She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  She let the statement hang there, waiting for my response. It was a classic interviewing technique I’d used myself, usually when interviewing pop stars who’d just come out of rehab for ‘exhaustion’.

  ‘I haven’t started my family because I’m not having one.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  I tried not to let the question bother me the way it normally would. Why did people think you were bluffing when you told them you didn’t want kids? Honestly, I was more surprised when people told me they did. Really? You want a human alarm clock that can never be turned off? You want to wipe someone else’s arse for three years? You want to learn every lyric The Wiggles have ever penned? You want to go to Fiji every year instead of Paris?

  The fact was, I’d never seen myself with kids. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them – although I definitely faked liking some of them – I just wasn’t drawn to having my own. And yes, I had thought about it a lot, but no, I would not change my mind. I just didn’t want them, in exactly the way that some people did want them. There was nothing more to it than that.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding to emphasise my surety.

  ‘Do you have a partner?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Dr Fisher looked up. ‘Yes, you do?’

  I started to nod but it quickly segued into a side-to-side motion. A maybe motion.

  Dr Fisher raised her eyebrows, urging for more information.

  ‘It’s … complicated.’

  *

  Jase had come home – to his home, which I was still inhabiting – last night to collect some more clothes. Two weeks had passed since our fight and the only contact we’d had were a series of perfunctory text messages about the landlord needing access to the bathroom for repairs. Every night I’d gone to sleep in our bed, alone, contemplating the irony of finding a guy who was so nice he’d let me stay in his apartment even after we’d basically broken up.

  ‘So … are you going ahead with it?’ he’d asked. I couldn’t decipher his tone.

  ‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t look at Jase, so I concentrated on the wall behind him, on the painting his sister-in-law had given him for his birthday a few months back. I had always thought it was too literal to be good, but now I appreciated the cool grey curve of the bicycle wheels on the sandy pavement. It was nice of Emily to do that for Jase. Why couldn’t I have been nicer to Jase?

  ‘Oh.’ He nodded. ‘I thought so.’

  We were both silent for a while, each alone with too many of our own thoughts.

  ‘When does it, uh … when will it happen?’

  ‘Um, like … now. I have an appointment at the clinic tomorrow. If that goes well then … it starts straight away.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Jase …’

  ‘I think I’d better come home.’

  I felt a momentary spark of hope, before I realised what Jase meant. He was coming home; I was leaving.

  ‘Oh. Yeah, of course.’

  I thought of all the kisses we’d shared and how I couldn’t even remember when the last one had been. Was it when I’d arrived home on the night of the fight? Had it been earlier that morning? Now that it was never going to happen again, it seemed important that I remember the last time Jase and I had kissed, to keep it in my mind as a sort of memorial.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Um … Nina’s, I guess. Can I, um … can I have a few days? Just to sort everything out, see if Nina and Matt have room for me.’

  ‘Well you’re having a fucking baby for them, George, so I reckon they can spot you a bed for a few nights.’ He paused, letting the venom slip out of his voice. ‘Sorry. Sure, take a few days. I’ll come back on the weekend.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK.’

  *

  ‘Complicated,’ Dr Fisher repeated.

  I grimaced. ‘It’s not actually complicated. I don’t have a boyfriend. I did. Now I don’t. But we were not planning on having a baby together. And don’t worry, this is not one of those weird things people do for a lark after a break-up, like get a bad haircut or take up tribal drumming.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Well, we run counselling sessions before any of this begins. You’ll chat through all of this during those sessions. There is a lot at stake here, and you need to consider everything very carefully.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Alright. The last, and probably most important question we ask potential carriers is: why are you doing this? Do you understand that in Australia, it is illegal to pay surrogates?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’

  ‘OK, good. Why are you doing this?’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Because I can’t imagine not doing it.’

  She nodded and looked up, right in my eyes this time.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because … because Nina’s my best friend and she wants this – she wants a baby – more than anything. I can’t even imagine wanting something as badly as she wants a baby. I don’t have anything to compare it to. Nothing.’ I looked down, suddenly overcome with sadness for Nina. For her, missing out on a baby was like grieving every single day, except it was worse in a way, because there was nobody to grieve for. Just the idea of something, the spectre of it somewhere. And like grief, when you see someone everywhere, in everything, Nina was reminded every single day that she didn’t have a baby. The thought that I could do something to help was too powerful; I had to do it.

  There was another part of me that felt guilty, too. Guilty that I was probably able to do something that Nina couldn’t. Guilty that Nina wanted it so much and I’d barely given it a thought.

  And another part of me thought: it’s nine months, why not?

  ‘Do you understand that there’ll be extensive counselling before we move on to the next stage of the process?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Do you understand that Nina and Matthew will be the legal parents of this child?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ That was as clear as the gin martini I’d been craving since this appointment began.

  ‘Then let’s get started.’

