Sacking the Stork

by Kris Webb

  However, the bonds of first boyfriends and first kisses were too strong to ignore and I pushed my way across the crowded room to where Debbie was chatting to a very attractive man dressed from head to toe in black.

  They were talking animatedly and I stood awkwardly behind Debbie for a few seconds before tapping her on the shoulder.

  ‘Hi, Debbie,’ I said as she turned around. ‘Do you remember me, I’m –’

  ‘Sophie!’ she screamed, throwing her arms around me. ‘How are you? I can’t believe we’ve actually run into each other again after all this time. What are you doing, are you living in Sydney?’

  She suddenly remembered the man she’d been talking to and turned back to him with one arm still around me.

  ‘Peter, this is one of my oldest friends, Sophie. Sophie, meet Peter.’

  Peter looked less than thrilled to have had his cosy chat with Debbie interrupted by my arrival and announced that he was heading to the bar.

  ‘A vodka, lime and soda for me, Peter,’ Debbie said.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I muttered in response to Peter’s raised eyebrow, which I gathered was a halfhearted attempt to offer me a drink.

  ‘Peter,’ Debbie called after him, ‘fresh lime, remember?’

  Peter waved over his shoulder and headed into the throng surrounding the bar.

  ‘I’ve just moved to Sydney,’ I said, answering one of Debbie’s questions. ‘Dad married a really lovely English woman and they moved to London a couple of years ago. So there was nothing to keep me in Brisbane. I decided I wanted to live in a big city, applied for some jobs in Sydney and here I am.’

  I had packed up to move into a flat with friends at the same time as Dad and Elizabeth sold the house to move to England. Even in a new job and new flat I’d felt their absence strongly and Brisbane had never really felt like home after they’d left. So after a couple of years I’d found a marketing job in Sydney, packed my worldly possessions into my little hatchback and headed south.

  ‘Well,’ Debbie told me with the kind of sincerity that comes from having consumed more than the recommended weekly alcohol intake in three hours, ‘you know, sometimes you have to believe in fate. I just kicked out my obsessive compulsive flatmate yesterday. Do you need a place to live?’

  And so it was decided. Drunk and without knowing what suburb she lived in, I had agreed to move in, thinking that it would have to be better than sleeping on a distant cousin’s floor, which I had been doing for the past two weeks.

  Despite its impromptu start, our flatting relationship turned out to be a huge success and Debbie and I lived together in various parts of Sydney until we moved to Coogee three years before Sarah was born.

  Debbie is, to use a cliché, everything that I am not.

  She is continually mystified by the fact that I will not spend $500 on a pair of designer shoes that were in the latest issue of Vogue when I can get a perfectly good copy at a chain store for $60. Having said that, I am definitely not above borrowing her Gucci loafers or Prada sandals.

  Debbie always knows the cool bands and has the latest CDs as soon as they hit the market, while I still think that I am on the cutting edge of music because I own Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. She also knows all the musical legends of the last fifty years and can reel off the names of albums by artists I’ve never even heard of.

  Debbie’s makeup bag looks like something a professional would carry around a movie set, and she has at least fifty lipsticks from the most exclusive cosmetic companies. My makeup bag contents consist of an eyeliner, mascara and foundation (all of which have come from bargain bins at chemists), and I own two lipsticks at latest count, one of which is so worn down I have to stick my finger in to get any out. I long ago came to the conclusion that I would make fewer mistakes if I didn’t use much makeup and my standard face for the day (which incidentally is the same as my special occasion one) can be applied in the time it takes me to go one stop on the bus on the way to work.

  Debbie’s wardrobe is neatly arranged in colour groups, with trousers on the bottom rack, suits, skirts and blouses on the top, and dresses to the right. She is the only person I’ve ever met who can actually do the ‘From Work to Nightclub Transformation Using Only One Scarf and a Red Lipstick’ that women’s magazines exhort us to practise. I tried it once but decided that I looked like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.

