She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  At least I would have made a decision.

  ‘He said he’d support me. You know, either way.’

  ‘Oh. That’s good. Sounds like Jase.’

  ‘Yep.’ I paused. I wanted to talk through this with Neen. She was – ironically enough – the only person who I could have this conversation with. She was also the only person I couldn’t have this conversation with.

  ‘Neen –’

  She held up her hands to stop me. ‘I don’t need to know. You don’t have to tell me.’

  I flinched, knitting my brows. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean … I need some space from you, George. And I think that you’ll make a better decision if you don’t factor me in.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I think it’d be good if we spent some time apart.’

  My mind slowed, like it was taking steps through quicksand.

  ‘Are you … are you breaking up with me?’

  It sounded like a laugh, but it was more like an audible sigh. ‘Um … maybe. Not forever. I don’t think, anyway. But … yeah. I guess.’

  The pub choir, such as they were, yelped with delight in the corner. Daryl Braithwaite’s ‘Horses’ was playing. They all stood, hands on hearts, and sang along like it was their national anthem. It kind of was, I suppose.

  I couldn’t hear the words, just a muffled version of the melody, because Nina didn’t want to be my friend anymore, and suddenly I felt like I was twelve years old, alone at lunch because nobody would sit with me. The next time I looked up it was because I heard the scrape of Nina’s chair against the hardwood floor. She placed a hand on my shoulder and smiled, but just with one corner of her mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry, George, I just can’t. Not now.’

  16

  Week 18

  ‘George! George!’

  ‘Mmm …’

  Jase slid his arms around my waist and leaned forward to kiss me. His lips were soft, like he’d been using the lip scrub I’d specifically left out for him, months and months ago, in the shower. I felt his stubble graze my chin and let out a deep sigh.

  Oh, sex. I have missed you.

  ‘Gawgee! Gawgee! Gawgee!’ Lucas was stage-whispering directly into my left ear, the one not currently pressed into my pillow. I cracked open an eye. Lucas was leaning over the bed, straining to peer at me.

  ‘What? Lucas?’

  ‘Geooooooorge! Wake up, wake up!’

  I shook my head to empty it of its sex-dream contents. Why was I having sex dreams about Jase? It’s over, it’s over. Enough, George, it’s over.

  ‘What?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Your mummy, Gawgee. Your mummy is here.’

  Now both eyes flew open. ‘What?’

  ‘Your mummy is on the phone.’

  ‘Oh.’ I breathed a sigh of relief. It was barely 7 am. I wasn’t sure I could handle coffee, let alone my mum. ‘Where’s the phone, Lucas?’

  He shrugged and made a hand gesture, like ‘Who knows?’. He was grinning.

  ‘Have you hidden it, Lucas?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘Lucas.’ I attempted to summon a stern tone. I tried to imagine Lucas was a junior fashion assistant who’d run off with an expensive pair of shoes we needed to return. ‘Where did you hide it?’

  ‘Find it, Aunty Gawgee, find it!’

  I pushed the covers off and looked around. The spare room – my erstwhile bedroom – was a chaotic blend of my belongings and Lucas’s toys. Barely an inch of carpet remained visible. On the bookshelf, an army of plush toys sat, waiting to be put to use. Each was more odd-looking than the last. I’d turned them around so I didn’t have to imagine their creepy faces staring at me as I slept.

  ‘Lucas, it’s not a fun game to hide somebody’s phone. Where did you put it?’ Lucas shook his head and laughed maniacally. Then he ran away.

  ‘I hide it, George, I hide it! You find it!’

  Argh. I knew Mum – if she actually was on the phone – would stay patiently on the line, waiting for Lucas to return to her, like he was a receptionist who was too busy to pick up. Which meant that I couldn’t just ring my phone to find it.

  ‘Ellie!’ I called out, realising I was on the verge of dobbing in a three-year-old.

  She poked her head around the corner of the door. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Lucas hid my phone.’ Yep, there it was. I was totally dobbing him in.

