I sat in front of my laptop and reposted all my commission ads in various places to see if it would result in any more email inquiries. It hadn’t by the afternoon. I waited, sitting with my phone next to me and pouncing on it each time my LED flashed, hoping it was an inquiry, or even Sarah, or Gemma… and each time, it was in Korean.
Bree was watching me out of the corner of her eye while she leant on her elbows and slogged her way through a chemistry text, and she didn’t have to say anything for me to know what she was thinking: that was a lot of emails, even for Mum.
I couldn’t face any of her crap, though, because not being able to do anything productive except wait for Sarah was killing me. I used to make nearly $450 a day working at Frost. Today, I hadn’t made a cent, and the clock was ticking on finding some reliable way to pay back my ridiculous debts.
Sarah wasn’t home by dinner time. My stomach was in knots and I wasn’t the least bit hungry, so Bree ended up eating most of my dinner.
By seven, after Bree had washed our dishes and sat back down at the table, she was even looking at the clock herself. “I wonder where Sarah is.”
I checked the time on my laptop. “At seven? Probably still at work. She had some big meetings this morning so I think it might finally have been assignment day today.” And from her earlier text messages, I gathered she wasn’t too happy about the project she’d been assigned to. Part of me hoped it was because she’d been put as Team Admin which meant that she’d be able to keep normal hours and bring extra work home. She’d hate it, but given that she was pregnant, it was probably better for her than something high power and high stress.
Except an hour later she wasn’t home, either, and when it hit ten, Bree was yawning. “It’s really late and they still haven’t replied to me. Neither of them has.” Something occurred to her, and she turned to me. “Hey, do you think they’re out together?”
My eyebrows went up. “Maybe,” I said. It was a thought. They used to hang out all the time, so I supposed it was possible.
Bree seemed pretty content with that explanation, and so I stoked the fire for her and she lay on her back reading textbooks on her tablet until she predictably fell asleep. I watched her for a little while as her chest slowly rose and fell. She was just like any other year 12 student, now. Worrying about her schoolwork, preparing for her final exams. Not worrying about money.
This is what you got that loan for and why you’re not telling her, I reminded myself. This is what Bree gets out of it.
I just had to make sure I could pay it back, which meant getting a fucking job. I looked up at the clock; 10:44pm. That was late. Even for me that would have been late, and Sarah had usually left before me.
I helped Bree to bed—“You’re supposed to carry me…”—tucked her in, and then went and sat at the table in front of my laptop.
A whole day had passed. I should probably have been sending my resume around for those professional positions anyway, shouldn’t I? Maybe I could pick up some temp job where they were so desperate for someone to start immediately that they wouldn’t care if I looked maybe 20 max, hadn’t worked for three months, had only had one proper job in my life and no referees from it, and that the sex markers on all my IDs were completely at odds with how I….fuck. Fuck, who was I kidding? That type of job didn’t exist. No one would ever be that desperate for a marketing clerk. Not to say I wouldn’t find someone to employ me eventually—I was good at marketing and material design, I knew eventually that would mean something—but ‘eventually’ was way, way too far away. I needed Sarah to give me some advice on how to get a job now.
But what if she didn’t come home tonight? I mean, it wasn’t unheard of for Frost to put late-working teams up at the hotel I’d lived at for four years. Maybe she’d—
Keys turned in the front door.
I sat up straight, listening. I heard the click of the lock, and then the long screech as the old door swung open. It was her; she sighed as she took her coat off. Finally. Feeling a surge of relief, I jumped up, abandoning my laptop and going to greet her. There was probably still enough time for late-night chats before we went to bed. She might want to debrief after such a long day, too.
I was in the middle of making a joke about secret double-lives because she was out so late when she turned towards me and the words caught in my throat. She looked terrible. Drawn and pale, and so, so exhausted.
My grin fell. “Whoa,” I said, rushing over to her. “Are you okay?” I put my arms out for support.
She batted them away. “Yeah,” she said in a gravelly voice. It was the kind you had when you’d done a lot of late-night talking.
I squinted at her. “Yeah, you’re totally the picture of good health. You should start a blog.” I put an arm around her anyway, but she just made a beeline for the bedroom and struggled with her dress.
“Can you get that?” she said, pointing down her back. I did her zip for her, and she pulled the dress straight off, and her bra followed suit. At my wide-eyed expression, she rolled her own eyes. “Please, you’re going to be seeing these hourly after I’ve had Junior here,” she flatly reminded me. She had an old t-shirt over her head pretty quickly anyway and just climbed straight into bed. She didn’t look like she was trying to go to sleep, though. She just stared at the ceiling.
This was very unlike her. Gingerly, a sat down on the edge of the mattress. “Can I get you anything? A Panadol, maybe?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe a bowl of bland cereal…?” I attempted with a bit of a grin.
She sighed, looking at bit guilty. “I’m sorry, I totally suck. I thought I’d be home earlier and we could hang out a bit, and then I looked up at the clock and it was past ten…”
Oh… so no chats after all? I swallowed. There went my grand plan of getting Sarah’s help with the hole I’d dug around myself. I waved my hand dismissively anyway, despite the fact I was screwed. I supposed it wasn’t her problem anyway.
