‘Joe,’ she hesitated, ‘I don’t think I should be travelling so far away from the hospital at this stage.’ She shifted in her seat, resting a hand on her belly as though to remind him. ‘I’ve been having a lot of contractions on and off lately.’
‘They’re only Braxton-Hicks, they could go on for weeks.’
She looked at him. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I’ve been reading the books.’
‘You have?’
He glanced at her. ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
‘Anyway, you’ve still got weeks to go,’ he went on. ‘But I don’t know how long Dad’s got. I think you can risk being a couple of hours’ drive from the hospital.’
‘I could go early.’
‘First pregnancy you’re more likely to go later,’ said Joe. ‘I need to get back to Dad. I need to be with my family right now, Sarah.’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I do. You should go and be with them. I’ll be fine.’
He sighed loudly. ‘I can’t keep leaving you here on your own.’
‘I won’t be.’
‘Oh right, because Ian will keep you company, I suppose?’
‘Well he is close by if I need anything.’
Joe shook his head. ‘You know, Sarah, I have to say it, I find this whole thing with Ian weird. I still don’t understand what he’s doing here, hanging around.’
‘He told you, and I’ve told you, a number of times, he’s on a working holiday,’ she insisted. ‘We were good friends, Joe, we worked together. If he was a woman, you wouldn’t be thinking twice about him “hanging around”.’
Joe pulled up at traffic lights. ‘Whatever, I’m still not comfortable leaving you again.’
There was a pause before she spoke. ‘I don’t think it’s such a bad idea, to be honest.’
He frowned at her. ‘What does that mean?’
She didn’t look at him; she was staring down at her hands. ‘I’m just wondering if we need a break.’
‘A break?’ he exclaimed. ‘What are you talking about? We’re not even really together.’
‘That’s the whole problem,’ said Sarah. ‘I thought it was going to be different, Joe. I thought this would be our time to bond, before the baby came.’ She finally met his gaze. ‘But you’re not over that woman, I saw the way you looked at her tonight.’
There was the toot of a car horn behind them. Joe looked up to see the lights had changed. He took off again, clenching his jaw as tightly as he was clenching the steering wheel.
‘Sarah,’ he said in a level voice. ‘I told you I needed time. I’ve been as honest as I can, which is more than I can say for you.’
‘What are you implying?’ she said defensively.
He glanced across at her. ‘We could have avoided all this if you’d told me you were pregnant before I left England.’
‘Avoided what? That you were over me, that you wanted to leave me and settle down in Australia without me?’
‘I suppose we would have had to work through all that,’ he returned. ‘But it would have been a hell of a lot less complicated if there was no one else involved, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said quietly.
He sighed. ‘Look, we just have to hang in there till the baby comes, I’m sure it’s going to make a difference.’
There was a pause before she replied. ‘I don’t know if I can, Joe.’
‘What?’
‘I think that perhaps I made a mistake.’
Joe swerved the car over to the side of the road, pulling up in a no-standing zone. He reefed on the handbrake and turned in his seat to face her. ‘What are you trying to say, Sarah?’
‘Coming out here to Australia,’ she said tentatively. ‘I think it might have been a mistake.’
‘Well I think you have to give it a bit more time before you decide you can’t live here, don’t you?’
‘I don’t mean coming to Australia, I mean coming to you. I’m beginning to think I should have left well enough alone.’
Joe was stunned. ‘Is this some kind of a game to you, Sarah? Tell him, don’t tell him, come, go . . . are you motivated by what’s right at all?’
‘That isn’t fair.’
‘I think it’s a perfectly fair question,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘I don’t understand what you’re playing at. You came all the way out here to tell me you’re having my baby. I never would have known otherwise. And you know what, at first I wished I didn’t, that you hadn’t told me, that you’d met someone else and the child would never know the difference.’
She was staring at him. ‘You actually thought that?’
He nodded. ‘It made me ashamed of myself that I even entertained the idea, that I’d prefer not to know I had a child somewhere in the world. So I decided I had to get over it. And I’m sorry if it’s taking longer than you’d like for me to come to terms with this, but I’m doing the best I can.’
His voice reverberated throughout the car.
‘I know you are, Joe,’ Sarah said after a while. ‘And despite what you think,’ she said slowly, her voice heavy with emotion, ‘I was trying to do what I thought was right too, so the baby would have a mother and a father. But if there isn’t any love –’
‘Are you saying you don’t love me either?’
‘I don’t know any more, to be honest,’ she said plainly. ‘I know that you don’t love me, Joe, and I don’t know if you ever will. All you can offer me is to wait and see, to hope that when the baby comes you might feel differently.’
Joe leaned his head back against the seat. This was such a fucking awful mess. He couldn’t keep living like this, something had to change. Ironically it was Jo’s words that kept echoing in his head. What was the point of all this if he didn’t put his heart and soul into it? Then nobody wins.
‘I understand how that must make you feel,’ he said eventually, attempting to soften his tone. ‘But this is all academic, Sarah. You’re due very soon, and I’m not going to let you do this on your own, so far from home. Whatever you think, I do care about you, and I’m completely committed to this child. We’re going to have to make the most of this, we’re going to have to try, for his sake. Shouldn’t the baby be our first priority?’
