Larger Than Life

by Adele Parks

  ‘Help yourself,’ smiles Julia. Immediately guilty, I try to resist by clasping my hands behind my back. I last about four seconds before I start to eat the lime ones. The thing is, all I want to do is eat. Eat and eat and eat and eat. Anything. Everything. I just want to stuff food into my mouth and chew it very quickly so I can stuff something new into my mouth. I eat as though I want to compensate, in the next fifteen minutes, for nearly fourteen years of starving.

  Thinking about it, this is absolutely the case.

  ‘Didn’t you get the memo? Some speaker is over from the US office. A three-line whip that everyone attends.’

  Funny, no one mentioned an imperative meeting when we were discussing diaries this morning, not Brett, nor Karl, nor Drew. Or maybe not so funny.

  ‘No, I didn’t get the memo.’ I resist adding that, as my number two, it is Julia’s responsibility to see that I do get memos and that important meetings are put in my diary. It’s so tricky managing a colleague/friend relationship. She’s unconcerned, more involved in applying another coat of nail varnish. Julia is not ambitious. She’s ‘in advertising’ simply because she spent so long in bars in Soho that a number of people assumed she already had a job in some agency or other and eventually she was ‘headhunted’ from a job she didn’t have into this one, a job she barely does. She’s extremely bright, but has a trust fund and is too wealthy to care about actually doing the job well.

  ‘You should have gone, there’s free sandwiches and champagne,’ she comments.

  Besides the free lunch I should have gone. It turns out that the ‘speaker’ from the US office is none other than the new Global Chief Executive, Philip Marx. He recently inherited the role after a rather savage and sleazy power struggle. The entire corporation was split into two rival camps of supporters. Anyone with any commercial and survival instinct knows that it’s career suicide not to be seen to be endorsing, and celebrating with, Marx. The war cry of the office is ‘the best man won’. Not because Marx is the best man for the job, but because he won. Fuck.

  ‘Why aren’t you there?’ I demand. Her absence combined with mine will be interpreted as departmental mutiny.

  ‘I offered to man the phones.’ At that point a phone rings. Julia ignores it, as she is busy blow-drying her nails.

  ‘Any messages, then?’ I ask but I’m not hopeful.

  ‘Er, yeah, there was one.’ She roots around tentatively on her desk; it’s a mass of cosmetics, but there are one or two pieces of paper interspersed with the mess. ‘Here.’

  She waves a Post-it note triumphantly. However, on reading the message it’s about as clear as the Enigma code.

  ‘Who’s Gar?’ I ask. Apparently he wants me to call him.

  ‘AAR,’ she clarifies.

  The Advertising Agency Register. The AAR contact me when Q&A have made it on to a pitch list. This is good news, I suppose, although frankly I’m so stretched with my current workload that getting on to another pitch list is a mixed blessing. To be accurate, it’s not that my workload has increased at all, it’s just that I can’t tackle my in-tray when my head is down the loo.

  I sit at my desk and hope that no one has noticed my non-attendance. Fifteen minutes later everyone starts to file out of the boardroom and back to their seats.

  ‘Oh, Georgina, you are here,’ says Karl. We thought you’d gone shopping.’

  Bastard.

  ‘When have you ever known me to go shopping at lunch-time?’ I smile.

  Karl raises his eyebrows. A gesture that succinctly implies, to anyone taking an interest, that women simply can’t help themselves and, important business meeting or not, we will be out abusing the plastic. I adore shopping but I’ve never, ever shopped on company time.

  ‘I was expecting an important phone call, I couldn’t leave my desk,’ I lie.

  ‘Really,’ smiles Karl. ‘Shame. Interesting meeting. You were missed. Marx even sent someone to look for you.’

  Bugger. I mutter something about being in the loo at the time and decide not to tell Karl that he has a cress seed stuck between his teeth.

  Things go from bad to worse when that afternoon, unable to fight the overwhelming fatigue of pregnancy, I twice fall asleep at my desk, only being brought back to consciousness by banging my head on my computer screen. Dean notices my fiery ambition has been dampened to smouldering embers when during a team meeting I lose my train of thought three times. On the fourth occasion he leaves the room without even excusing himself. By doing so he makes it clear I’m wasting his time.