A silence stretched between us. Sarah just stared upwards, almost unblinking. I watched her. This was more than just being tired and sick, wasn’t it? I couldn’t tell if she was depressed, or sad, or angry… or whatever she was, but she wasn’t just tired. She was tired and something. Sarah was top of her class at hiding her emotions, though. It could be anything.
I touched her calf over the doona. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked gently.
Her jaw tightened. She turned her head towards me on the pillow and said with gravity, “What am I doing, Min?”
I didn’t know how to reply to that. I just kept slowly rubbing her leg.
She looked back up anyway. “I’m not mother material. I mean, look at me: it’s past 11 and I’ve been at work for 15 hours. I didn’t have lunch. I forgot, actually. I had a Mars bar for dinner. I can’t even feed myself.” She shook her head. “And I know I should, but I really don’t want to quit my job, or take leave or anything, I really don’t, but it’s like my body isn’t giving me the choice. I used to always know how far I can push myself. I’ve never had a problem with it, never, but by mid-morning today I was already tired. I was sitting in front of Diane this morning and I was already tired. I’m so goddamn tired and there’s nothing I can do about it, and do I seriously think that’s going to get better when I’ve been up all night with a screaming infant?”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to manage it,” I told her, trying to be reassuring.
She sighed. “Maybe,” she said. “Probably at the expense of my kid. I’m going to be that mother who skypes her children from hotels and tells them to brush their teeth and that I’ll see them in two weeks. ‘Mummy’s busy with work, honey, what was your name again?’ I can see it now.”
I couldn’t figure out why all of this had suddenly blown up. “Did something happen at work?” Something occurred to me. “Did someone figure out you’re pregnant?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, thank god. It was assignment day today.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d been right. “Did the goss about that big project you were talking about turn out to be right?”
She looked very bitter. It wasn’t an expression I’d often seen on her. “Yes. They’re calling it ‘Flagship’, it’s a 160-million-dollar media saturation project. Television, radio, billboards, print, everything, across 11 countries. Almost 75% of the Marketing team is on it, and the aim is to hit it all at once in the lead up to Christmas. The bonus for meeting sales targets is $18,300, and they’re flying everyone who’s on it out to some resort in the Blue Mountains for two weeks to figure out how to do it.”
My eyebrows went up. “Wow,” I said. “But I bet they’re going to make people work for it. Frost wouldn’t give out that sort of bonus unless there was a shit tonne of overtime involved.” I was about to ask her if she was successful, but then noted her lips. They were pressed in a thin line.
She was watching me. “Aren’t you going to ask if I’m on it?” she prompted anyway.
I opened my mouth, and then closed it. “Should I?” She nodded stiffly. I wasn’t sure what to expect because she looked so emotional, I didn’t know what she was playing at. “Okay, are you on it?”
There were tears in her eyes as she said, “I’m Lead.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked, glancing up at the clock on the wall while Sarah, dressed only in underwear and probably freezing half to death, dug through all her clothes. It wasn’t even 7am yet.
“The executive coach leaves at eight,” Sarah told me in answer. She then yanked a piece of clothing of its hanger and looked critically at it. “Ugh, I hate this top. I don’t even know why I bought it.” She pulled it over her head anyway and then turned and presented herself to me. “What do you think?”
It was so baggy it looked like maternity wear. I shook my head.
She groaned. “I knew it!” she said, pulled it off, and kept digging. “I’m screwed. I’m completely screwed. They’re going to take one look at my stomach and demote me on the spot, I know it.” She took out another dress. “Maybe this one will look okay?” She pulled it on, but it wouldn’t zip up. Making a frustrated noise, she chucked it on the floor and turned back to the open wardrobe.
“How long does the project run for?” I asked her as she started rummaging through her clothes again. “Maybe they won’t demote you.”
“The campaign launches in mid-November,” she said. “And I’m due in December.”
I winced. That was cutting it really fine. She’d probably be feeling even worse in her last trimester, too, when all the really hard work would be happening. “Maybe it wouldn’t be terrible if they do?” I asked tentatively. “I mean, you’re still really sick all the time, and wouldn’t it be better for both you and the—”
“You sound like Rob,” Sarah said, cutting me off. From her tone of voice, it was clear she didn’t want to consider that at all.
Well, she should be considering it, I thought. When I’d been Lead, I’d quite literally nearly worked myself to death, and I was only heading up a very small team. Sarah was still nauseous every day and she’d been going to bed really early recently. She could kiss that sort of luxury goodbye if she was running a project of this size. She was going to have it far worse than I did.
I realised she’d been watching me while I was lost in thought. “I can feel you disapproving,” she told me sternly. “It’s like a quiet person superpower. They sit there, and you can just feel them judging you.”