  When Debbie buys a new blouse, it will produce seven different outfits when combined with her existing clothes. I, however, am an impulse buyer and my cupboard is dotted with expensive items that look fabulous on the rack but go with absolutely nothing else I own.

  Debbie has always been surrounded by men who fall over themselves to get her attention. Our flats all had a revolving parade of men who each lasted anywhere from one night to three months. Debbie looks mystified when women complain bitterly about the fact that Sydney is full of gay men. A drought for Debbie is a Monday night in with a video.

  In stark contrast I had had only two serious boyfriends before I met Max (Mark Johnson was not one of them, I am glad to say) and have spent considerable periods of my adult life without a man.

  Debbie is five foot nine and has long hair which is always impeccably coloured a rich auburn with just enough wave to keep it back off her face. Although she scorns all forms of exercise, she never seems to waver from a perfect size ten. While I’m the same height (and fortuitously the same shoe size) as Debbie, my short blonde hair is often overdue for both a cut and a colour and I tend to fluctuate between a size twelve and a size fourteen (although in a fruitless act of denial, I refuse to buy anything bigger than size twelve).

  The glaring inconsistency in Debbie’s life is her job. She should have been a senior executive at a major fashion house or a globetrotting business consultant mingling with the world’s beautiful and exciting people. Instead, she is in fact the buyer for a chain of stores called ‘Mr Cheapy’ that sell no item for more than five dollars and are crammed with very unglamorous items like toilet doilies and cans of air freshener. Debbie goes to great lengths not to divulge the nature of her job and only rarely admits to working for a ‘discount retail chain’. For the last five years she has been combing Asia for the bargains that made the company a household name and, despite her frequent tirades about the rubbish she has to buy, shows no signs of leaving for more exciting but less lucrative pastures.

  Debbie pulled up outside my house and hovered while I took everything inside.

  My house is a sandstone terrace with a small patch of grass behind it. In an effort to become more motherly during the later stages of my pregnancy, I’d tried to cultivate some herbs in one of the garden beds. While they had never actually died, neither did they seem to get any bigger. Given that picking enough herbs for one pasta sauce would have decimated my entire crop, I had continued buying my herbs from the local fruit shop, leaving my crop to its own devices.

  I had always known that living with someone else’s baby was way too much to expect of any friend, let alone someone who lived like Debbie, and that eventually I would have to move. That had become crystal clear to me one Saturday morning as I lay in bed listening to Debbie have sex with her latest conquest.

  I was trying to concentrate on that week’s instalment of ‘What appalling things are going to happen to your body next’ in the pregnancy book I had bought after my traumatic experience with the tomes Karen had lent me. Operating on a strictly need-to-know basis, I was only reading one week ahead of my rapidly expanding body. I was starting to feel like an elephant, and as my spatial awareness hadn’t changed quickly enough to keep up with my shape, I was constantly knocking things off shelves and desks.

  As the noises from the next room floated through the air, I happened to read that the baby’s ears were open and could hear sounds from the outside world. I remembered hearing that children who had classical music played to them in the womb had grown up to be concert pianists and I didn’t even want to think about what hearing Debbie’s sounds
of passion could do to my baby.

  Piling all my pillows on my bump, I tried to go back to sleep. However, the sounds in the next room began to reach a crescendo. Five years of living with Debbie in various flats with thin walls had taught me that this could go on for quite some time, so I gave up all thoughts of sleep, dressed and headed out to find the real estate section of that morning’s newspaper.

  House-hunting in Sydney is not something to be undertaken lightly (or at seven months pregnant). One of Sydney’s miracles is that you can live literally on the beach and only be thirty minutes from the city centre. One of its realities is that you have to be a millionaire to be able to do it.

  For we mere mortals who can’t afford $1000 a week in rent, understanding real estate ads is a fine art. ‘A water view’ means you have to lie on top of the bathroom cupboard to catch a glimpse of the horizon, and ‘easy walk to cafes and beach’ means take some change because you’ll need to get a bus.

