She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  ‘I had a great morning out there, George. You never ride with me anymore. How come?’ he called from the shower.

  I looked into the mirrored wardrobe door. My eyeliner had found refuge somewhere around my cheekbones and last night’s lipstick had stained my lips a shade of red that was verging too far on French mistress territory for this time of the morning.

  ‘I can’t keep up with you, that’s why,’ I said. Under my breath, I added, ‘And it’s all a bit fucking weird.’

  Jase had been a normal person, once, in the not-so-distant past. I remembered it very clearly. When we first met, his approach to fitness had been like that of any other red-blooded male: he exercised to get laid. It was relatively easy and it got results. A few runs each week, or a couple of sessions at the gym. Done.

  But six months into our relationship, Jase had discovered cycling. I’d done the good-girlfriend thing and given it a go for a month or so, but … how do I put this? Cycling is mega-boring. It hurts where things should not hurt. But mostly, I didn’t get it because it was weirdly cult-like. It was like the grown-up version of collecting baseball cards when we were little. It seemed like everyone was suddenly into it, though it wasn’t clear why. It took up a lot of time. For something that seemed like it was an individual pursuit, a helluva lot of people wanted to do it together.

  And for something that, on the face of it, seemed like it should be inexpensive, it was really fucking expensive. The clothes came first, then the new helmet. Then the techy accessories that beeped when Jase met a certain statistic. And then, of course, he had needed a new bike. One that cost more than the handbag I’d splurged on after my promotion to editor. I’d agonised for months over spending $1500 on a glorified bobby-pin carrier, but Jase had forked over eight grand for his bike like he was paying for his morning flat white.

  Joining Jase in the bathroom, I peeked through the shower curtain, admiring the side effects of cycling. Six months of pedalling had gifted Jason with an enviably V-shaped torso. If I squinted and looked at him in just the right light, I’d swear he was a Hemsworth brother. Maybe not one of the A-list ones, but still.

  I stepped into the shower with him and remembered fondly when mornings like this would end in a frantic commute to work because we’d spent the twenty minutes we were meant to be getting ready, getting busy. We still got busy, of course, but now it was more likely to be at the end of a long day, wrapped in bed sheets and punctuated by a nice kiss goodnight. Which was fine, in its own way. It was good. Some couples never had sex. Like, honestly, never. I was willing to bet Lucas would stay an only child forever, because there was no way Ellie and Simon were getting down on the reg. Maybe on their birthdays. But Jase and I still had good, mattress-thumping, dizzying, breathless sex. It was just that it was scheduled for after Lateline.

  I was washing my hair when I remembered my conversation with Nina. Baby. Can’t get pregnant. Need uterus. Would you mind? I recalled her gulped-back tears and her nervous smile as she asked me the most important question she’d ever ask anyone, and my utter uselessness in the face of it. Bloody hell, I’d asked for more wine. Sorry, before I answer this very important question, I’ll need another glass of the $7 sav. Could I have bene any more insensitive?

  And could Nina be serious?

  Of course she’s serious, you bloody moron. What kind of person asks to borrow another one’s uterus as a joke?

  I tried to do the maths in my mind. Nina and Matt want a baby. Nina and Matt can’t have a baby. Nina and Matt want me to have a baby for them. Well, sort of. Fucking fuck, I don’t have to sleep with Matt, do I? No. Come on, George, pull it together. They have turkey basters, or something, for that, don’t they? Don’t they? I stepped out of the shower.

  ‘Are you going to rinse that?’

  I looked up at Jason. He was staring at me as if I was wearing a turd for a hat.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Babe, you’ve still got shampoo in your hair. Get back in!’

  Oh, shit. I did, too. I was towelling myself off with a scalp full of John Frieda. Bloody hell. How could a person be expected to be at the top of their personal grooming game at a time like this?

  I began rinsing and it suddenly occurred to me that I’d have to ask Jason what he thought of all this. Hey Jase, I know we’ve only been going out for a year but a friend needs my uterus. Just for a few months. Nine, to be exact. What do you think?