  8

  Week 9

  Writing my editor’s letter every month always reminded me of the ‘letter book’ Nina and I used to share in high school. If I ever get really famous, my biographer, or the director of the film based on my life (ideally Kathryn Bigelow, because I once interviewed her and she was totally badass, but I’d take Sofia Coppola, too, for the dreamy clothes and awesome soundtrack and possibility that she might cast Josh Hartnett as my love interest), will point to these letter books as early evidence that I was destined to be one of the great magazine editors of all time.

  That, or a massive nerd.

  A letter book is exactly, disappointingly, what it sounds like. I would write a letter to Nina one afternoon, I’d hand it to her the next day at school, and she’d write in it. And so on. All that effort, despite having already been together for six hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year. What was it about being a kid that made you crave contact so, so badly? I thought of all the ways I’d tried to dodge social engagements to be alone even in the past month. But back then, I would have sutured myself to Nina if it were possible. We talked all day at school, passing notes in class and whispering to each other while a teacher’s back was turned. We talked all the way home on the bus, and then, when we got home, we still had more to say so we wrote it all down in our letter book. Looking back, trading daily letters – in the nineties, for god’s sake, I mean, we definitely could have been IM-ing each other at the very least – was a definite sign that Nina and I were the type of nerds who could practically trademark the term, we owned it so completely.

  I doubt girls write each other letters anymore. They probably spend hours putting together a perfect flat-lay of tomorrow’s outfit for Instagram instead, and just tag each other in it and use emojis to spell out their afternoon tea (pineapple, wink, donut).

  Before each letter, Ni
na and I filled out a little questionnaire – like we were celebrities in a magazine, further proof – that detailed our up-to-the-minute likes and dislikes. As if it was reasonable that these could change on a daily basis.

  I remember using the letter book to passionately argue the case for Dylan over Brendan and write poems dedicated to Drazic’s eyebrow ring. Nina used it to rant about our teachers and the ways they were ‘holding us back’ and ‘not allowing us to express ourselves fully’. We traded the letters as carefully as if they were copies of Smash Hits, or the Beanie Babies we truly imagined would be collectables one day.

  Writing my ed’s letter always prompted me to wonder what it would be like if my fifteen-year-old self were writing it. Who did I like right now? What did I want? (If I recall correctly, my fifteen-year-old self desperately wanted a handkerchief top and the midriff to pull it off. She would have died if she’d heard GreyBeard Wizard-Man telling her 34-year-old self she looked ‘healthier in the stomach region’ this morning.)

  Want: Nina to have the baby she’s always dreamed of.

  Don’t want: the pressure of knowing that Nina’s baby is now my responsibility.

  After talking through absolutely every detail of my private life – including ones that didn’t seem relevant to the situation at all – in the mandatory counselling sessions, the main question I was left with was: what if it didn’t work? How would I face Nina if this was her last effort and … it wasn’t enough? If I wasn’t enough?

  I wanted to turn back the clock and be nicer to Jase.

  But even after everything that had happened, I still didn’t want to go back and have the baby talk with him.

  Bloody hell.

  Although fifteen-year-old George wouldn’t believe it, this situation was a lot more complicated than my three-year high-school crush on Mark Daley.

  I heard a knock on my door. I looked up – it was Lucy.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’

  ‘Features meeting. Do you still want to do it now …?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, definitely. Can you get everyone to come in?’

  Work had become my refuge but it was still chaotic, what with daily emails from Meg asking me if we’d had any more iPad subscribers overnight and whether I’d read the latest forum posts on MamaKnowsBest.com, a website where women pretended to care about feminism but seemed to spend a lot of time bitching about each other. Up until now, we’d all made fun of it – but you couldn’t argue with the fact that it was the number one women’s website in the country and constantly hiring new writers. We hadn’t hired anyone new in a while – we hadn’t even replaced my deputy after she’d been made redundant. So I had to concede that Meg was right – we probably could stand to take a link out of their book.

  Lucy returned with the team in tow. Today she was wearing a black silk jumpsuit with leopard-print heels. Her ashy blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail that would make Blake Lively jealous, and her nails looked like they’d been manicured, oh, five minutes ago. Lucy. Lucy would never get herself into this mess.

  She took charge like I knew she would, and I sat back, listening to the team pitch their ideas ferociously. This was one of my favourite parts of the job.

  Somewhere in between our beauty editor, Dom, talking about a new fat-freezing technique and Lucy pitching an interview with a woman who’d designed an anti-street-harassment app, I got an email from Nina.

  Clinic says you’re an excellent match! Just spoke to Dr Fisher and she said your bits are all in working order – not even a little bit rusty from all that wine we drank in the Hunter Valley last year. Yay! We just have to wait for your period and then we can start. PS Matt making ‘pad Thai’ for dinner. Have a big lunch. It’s just packet noodles with soy sauce and a BBQ chicken.

  Matt’s cooking was famous. Well, not so much famous as infamous. The trouble was, he really liked cooking. And people who really like cooking usually think they’re really good at it. Like people who like singing. Or dancing. If bad dancers had two left feet then Matt had two left … tongues. Or hands. Or something.

