She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  Fran laughed. ‘Do you want toast, too?’

  ‘Yes, please. With Vegemite. Ta, Fran.’

  ‘Everything OK now?’ asked Lucy.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, all good. Sorry about that. I must have a lot on my mind,’ I said, trying to excuse my absolute ineptitude.

  Jesus Christ. Hangover or no, I’d just shown my nineteen-year-old assistant porn because I couldn’t even remember the address of my own magazine’s website. Not to mention the fact that Lucy had been the one to bail me out. I could be fired. I immediately bookmarked Joliemagazine.com and made a mental note to check the website more regularly. Like, more than once a year, which was my current frequency.

  My phone beeped. It was Nina.

  I am a hungdog millionaire. Lunch

  today near you? Or I can come

  to office. Will bring burgers. x

  God, did she want an answer today? I’d barely had time to apply mascara, let alone contemplate a lease on my reproductive organs.

  Sure. 1 is good for me. Meet

  me at pub next door. x

  Yep. It was definitely going to be one of those days.

  3

  Week 1,

  DAY 2

  ‘I’ll have a Coopers, please.’ In theory, I hated the idea of hair of the dog. Drinking more alcohol to erase the effects of all the alcohol you’ve already drunk? That’s crazy. But in practice, it totally works. Your hangover is all but gone after that first, sweet sip of beer – it has to be beer – and you’re free to go about your business again, as if last night’s three bottles of sav blanc never even touched your virginal lips.

  I found a table and sat, enjoying the cold beer and feeling its effects immediately. Ah, alcohol. Is there anything you can’t do?

  ‘George, hey!’ Nina walked in looking all freshly pressed and laundered and generally gorgeous in a black jersey maxi dress and motorcycle boots.

  ‘Oh my god, how do you look so amazing? I feel like a garbage truck ran me over and then dumped a ton of bin juice on me. You look like you walked off the set of a deodorant commercial.’

  Neen rolled her eyes. ‘Perspective: I woke up an hour ago! I slept it all off. Poor thing – not so much with the nap-a-latte, huh?’ She sat down opposite me and immediately began perusing the wine list.

  ‘No wine for me, thanks,’ I said in anticipation. I’d already shown my assistant the inner workings of the female reproductive system this morning; I couldn’t allow any more mistakes.

  ‘OK, none for me either then. Probably for the best. Might join you in a beer, though.’ While Nina went in search of a beer, I wondered what the rest of our lunch conversation might sound like.

  ‘So, George, will you have my baby for me?’

  ‘Uhhhhhhhh. Um. Mmm.’

  Tumbleweeds.

  Or maybe:

  ‘George, I know it’s a lot to ask, but … do you think you could do it?’

  SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH. (That was the sound of my chair scraping against the hardwood floor as I made a bolt for the exit.)

  Nina returned, middy in one hand and a menu in the other. ‘So, George, I just wanted to say … about last night … I put you in such an awkward position. I am so sorry,’ said Nina, sipping her beer. ‘I should never have asked you such an important question in such a trivial way. You’re my best friend, I owe you more than that.’

  I waved the suggestion away and shook my head. ‘No, it’s fine. I mean … I was a little freaked out, but you know … it’s totally OK.’

  Nina raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? You’re a peach, George. Thank you. I really am sorry. I mean, god, I wish we didn’t have to ask at all, but …’ she trailed off and smiled forcibly.

  Having never wanted kids myself, it was hard to understand why Nina wanted them so very much – more than anything, in fact. Don’t get me wrong: sometimes I found children to be quite pleasant. I do love little girls with Madeline haircuts and kids who say the darnedest things – I mean, I’m human – but the idea of getting pregnant, giving birth and then, on top of all that, raising a kid was not particularly appealing.

  To be honest, sometimes I hadn’t really understood why Nina wanted a baby so much. I mean, yes, she’s caring and nurturing, but only in so much as she frequently stops to give out-of-towners directions, and, you know, is a primary school teacher. But essentially I saw Nina and I as the same person. We liked so many of the same things (cheeses with wanky names, Arrested Development, Stila lip glosses) and shared basically all the same beliefs (don’t be a dick, tipping is only necessary when the service is good, pixie cuts don’t work unless you have the angelic face of one Michelle Williams). We were the same except for this one thing: Nina had wanted a baby all her life and I didn’t. A very, very small and very, very selfish part of me was almost relieved that it hadn’t happened for Nina and Matt yet. What if she turned into another Ellie?