  So by eleven that morning, when I and my bump-that-could-hear were headed for Saturday morning coffee at the King Street Cafe in Newtown, I had seen two flats which smelt so bad I couldn’t get in the door and one that was so dark I couldn’t even tell how many bedrooms it had.

  Newtown is Sydney’s answer to London’s Camden. When I’d first moved to Sydney, it hadn’t rated at all on the list of cool places to be, but in the last couple of years the young professionals had begun moving in and I’d recently discovered that, despite the suburb’s grungy feel, even the Newtown rental market was out of my league.

  As usual, finding a park near the cafe was almost impossible. I was forced to drive several blocks down King Street and was almost in the next suburb by the time I spotted a park in a side street. As I pulled up, I noticed an old ivy-covered terrace house with a ‘For Rent’ sign. A real estate agent was showing a couple through and, on impulse, I followed them in.

  Although the house was certainly not palatial, it had a good feel (if you managed to ignore the bathroom, which looked as though it had been stuck in a seventies time warp), and it was certainly big enough for me. I had no idea how much space a baby needed, but as it wouldn’t even be able to sit up for the first few months, I figured it couldn’t be too demanding.

  The whole of the lower floor was open-plan, with the lounge leading into the kitchen which led into the garden out the back. Upstairs were three small bedrooms and a bathroom. I had recently read with horror that babies weren’t toilet-trained until they were about two, so I figured I had a fair while before I had to worry about sharing a bathroom. That was probably a good thing, I reflected as I looked around, because it would take at least that long to get rid of the mould lurking in the corners.

  ‘How much is the rent?’ I asked the agent after a quick look.

  My heart sank at the answer. I had decided to use the money I’d been saving for a deposit on a house to finance some time off with the baby before I faced the reality of going back to work. The amount had seemed like a lot when it was a figure on a bank statement, but the rough (and very depressing) budget I’d drafted showed that I’d be lucky if the money lasted much more than three or four months.

  I’d always thought that owning a bed, sofa, fridge and washing machine was very grown up, but now realised that I’d need to buy more furniture if any new home of mine wasn’t going to look like a student’s flat. After putting aside money for the least amount of furniture I figured I could get away with, I’d decided that three hundred dollars a week was the most I could spend on rent, and the landlord was asking four hundred.

  Obviously, moving away from the beach and into a relatively unknown suburb didn’t mean the dip in rental prices I’d optimistically expected. Nevertheless, I told the agent that I’d like to make an application for the property, figuring that the landlord could only reject my offer.

  This irritated the couple on whose inspection I had gatecrashed, but they were still arguing about who cleaned the bathroom more often. That was one advantage of being single – at least I didn’t have to confer with anyone on my decisions.

  The real estate agent looked at me uncertainly. My pregnant belly gave me an initial aura of respectability, but that was lost as soon as he looked at my bare ring-finger. Still, I was well-dressed (although by Newtown standards that only meant I wasn’t liable for arrest for indecent exposure) and he gave me an application form to return to his office on Monday.

  After deciding that I could manage three hundred and twenty dollars at a push, I lodged an application for that amount, together with glowing references from our current landlord and my boss. Even in my more positive moments I didn’t hold out much hope that my application would be accepted and I continued looking at dingy places that no amount of bright paint and plants could redeem.

  The following Wednesday I had just hung up the phone after a very tense discussion with a printer who was trying to renegotiate the pricing for a run of posters for our next event, when it rang again.

  ‘Yes,’ I snapped into the receiver, assuming it was the printer again.

  ‘Sophie Anderson, please?’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Yes, speaking,’ I replied more warmly as soon as I realised the print cost war wasn’t about to be immediately resumed.

  ‘Sophie, this is Adrian Henry from Barker & Henderson Real Estate. We met last Saturday.’

  I tried to recall an Adrian in the line-up of real estate agents I’d met, but failed. Eyeing the stack of agents’ cards I’d collected, I replied in what I hoped was a convincing tone, ‘Yes, Adrian, how are you?’

