She's Having Her Baby
Page 8
‘Guys?’ I said, pointedly.
Lucy looked up, eyes wide. ‘Um … I don’t know. Are we being honest here?’
I swallowed my irritation back. ‘Always,’ I said, hoping it sounded honestly passive-aggressive. Which it was meant to.
‘I don’t think it’s very … now. It feels a bit done to me.’
I pursed my lips and nodded. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I know this is our fortieth anniversary, but I think the issue should be about looking forward, moving on to the next thing, not looking back. Looking back is … kind of boring.’
‘Oh.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Well, thank you for your honesty, Lucy. Dom, any ideas on the beauty front?’
She nodded with the excitement of a small child on Christmas morning. ‘Yes! I’ve been wanting to make sure it was all confirmed before I told you, but … Emily Collins wants to work with us!’
Who?
‘Who?’
Dom stared at me. ‘Emily Collins. The vlogger?’
I stared back.
‘Emilycollins.com? She does the haul videos?’
I knew that term. I was positive. It had something to do with the internet. Probably.
‘Oh. Is that that thing where the girls buy things and then show them on camera?’ I raised my eyebrows sceptically. Dom didn’t really want to work with her, did she? That chick was a flash in the pan, at best. Dom was a beauty editor – she knew her BB from her CC, her concealer from her highlighter. She’d been in the game for ten years. She’d interviewed Kate Middleton’s hairdresser, for god’s sake.
‘Yeah! She just signed a major endorsement deal with Beauty Savers. So now we have access to her!’ Now we have access to her? How hard could it be to get a uni student who lived at home and made a couple of videos on the side to answer our call? Dom delivered the news like she was telling us that Channing Tatum was about to arrive and make cocktails before taking us all out for a night on the town.
‘Did you have a meeting with Beauty Savers?’
Beauty Savers was a major advertiser. A budget beauty store that didn’t look it, with its pastel-pink merchandising and ever-smiling shop assistants (if you walked into a Beauty Savers and the person who served you wasn’t smiling, you got a free Smile Pack, full of beauty loot). Beauty Savers had plenty of money to spend. And unlike other advertisers, they rarely made demands of us. Beauty Savers would never have asked me if we could run a four-page editorial on lipstick – literally, on one lipstick – because they knew it was boring and totally obvious. They possessed that thing that most brands didn’t: self-awareness. We loved them.
‘Yeah, a couple of days ago,’ Dom said, like it was common knowledge. ‘Meg was there. You were at the lunch for the fashion council, I think.’
‘Ah, right,’ I said, trying not to appear visibly rattled. Why had Dom been invited to an ad meeting without me – with one of our biggest clients? At least Meg had been there. ‘So, what’s your idea?’
‘Well,’ said Dom, hands clasped in front of her like a giddy schoolgirl. ‘Emily and I are going to start the Jolie beauty channel, sponsored by Beauty Savers.’
‘Ohhhhh,’ said Fran, her eyes wide with delight. ‘That sounds so cool! Can I be on it? Please?’
‘Uh, maybe,’ Dom said, non-committally. Fran worshipped Dom the way teenagers worshipped Taylor Swift: ferociously and to the exclusion of all others. I half expected her to form a Dom fan club. Admittedly, Fran wasn’t alone. Dom was your classic beauty editor – pretty, smart and friendly in equal measure, but never intimidatingly so. I’d been at events where grown women fangirled over her. ‘To begin with, we’ll only have six videos and they’re all mapped out already. So maybe for the next round.’
I shook my head. ‘Hang on, I haven’t approved any of this. Did Meg?’
Dom cocked her head to the side, her pretty face contorted into a quizzical look. ‘Um, yeah. I was just waiting until Emily confirmed things from her side, but … I thought it was your idea, George.’
I tried not to be insulted. ‘Uh, no. It’s not my idea. So …’ I paused, trying to wrap my head around all of this. Meg had signed a deal with Beauty Savers without so much as telling me there had been a meeting? I could feel the anger percolating.
‘Personally,’ Lucy interjected, ‘I don’t think it’s a great idea. What will the videos be about?’
