by Kris Webb
‘Yes,’ I replied lamely, trying vainly to recall how people conducted business discussions. ‘We’re very excited about the product and have a number of outlets interested in stocking them.’
I figured that if Debbie had told this man the screaming lies it seemed she had, then a couple of small additional ones from me wouldn’t hurt.
‘Well, as I said to Debbie, if the books are as good as they sound, we could be interested in doing a deal with you.’
My mouth fell open as I thought about what this could mean for us. Getting a grip on myself, however, I recalled that we didn’t actually have any products, or in fact any clue about what we were doing, or who would make them.
At that moment Sarah decided that standing still in the kitchen was insufficient excitement and started to cry. Figuring that David Fletcher wouldn’t be too impressed if he knew just how hands-on my baby book research was, I coughed loudly into the receiver until she had stopped and was staring up at me, obviously trying to figure out whether her mother had lost her mind.
There was a silence from the other end of the phone and I said, ‘So sorry, David, I can’t seem to shake this cold. What were you saying?’
‘I was saying that an exclusive deal isn’t out of the question.’ He sounded a touch impatient now. ‘But we’d have to move quickly. I have to finalise the products we’re stocking for the December season by the middle of next month, so I’d like to get a look at your products, talk numbers and decide whether we want to get them into stores for Christmas.’
‘The middle of next month . . .’ I repeated inanely. ‘That’s what, six weeks away?’ I was thinking that six months would be a more realistic deadline at this stage.
‘Just under,’ David answered. ‘But Debbie seemed to think that the timing is achievable for you. We’d need the actual products in the store by the start of November.’
Had Debbie been taking mind-altering drugs? Our business venture to date consisted solely of a ten-minute telephone discussion, but she had been doing a deal with Handley Smith that had us on a five-week deadline.
Turning my attention back to Sarah, who was squirming in my arms, I realised that another yelling session was imminent. Figuring that David would think I had some deadly disease if I produced another coughing fit, I unceremoniously dumped her on the hallway rug and retreated to the kitchen, where I could see her but hopefully David couldn’t hear her. The hideous pattern on the 1970s wallpaper seemed to appeal to her and she lay happily staring at the wall.
Now I could concentrate on the conversation, I figured that as Debbie had leapt in with both arms and legs I might as well do the same. ‘Yes, that shouldn’t be a problem, David,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you need from us between now and then.’
‘First up I need to know your colour range.’
‘Colour range? Yes, of course . . . ’ I replied. ‘Well, obviously we’ve got the traditional pink and blue . . . but not insipid pastels. They’re both really vibrant colours,’ I added with sudden inspiration. Rapidly running out of ideas, I looked frantically around the kitchen. I spotted the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and said impulsively, ‘And we thought we’d round the collection out with lime green, strawberry, orange and banana yellow.’
‘Sounds good,’ said David, obviously taking notes. ‘Now when can I see them? Would Thursday work for you?’
I had been on a roll with my descriptions of the books and had almost convinced myself they were something other than a figment of Debbie’s and my imaginations. However, David’s question pulled me up with a jolt.
‘Let me check my diary,’ I said, desperately playing for time. I had absolutely no idea how long it would take for Debbie to get some samples that would roughly approximate what I’d just been describing, but as I couldn’t even get a letter to the other side of the world in less than a week, I figured three days was probably a little short.
Unable to think of a good reason to put the appointment off for more than a week, I said, ‘This week’s really bad for me – could we make it next week, say Friday?’ I looked at the calendar on the fridge as I spoke. My activities for the week consisted of one baby massage class and lunch with someone I’d met at antenatal classes who’d had a baby a week after Sarah was born. Not exactly wall to wall with appointments . . .
‘I guess that will have to do,’ David said reluctantly.
He was obviously used to people falling at his feet to try to get their products into his chain and seemed to be rather taken aback by my lack of enthusiasm. Had I a product to show him I’m sure I would have been at his office within the hour, but the present situation didn’t give me much option. I could only hope that he thought I was planning to talk to other retailers first.
Sarah’s fascination with the wallpaper seemed to be waning and I decided I should get off the phone before the conversation, which hadn’t been a resounding success to date, deteriorated any further. I wrote down David’s address details on the back of an unopened bill and made a time for the appointment.
‘I look forward to seeing you and your baby books next Friday, Sophie,’ he said by the way of goodbye.
As soon as we were disconnected, I dialled Debbie’s number.
‘What on earth were you thinking, telling David Fletcher we were ready to go with our baby books?’ I yelled into the receiver as soon as she answered.
‘Oh damn, did he call you already?’ she replied calmly. ‘I figured he wouldn’t do that just yet and so I’ve been trying to get some research done to stop you going ballistic when you heard I’d slightly exaggerated our position.’
‘Debbie, we don’t have a position,’ I retorted. ‘We have a vague idea about a concept for some books, no idea of what they’d look like, where we’d get them from, or if we even want to go ahead with it!’