  Fuck. What would I say to him? We had been dating for a year – which, sure, in your thirties, was the equivalent of five years in your twenties. After a swift shag-a-thon courtship we had settled comfortably into what mag girls called an LTR (long-term relationship). So we were fairly serious. I guess, anyway. After a few months, I’d ditched my roommate and moved in with him. It had just seemed like the easiest thing to do. We liked each other a lot. Apart from cycling, we had a lot in common. We had great sex – a little less frequently than before, sure. We’d exchanged L-bombs pretty early on. But Jase and I had never ever talked about having kids. I didn’t want kids, plain and simple, and I assumed from the annoyed glances Jase gave kids who interrupted his egg-white omelettes at brunch that he didn’t either.

  There was no time to think about mentioning it to Jase this morning anyway – I was twenty minutes late, and not because we’d just had slippery hot sex in the shower. Once I’d rinsed my hair properly, dressed and applied enough concealer to erase a Lindsay Lohan lifetime of regrets, I made a beeline for the front door. I was running down the stairs of the apartment block when I realised I’d left my handbag upstairs.

  It was going to be one of those days.

  After a mad dash back up the stairs, I ran for the bus and arrived approximately one and a half seconds too late. I heard the squeak of the doors concertina-ing closed as I rounded the corner. Not for the first time, I cursed myself for not knowing how to drive. When I was made editor of Jolie, the company had offered me a car space – one of the few perks we had left after years of budget cuts. Admitting to the CEO that I’d never advanced beyond my learner’s permit had been almost as embarrassing as the third time I failed my Ps. Which was ten years ago.

  Five freezing minutes later, I was on a bus racing down Broadway. When I reached my stop, I stepped off the bus, calling ‘thanks’ to the driver, and made my way to our building.

  ‘’Allo!’

  GreyBeard WizardMan greeted me, as he did every morning, with a wide, toothless smile.

  He was wearing a plaid blanket draped across his shoulders, a look I remembered seeing in my own magazine only recently. We’d called it ‘shrobing’ and suggested readers purchase $500 capes (that, honestly, looked like they could double as doonas) to wear as pashmina-style overgarments. The irony that the homeless man who camped outside our building was also wearing this trend was not at all lost on me.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, as non-committally as possible. I know. I am a bad person for not wanting to talk to GreyBeard WizardMan. But it’s not for the reason you think: it’s not because he’s homeless that I don’t want to talk to him, or even that he smells a bit like a lost cat and a lot like an empty can of tuna, or even because he might hit me up for a dollar. I don’t want to talk to him because he is really, really rude to me. All GreyBeard WizardMan ever wants to talk to me about is my appearance. Which he finds lacking.

  ‘Your face!’ he said, apropos of absolutely nothing.

  I nodded and searched for change in the bottom of my bag. I found a crumpled $5 note and thrust it in GreyBeard’s coffee cup, which, I discovered too late, was half-full of lukewarm coffee.

  As I shook my hand free of coffee, I foolishly asked, ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  GreyBeard directed me to the planet-sized pimple that had recently taken up residence on my cheek. Right, smack-bang, in the awful middle.

  I shook my head and shrugged.

  ‘Get some of that Proactiv, love!’ he yelled, as I strode off.

  I wondered where exactly GreyBeard had been exposed to Proactiv. Pro
bably Jolie – maybe it was where he’d learnt to shrobe, too.

  I made it into the lift and – obviously – immediately inspected the crater on my face in the mirror. GreyBeard was right. I did need Proactiv.

  ‘Morning, Georgie!’ said Fran, my assistant, as I walked into the office. Fran was not so much cheerful as literally full of cheer. I’d never seen her upset or even annoyed. Fran must have rose-coloured contact lenses, because absolutely nothing fazed her. I’d known I wanted to hire her when she’d thanked me (quite sincerely) for the (quite critical) feedback I’d given her on a series of sample articles she’d written when she was interviewing for the job.