Dom raised her perfect eyebrows. ‘Well, in the first one, Emily is going to teach me how to do the perfect smokey eye –’
‘No,’ I said, holding my hands in front of me, like ‘please stop’. ‘We’re not doing this. First of all, if I see one more video about a smokey eye, I will stab someone with a stick of eyeliner. Secondly, you’re the expert, Dom! Not Emily bloody Collins. No, we are absolutely not doing this.’
‘Why?’ she asked, her voice awash with sulkiness.
‘Because it’s a terrible idea!’
‘George, it was your idea!’
I scoffed. ‘It was not my idea. And we are not doing this. We need to concentrate on ideas for the birthday issue, not videos of eye makeup that people can get anywhere they click on the internet. Don’t reply to Emily until I speak to Meg, OK?’
Dom nodded, her mouth pulled to one side in a disappointed smirk. ‘Sure,’ she said, quietly.
The girls left the room and I checked last week’s calendar. Had I missed a meeting request? I hoped I had. At least then I could only be accused of being unprofessional, not, apparently, entirely redundant. I was the editor. It was my job to talk to the clients and make them feel all warm and fuzzy and ready to advertise with us again. How could I do that if I wasn’t even invited to the meetings?
Nope. No meeting request.
Fuck.
I picked up the phone and dialled Meg’s extension.
‘Hello, pet,’ she said.
‘Hi, Meg. Listen, I’ve just had Dom in here, and –’
‘And she told you about Beauty Savers?’
‘Yeah. What’s going on?’
‘I wanted to wait until it was all confirmed to tell you. Emily Collins is going to –’
‘Yeah, I know all of this. Meg, why didn’t you run this past me? I looked like an idiot in front of my team. I didn’t know anything about it whatsoever. And if I had, I definitely wouldn’t have approved it.’
‘That’s exactly my point. This is the kind of idea a client like Beauty Savers loves. They’re putting $150,000 behind this. We’ll be able to insert the videos into the iPad edition – it’s a great way to add value, like we said we needed to. Pet …’ Meg paused, sighing audibly. ‘If you’d been in that meeting, we wouldn’t have got them across the line.’
‘What? That’s crazy! For $150,000, I would have shut my mouth, Meg!’
‘But you wouldn’t have been able to turn off that look you get when people talk about digital stuff. Everyone would have known how you felt about it. You’ve got absolutely no poker face, George – none.’
It was true. I hadn’t. It confounded me, even now, to think that I’d been able to hide the surrogacy plan from Jase for as long as I had. Lucky for me, Jase was as bad at reading signals as I was good at giving them.
‘So this is a done deal?’
‘Yes. It’s a great deal. If they like the first six videos, they’ll sign on for another twelve. We need this money, George, and we need faith from the advertisers that we can handle all this digital stuff. Right now, we’re not projecting that.’
I sighed. ‘OK. You’re right. Just …’
I paused.
‘Yes, pet?’ Meg asked.
‘Just please don’t make any more decisions without me, Meg.’
‘Of course not, love.’
9
Week 13
‘Are you sure I can’t get you anything else?’
I shook my head. ‘Neen, would you sit down? I’m fine.’
‘OK, sorry. I just … you know, I’m just making sure you’re OK.’
Nina had been hovering ove
r me like a fly on a leftover sausage since I’d arrived at their place four weeks ago, like a rom-com heroine down on her luck, carrying my clothes in what I now realised was an absurdly expensive suitcase given my current employment and relationship status (respectively: doubtful and completely fucked).
‘George, I can’t tell you how grateful we are,’ said Matt as we ate breakfast, his normally wry eyes baleful. I knew exactly how grateful Matt and Nina were, because they kept telling me, on an almost daily basis. ‘But we want you to know that of course it’s OK if you want to change your mind. So if you ever want to, please just say so.’ Again: already had this information.
I nodded, chomping on my extra-crispy bacon. ‘Yeah, I know.’
Would it sound completely awful to say that I was already over talking about it? Probably, yes. But as well as living with Matt and Nina, I’d been going through legal and social counselling. It was like my radio was tuned to all baby, all the time. Of course, I really did want to help Neen and Matt, and I wasn’t about to back out, but all this talk of eggs and fertilising and babies and ovens just made me want to stick my head into a plate of ricotta hotcakes and pour maple syrup into my ear canals until I could no longer hear it.