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said sheepishly. ‘But when I started talking to David, he was so interested in the idea, I figured there’d be a good chance he’d try to get someone else to do it if we didn’t, so I decided to go for it.’
‘Well, we have an appointment on Friday week to show him our range of books, which, by the way, come in bright pink and blue, lime green, orange and banana yellow. Oh, and strawberry.’
‘Hmmm,’ Debbie mused, ‘you couldn’t have come up with colours that were a little more standard, could you?’
‘Debbie . . .’ I growled.
‘All right, all right, I understand you were in a difficult situation. The good news is that there’s a gift expo in Hong Kong in a few weeks. There’ll be suppliers there from all over Asia, including some that make silk- and paper-covered books. If we can wing our meeting with David and get him hooked, I’ll be able to find something very similar, if not identical, to the notebooks and sort out our pricing and lead times.’
‘Hold on, Debbie,’ I said. ‘We really need to figure out whether this is what we want to do before we get too carried away.’
When we’d vaguely discussed it yesterday, starting our own business had sounded like the perfect solution to my problem of having to earn money but not wanting to leave Sarah with someone else for ten hours a day. More than half of the money I’d put aside to live on until I went back to work had gone, and while I’d been trying not to think about it, I knew that at this rate I’d have to go back to my job within the next month or so. The thought of spending some of my quickly dwindling savings on a venture that might go nowhere gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘Sophie, I think we’ve got to follow this a bit further,’ Debbie said seriously. ‘We can see a gap in the market, there’s a major department store very interested, and I’ve got a pretty good lead on where to get the stuff from. I could get an airfare to Hong Kong on frequent flyer points, so we’ll only have to pay for my costs while I’m there. What do you say we see what I can come up with? If it doesn’t go any further we haven’t lost much. If it does work out and we each put, say $10 000 or $15 000 in, we’ll double or triple our money and maybe be ab
le to roll it out into a full-scale business with a whole range of products.’
I didn’t have $10 000, let alone $15 000. But if I wanted to get off the corporate treadmill I was going to have to take a chance sometime, and I knew that passing up an opportunity like this was the kind of thing I might always regret.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘Book your ticket and let’s see if we can figure out how to come up with something vaguely resembling a baby book, before the meeting.’
The next couple of days passed quickly as I spent every second Sarah was sleeping trying to come up with a design for the baby book pages. Debbie had found someone who would supply a patented binding system, which made the whole book easy to personalise by inserting individual pages in any order. My challenge was to come up with some pages that looked great and would appeal to different people.
Having spent years coordinating the printing and design of event invitations, designing some pages for a baby book should have been a piece of cake. However, it was proving surprisingly difficult. What to take out of the standard baby books was easy. It was what to put back in that was slightly harder. I sat staring at a blank piece of paper for a number of hours. I decided to think about the things that I wanted to remember and I thought Sarah would one day like to know.
First Pictures: This page could be whatever the parents wanted it to be. For Sarah, I decided it would be a picture of the first ultrasound Dr Daniels did.
Birth Announcement: This would assume that the news had been spread via email, which was how Debbie had informed our network of friends of Sarah’s arrival. I also wanted to figure out a way that some replies could be slotted in (some of the ones I’d received had been hilarious, one of my friends even having penned a limerick to celebrate the occasion).
First Visitors: In Sarah’s case it would have to be Debbie, who unfortunately had avoided being captured on film in the very unglamorous outfit she’d worn during the delivery.
First Party: Of course this would have to be Sarah’s coming-out at the King Street Cafe.
Baby’s Family: This was a tricky one, but I figured if I left it at that, people could put in what worked for them. At least they wouldn’t have to deal with things like glaringly blank spaces in sections dedicated to the baby’s father.
Baby’s Family Tree: Sarah’s family tree needed a bit of work, but I thought it was important for her to know where she came from.
Vital Statistics: This wasn’t just the standard baby weight, length, etc. It was also a calculation of the number of times the baby fed, woke during the night and had its nappy and clothes changed over the first ten days. I’d found myself totting these things up in sleep-deprived moments and figured it wouldn’t be bad for Sarah to have some idea of what she was up to in her early days.
List of Accomplishments: I felt that just recording things like first smile and sitting up missed out a lot of milestones that were significant to me. After all, as Sarah wasn’t going to read this book for quite some years, it was my book as much as it was hers. So I decided to add a checklist of things that had proved hugely daunting on our arrival home from hospital, but which were already second nature. Jotting down the first couple of things that came to mind, I listed burping the baby over your shoulder (which I only tried for the first time after I put a pillow behind me in case I dropped Sarah over my back), and my personal nemesis from the early days – fingernail cutting.
After a bit of thought, I put back some of the more traditional options I’d initially excluded. This book was supposed to be about options and a lot of people still had babies in wedlock and had them christened.