  She laughed. ‘Where is it?’

  I threw up my hands. ‘It’s lost, Ellie. He hid it. I don’t know where it is. I thought you might.’

  She shook her head, still laughing. ‘Oh my god, he loves phones. And hiding them. He’s done this to me so many times.’

  ‘Oh, great. Pleased to be part of the club.’

  Ellie rolled her eyes, exasperated. ‘Calm down, George, it’s just a bloody phone. He usually puts it in the breadbox. Come on.’

  I pulled my terry-towel robe on and shuffled to the kitchen behind El.

  She opened the breadbox and pulled out my phone, triumphant. ‘Ta-da!’

  I heard a muffled sound from the speaker. Mum. True to form, she was still there.

  I grabbed the phone from Ellie. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Darling! Where’s Lucas?’

  ‘He came to get me. He told me you were on the phone. How long ago did he stop talking?’ I turned to the open breadbox and pulled out a sourdough loaf. Handmade by Ellie, of course. She didn’t like Lucas eating what she called ‘packet poison’, so she made all of his food from scratch. One time she’d even made her own soy sauce. On Lucas’s first birthday, Ellie had confided that the thing she was most proud of, after raising a baby for an entire year, was the fact that she hadn’t ‘caved’ and given Lucas food from a jar. Without my help, this poor kid would never know the soft, fluffy, zero-nutritional-value delight of Wonder White.

  ‘Oh, fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Mum! You should have hung up.’

  ‘We were playing a game, honey.’

  ‘Right. So did you call, or did Lucas bum-dial you?’

  ‘Did Lucas what-dial me?’ I heard a giggle on the other end.

  ‘Bum-dial. It’s when you accidentally call someone – your bum hits the call button.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Why does your bum call?’

  ‘Because you’re sitting on your phone, Mum.’ I thought of Mum’s mobile, which, for reasons unknown to me, she never took outside the house. It had never needed charging because it sat on its little charging station, day in and day out, without ever really being picked up. Occasionally I called it just to make sure it still worked, but I’m wasn’t sure anyone else even knew the number.

  ‘But why would I sit on my phone?’

  I sighed. ‘Just … by accident, Mum.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘So, did you call?’

  ‘Yes. I feel like we hardly talk anymore. Last night Kevin and I were having dinner and he asked me if you and Jason were planning on coming out to see his entry in the flower show this year and I thought, “I haven’t even asked Georgie about the flower show!” So I thought I’d better ring.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ I was stalling. I didn’t want to tell Mum that a) Jase and I had broken up, b) I was pregnant, and c) I really didn’t want to go to the flower show.

  ‘It’s not for a few more weeks, but you know Kevin, he likes to know who’s coming. Makes him less nervous than if you all turn up and he’s not prepared, the poor darl.’

  Kevin was Mum’s husband, her third. Her first, my dad, hadn’t lasted long – a chef, he’d jumped aboard a cruise ship a few months into her pregnancy and about a year into their marriage. I’d met him a few times and it never failed to be extremely strange, mainly because I felt absolutely nothing for him. Not love, not disappointment, not anger. Just … nothing.

  Edward came after Dad, but he wasn’t around for much longer. He and Mum met at a friend’s wedding. It was also Edward’s wedding, but that hadn’t stopped him flirting with Mum. He skipped out on
his bride two days after the wedding, got a quickie divorce and married Mum. Guess what happened next?

  But Kevin – Kevin was the Real Deal. He was the bread to her butter, the frosting to her cupcake. At last, a solid, reliable Man. Not a man, lowercase. A Man. He could be counted on to fix lightbulbs that had burnt out, to open unrelenting jam jars and grill a steak until it no longer resembled anything vaguely edible. He loved gardening and took painstaking pride in his roses, once telling a local kid he’d ‘knock his block off’ if he so much as sneezed on his favourite David Austins. He was quiet and liked his shed and had two light beers every night and had only ever asked one thing of Mum: to move to the North Coast, so he could be near the ocean and the banana plantations, his favourite fruit.