‘How’s the counselling going?’ he asked. Nina shot him a look. Matt held up his hands in submission. ‘Sorry – not my place to ask. Sorry, George.’
I shook my head, digging into my eggs. ‘No, no, it’s OK. Uh, it’s fine, I guess. Weird questions, you know. Very, er, personal. Which is the whole point, I suppose.’ I looked up from my plate to see Nina and Matt staring at me intently, nodding along. To say I was feeling slightly pressured to perform was an understatement.
I wanted to do it for them, but I wanted it done. As in, now. In the weeks since Nina had asked me The Question, I’d heard more infertility stories than I’d worn clean undies. It wasn’t even that I’d begun to talk about the surrogacy with the outside world: Nina, Matt and I had all decided that we’d wait until the bun had safely started to bake before we’d say a thing to anyone outside our odd little fertility triangle. But even so, talk of babies and struggles with fertility found me, somehow, in ways they never had before. It was like when you hear a new band for the first time and then suddenly they’re everywhere and you wonder how you’d never heard them before, because now it seems like you’d never turned on the radio and not heard them.
Ellie had started it. Of course.
‘My friend Eva took forever to get pregnant. She finally started doing IVF but then her husband cheated on her. But by that point, what was she going to do? Not go ahead with the IVF? She was thirty-eight. She didn’t have much more time. So she forgave him, took his sperm and now they’re married with a three-year-old.’
Ellie said all this with a kind of casualness that belied the ridiculousness of the situation. This chick’s husband cheated on her and she still went ahead and had a baby with him? I could feel my eyes ready to pop from my head.
Every time I opened a mag at work, there was a story about dwindling egg supplies. Poor sperm quality. The cost of IVF and concerns that middle-class parents wouldn’t be able to afford IVF and private schools. One article quoted a woman named Bernice as saying, ‘I waited such a long time to have a baby. I invested so much in him. I’m not sure I see the point unless I can send him to Cranbrook like his father.’ I tried to be sympathetic, but Bernice was pushing it.
Like the journo I am, I’d taken to all-night Google sessions with the passion of a nineteen-year-old hoodie-wearing technocrat. My brain was drowning in acronyms: IUI, IVF, ART, GIFT, ICSI … And stats. So many depressing numbers. One cycle of IVF had a 33 per cent chance of working. When Nina turned thirty-five, the chance of her miscarrying jumped from 15 per cent to 20. Even getting pregnant normally – in a bed, surrounded by candlelight and roses, I presumed – wasn’t easy. There was a 15 per cent chance it’d take. How could that even be possible? The odds were stacked against us all. How did anyone ever get pregnant?
I found myself getting lost in the stories I read on infertility forums. The woman who was looking for a surrogate because she’d had a stroke in her early thirties and would now be on a drug that caused birth defects her whole life. The woman who felt inexplicably guilty that she couldn’t have a baby with her second husband, having already had one with her first. The woman who was looking for a donor egg because all of hers ‘had cracked in the carton, apparently’.
Then there was MummytoBe73. Guessing that ‘73’ denoted her year of birth, I did the quick, depressing maths. She was over forty. Her forum thread, ‘Looking for a Tummy Mummy’ (the popular name for surrogates on these forums), had been active since 2006. Every month since her original post, in which she’d explained that she and her husband couldn’t have children on their own, she had posted an update. The last one was from only a month ago. They were still looking. I wondered where she found the hope she needed to keep going after so much heartbreak. I tried to imagine who this woman was, where she lived and what she did. How much of her day was spent thinking about the baby she wanted so much? It was too depressing to fathom.
I read stories about ovarian drilling and decided I never wanted to hear that term again. I learnt technical acronyms like LP (luteal phase) and LSP (low sperm count) and truly sad ones like FBOW (for better or worse) and BFN (big fat negative). The three letters everyone seemed to want on the forums were BFP – big fat positive.