  Being at Nina and Matt’s had its upside, in that I could sleep on a bed within four safe walls, as opposed to being at a women’s shelter or wherever the hell else I would have ended up seeing as I was currently homeless. But it was also like being the only sober person at a party. Everyone was settling in for a big night and enjoying the sweet, familiar buzz of booze – except me. So being at work was a relief.

  ‘George?’

  I looked up.

  ‘What do you think?’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘What’s that?’

  Lucy laughed. ‘The social media issue we’ve been talking about. Where’s your head been, George?’

  ‘Oh, right. Social media issue? Whose idea was that?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Lucy. ‘Charm did it in the States. I think it’s a great idea. They put Natasha Cook on the cover.’

  Everyone in the room – except me, notably – aahed and smiled.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Who’s that?’

  For the briefest of seconds – the very, very briefest – I saw Lucy’s eyes flash with annoyance. Then she smiled. ‘You know, Tash Cook. She does We the Sheeple.’

  I shook my head. Some niche designer I’d never heard of?

  ‘The blog? It’s, like, about copycat fashion?’ Lucy went on. ‘You know, she finds two people on the street on the same day who are wearing basically the same thing? It’s really massive. I love her so much.’

  Finding two people wearing the same outfit? How hard could that be? Let’s be real: all fashion is copycat.

  ‘Is this for the anniversary issue? Because I think we’re going to do the retrospective,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ Lucy raised her brows this time. Again, I thought I detected a flash of indignation.

  ‘Yes – remember? We talked about it at the last meeting. We’ll look back at all forty years. Get all the old editors in for a shoot, look back at the big covers, all that stuff. And didn’t somebody suggest a sex special? We could incorporate that.’

  It was Jolie’s fortieth birthday in Australia at the end of the year. Given Meg’s insistence that we rebrand, despite the fact that our current brand was actually pretty outstanding, I had pushed this project to the back of my mind. What would Jolie look like in six months, if I made all the changes Meg wanted me to make? A text message? An Instagram account? Ugh and ugh squared.

  Still, I knew that if we were going to save Jolie, the fortieth anniversary would be the best way to do it. I imagined a big advertiser party, the kind we used to throw when I’d first started in mags, a time that was so freewheelin’ and fun-lovin’ it should have been illegal. We’d thrown parties just because we could. It was January, how about a summer party? It was February, how about a Valentine’s Day party? It was June, how about a Queen’s Birthday party? We’d plied the advertisers with bottles and bottles of champagne, and made charming small talk with them, and told them how much we loved their products and how much the readers loved their products, and blah blah blah, they’d spend all their ad dollars with us. Everyone was happy. I remember thinking, back then, that it was all so much work, but it wasn’t. Not at all. Those were the salad days, the days before wi-fi and MamaKnowsBest and every chick who worked in retail having her own street-style blog. The days when every company had money to burn and everyone knew it. I knew Meg would love the party idea – one big hurrah to show the world that Jolie was still here, still providing a voice for women and enough big, shiny pages to sell hairspray and nail polish.

  ‘Oh, I remember you telling us about that,’ said Dom. Which wasn’t entirely true: it had been a team idea, hadn’t it? ‘You mean like a sealed section and we all talk about the crazy sex stuff we’ve done for the mag?’

  I nodded. ‘Just a few pages. It’ll be part of a bigger special, a look back at all the ways Jolie has changed, all the progress we’ve made. It was meant to be a joke.’ The fact that I had to explain to my team that it was me
ant to be a joke wasn’t a great sign – but couldn’t they see that the sex-trospective was a really funny idea? Over the years, I’d had to road-test, in no particular order: a vagina cover meant to protect my modesty during the height (depth?) of the Brazilian craze, a powder that purported to change the taste of my then-boyfriend’s – ahem – product, a DIY dildo kit, and a Shewee, a small plastic funnel that allowed women to stand up and wee. Like sitting down to wee was the only thing holding us back.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, sensing the need to move on. ‘Does anyone have any other ideas?’

  ‘The social media issue,’ said Lucy, as if it were obvious that this was the only idea worth exploring.

  ‘Mmm, I’m not sure about that one. Work on a proposal and get back to me – I’m lukewarm on it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking – we’re in this really cool feminist moment right now. Beyoncé’s a feminist, there are more female writers and directors and female-focused TV shows and movies than ever – and the word is just out there. I can’t remember another time in my life where it’s been so visible.

  ‘I think this issue needs to recognise that, you know? Jolie has been around for four decades – that’s pretty significant. We can ask a writer who’s synonymous with each decade to write about how feminism has changed since the ’70s, ’80s, what-have-you. We’ll get Jen to style them, Christina can shoot. Actually, that’s a really good point – I think we should make a big deal of the fact that everyone working on this issue is a woman.’

  I looked at my features team, excited for what I assumed would be their ecstatic response. Dom was applying a top coat to her nails. Lucy was shading in a triangle she’d carefully sketched on her notepad. Only Fran was gazing up at me, smiling, as she always did.