by Roxy Jacenko
A few minutes later, the car went down into the hospital’s underground car park and pulled up in front of a set of lifts. A nurse was waiting for me with a wheelchair.
‘I’m not getting into that,’ I told Lulu. ‘What am I, a cripple all of a sudden? I’m quite capable of walking into the hospital on my own. I mean, what if someone sees me? And where the hell is Michael – has he left for the airport yet?’
Blame all those hormones running rampant but I was now questioning what kind of boyfriend I had on my hands anyway. Who went on a business trip to China when their girlfriend was just a week out from having his baby? It doesn’t matter that I had insisted he leave because there was a huge deal in the offing which would net him a cool million dollars. That wasn’t the point. It was time he stepped up to the plate, and the plate he was stepping up to better be made by Hermès.
‘He’s flying back as we sp-speak.’ Lulu’s stutter had suddenly returned, no doubt brought on by the stress of Fashion Week and the realisation that the way I was carrying on she might have to become an assistant midwife right here in the car park. Well, I’ve always said that my Bees have to be versatile and adaptable.
Saintly, our driver, was all business. His real name is Stevie, but he’d earnt his nickname by getting us out of many pickles and also for the number of times he’d pulled an all-nighter as he waited to bring one of our clients back from Sydney’s drinking site in the middle of the harbour, The Island, in the early hours of the morning. The celebrity who’d given him the most trouble was the pop-star daughter of a famous actress – she’d tried to get the happily married Saintly back to her hotel room. He’d been on the verge of banning all Queen Bee work after that, but we had managed to talk him round with a little help from Michael. Now he was almost part of the family. Saintly walked swiftly around to open the door to take me firmly by the arm, while signalling to the slightly startled nurse to bring over the wheelchair.
‘Come on, Jasmine, take a load off,’ he insisted, handing my prized Birkin bag to the trembling Lulu. I relinquished it but held on to my personal phone for dear life; Lulu was welcome to man the other three devices just while I got settled. I was beginning to feel an ache like the period from hell had just started. It felt putrid, and the thought of trying to deal with the nosy fash pack threatened to make me throw up more dramatically than Belle Single after a night on vodka shots.
Right then I forgot about any objections I’d had to the indignity of riding around in a wheelchair. In fact I’ve never been so thankful for a seat since that Emirates flight attendant introduced me to the many comforts and attributes of 1A.
So this was what it felt like to have a baby.
Of all the sights on show at the Prince of Wales Private Hospital that afternoon, perhaps none quite matched the one that greeted staff when the lift doors finally opened on the delivery room floor. There I was in my shimmery Allison Palmer dress, now limp and ruined, a pair of Chanel shades all but welded to my eyes, and close behind was small blonde Lulu, white as a sheet, carrying my Birkin bag, her Céline Trapeze tote, several phones, and the all-important Fashion Week manifesto for day one.
‘Oh my goodness, what do we have here, disco mum?’ said a fifty-something nurse wearing a teddy bear badge with her name on it: Milly. She was evidently the maternity suite equivalent of Queen Bee’s meeter and greeter, but right now I wasn’t up for her droll humour. In fact, the way my insides felt as though they were being ripped apart, I didn’t think I was up to very much at all.
‘You can sit over there, dear,’ Milly said to Lulu. Before I could point out that I needed my personal assistant with me at all times, Lulu plonked herself down on a comfy chair in the small reception area, a look of sweet relief on her face. It seemed Lulu wasn’t quite ready to hear about the ins and outs of my birthing canal right at the moment; her plan was no doubt to greet Project B when he or she had been bathed and was preferably modelling an Adrienne & The Misses Bonney romper suit. No doubt in Lulu’s mind, anything else was beyond the call of duty. Hell, the only way she had been able to stomach watching Grey’s Anatomy was because she simply could not get enough of Drs McDreamy and McSteamy. After being processed, I was taken through to a small room and helped up onto a bed, where I received the first of what would be many examinations.
‘The baby’s at the starting blocks but they’re not going to be diving in for a few hours yet,’ Nurse Milly cheerfully announced from my business end. ‘You’re only two centimetres dilated. You have Dr CK Coach, right? Luckily we’ll catch him before lunch – he doesn’t like to be called after he’s sat down unless baby is well and truly on its way.’
‘Fine,’ I managed, ‘then will you please send in my assistant? We have work to do.’
‘Well, good luck with that,’ responded Milly, who obviously couldn’t wait to head back to the nurses’ station and tell them all about the bizarre first-time mum who thought she was in control. Once those contractions started in earnest, this trainee mama wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything – especially not work. It was what happened with many first-time mums – they were often in denial at just how massively their lives were changing. Having a baby was not exactly like having a mini-cosmetic procedure in your lunch break.
Lulu sheepishly entered the room in a tangle of mobile phone cords and files. ‘Michael’s def on his way back,’ she reported. ‘He was just boarding the plane when I called and he wants you to hang on for him. I was going to bring the phone in for you to talk to him but they said you needed some privacy.’
‘What! I thought that he was already in the air?’ I said, feeling testy.