I blinked at her. “I’m not judging you,” I said, trying not to look down at her swelling stomach. “I’m just worrying about you, like Rob probably is. You’ve been really sick for two months, and now you want to take on something like this?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Hey, I’m not exactly looking forward to how crap it’s going to feel working long hours and late nights with Junior here doing a number on me, either,” she said, gesturing to her stomach. “But this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’d given up on this happening to me, but it’s finally happening: I’m about to lead one of the biggest marketing projects Frost has done since the business was launched, Omar’s even going to play a personal mentoring role for me so I don’t mess up. I know I can do this. I’m excited about doing this. I’m going to have team leaders and actual staff reporting to me. When I imagined my career, this is what it looked like.” She paused for a moment to think about what she’d said, tilting her head and cringing. "Okay, so, granted, I imagined a lot fewer chauvinist pricks in my workplace, but yeah. I don’t care how sick I feel, I’m not giving this up. No one should expect me to.”
I felt uneasy. “No one is expecting that. It's just...” I took a breath. “So you’re definitely going to do it, then? No maybes?”
She gave me a look like ‘are you kidding me?’ and turned back to the cupboard. “I’ve been waiting seven years for this,” she said, and then pulled out another top. “Ugh,” she grumbled about it as she tried it on, ending the conversation.
While I was helping Sarah fill her suitcase with belly-hiding clothes, my mind wandered back to where it had been last night. I kept waiting for a break in the stream of Sarah stressing about how she looked for an opportunity to even mention that I could use some advice about getting a cash-in-hand job. When it finally came—“Earth to Toyboy, urgent opinion required on this blouse! How come you’re so totally spaced out this morning, anyway?”—I took one look at her, pale and wound up, and just left it.
It wasn’t long before Rob’s ute rattled up beside the house and he grabbed the full suitcase to load it up on the tray for her. She spent a couple of seconds agonising over her silhouette in the full-length mirror before making a defeated noise and putting on some bright red lipstick, ‘to distract people’.
She paused as she was following Rob outside to give me a hug and look anxiously down the hallway towards my door. “Tell Schoolgirl I’ll call her so I can properly apologise about not being able to help her with Chem for a while, could you? I haven’t really got time to…” She checked her watch. “Shit. Okay, I’ve really got to run!”
I said goodbye to her, my chance of getting any sort of timely cash-in-hand job advice and the likelihood Bree was going to get that 75 average I’d promised the Principal, and closed the front door. My fingers lingered on the handle for a second. ‘Shit’ is just about right, I thought. Shit.
Well, I just needed to start looking for work, didn’t I? Any sort of work, even from the places that would want to put me through three interviews. Maybe if I could slog my guts out for a couple of months now, I could save up some money and go back to part time when my research period started at uni.
I tiptoed into the bedroom to put on an extra layer under my hoodie so I didn’t have to add ‘hypothermia’ to my long list of problems, but Bree wasn’t asleep after all. She was lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and I could see the shoulders of her dressing gown peeking up over the doona. She’d been up already.
Frowning, I paused and listened for Rob’s ute, but it was probably already gone. “How long have you been awake?” I asked her. “You just missed Sarah. She got promoted at work and she’s going to be away for a couple of weeks while they have strategic meetings and figure out how they’re going to…” Bree was just staring at me. She looked guilty. “What?”
She gave me a pained look. “Um, I know all that...”
I stared at her for a second, and then it dawned on me why she was wearing her dressing gown and how she knew. I sighed at her. “You were eavesdropping!” She sunk back into the mattress, looking remorseful as I shook my head at her. “I keep forgetting who I’m dealing with! Well, why didn’t you just knock and come into the bedroom? It wasn’t exactly a private conversation, she would have been happy for you to help, too.”
Bree shrugged—she wasn’t telling me something—and then changed the subject when she noticed I was taking off my hoodie. She looked hopeful. “Are you coming back to bed?”
Bree looked past me to my bedside table where my phone was flashing. I’d been ignoring it. “Yeah,” she said, “you can pay someone a salary to spend all day replying to your mum, that way she won’t suddenly show up on the doorstep.”
The colour drained from my face. “Don’t joke about that,” I told her darkly. God, I didn’t even want to think about it.
Bree looked guilty again. “Sorry,” she said, and changed the subject. “Maybe I should get a job. That way I can pay for a Chem tutor since Sarah’s obviously not going to help me anymore, and maybe one for Maths, too…”
I began to say, “No, you need to focus on your studies,” when halfway through it I realised the rest of what she’d said and did a double-take. “Wait, why Maths? Did Gemma tell you she can’t help you anymore?”
Bree made a face. “No…” she said, “she didn’t tell me anything. I texted her like six times in the last two days and then I realised I was being kind of like your mum so I stopped. But yeah, nothing. I think she’s probably disappointed about my 64 and thinks tutoring me is a big, fat waste of her time.”
Frowning, I watched Bree for a second. “That doesn’t seem like Gemma, does it?” I asked. It was a genuine question.
Bree shrugged. “She’s probably too nice to tell me that it’s a crap mark and she’s really disappointed or something, because nice people don’t generally just completely ignore you for no reason, do they?”
That made me think of Henry telling me to leave him alone at the restaurant and then changing his phone number. I grimaced. “Maybe if the person had done something awful to them,” I said. “But getting a 64 doesn’t really constitute ‘awful’, does it?” I grabbed my phone from the bedside table. Quickly dismissing the email notifications, I opened messaging. “Maybe she’ll respond to me. What should I say?”
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