  I call Hugh because I need to be soothed by his sympathetic tones.

  ‘Can you talk?’ I ask, as I know how irritating it is to be called at work when you are right in the middle of something tricky.

  ‘Not a good time, Babes, is it important?’

  To me, yes. ‘Nothing that can’t wait until this evening,’ I mutter and carefully place the phone back in the cradle. I pick the phone up again, just to check, but the line is dead and the dead tone isn’t in the slightest bit sympathetic.

  At six the computers are slowly switched off as thoughts turn towards cool lagers. Most people are bushed with the exertion of trying to impress Philip Marx. I’m bushed with the exertion of trying to stay awake.

  ‘Drew, fancy a beer?’ asks Karl.

  ‘Ever known me to say no?’

  ‘Brett?’

  ‘Damn right, I do.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask. The silence can be heard in Asia.

  ‘Look, Georgie, no offence, Babes, but we’re planning on a bit of a lads’ night. No skirt,’ explains Karl. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Sure,’ I smile, ‘I understand.’ And I do. It’s crystal clear. ‘I have plans, anyway. I’d have had to rearrange.’

  ‘Of course you do. See you tomorrow. Enjoy. Take care.’

  He throws out a couple more facile, insincere comforters and they leave. Karl knows I haven’t got plans tonight as plainly as he knows that I always attend the boys’ nights out in the local pub, where all the real wheeling and dealing is conducted. He doesn’t give a damn if I enjoy my evening or if I take care. These platitudes are spun to the losers and no-mates simply as a conversational salve. Finding myself abruptly excluded from the high-powered meetings in the boardroom is serious; exclusion from high-jinks meetings in the pub is the signing of my death warrant. If I don’t receive the latest hints and tips, as I have always done in the past, my job (as much dependent upon rumour as on share-of-voice reports) will become increasingly difficult. Just fifteen weeks pregnant and already I’m history.

  I should fight back. I should rally, reassemble, charge and counter-attack. And I would. I certainly would. I’ve done it before. Only now I can’t think how. My mind is a fog.

  The best thing is for me to have an early night and to get in at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to strategize. I mustn’t get this out of proportion; after all it’s not as though I’ve received my P45 in the internal mail.

  Julia is reapplying her lipstick. It’s unlike her to stay a minute after five-thirty. She must be going somewhere special.

  ‘Going somewhere funky?’ I ask, half-wondering if she’ll invite me along. We haven’t been out together for a couple of weeks, in fact since the afternoon at the Bluebird. Whilst I do feel a bit guilty for neglecting our social life (it’s always me that arranges the nights out), right now clubbing is so low down on my agenda it doesn’t even make it to AOB.

  ‘Nowhere special. Just out with Karl and the boys for a drink.’ She snaps her bag and her smile closed.

  I see.

  19

  I can’t consider waiting at a bus or Tube stop so I decide to jump in a cab. I know this is a big mistake when I have to endure a solid twenty-minutes monologue on foreign and domestic policy according to Mr Cabby. None of it is original or enlightened; most of it is offensive. Although when I think about it carefully, he’s not saying anything I haven’t heard before and it’s never bothered me in the past. But,
suddenly, I object to the barely disguised bigotry; it’s not made any more acceptable just because it appears in most of our national newspapers. The cab driver puts me in mind of the difficult man in the bookshop. He makes me think that however much Milton sterilizing fluid I use this world will never be clean enough to bring my baby into. I’m not in a good mood. It’s not my idea of fun to crawl through town at about three miles per hour, breathing in toxic fumes. It amazes me that even at this speed he can manage to brake so suddenly that I am flung from the backseat and only just prevent bashing my head on the glass partition by rolling into the brace position. Whilst there I fall asleep; when I wake up the meter reads nearly forty quid, even though ordinarily the journey home costs me seven. I know the cab driver has been driving around in circles, taking advantage of my chronic fatigue. I tell him so but he argues that the traffic was bad. I know he knows I don’t believe him but I’m too strung out to argue. The only form of protest I have available to me is to refuse to leave a tip.

  I tip him.

  And then stumble out of the cab and into my flat, dazed with the humiliation of being so weak as to accept his bullshit.