With an initial list of pages in hand, I visited an old friend of Max’s who ran a design studio overlooking the water in the harbourside suburb of Balmoral and to whom I’d given a lot of work over the previous couple of years. Single and childless, Simon might not have been the best choice to design a baby book, but I wanted the book to look different from all the others on the market. One thing I was sure of was that Simon wouldn’t come up with a design sprinkled with storks and chubby babies. Besides, I sometimes missed the buzz of a design studio and it was a good excuse to visit – even if it was only briefly.
‘So let me get this straight, Sophie,’ he said. ‘You’re looking for a contemporary feel for a baby book . . . Has no one ever told you that kids and cool don’t work?’
‘Simon, shame on you. Haven’t you seen Cindy, Elle or Catherine lately? A baby is THE accessory. You’re just not in the loop if you don’t have a baby.’ I wasn’t even sure that I believed this argument, but I felt I had to at least put up a fight.
‘Well, I’ll settle for the latest Mooks trousers myself. When do you need these designs back?’ He laughed at the look on my face. ‘You’d think, after nearly fifteen years in this industry, I’d stop asking that, wouldn’t you? Let me guess, you’ve got a meeting with the head of Harrods tomorrow morning.’
‘It’s not quite that bad. It’s not Harrods and the meeting isn’t until the end of next week.’
‘Actually, you’re in luck. I’ve just had a new designer start this week. I’ll throw her this one to warm her up before I give her a real job.’
Despite Simon’s professed lack of enthusiasm, I had worked with him for long enough to know that he would relish the challenge, and I left knowing there was a good chance he would spend more time than his junior designer on the project.
FOURTEEN
Debbie had taken upon herself the responsibility of ensuring that I didn’t slip into social obscurity, and had been trying to convince me to go out with her since I’d arrived home from hospital. The day after my meeting with Simon, she was at my house to talk about the books and had obviously decided she was no longer taking no for an answer.
‘Sophie, there’s a group of us going out for some drinks tomorrow night. There’s only one acceptable excuse for your not coming and that’s if you’re doing something more exciting. Which, I would have thought, is highly unlikely,’ she added confidently.
‘Deb, I’m just not sure about leaving Sarah at night,’ I answered. ‘And besides, I’ve been out of circulation so long I don’t think I’d be able to hold a sensible conversation with anyone.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a sensible conversation on a Friday night,’ Debbie retorted. ‘Trust me, as long as you don’t talk about Sarah’s nappies, or start flashing her photo around the bar, you’ll be fine.
‘I’ve already spoken to Karen,’ she continued, ‘and she would love to look after Sarah while you’re out. She tells me that Sarah sleeps from about eight until three these days anyway, so she won’t even know you’re gone. You can feed her before you go and be back in plenty of time to feed her at three.’
Debbie saw me start to protest and cut me off. ‘Sophie, you’re in grave danger of thinking that a chat over a cup of tea and a Tim Tam is a social occasion. Read my lips. It is not. We need to get you back out there.’
She was right, I knew. Sarah would be fine with Karen – more than fine, in fact, as Karen knew about a hundred times more about babies than I did. For the first time I admitted to myself that the reason for my hesitation had more to do with me than with Sarah. I was the mother of a small baby and my life was filled with feeds, nappies and nursery rhymes. My last experience of bars had been as the only sober person present, and while this had not been a lot of fun, at least then I had been working and so had something in common with the people around me.
‘Karen also tells me that you could express,’ Debbie screwed up her nose in distaste, ‘some milk and leave it just in case Sarah wakes early. Please do not tell me how you do that. I do not need to know.’
A lot of baby-related activities sound a lot worse than they actually are. However, expressing milk is not one of them. Suffice to say that all jokes about cows and pumps are horrifyingly close to the truth and that it is as undignified an activity as you would care to imagine.
Figuring that I was just
prolonging the inevitable if I didn’t go along on Friday, I decided I might as well surrender.
Walking out of Karen’s front door without Sarah on Friday night, I felt as though I was missing one of my arms. For the last two and a half months Sarah, her pram and my bag of Sarah stuff had accompanied me everywhere, and to be heading out with only a handbag was decidedly strange.
I’d been about to throw on trousers and a shirt when it had suddenly dawned on me that as I wouldn’t have to feed Sarah, I could wear a dress. My excitement was short-lived, though, as the first dress I tried was way too small in not just one but a number of places, and after one look I threw the next two on the bed without even bothering to try to squeeze into them.
The last dress in the cupboard was one I’d had for several years. It was dusky red with vague violet outlines on it and a deep V-shaped neck. Pulling it over my head and zipping up the back, I turned to look in the full-length mirror on the inside of my cupboard and laughed aloud. With my normal breasts the neckline had never been anything remarkable, but now my Sarah breasts were prominently displayed in all their glory. I’d been living with these breasts for a while, but until now they’d just made for a better shape in T-shirts and tight jumpers, and this look was a revelation.
The dress was already half unzipped when I stopped. After all, I told myself, my breasts were just on loan and the cleavage I was displaying was something that no amount of padding in a bra could produce. With a surge of bravado I rezipped the dress, pulled on a pair of strappy shoes, gathered Sarah and her luggage, and drove straight to Karen’s.