  ‘Very well, thanks, and I’m calling with good news,’ he continued. ‘Your application for the house at 32 Henry Street has been accepted.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked incredulously, never having heard of a landlord taking that kind of rent drop.

  ‘Certainly am,’ he replied cheerily. ‘The landlord decided that you sounded like the perfect tenant and so is prepared to compromise on the rent.’

  I pushed my chair back and gazed out the window, unable to stop the smile spreading across my face. Maybe we didn’t have much else, but at least my baby and I now had a home.

  FIVE

  Having driven us home from the hospital, Debbie left and I lay Sarah on the sofa. I looked at her blankly, wondering what on earth to do next. Years of reading magazines like Cosmopolitan and Cleo hadn’t prepared me for this. Somehow articles like ‘An Afternoon with a Baby, a Minute-by-Minute Account’ didn’t seem to have made it into those publications.

  A sudden attack of panic hit me. What did the hospital think they were doing letting someone as irresponsible and unreliable as me out the door with a human being as fragile and vulnerable as the one looking up at me? For God’s sake, I couldn’t even remember to put out the recycling bin on the right day!

  The nursing staff had threatened dire consequences for anyone who should dare to take their baby home without a capsule (thankfully they hadn’t made it as far as the car park and spotted Debbie’s convertible). However, they seemed not to realise that the risk of a car accident was minimal compared with the danger Sarah faced by being left alone with a mother who could coordinate a sporting event for 10 000 people but had not the first clue about how to deal with a tiny baby. Somehow I’d expected that the baby would come with an instruction manual, or at least a checklist of dos and don’ts, but they had sent Sarah, Debbie and me out into the world with barely a goodbye.

  At the hospital I’d watched intently as they showed me how to change Sarah’s nappy and bath her. Not having had any brothers or sisters or other babies around when I was growing up, I’d managed to reach the age of thirty without ever having changed a nappy. When I was five I had a doll called Mandy who wet herself when you fed her water. However, I gathered by the nurse’s expression when I explained this to her that it really wasn’t the kind of thing you put on your nappy-changing résumé.

  If I’d thought nappy-changing was tricky, bathing looked like one of
those activities television programs urge you not to try at home. Just holding Sarah coated with slippery soap in a bath full of water seemed to me to be a big enough accomplishment, let alone actually cleaning any part of her body. As the nurse twirled Sarah in the water with one hand, while cleaning inside her ears with the other, I looked on in awe. I hoped that she was doing a good job, as I didn’t think I’d be able to execute that technique for at least another six months.

  Figuring that now we were home there was no point in putting off my first unassisted nappy change, I carried Sarah into her room, which I’d painted bright yellow during the long weekend mornings of my pregnancy when no one else I knew was awake.

  ‘What do you think of your room, darling?’ I asked. She seemed rather unexcited by it, which I supposed could have had something to do with the fact that she couldn’t focus on anything more than twenty centimetres from her face.

  The change table was in about ten pieces on the floor.

  Debbie had arrived with it one day, claiming that it had been a sample from one of Mr Cheapy’s suppliers. Either Mr Cheapy was going through an identity crisis, or Debbie had bought it herself knowing that I was struggling to afford everything. The price tag I’d later spotted on the bottom of the box had confirmed my suspicions, but when I’d tried to thank her, she’d denied everything and stuck firmly to her original story.

  I had been very efficient with my baby goods buying, dividing the necessary purchases into different lists headed ‘five months’, ‘six months’, etc, both for the sake of my bank balance and to help myself ease slowly into the fact that I was actually going to be a mother. Somehow, buying a pram would have been unthinkable when I was four months pregnant, but was quite manageable psychologically once I had a stomach you could balance a beer can on.

  There were some items that I couldn’t bring myself to buy even at eight months pregnant, and those purchases, and jobs like assembling the change table, were on my list of things to do after I’d stopped work a week before Sarah was due. However, her early arrival had ruined my grand plan.