It was a huge, exhausting parallel universe I hadn’t even known existed, and I’d barely scratched the surface. I felt guilty relief that I had the luxury of never wanting to conceive in the first place. Suddenly all the rude, too-intimate questions people had asked me over the years about why I didn’t want children seemed infinitely preferable to this never-ending grief.
But the forums made me worry. There were women who talked about their fourth and fifth attempts at surrogacy IVF. What if it didn’t work? What if I decided I was done after one failed attempt? What would that say about me? It was something my counsellor, Dr Hewitt, had probed me about. In my mind, I’d assumed Nina and I would do the transfer, I’d get pregnant and bam, nine months later, Nina would have her baby. Well, technically, I would have Nina’s baby. Resume normal life.
‘It doesn’t always work that way, you know,’ said Dr Hewitt. He was a comically tall man with a strangely feminine shape. I’d never seen a pear-shaped man before, and yet, here was Dr Hewitt, looking for all the world like he needed a visit from Trinny and Susannah and a waist-cinching belt to make his assets work for him. ‘Some surrogates don’t get pregnant on the first try, and they’re wary of giving it another go. How would you feel about that?’
How many times could a person be reasonably expected to loan out her plumbing?
‘Uh, I don’t really know,’ I said, suddenly confronted with the idea that my own body might not be up for the physical challenge I was about to put it through. ‘I think I’ll only know when it happens – you know, when I have to make the call.’
Dr Hewitt nodded. ‘What about Nina and Matt, though?’
I exhaled deeply and shrugged. I truly didn’t know.
‘I’m not trying to put roadblocks in place here, Georgina – er, Georgie –’
‘George.’
‘Right. My job isn’t to scare you away from this – I just need to make sure you’ve thought of all the possibilities. Do you understand?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, of course.’ But what had begun as an incredibly simple decision to help my friend was spiralling into dangerously complicated territory. It wasn’t even that I thought I might bond with the baby and want to kidnap it or something crazy like that – though those questions had been asked, too – it was more the fact that mine had been a decision that had seemed almost – almost – straightforward on the face of it, but had spawned so many micro-questions I had only the vaguest wisp of a clue how to answer. Every single day, I felt like I was interviewing for a job that might not even exist. Dr Hewitt had brought up all sorts of
scenarios I hadn’t even thought of. What if I got pregnant and there were complications – would I be able to be on bed rest, possibly for months? This had never occurred to me. I imagined telling Meg I’d be editing the mag from under my doona. I had a feeling it wouldn’t go down well. What sort of contact would I want with the child? And what if that was different to the contact Nina and Matt wanted me to have with it? It was exhausting even thinking about all the what ifs.
The worst question Dr Hewitt had asked was also, in hindsight, the most obvious. But, like all the others, I’d never given it a second thought. Or, in fact, a first thought.
‘How do you feel this will affect your friendship with Nina?’
In my mostly selfish mind, I imagined it would make Nina eternally grateful to me, and that she’d likely shower me with gifts and, every so often, she’d look at me knowingly, with a hint of sadness but a whole lot of joy, thinking how different things could have been if she didn’t have me, George Henderson, Purveyor of A Fine Uterus, as her best mate.
And then Dr Hewitt talked me through all the ways Nina might find to resent me. Maybe she’d resent me right from the beginning, after the surprise and giddiness of being pregnant had worn off and I became just another knocked-up person who wasn’t her. Maybe it wouldn’t happen for years, but when it did, it would pump the brakes on our friendship so hard, I’d be hurt just from the force of it.
Nina placed her hand on mine across the table, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Don’t worry, we won’t ask you for the details – you don’t need to tell us what goes on in Therapy Land.’ Nina and Matt exchanged wry smiles, having experienced their fair share of visits to Therapy Land, too.
‘It’s OK. Really. I think I’m just new to a lot of this and I’m still getting used to it.’
Nina nodded, seemingly satisfied with my answer. ‘Good. And remember, like we told you, just let us know if you need anything, OK?’
I smiled. ‘Well, there is that new Chloé wallet I’d been looking at for Christmas …’ I teased.
Nina smiled back. ‘Really, George, anything you need, you just tell us. We’ll take care of it.’