  I don’t bother to hang up my coat but fling it over the back of a chair. I pull myself up the stairs and into the bedroom. I start to take off my suit and shirt. My breasts ache and then bounce about as I release them from my boulder-holder bra. There’s a limited range in maternity underwear – big knickers, big bras and not a suspender belt to be had, not for lust nor riches; all of it is less aesthetically pleasing than the Hunchback of Notre-Dame’s vest. My boobs finally settle down long enough for me to examine the red welts where my engorged flesh, swollen to unrecognizable proportions, has chafed against the generous elastic straps.

  Oh God, I forgot to call AAR. I must do that first thing tomorrow. Sod it. There’s nothing for it. I can’t fight it. I struggle out of the rest of my clothes, rummage around Hugh’s drawers for a roomy T-shirt and, although it’s not yet seven, I slip between the cool cotton sheets.

  To sleep.

  I wake up to see Hugh rip off his tie; too impatient to unfasten the buttons on his shirt, he removes it by seizing it at the back of the neck and hauling it over his head in one swift efficient movement. It’s almost as though he doesn’t like having his face covered by the shirt in case he misses anything. The muscles in his back and shoulders flex tantalizingly. My heart leaps to my throat and I have to swallow it back down again. He pulls off his trousers and boxers, throws his socks into a corner of the room and slips between the covers.

  ‘This is a nice surprise. What are you doing home so early?’ he asks.

  I’m a no-mark, a has-been, a loser. I say that only in my head because if I say it out loud it might ring too true. His hands are already running up my thighs; he encounters the T-shirt and halts. ‘Oh.’

  Oh indeed.

  I’m a girl with serious aspirations to glamour. In all the time we’ve been together, Hugh has never seen me in anything other than designer underwear. If I bother with nightwear at all, it is always silk. This is not because I keep my best underwear for the nights when I think we’ll have sex; I simply don’t have anything other than sexy stuff. My wearing an outsize cotton T-shirt in bed is the equivalent to other women leaving a note that reads, ‘Your dinner is in the dog’. Finding me in bed early of an evening, Hugh had obviously thought I was requesting a steamy session.

  Wrong.

  Very wrong. My libido has absconded. It is possibly nestling under my many acres of stomach. How can I feel sexy when my body is a pincushion and a professional producer of urine?

  I grab his wandering hand and force him into conversation. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Fine; yours?’ He doesn’t care. He wriggles so that he can start to caress my hair with his left hand. I consider clutching his hand in my vice-like grip, but then I notice that the caresses feel nice. If only he’d leave it at that, then I could relax. But I know that the hair-caressing stunt is just to lull me into a false sense of security, then he’ll move in on my tits.

  ‘Terrible.’ I start to tell him about missing Philip Marx’s introduction meeting and then the scene with my boss during the team meeting. Ours is a small industry so Hugh knows Dean and therefore tries to reassure me.

  ‘Dean is known for conducting his meetings like that, leaving before they are over, taking calls in the middle, it’s a way of reminding everyone how important he is.’

  ‘No, it was more sinister than that, he was marking my card.’

  ‘You’re over-reacting, it’s your hormones. Your body is going through a lot of remarkable changes right now. That’s why you are being so extreme, tearful, overly sensitive and moody.’ Suddenly he’s turned into Dr Hilary Jones, but even more patronizing.

  I glare at him but don’t reply. Instead I reach for my week-by-week guide. I almost find it funny when I read that in week fifteen ‘growth continues to be rapid, but the skin is very thin’. I can’t help but be concerned that the skin may have to toughen up, with Hugh as a father. Both mine and the baby’s. Apparently its entire body is covered in a fine hair called lanugo. Yet more similarities. I nudge the duvet surreptitiously and try to quickly appraise my body without drawing Hugh’s attention. Besides the great mass that is my stomach, the other obvious sign of my pregnancy is that my bikini line has hit my knees. This entire process is designed to humiliate.

  Hugh starts to massage my neck. It’s pointless, I’m so tense it feels like he’s nipping me. I tell him about barfing on my keyboard. His eyes glaze over and I don’t blame him, I’m boring myself. In an effort to rediscover the woman I consider myself to be I put down the book and give way to his caresses. I’m pretty sure a really substantial orgasm will make me feel at one with the world again.

