking suspicion my morning’s caffeine intake would probably keep Sarah awake for most of the weekend.

  THIRTEEN

  There were some advantages to being a single mother, I reflected as I put Sarah in her cot for a sleep on Sunday morning. I looked down at my once-trendy pyjamas which were now splattered with stains of different colours. When I went out, I could get it together enough so that at least people didn’t stare, but at home when it was just Sarah and me, I didn’t even pretend. Believing that I had to maintain some standards, however, I did have a pact with myself that I wouldn’t stay in my pyjamas later than ten a.m. – even on Sundays.

  I glanced at my watch and, seeing that I still had nearly an hour left, I padded into the kitchen to make myself another cup of coffee, just as the phone rang.

  ‘Can you believe I don’t have a hangover?’ said a voice I immediately recognised as Debbie’s.

  ‘Morning, Deb,’ I said. ‘What are you doing up this side of midday on a Sunday?’

  ‘I decided my body needed a bit of respite after my alcohol intake on Friday and went straight home after the movie. I was asleep by eleven and I feel like a normal human being this morning. This quiet life is sensational, Sophie, I don’t know what you’ve been complaining about.’

  ‘Trust me, the enjoyment wanes after you’ve done it for a year,’ I said darkly. ‘Surely Ben and Anna wanted to go for a drink afterwards?’

  ‘They cancelled at the last minute – something about all the fuses in the cafe being blown.’

  ‘Anna?’ I asked with a wince.

  ‘Afraid so. When I spoke to Ben he was threatening to ban her from the cafe altogether.

  ‘The reason I’m ringing is because I’ve had an idea for our business – well, actually, you sort of had it.’

  I frowned into the phone while she continued.

  ‘Remember yesterday at the cafe when you brought out that hideous baby book?’

  ‘Deb, hideous is a bit strong – it was a present,’ I protested.

  ‘Trust me. I bought hideous stuff for five years. I can recognise it from twenty paces, even with a hangover that would have killed a horse. Anyway, I was going through some boxes of sample stock I brought back from various business trips and I stumbled across a range of notebooks I picked up in Hong Kong. They were made in Thailand and are very cool. There are different patterns or you can get plain colours in a kind of silk finish.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ I said, not sure what this had to do with Evelyn’s baby book. ‘What are you thinking of doing with the notebooks?’

  ‘Nothing with the notebooks. But what about if we used covers just like them and designed and printed pages for our own baby book? The books could come with all the different pages loose and you could just clip in whatever pages you want for your baby.’

  ‘Kind of like a do-it-yourself baby book?’

  ‘Exactly. It won’t be tacky because of the cover and the way we design the pages,’ Debbie said. ‘We could have pages like the baby’s head-wetting or . . . What do I know about what mothers want in their baby book? That’s your department. But what do you think of the idea?’

  I hesitated. ‘Deb, I think it’s probably got merit. I have to tell you, though, the idea of sitting for eight hours every day in a shop talking to new mothers doesn’t do it for me. I’d rather go back to my old job . . . ’

  ‘I’m not talking about a shop,’ Debbie interrupted. ‘I’m talking about designing the book and then wholesaling it to the big department stores. They’re always looking for interesting stuff to buy.’

  ‘Do they really buy things like that from small companies? I would have assumed they’d import it themselves.’

  ‘They do import a lot of their own stuff, but for individual products like this they’re happy to buy from anyone if they think it will sell. I have a contact who is the national buyer for Handley Smith. I’ll give him a call and see what he thinks.’

  Handley Smith was one of the largest department store chains in the country, and knowing Debbie, I was suspicious of the connection. ‘This contact of yours . . . You haven’t slept with him by any chance, have you?’

  ‘Sophie, I’m shocked you’d think that of me. Of course not!’ Debbie protested.

  There was a pause as I let a disbelieving silence fall. Finally, Debbie broke.

  ‘All right, all right. I did make some moves on him one night about a year ago, but nothing happened. It turned out he’s been living with a woman for five years or something. Definitely not the kind of guy who would cheat. Shame, though – he’s not ugly.’

  ‘That sounds more like the truth. I guess if you already know him it can’t hurt to run the idea by him. Do you need me to do anything?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ she answered. ‘Although you could start giving some thought to
how we would make every new parent in Australia aware of the books with a marketing budget of about twenty cents. The department stores are more likely to take on a product if they know we’re going to be doing our own marketing and pushing people into their stores.’

  I hung up the phone and grabbed a piece of paper to scribble a couple of ideas that had hit me while we were talking. Chances were nothing would come of it and Debbie would find something more glamorous than baby books to occupy her time, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit of a think.

  The next day I was just heading out the door with Sarah when the phone rang. I hesitated, trying to figure out whether or not to answer it. After all, the period of time in which Sarah didn’t need either to sleep or feed was a very short window of opportunity and I was heading to Karen’s for a much-needed chat. Talking to a baby was all very well, but it wasn’t exactly mentally stimulating.

  However, I’ve always found it hard to resist answering a ringing phone, regardless of the fact I have an answering machine, and after a moment’s hesitation I picked up the handpiece.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ms Anderson, this is David Fletcher.’

  ‘Oh, hello,’ I said vaguely, racking my brain to try to figure out who on earth David Fletcher was.

  My tone had obviously given me away as he said, ‘I’m a buyer for Handley Smith. Your partner Debbie Campbell spoke to me earlier today about your range of baby books, which you’re interested in placing in our stores.’

  Suddenly I wished I hadn’t picked up the phone.

  ‘Oh, yes of course, David. Debbie said she’d had a positive discussion with you this morning,’ I replied, inwardly cursing Debbie, who had told me nothing of the sort.

  ‘Debbie told me that your initial order of books is ready to be shipped to Australia and that you are in the process of placing them in various outlets.’

  Thankfully he couldn’t see the look on my face, or the fact that Sarah had chosen this moment to vomit all down my black shirt. I was still attempting to wear black, largely because I didn’t own much else, but the combination of black clothes and white vomit just wasn’t working for me. I tried to ignore the mess both Sarah and I were now in and concentrate on figuring out just what untruths my ‘business partner’ had told this man, who could buy thousands of baby books from us if he decided to.