‘Nah, he was just on his way to the airport when we spoke the first time,’ reported Lulu, looking even more nervous if that was possible. ‘He’s due to fly in first thing in the morning. It’s a Cathay Pacific flight and I think it gets in just before six am.’
Fan-fucking-tastic. I had no plans in prolonging this birth until then. He could bloody well watch the video replay afterwards. In the meantime, I needed someone with a bit of influence around here to get me moved to a more luxurious suite away from Nurse Ratched as I had already christened Milly. After all, Michael’s father, Bruce Lloyd, played golf with Dr Austin Smythe, some ancient specialist who was on the Prince of Wales Hospital board. But just when I was about to ask Lulu to try to get Michael’s dad on the line so I could speak to him, she told me some really startling news.
The newest The Voice judge Ricky Martin had turned up unannounced at the Allison Palmer show with his adorable, four-year-old twins Valentino and Matteo (was it a sign that with Project B on the way, I better start looking at junior A-lists?). Apparently he did RSVP but that response must have been lost in translation somewhere. Of course, all three would have to be seated in the front row. This meant there had to be a radical rearrangement. But who to dump?
‘Allison’s family members?’ Lulu asked hopefully, because she hated to have to be mean to any of her fashion pals.
‘Are you kidding? That would be a very bad look,’ I said. ‘Take out any fashion assistants and leave only the fashion editors and directors. Okay …’
‘Bloggers?’ tried the ever-hopeful Lulu, who never had to deal with bloggers – that was Angel’s domain.
‘No, they’re the most important of all,’ I reminded her. ‘Most of them reach three times more people than the majority of the fashion mags. That’s why they’re known as “influencers”.’
Ricky Martin’s appearance had thrown us into chaos. But it wasn’t his fault. Of course he had been invited to the show and the fact that he had brought his children along could result in a front-page picture right around the world. You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity. We just had to ensure there would always be Allison Palmer signage in every frame that the paps got of him and the kids. It was just a darn shame that when it came to being prepared his RSVP had gone AWOL. We had just expected that like most stellar A-listers, he couldn’t be bothered to respond at all.
‘Lulu, we’re just going to have to add three extra seats to the front row,’ I said, knowing full well that it was already so squished that the person seated at the very end was almost backstage in the models’ changing room – good thing that the junior Martins really were pintsized.
Suddenly it came to me in a rush of pregnancy hormones. Move that sarcastic gossip columnist Wally Grimes of The Echo and his fashionista mate Georgia Bunt, who writes very occasional pieces for the International Tribune, into Row B; then we only had to find one more seat. It really didn’t matter about demoting Wally and Georgia, as they would only write sneering reports of the Allison Palmer show anyway – she was far too commercial for them. But Wally would now be especially furious at not sharing the front row with both Nick Rees and Ricky Martin. Too bad. Wally had written one cruel column too many about me in the past. And he had stopped just short of suggesting that I’d slept with Matt Ashley after the cricketer had all but attacked me.
‘And Lulu,’ I said, easing myself back on the pillows, which now felt delightfully soothing on my back, ‘make sure they’re shifted to the Siberian end of Row B. I don’t want Wally putting one of his big, fleshy mitts on Nick’s shoulder when he asks him for a quote – as for Ricky Martin, he is going to be hypersensitive to any unwelcoming pawing because he has his family with him. (Even if he didn’t, the last thing that the hugely desirable Latino singer would want was to be pressured by a gossip columnist, especially one like Wally Grimes who didn’t take no for an answer.)
No sooner had I got out my directive than my body was consumed by a contraction, which left me anxious about finding some pain relief.
‘Epidural?’ I asked Nurse Milly, who had bustled back in to keep an amused eye on proceedings.
‘Not yet, dear,’ she said briskly. ‘You still have a way to go before you can get that sort of relief.’
I shot her a disbelieving stare, and turned back to Lulu to go over the next few hours again. Security had already been briefed about what should happen when the show ended, with a contingent of security guards ushering the super VIPs, including the editors of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, backstage to a special room where Allison and several of her supermodels would be waiting, as well as interviews with vogue.com.au and a special Fashion Week photo essay for Harper’s. What was not going to happen was that the no-name bloggers and fashion writers with a circulation of twenty thousand and under were going to monopolise anyone’s time.
Thankfully, this might be the last Fashion Week to which I was going to have to pay such acute attention, since the Queen Bee agency was officially being acquired by Ivan Shavalik and his wife, Svetlana. The cashed-up Russians had officially made an offer that I couldn’t refuse shortly after we had landed some pretty major accounts. Of course, I had knocked them back initially but, after feeling so miserable early on in the pregnancy, it had seemed like a fabulous idea. The money was fantastic and, while the deal included the naming rights to the agency, there was a juicy two-year contract for me as a consultant. Consulting was going to be my new It job, and my fees were as plump as Mel B before she hit Jenny Craig. It would hardly matter that I was also contractually prevented from starting another PR company for five years. That would take me right up to the time when Project B was about to start school. Perfect. Let someone else deal with all the crazies and their inflated ideas of their own worth – like Lidia Blue, who had invented gel chicken fillets to slot into the bra to make the wearer look like Kim Kardashian and who had wanted me to make her as famous as Steve Jobs for her services to the flat-chested. From now on I was going to keep most of the really annoying clients at a distance of not less than twenty kilometres as I got on with the serious business of being a mum. For the next five years at least, I would be taking an extended vacation to Disneyland as far as the fashion industry was concerned. My office was shifting to my home, and I was going to do something else really radical: I was going to start cooking regular meals, including breakfast. Right now we didn’t even own a toaster – Michael thought our breakfast nook was table number five at Jackies in Paddington (the inside table with a panoramic view of the courtyard, so we would always know exactly who was coming). Yes, a brand-new life awaited us – all I had to do was sign on the dotted line.