  And despite the fact that, in these days of editorial cutbacks, Fran wasn’t so much my assistant as the Office Everything, she was truly grateful for the opportunity to be our resident lackey. She happily bought my coffee and did my photocopying and helped me figure out how to dial in to a conference call, and she also oversaw the magazine’s website, and wrote the odd article. And she got paid about half a cent an hour for the honour of doing it all. It was all part of the glamorous world of magazines in 2015 – nobody was paid what they were really worth anymore. Not even me.

  ‘Hey, Fran! How was last night? Big date, right?’

  Fran blushed. This happened a lot. Last week, Fran had blushed when I asked her how her visit to the dermatologist went. I have no idea why.

  ‘Georgiiiiiiie!’ She coyly covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Oh, come on, nobody else is here. How’d it go? What’s his name again? Alfie?’ I turned on my computer and, after the Apple ‘ahh’, heard the dinging pelt of a few hundred overnight emails.

  ‘Alex. His friends call him Al.’

  ‘Ugh, Alex is much nicer.’

  ‘I agree, Georgie.’ What a surprise. Fran would agree with me if I suggested she change her own name.

  ‘So …?’

  ‘Oh! Well, it was OK. We went to dinner, which was nice – we had Vietnamese food, which I’ve never had before. It was very spicy. Do you find that?’

  ‘You’ve never had Vietnamese food before?’ Why did this shock me? Fran had never had a cappuccino before she started working at Jolie.

  ‘No. I thought it would be like Chinese food, but it wasn’t. I was going to order beef and blackbean, but they didn’t have it.’ Sometimes – like, every day – I felt as if Fran was from another era. It was one of the things I liked best about her, actually. I had no idea when she was from, but it was a time when employees respected their bosses and didn’t backchat and generally were inspired by your every word. Fantastic. And Fran was quaint in other ways, too. When she went to the movies she saw ‘a picture’. She asked for ‘fizzy water’ instead of mineral. The only clue she had anything to do with the current decade was her vague but terribly excited ramblings about the TV shows she was watching. She frequently rabbited on about some show she just ‘knew I’d love’, giving a long, strange, incredibly unclear recap of last night’s plot, while taking care not to give away any spoilers just in case I decided to watch it at some stage.

  ‘No, I don’t imagine they would. I’m glad it went well.’

  Fran nodded earnestly – everything Fran does is earnest; the girl wouldn’t know irony if ten thousand spoons hit her when she needed a knife – and turned to leave.

  ‘Fran? Before you go?’

  ‘Coffee?’ she asked, smiling expectantly.

  ‘Yes, please.’ God bless Fran.

  I began sifting through the avalanche of emails that had crashed into my inbox since I left the office less than twelve hours ago. Three hundred and fifty-four of them, in total. Since I’d been out with Nina last night I hadn’t had a chance to answer them on my phone as I normally would, so here I was: hungover and faced with an email deluge. There were dispatches from international news agencies, photo library updates and a few emails from American celebrity managers about our cover options. ‘Could Jessica be holding a bottle of Vitamin Water in her cover shot?’ No, she could not. I sighed. The most recent email, sent just a few minutes ago, was from my publisher, Meg. Also known as The Big Boss. Meg handled the money and vetoed covers and had the kind of park-facing corner office that you read career advice books about. There were no grey areas with Meg; it was black or it was white. She was the kind of person who could say things like ‘You’ve made a powerful enemy today’ and sound entirely serious and very frightening. She’s whip-smart and funny and basically the person I want to be when I grow up. It constantly startles me that I’m the editor now, because when I started in mags I was Meg’s assistant. I was Fran. Well, not quite Fran. Nobody is Fran.

  To: Georgie Henderson

  From: Meg Downing

  Subject: Jolie website

  George,

  What’s happening with the website these days? How often is it being updated? I had a meeting with the digital team yesterday and they were talking about installing a paywall. I don’t think that’s the right idea. They mentioned a digital edition, and I think that’s better for the market. How many subs does the iPad edition have? Need numbers by next week’s meeting.