  She said no. They were perfect together.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Um … it does sound great but I might skip it this year. Jolie is on deadline.’

  Mum paused. ‘Alright. Why are you at Ellie’s?’

  I sifted through my imagination for some ideas. Maybe Ellie and I had been out on the tear and I’d crashed here? Nope, Ellie would never do that. Maybe Simon was away and I’d been called in to assist with Lucas? Nope, I would never do that. And Ellie would never ask me.

  In the end, I decided to do it Band-aid style. Rip it right off.

  ‘I’m pregnant, Mum. And Jase and I have broken up. Not because of the pregnancy. Other stuff –’

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ I could hear excited breathing down the line. Lord, give me strength.

  ‘Uh, yes, but –’

  ‘Darling, why didn’t you tell me? How long have you known?’

  ‘Mum, don’t get too excited, OK?’

  ‘Oh darling, don’t worry about that silly don’t-tell-anyone-before-twelve-weeks rule, it’s ridiculous. Never had it in my day. Nonsense, it is. Pure nonsense.’

  ‘No, Mum, it’s not that, it’s … I’m actually past twelve weeks, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, but –’

  ‘You’re past twelve weeks?’ She didn’t say it unkindly. She didn’t even say it in that patented, mother–daughter passive-aggressive way, which made me feel much, much worse about not telling her.

  ‘Mum, please don’t be mad.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘I don’t … I’m not sure what I’m going to do, Mum.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means … it means I have options.’

  She said nothing. Did other women – besides, I don’t know, Rory Gilmore – feel comfortable talking to their mothers about abortion? My mum had every reason not to have me, and yet, she did. She’d been twenty-two, alone and, thanks to her coddling parents, her only real life skill had been fashioning a mean French braid. So why would she have had a baby? What could possibly have been in it for her?

  ‘Is this because of Jason?’

  ‘No … Sort of. Not really.’

  ‘Well, what happened with you two?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything.’ I ripped off a chunk of bread but I couldn’t eat it. I felt all churned up inside. I played with it instead, pressing the soft part until it became flat and dense, and rolling it into little balls.

  She sighed. ‘Jason is a wonderful man, Georgie.’ Georgie. Ugh. I hated that she refused to call me George, like everyone else. ‘It’s a man’s name, Georgie – I didn’t name you that!’ she’d tell me every time I implored her.

  ‘I’m aware, Mum.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Mum! I didn’t do anything. It just – it just didn’t work out, OK?’

  ‘Darling, if this is cold feet, just say so. It’s OK. Everyone has them. I even had them with Kevin, and that was my third time.’

  ‘No, Mum, we’re not getting married. That’s not – that’s got nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘Jason is very traditional.’

  Is he? How did my mum know this and not me?

  ‘Mum, stop. I’m not getting married. I’m not even sure I want this baby, OK?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Georgie.’

  ‘Mum … please. I can’t really have this conversation right now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … it’s early.’ It wasn’t for Mum – she woke at 5.30 am every day to do her Jane Fonda workout video. Purchased in the late ’80s, I couldn’t remember a day going by when she didn’t play that bloody video. I knew every word Jane uttered in it. When standing – in line for groceries, say – I often found myself subconsciously ‘activating my glutes’ the way Jane had taught us.

  ‘Look, I don’t see why you can’t come to the flower show. We can talk about all of this there.’

  I gritted my teeth. ‘Mum, I’m not going to the flower show. And I just … I need to figure this out by myself, OK?’

  ‘What do you need to “figure out”?’ I could tell she was actually doing the air quotes, even though nobody was watching.

  ‘I just told you this, Mum.’

  ‘What?’ She was as indignant as I’d ever heard her – even more so than the time she’d insisted she’d seen Russell Crowe at her local Woolies, the day after he won his Oscar.

  ‘Mum …’ God, don’t make me say it. I tallied up the list of people who knew so far. People who might question the decision I made. Jase, Ellie, Simon, Nina, Matt and now Mum. Six. Great. ‘Like I said, I have to figure this out.’ I paused before adding, ‘On my own.’