She was staring at him, biting her lip. But finally she nodded slowly.
‘All right then,’ said Joe. He breathed out heavily. ‘I won’t go back up to the mountains until I have to.’
‘But you have to now, Joe, I can’t let you –’
He held up his hand to stop her. ‘The girls will let me know when it’s time. I can make it up there in under a couple of hours. In the meantime I’ll stay here with you.’
Sarah clasped her hands on her belly, her head bowed. ‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘But I do, Sarah, that’s the thing.’
New Year’s Eve
Jo was settled in for the night. She had a bottle of bubbly chilling in the fridge, though she wasn’t at all sure she was going to be in the right spirit to open it at midnight, even though she finally had her place to herself again. Charlene’s course of treatment was complete and she was spending New Year with Belle before she headed back home next week. Belle had asked Jo to join them as well, but they were having all the neighbours in for a soiree and Jo would really rather not. Angie had asked her to a cast party; they weren’t performing tonight, the preview season was over and they were going to celebrate. Any other time, that might have been fun.
But she wasn’t in the mood for fun exactly. She didn’t want to be dismal either, but it was difficult to know what to do with herself. She had wandered around the video store for forty-five minutes this afternoon looking for a title that wasn’t too sad, or too funny, or too epic, and certainly not too romantic . . . but in the end she gave up. She didn’t know what mood she was in, or what mood she wanted to cultivate. She wanted to be hopeful, she really did, but there wasn’t a movi
e that seemed to embody that for her, and besides, she wasn’t so sure a Hollywood movie should be her inspiration for the new year. Or her life beyond.
One thing was for sure, she was sick of the sound of her own voice in her head. So she went home and played music on the stereo. Loud, boisterous, headbanging stuff she could bop around to while she pottered about the flat putting things back in place, reclaiming the space now Charlene was gone. But as the clock ticked over to ten, Jo seriously wondered how she was going to make it all the way to midnight, whether she shouldn’t just give up and go to bed. The new year only set people up for failure and disappointment. All that bright hope that things were going to be different, funnelled into unsustainable resolutions that nobody ever kept. She’d done her column on that last new year, miserable killjoy that she was.
Jo had not submitted a Christmas or New Year column this year. It wasn’t unusual to drop regular features over the holiday period, and besides, she had been totally occupied pulling her investigative piece together. She was glad for the distraction; ever since the night of the play, all she could see every time her mind drifted was Sarah’s face, her baby bump, the two of them together . . . So Jo had thrown herself into her work. The weeks before Christmas had been spent gathering information, which presented its own particular challenges at that time of the year. But she knew if she didn’t make headway then, she wouldn’t have a hope come the January shutdown. So she was persistent to the point of being annoying, and finally she was able to begin connecting the dots.
All roads led to one senior minister, but Jo had to be a hundred percent sure she had it right. She didn’t want another debacle like the Andrew Leslie affair. This wasn’t personal, however; it was corrupt and possibly criminal. The tendering process had been manipulated in favour of certain preferred contractors, as the original informant had indicated. Appeals from other contractors had been quashed and environmental impact statements buried to ensure the tollways went ahead unimpeded. But even worse, Jo had finally linked the senior minister to various companies investing in the projects, companies that were set to make enormous profits. It had involved untangling a matted web of family trusts and offshore shelf companies, but as Jo had written the piece up and it had begun to take shape, her heart had started to beat a little faster. She’d gone over and over it, fastidiously double-checking every detail, keeping her writing objective and spare. She’d written only the facts; she hadn’t embellished a single point. It was a strong piece of journalism, and Jo was proud of it. She was ready to submit it to Leo, but considering the sensitive nature of the material, she had decided to wait to give it to him in person next week. She wasn’t comfortable about it floating around in cyberspace, unsupervised.
Suddenly her intercom buzzed and Jo’s heart did a small involuntary leap.
‘Hello?’
‘I knew you’d be there, you big liar.’
It was Angie. Jo had told her she was spending the night at Belle’s, just as she’d told Belle she was spending the night with Angie, so neither of them would feel sorry for her. She had not counted on feeling so sorry for herself.
‘What are you doing here?’ Jo asked.
‘I’ve come to see the New Year in with you. What do you think I’m doing here?’
‘But you have a fabulous party to go to.’
‘Been there, done that. And it wasn’t fabulous knowing my best friend was spending New Year’s Eve on her own.’
‘But I told you I was going to Belle’s.’
‘Lucky I know when you’re lying then, isn’t it?’ she returned. ‘Now, I’ve got one bottle of bubbly, have you got any grog up there or do I have to go pick up some more?’
‘I’ve got a bottle,’ Jo said meekly.
‘That should do us. So are you going to let me in?’
Jo hesitated. ‘Are you sure, Ange? I don’t know if I’m going to be very good company.’
‘Just shut up and press the button!’
She did as ordered, and skittered out the door and up the hall to wait at the lift. After a minute or two the doors opened and Angie was standing there, and Jo didn’t think she’d ever been happier to see her.