  Now I felt like I had to keep asking about it, but I was never sure how to deal with the answer. ‘How’s everything going?’ I’d ask every so often, ‘everything’, in this case meaning Nina’s entire reproductive life. ‘Not this month,’ was always the answer. Most of the time, I just smiled faintly and squeezed her hand – your classic non-reply reply. But when I had told her last night that I wished I could have the baby for her, part of me had definitely meant it – I wish it was that easy.

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ she’d told me after the miscarriage. ‘Why is it so easy for everyone else, but not for me? I mean, I see teenagers with babies. I see heroin addicts with babies. There’s no fairness to it. I can’t go to another baby shower and listen to people tell me how easy it is to get pregnant. I can’t listen to Matt’s mother tell me to just relax and it’ll happen. I can’t listen to fucking Jill tell me that having a baby when you’re over thirty is “gross”. I can’t listen to another pregnant woman tell me how fantastic she feels. And I especially can’t listen when she tells me how awful she feels because she’s pregnant. Because I just look at her and think, “Are you nuts? Do you know what I would give to have morning sickness or sore boobs or swollen ankles or whatever it is that is pissing you off so much?”’

  I hadn’t known what to say to her then and I still didn’t now.

  ‘Oh, hon. This is so shit. This is so seriously, utterly, woefully, terribly shit. You should have a zillion babies. You should have more babies than Brad and Angelina. You should have more babies than bloody Princess Mary. You should have all the babies, everywhere.’

  Nina smiled but I knew my lame attempt at light-heartedness probably wasn’t helping. It always worked better when Nina made fun of herself.

  ‘What about Jill?’ I asked.

  Nina rolled her eyes. Nina’s little sister, Jill, was pretty much the opposite of Nina. She was Bizarro Nina. Nina: dependable; Jill: flaky. Nina: wise; Jill: slept with married men and once lost her bank balance in a bar fight. Nina: saved; Jill: spent. Nina: caring; Jill: specifically cultivated friends who weighed more than her so she’d look better standing next to them.

  ‘Come on, George. As if. I wouldn’t ask to borrow Jill’s favourite dress let alone her bloody uterus!’ She snorted into her beer.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Besides, she’s in Belgrade for the next few months, so even if I wanted to ask her, I can’t.’

  ‘Belgrade? What’s she doing there?’

  ‘Getting a nose job. It’s her birthday present from Dad and Leanne.’

  ‘What? Are you serious?’

  ‘Yeah. The people who wouldn’t loan us $10,000 for IVF because “it’s not natural” just paid for my sister to fly to a gulag to get her nose whacked. I can’t make this shit up, George.’

  ‘Fuck, that’s ridiculous. What’s wrong with her nose, anyway?’

  Nina made a face. ‘It’s actually not a great nose. It’s like a hybrid of the Michael Jackson “after” nose and the Donatella Versace “before” nose. But still, that’s totally beside the point.’ Nina sighed and took a sip of her beer
. ‘Anyway, I’d never ask Jill. She’d just find some way of making it all about her. I couldn’t even trust her to hand over the baby at the end, you know? I bet she’d decide it was actually really cool to have a baby, because Victoria Beckham has so many of them, and she’d bundle it up in Baby Dior and run away with it. And probably give it some ridiculous name like Indigo or Rain. And spell it R-A-Y-N-E. Maybe add an umlaut or something, just for kicks.’

  I nodded, but I was only half-listening. I was really thinking about all the possible ways to tell Nina I couldn’t do it.

  ‘Sorry, Nina, I’m really busy with work right now and having a baby for someone else doesn’t really fit into my schedule.’

  ‘Sorry, Nina, but I just did a juice cleanse and I can finally fit into my J Brands and I don’t want to ruin that, you know.’

  ‘Sorry, Nina, but I love wine too much and I just can’t imagine giving it up for nine months. Ditto brie.’