  Sex is unworkable.

  Hopeless.

  However hard I try I cannot summon up the tiniest residue of desire. Even when I try to stay absolutely still my stomach thinks it’s competing in a gymkhana. I feel entirely separate and alone. Hugh’s hand runs up and down my thigh but it feels as though he is peeling off my skin. He tries to kiss my stomach, which causes me to shudder; I don’t want him to touch the squelchy bits. Bastard lying maternity books say I ‘might be suffering some slight discomfort in the breasts, a tingling sensation’ – in reality they feel as though they’re being tackled by the entire national rugby team, so they are entirely off-limits. He interprets my brushing him away and dismissing foreplay as an indication that I want a quickie. I suppose I do, in as much as I certainly don’t want to prolong this.

  I’m ashamed of my loss of desire and so hide it by faking orgasm. This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever faked and it’s with the man I love more than myself. Where’s the sense in that? I’m not even very good at faking it. I find myself impersonating people on TV pretending to orgasm and not imitating my own.

  ‘God, yes, yes, yes. Oh that’s it. Don’t stop. Oh wow. Oh angel.’

  Hugh sees through me and this hurts both of us equally. He rolls away from me, picks up a packet of cigarettes and then puts them down again. He does this in an extremely pointed manner. He wants me to note his huge sacrifice. But I don’t feel grateful that he’s restricting his smoking because I know he can still drink whisky.

  ‘Is this still about Valentine’s Day, Georgina?’

  He means the fact that he forgot Valentine’s Day and had to resort to buying me a bunch of carnations from the local garage, the type of bouquet that makes a dusty box of Milk Tray look positively thoughtful.

  ‘I just don’t feel in the mood, that’s all. I’m not well,’ I mumble. ‘It’s ironic that I feel permanently premenstrual when in fact that’s something I simply am not.’ I try to smile.

  ‘Well, that’s something to be pleased about, isn’t it?’ he says encouragingly. ‘No more periods for months. You’ve always grumbled about your periods. You said that they were the worst plague inflicted on womankind.’

  I’m now having a ret
hink but I don’t say as much.

  ‘I’m sorry about Valentine’s Day. And I’m sorry I’ve been working such long hours. I’m very involved in…’ I tune out. Again, it’s unprecedented but I’m not sure I care what’s going on in Hugh’s office. I only start to listen again when I hear the words, You need a holiday.’

  Love.

  Incredible, wonderful love.

  Yes, yes, I do. Somewhere glamorous, somewhere peaceful, somewhere hot. The Caribbean? The Maldives?

  ‘We should go away with the kids.’ Hugh turns to me, enthusiasm oozing out of every pore. ‘Why didn’t I think of it earlier? We can tell them about the baby.’

  Pig.

  Misogynistic, chauvinistic pig.

  No, no, I won’t. However, because I’m pregnant my brain appears to be operating in reverse and I can’t formulate an excuse quickly enough. Holiday and kids in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

  Hugh interprets my silence as an assent. ‘Not abroad but somewhere in the country. We could take long bracing walks.’

  Holiday and long bracing walks is another contradiction. Holiday equals white, private beaches and long days lying in the sun. However Hugh is too approving of his own idea to notice my doubts. I can only hope that Becca vetoes the suggestion.

  March

  20

  Becca thinks it’s a brilliant idea for Hugh and me to take the kids away. She even suggests that we team up with Hugh’s brother Henry and his family. I’d have never credited her with so much spite.

  Henry is a pleasant enough guy, but his wife, Penny, and I don’t see eye to eye. She’s Becca’s friend and, as such, is never going to be mine. Their three children, whose names escape me, are devil’s spawn. Suddenly I’m noticing how many badly behaved children I know. I wonder if there is any other variety. Ideally I’d like one that comes with a volume-control button and self-clean surfaces.

  To avoid the weekend away being an unmitigated disaster I suggest that Sam and Gilbert join us. Hugh has enough sense to realize that, in this case, dilution is desirable and readily agrees. Moreover, when Sam rings up and asks if Gilbert’s brother James can join the party too, we fall over ourselves and agree.