‘Thank you,’ she gushed. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Cut it out, you might be a head case but you’re not exactly a charity case,’ she said, walking out of the lift. ‘Besides, this was my plan all along, pre-New Year’s with my new best friends, the main event with my old best friend, no offence intended.’
‘None taken,’ Jo smiled.
Ten minutes later they were planted on the living room carpet, raising their glasses to each other.
‘What should we drink to?’ asked Angie.
‘I don’t think I’ve got much to drink to, what do you suggest?’
‘Well, let me see, I suppose we could drink to Joe and his new baby, seeing as you’re so cool with all that,’ she said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Another dirty lie.’
Jo pulled a face.
‘You never had me fooled. I just knew I wouldn’t have the chance to talk to you properly until the play was over. But I do now. So out with it.’
Jo shrugged. ‘There’s really nothing more to say. It’s over between us, he has a new life.’
‘But you’re not okay, are you?’ said Angie. ‘That’s why you ran off from the theatre the other night. I bumped into Joe and the woman when I came out to find you.’
‘You did?’ she asked, trying to be nonchalant. ‘So you saw her?’
‘Uh huh,’ Angie nodded, taking a sip from her glass.
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Not much, I barely said two words to her. Joe asked me if I’d seen you, he was looking for you as well.’
‘Was he?’ she said wistfully.
Angie put her glass down on the table. ‘You’re not fine with this at all, are you?’
Jo stared down at the carpet. ‘It doesn’t make any difference. You know, seeing him with her was . . . well, it was excruciating, to be perfectly honest. But it also made it real.’ She looked up to meet Angie’s gaze. ‘She’s a real live person walking around with Joe’s baby inside her. I don’t have any choice but to move on.’
‘How do you plan to do that?’
‘By talking about something else,’ she said plainly.
‘You mean by avoiding the subject?’
‘Yes, actually. Anything to get my head out of this space. I can’t keep thinking about him and talking about him. It’s too hard.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Angie. ‘So what do you want to talk about instead?’
‘Something happy and uplifting for New Year’s,’ said Jo. ‘Your plans, for example.’
‘My plans for what?’
‘Your plans to capitalise on your new-found fame.’
‘I tried to tell you the other night, Jo,’ said Angie, ‘there is no fame to be found in an amateur theatre group.’
‘But you’ve had a great opportunity here,’ Jo insisted. ‘You have to build on it.’
‘It’s not that easy, you know how difficult this profession is.’
‘Fair enough, but you still have the main season to go. What’s your agent doing to promote it, get you some attention where it matters?’
Angie shook her head. ‘I only got this chance because it’s an amateur production, and I appreciate it, I really do. I’m having a ball. But no one else is going to look twice at me.’
‘So what are you going to do about that?’ said Jo, unfazed.
Angie shrugged. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘Of course there is. You have to think positively.’
‘Jo, all the positive thinking in the world is not going to change the world. I would never even be considered for a part like that in mainstream theatre.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look at me.’
‘I am, and I see an incredibly talented, beautiful woman.’
‘Who’s overweight.’
Jo paused, considering he
r. ‘So lose some of it.’
Angie blinked. ‘Oh, okay, Jo, I’ll make that my new year’s resolution,’ she said sarcastically.
‘New year’s resolutions don’t work,’ she said bluntly. ‘You need a strategy.’
‘Why are you talking like this, Jo?’ She seemed hurt. ‘You’ve never talked like this before.’
‘Because I’d never seen you act before,’ Jo insisted. ‘Not really, and I understand what you’re saying, I do. I know how bigoted the world is, so never mind that at least half the population is overweight, and you are in fact, quite average – if you won’t be considered for roles because of your weight, then you have to lose some of it.’
Angie looked piqued. ‘You think it’s that easy?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be easy at all. I imagine it would be really hard. In fact, everything I’ve ever read suggests it’s incredibly difficult.’
‘Then why are you giving me a hard time?’
‘Because if I had a talent like yours, I’d do everything I possibly could to give myself a chance,’ she said plainly. ‘I know it’s unfair, Ange, but don’t hide behind it either. Do you realise how good you are? Did you hear the applause, the praise? You could be really successful. Cate Blanchett-Nicole Kidman successful.’
‘Okay, now you’re being ridiculous.’
‘Why is it ridiculous?’ asked Jo. ‘You’ve got the potential. You’ve got the looks. If it’s only your size stopping you, then do something about it.’
Angie chewed on her lip. ‘What do you suggest?’
Jo thought about it. ‘Stop working around food, for a start.’
She frowned.
‘I mean, come on, talk about putting the cat among the pigeons,’ said Jo. ‘Why make it harder for yourself?’
‘What else am I supposed to do?’
‘Anything,’ said Jo. ‘Become an office temp, a receptionist, even a cleaner would be preferable, at least that would be a bit more physical, and you’d be away from food. Save up for a personal trainer, do whatever you have to do.’
Angie was listening intently, Jo could almost hear the cogs turning in her brain. She wasn’t too bad at sorting out other people’s issues.
Crossing Paths Page 46