  Her voice grew quieter. ‘Oh. Is that a way of saying …?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  I heard her sigh. ‘OK then. Well, I suppose I understand now why you didn’t want to say anything … I’ll let you go, Georgie.’

  ‘OK.’

  Before I could even say goodbye properly, she’d hung up. My mother had never hung up on me, even when I was a total git as a teenager and had told her I hated her because she wouldn’t let me use Sun-In to lighten my hair. I looked down at the phone, to make sure she was really gone. She was.

  17

  Week 19

  ‘So, I think what we really need, first of all, is a very clear social media strategy,’ said Lucy, smiling at Meg and me through her many, many instructions. ‘We have a Tumblr and Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, but there’s no direction. There’s no sense of cohesion.’

  Meg nodded and gave Lucy a ‘please continue, this is thrilling’ sort of hand gesture. She was beaming.

  I was trying my best not to gag on the memory of the bacon and egg McMuffin I’d scoffed on my way to work that morning. Nobody had ever mentioned that being pregnant felt like a permanent hangover. I was tired, aching, foggy and willing to eat a sock if it had enough salt on it.

  After I’d told the team that we needed to work on the digital side of things, Lucy had jumped to my aid. She was always emailing me links to blog posts about vertical integration or agile delivery or whatnot. I’d given them a cursory glance, thanked Lucy for her time and resumed ignoring the website problem. But then Lucy started cc’ing Meg in on the emails, and now we were ‘brainstorming Jolie’s digital revolution’. Suddenly it wasn’t just about getting more iPad subscribers or recording videos with some internet nobody. It was a ‘digital strategy’. It was ‘a new way of thinking’. It was scaring me shitless.

  ‘You know, some mags in the States and the UK actually have dedicated social media editors,’ Lucy went on. I rolled my eyes inwardly. A person employed purely to post Instagram pics? Give me a break. ‘But of course, the challenge with social media is turning it into sales. Just because your cover gets shared a million times doesn’t mean a million people will buy the mag.’

  ‘Exactly!’ I jumped in. This was what I’d been thinking the whole time. Getting ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ were nice, but what did they really mean? And would they pay my staff’s salaries? I sensed not. ‘I don’t want to spend all this time worrying about a Facebook post if it’s not going to sell the magazine.’

  ‘Oh, Facebook is comp
letely different,’ Lucy said breezily. ‘It’s much easier to see the benefits of a Facebook like or click because it all goes through to our own website, which, of course, is monetised. So we should definitely be investing in Facebook as much as possible. Which means that we need someone to update it who’s a bit more senior than Fran.’ She raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, even though I didn’t really, ‘but who else on the team has time to do this sort of stuff?’

  ‘I’d like to do it, actually,’ Lucy said. I sensed a slight flare in my nostrils.

  ‘Excellent, Lucy! Just excellent,’ said Meg. ‘See, Georgie? This is what I was talking about – we’ve got to think of this as an opportunity, like Lucy does.’

  I focused on not appearing to seethe as Meg undermined me in front of a junior staff member.

  ‘Let’s not get carried away. Maybe we should replace our online editor,’ I suggested. God, why had I thought that Lucy would be the answer to my prayers? She was embarrassing me, and it felt personal. ‘I mean, I get it – we need to move along with the digital stuff. But this is an area we’ve all neglected for a long time,’ I said, trying to deflect the blame from landing solely on myself, ‘so I think we need to really give it our all. Lucy, you have enough of a workload as features director. You don’t need all this extra responsibility.’

  I hadn’t wanted anything to do with Jolie’s online transformation, but Lucy’s eagerness to be involved had forced me into caring.

  ‘I can handle it,’ she said. ‘Besides, what I really think we should be doing is integrating the team so we’re all working across both platforms.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Most US mags do that now,’ she said. ‘The art director, beauty ed, fashion team, the writers of course – they all do both print and digital. It’ll be a big adjustment, but in the end it’ll really pay off.’