  ‘Sorry, Nina, but what if Jase decides he doesn’t love me anymore because I’m fat and gross, because life is not a Nora Ephron movie?’

  As I tallied up the reasons in my head I realised that none of them were good enough. None of them were reason enough to say to my best friend, ‘No, I will not keep your baby cooking. Sorry. So, schnitzel or steak?’ How about:

  ‘Nina, I don’t even want to use my plumbing for my own kid – I feel kind of weird about using it for yours.’

  I felt weird? That’s the best I could come up with? Weird?!

  I looked at Nina, who was drinking her beer and checking out the lunch specials. She wouldn’t keep asking me; I knew that much. She’d put it out there and let me decide. I knew that, either way, she’d still love me and we’d still be best friends. Even if I said no, she’d understand. Even if it meant that she’d never have kids.

  ‘Nina?’

  ‘Have you tried the parma here? Has it got a lot of sauce? Because I don’t like a lot of sauce, you know?’

  ‘Nina, I’ll do it.’ I smiled broadly to try to punctuate the sentence. It was a big one, it deserved a flourish.

  ‘What?’ Nina picked up her beer and swirled the last frothy drops in the glass, pausing to look up at me.

  ‘I’ll do it. I’ll have your baby.’

  Nina stopped. For a second she was still, her open mouth set in an O. Then she leapt to her feet and dropped the near-empty glass, clapping her hands to her mouth. And then she just stood there, open-mouthed and wide-eyed with smashed glass all around her beautiful motorcycle boots. The bartender shouted, ‘Taxi!’

  ‘Nina?’

  Her mouth was moving but she wasn’t saying anything.

  ‘Nina? Are you ok?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually.

  ‘I’m serious, Nina. I’ll do it.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, looking down. When she looked up again, her smile was so wide and bright, I felt like I was seeing her for the first time.

  4

  Week 2,

  DAY 3

  The really fantastic thing about being the boss was that everyone assumed you were always busy; far too busy to talk or be interrupted or return their emails. It was possibly the best thing about the whole gig, particularly as I didn’t get to enjoy the whole parking space thing. Which was why I was surprised to hear a tentative knock on my door when I’d settled back in after an advertising lunch. (Sample conversation: ‘Is there a way we can integrate our new glow-in-the-dark sex-toy in editorial? In, like, a very subtle and organic way? Where we show a full-page pic of the product? Now, the thing is, we don’t have much money …’)

  I was flicking through one of our competing titles, Glam, looking at a photo of the sylph-like Claire Danes, wondering if I’d be as skinny as her after I had Nina’s baby.

  Yep. That’s really what I was thinking.

  Not: Oh shit, I’ve agreed to have another couple’s child.

  Not: How the hell will all this work?

  Not: Do I need a lawyer or something or will we just pinky swear? Not: How will it feel to grow a human for nine months and then hand it over to someone else for ever and ever?

  Not: Shit, I haven’t even told Jase yet. Shit, shit, shit: what am I going to tell Jase?

  No, no, what I was thinking was: Will I be able to wear bodycon, in the extremely unlikely case I am one day invited to the Emmys and am photographed standing next to Claire Danes? It was fair to say that denial was my current crutch.

  I looked up from beautiful, skinny, moon-eyed Claire to find Fran at my door.

  ‘What’s up, Fran?’

  ‘Excuse me, Georgie, but Ms Downing is here to see you.’

  Shit! The meeting with Meg. I was supposed to tell her something … but what? Shit squared. My mind scrambled as I tried to remember what Meg had wanted from me in the email last week. I imagined telling her, ‘Oh, sorry Meg, I haven’t had time to get X, Y and Z for you because I’ve agreed to be a surrogate for my best friend and for the past seven days that’s all I’ve been capable of thinking of.’ Actually, I’d better not; Meg would just ask me to write about it for the mag.

  ‘Oh, right. Thanks Fran. She can come in.’