Of course, the way I felt right now I couldn’t have signed anything. I was in so much pain I couldn’t even see the dotted line.
2
It wasn’t how I’d pictured my birthing experience – not that I had been able to give it much thought, in between all those meetings and the craziness of my life in PR. But propped up on the bed and hooked up to all those monitors, which would register foetal distress if Project B was in trouble, was not how I imagined this new start to life would kick off. I even had some kind of drip feeding into the back of my hand, which made answering the phone a bit awkward, and still nothing had really got started yet. So far, giving birth was not exactly bone-shakingly life-affirming – it was just a series of progressively worse cramps.
Still, I didn’t really understand what everyone had been on about when they spoke about the pain of childbirth. But then maybe I have a higher pain threshold than most people.
You’ve got to in this job. Otherwise how could I put up with people like Sydney’s WAG du jour, Raelene Bax (the knitwear-designing fiancée of one of Australia’s most famous international actors, Josh Sweetwood), and her manager, Sharon, who was one tough bitch, judging from the emails she sent through on Raelene’s behalf, insisting that she had final approval on all photographs taken of her plus she got to keep all the clothes loaned to her for a shoot, as well as the jewellery? Sharon was a real ball-breaker. It was just a shame that we could never get her on the phone or schedule a meeting. It had taken us a couple of weeks to work out that the elusive Sharon didn’t exist at all – she was just a figment of Raelene’s imagination. It was a pity that this was also the extent of Raelene’s creativity – especially when it came to giving dopey, uptight answers in interviews. (‘Where’s your favourite spot to holiday, Raelene?’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry but that’s classified.’) How thrilled was I going to be to put Raelene in my too hard and torturous basket for now.
‘How are you, Jazzy?’ Lulu came back into the room still looking terrified by what she might see. I noticed that she was carrying my Louis Vuitton Keepall, which had apparently just been dropped off by Saintly, who had picked it up from Maria, my housekeeper. The Keepall had been pre-packed by Lulu and me just last week after Lulu had got the idea from reading the final chapters of What To Expect When You’re Expecting, no doubt trying very hard to avoid the gory bits. Lulu’s job was to brief me about what the baby’s birth and first days would be like, but on a strict need-to-know basis for both of us.
Before I could answer, three phones rang at once.
When there’s a crisis in the office, all the phones go off at the same time, the incoming call lights flashing up almost as intensely as the New Year’s Eve fireworks. So when the caller ID revealed Marshall Coutts’ number on my mobile and on Lulu’s handsets at the same time, I knew straight away that something big was going down. I felt it in my recently drained waters. Marshall was the senior partner in the law firm that handled all our business.
As she took the call and listened for a moment, Lulu’s face went a disturbing shade of green (so not her colour). I could hear some key words in his excitable upper-class English accent: something about Ivan and cancelling the contract. Surely not?
I grabbed the phone from Lulu, who by now looked as if she was going to faint.
‘Hello, Marshall. Yes, you do have me at a bad time,’ I said in response to his query. I couldn’t believe he was still going through the formalities of a mobile phone chat. ‘Yes, I’m in the freakin’ delivery suite and about to give birth.’
Marshall launched into an explanation. ‘Well, just to let you know, we’re tearing up all the contracts because Ivan doesn’t have a business visa. In fact, he doesn’t have the correct entry papers into
Australia at all. How he managed to get into this country is a wonder – not to mention what exactly he’s up to here. Looks like his acquiring of Queen Bee was all a front to make him look respectable. Indeed . . . Jasmine, I hate to be the bearer of bad news – particularly at such an, ahem, delicate time – but it appears that Ivan Shavalik could be a member of the Russian mafia. We’ll know more when our investigator’s reports come through.’
Maybe they should patch Marshall’s phone call into the rooms of all expectant mothers, because – whether it was the agitated tone of his voice or those alarming words – it seemed to do the trick as far as Project B was concerned. Right then, I felt the mother of all contractions. Either that or the lower half of my body had decided that it no longer wished to hang out with the top half. I couldn’t help it, I let out a large, wild yelp similar to the sound that escapes from your lungs when you suddenly lose altitude on Magic Mountain.
‘Arrrgh!’ I dropped the phone, which was hastily retrieved by Lulu.
‘Pardon! Pardon! Jasmine, are you there?’ I could hear Marshall almost hyperventilating on the other end of the phone, but for once I couldn’t deal with it because I now understood what everyone had been going on about when it came to giving birth.