  Ciao,

  Meg

  I scanned my bookmark bar for our website but couldn’t find it. I’m a paper and pen gal – I didn’t even have an iPhone until the company gave me one so I could check my emails on the hour. I typed in the address: Jolie.com.au. Suddenly, a naked, spread-eagled woman appeared on my screen, giving me a good look at her fallopian tubes. Fucking hell! What happened to our website?

  ‘Fran!’

  No reply. I stared at the screen, where a jumble of naked limbs contorted around one another. It was, weirdly, disturbingly arousing. But it was definitely not Jolie.com.au.

  Fran came back in with my coffee.

  ‘Fran, what the hell? Something’s up with the website. I think it’s broken.’

  She raced to my desk with the speed and grace of a toddler running after an errant toy.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I have no idea. But why is there porn on our website?’

  Fran’s eyes widened so visibly that they appeared to take over at least half her face. ‘What are you talking about? I was just on the website, it’s fine. Oh god, maybe I pressed something. I’ve probably broken it. Oh god.’

  ‘When were you looking at it?’ I turned down the sleazy music the site was playing. Ugh, my eyeballs. I was going to have to Purell them.

  ‘Just then, on my phone. While I was waiting for your coffee.’

  ‘Really? Show me.’

  Fran handed over her phone – bedecked with a Hello Kitty case, naturally – and I could see that she was right. The site looked fine.

  ‘What am I looking at, then? Why can’t I see this on my screen?’

  Fran rounded my desk nervously, as if she were afraid of what she might see. Fran had probably never even seen her own clamshell, let alone someone else’s.

  ‘Oh! Oh my god. What is she doing? Why is her hand –’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing. Just … what’s wrong with it? What should I do? I’m freaking out, Fran. What if our advertisers see this? Or Media Watch?’

  ‘Wait. I’ll get Lucy. Lucy will know.’

  Lucy would know. Lucy was kind of terrifying. She was twenty-two going on forty-five. She was the youngest features editor in Jolie’s history – worldwide – and deservedly so. Lucy had her shit together like nobody else I knew, including almost everyone my own age. She’d put a deposit on a studio a year ago, started her Masters in Publishing just because she could, and had over 30,000 Twitter followers. I had no idea how, but I was in awe, nevertheless. She had the self-possession of a young Gloria Steinem, the fast-paced witticisms of Lorelai Gilmore and the sharp intelligence of Hillary Clinton. She was a marvel to watch and a bitch to manage. Lucy was amazing, but she also knew exactly how amazing she was. Still, since my deputy ed had been made redundant at the start of the year, Lucy had really stepped up. I’d be lost without her.

  Fran
was back, Lucy in tow, in seconds.

  ‘What’s up?’ Lucy asked, coffee in hand.

  I threw my hands up. ‘No idea. I just clicked on to the website this morning and it looks like it’s been hacked.’

  Lucy raised her eyebrows. ‘Hacked?’

  ‘Yeah. With porn,’ I said, mouthing ‘porn’ for Fran’s benefit.

  Lucy looked suspicious. ‘Let me have a look.’

  She rounded the corner of my desk and I gestured to the screen. ‘See?’ I asked.

  ‘Hit refresh. See what happens.’

  I did as she said and we all waited. Fran drew her breath in like she was watching the latest Bond movie. Lucy stared at the screen intently.

  ‘George …’ Lucy began, the screen still loading. It was a wonder we ever sent a mag to print at all with the completely sub-par technology we used. We still had a fax machine, for Christ’s sake.

  ‘What?’ I asked, horrified at the prospect of explaining to advertisers that our website had apparently been annexed by ads for a film called Saturday Night Beaver.

  ‘It’s the wrong address.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Lucy pointed to the address bar. ‘It should be Joliemagazine.com, not Jolie.com.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, whoops.’ I tried to laugh it off as my face stung with embarrassment. How many times had I seen that URL? It was on my business card, for Christ’s sake. I tried to put it down to a momentary mind-fail but I had a feeling it had more to do with the fact that I hardly ever even thought about our website. ‘My mistake. I really need that coffee this morning, huh?’