  Meg, who had once been Jolie’s editor herself and remained every bit as polished and savvy as she’d been when she sat in my chair ten years ago, walked in with the confidence of a French divorcee smoking a cigarette at a cafe by the Seine. I’d started life at Jolie as Meg’s PA. She had seen something in me that I hadn’t, and I had wanted to be her ever since. Meg made poise seem effortless – she was one of those people who was just born with that innate sense of ‘Fuck you, I’m amazing’. So it could be a teensy bit intimidating to be her employee.

  ‘George! Darling! How are you? You look a little … how do I say this? Er, rumpled? Crumpled? Not so fresh?’

  ‘Just burning that Jo Malone candle at both ends, you know.’

  ‘Good! That’s what I like to hear,’ she said in her clipped Primrose-Hill-by-way-of-Double-Bay accent. ‘So you got my email about the website? I had a meeting with the dev team – I mean, I don’t understand half of what they say, but who does? – and they seem to think we can do really well with the iPad edition if we really work at it, make it special. Something about doing something to our audience. Customise them? No … optimise them, maybe. You know what I mean.’

  Actually, I didn’t. I’d worked in print my whole adult life – first as a cadet at my local paper, where my favourite task was ‘Around the Courts’, because I got to see what my old high-school classmates were up to or addicted to, and then at a publishing house, where I’d made some spectacularly terrible personal decisions that saw me (quite unfairly) labelled the ‘office skank’, and then at various magazines. I’d worked on big, mainstream mags like Jolie and smaller, more independent titles. I’d done interiors mags and teen mags and for a short, disastrous period of time I had been the token female at a men’s mag (sample quote: ‘Have we done enough retouching on the vag?’). By the time I came back to Jolie as editor, where my mag career had begun, I knew print like my favourite pair of jeans. I understood things like circulation and readership and inserted ads and fold-out covers and pagination. And call me old-fashioned, but I still loved mags. I loved seeing them in the stands, all glossy and promising. I loved buying them and opening to the first page to see which advertiser had taken out the opening spread (mainly so I could get on the phone to them on Monday morning and get them to advertise with us instead).

  I loved seeing what other art directors did, how other writers used their words, how other fashion editors styled the collections. And I was good at it. I knew which stories worked and which ones needed to be dropped. I knew how to work a cover line and how to tell if a cover model was going to be hot that month. But I didn’t get all the online stuff, and I wasn’t particularly interested in learning it. It just wasn’t me.

  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the internet – how else would I shop, or stalk people? – but I did not understand it. Not at all. Sure, over
seeing the website was part of my job description, but I figured it couldn’t be too hard. I’d pretty much bluffed my way into being a writer way back when – how hard could it be to copy and paste our articles onto a blog page or whatever it’s called?

  So, despite having no idea what Meg or this ‘dev team’ was on about, I nodded.

  ‘So how many iPad subscribers do we have now?’ she asked.

  ‘Ummm … hang on. It’s here somewhere.’ I scrolled through my inbox and found the email from Fran. ‘Right – we have 1200. Mmm. That’s not bad.’

  ‘And how many print?’

  ‘20,549,’ I said, without missing a beat.

  ‘Right, and all of them get access to the digital editions too, so we can put digital subscribers at around … 25,000.’ Meg smiled cheekily. ‘But what we need to do now,’ said Meg, ‘is really cash in on that audience. So we need iPad-only content. When people download the mag, they need to be getting something special.’

  I baulked. ‘Uh, they are getting something special. They’re getting Jolie.’

  Meg shook her head. ‘No, George. People want more than that these days. They want interactive covers. They want to be able to click on a t-shirt a model is wearing and buy it right then and there. They want more content – like videos and slideshows and all that business.’

  I rolled my eyes. Did people really want all that from Jolie? Couldn’t they get that from Facebook or something? Why couldn’t they be happy to read our beautifully written, exhaustively researched stories? Why couldn’t they be satisfied with the hours and hours of work our fashion team put into their spreads? Anyone could make Chanel look good on a page, but our readers wanted the high street brands, so that’s what we gave them. And believe me, it wasn’t as easy as it looked to make a knock-off Marc Jacobs dress look like a million bucks, or even like the $140 the high street stores sold it for.

  ‘OK … so who does all this? My team doesn’t have time to make interactive covers and videos, Meg.’