She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  ‘Fine.’

  I stared longingly at Nina’s perfectly cooked steak, desperate for a piece of meat that hadn’t been burnt charcoal black inside and out, which was apparently the only type I was allowed to eat according to Ellie’s pregnancy rules.

  ‘For what it’s worth, though, George, Jolie was great. They’re fucking idiots if they think a 22-year-old can do a better job than you.’

  Nina Doherty: decking people for me since 1993.

  25

  Week 31

  ‘Isn’t little George the sweetest?’

  I looked up from Expecting Love. I’d just finished the chapter on toilet training.

  When your little one is ready to step out of cloth nappies (remember, there is significant and growing evidence that artificial nappies can cause semi-permanent skin damage such as occasional redness) and into the wonderful world of underpants, constant praise is key. Of course, constant praise is essential in every area of a child’s development, but here it is imperative. I cannot express that enough.

  When your child indicates he is ready to move out of cloth nappies (see warning re. artificial nappies above) by picking up a pair of underwear you have left out for him in his room in a place he can clearly see them, tell him he is a very good boy for being so clever as to find them. Then tell him: ‘You are so clever, in fact, that I think you are ready to be a big boy and do a big boy wee on the toilet.’ If he should appear nervous about this in any way, immediately stop proceedings for at least three months. Then you may begin again, at step one.

  ‘Little George …?’ I stared at Mum, wondering which second cousin I was forgetting now.

  ‘Windsor. Er, Cambridge. What are they called?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, George!’ Mum slapped the page of the magazine she was reading with the back of her hand. I looked down at the page. Duchess Kate and her toddler son, George, beamed up at me.

  ‘Oh, George,’ I said. My mum talked about certain celebrities like she knew them intimately. Listening to her speak about Nicole Kidman, you’d have sworn they’d known each other since birth.

  ‘Isn’t he cute?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s cute. He looks like William.’

  ‘Of course he does.’

  ‘Well, you never know. Look at Harry … who does he look like?’ I raised my eyebrows but Mum, as I suspected, was having none of it.

  ‘He looks like Charles Spencer, Georgie,’ she snapped. ‘It’s a fact that lots of second children take after their aunts and uncles.’

  I kept my laughter inside even though it was beyond tempting to giggle at Mum for her strange, unabating loyalty to a group of people she’d never met, whose lives were paid for by her tax dollars.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And isn’t Kate beautiful?’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded.

  ‘And you can tell she’s such a good mum to him. Look at the way she’s holding him,’ said Mum, motioning to the page as if it were a signed affidavit that yes, Kate Middleton was a good mum, end of story.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, looking back down at Expecting Love.

  ‘Have you thought about where you’ll have the baby?’

  ‘In a hospital.’

  I couldn’t see it, but I knew Mum was rolling her eyes. ‘Yes, very funny, Georgie. Where?’

  ‘I’m booked into RPA, Mum.’

  ‘And where will you live with the baby?’

  ‘I’m looking for a place, Mum.’

  I was. And I was getting nowhere. The great thing about Sydney was that you had so much choice when it came to real estate. Would you like a one-bedroom studio that’s really more like a walk-in closet with a few taps? Excellent, you may live in any suburb from Bondi to Burwood as long as you can part with at least $500 a week, but probably more like $750. Possibly more. Or would you like a four-bedroom home with a generous backyard, six car spaces, a media room, formal living and dining and an in-built barbecue out the back? Fab! You can move to Penrith. See? So much choice.

  ‘You could live here,’ she said, as neutral as purple highlights.

  ‘Uh, thank you for the offer. But, um, that’s fine.’

  ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Georgie.’

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  Mum sighed heartily. ‘It means don’t be a brat.’

  ‘I’m not being a brat,’ I said, in a voice I recognised as very close to Lucas’s when he was in trouble with Ellie or Simon.

  Mum smiled, softening her face. ‘Sorry, love. I’m just worried about you. And the baby.’

  ‘You don’t need to be worried, Mum. We’re going to be fine.’

  Things were, in fact, incredibly fine. I was two-and-a-bit trimesters in and the size of a camping tent, but a good pair of Topshop maternity jeans had made me feel more comfortable than, perhaps, I had ever felt at any other time in my life. I had boobs you could rest a pint on, but thanks to Grace they felt buoyant yet supported. Amazing. My ankles had taken to swelling with fluid at about 4 pm every day, but since I wasn’t going to work, I could literally put my feet up.

  I couldn’t admit it to anyone – not Ellie, who wouldn’t understand, not Nina, who would probably find it the height of arrogance, and not Mum, who … well, I couldn’t tell her much of anything – but I still felt strangely disconnected from the growing person inside me. It was surreal to think that the bump in my belly held a little person who would be with me forever. So surreal, in fact, that I simply couldn’t connect the two. I had made up my mind, yes, but in a lot of ways I was still in limbo. I was still living in Ellie’s guest room and, good gracious, I was yet to purchase a single ‘baby’ thing. Unless you counted a Marc Jacobs nappy bag, in which case I had bought exactly one thing ‘for the baby’.

  People asked me constantly about the gender and the due date and how long I was taking off work and how I was feeling. Like 99 per cent of pregnant women, I smiled politely and answered their questions with a civility I hadn’t known I could summon and inwardly thought, ‘This is none of your business. And why do you care so much? I barely know these things and it’s my baby. Why are you so interested?’

  The other 1 per cent of mums-to-be, the ones who were brave enough to actually say, ‘Please fuck off and leave me to my seventeenth packet of cheese and bacon balls’ were my personal heroes.

  I was afraid I wouldn’t love the baby because I hadn’t planned it, because I had considered – quite seriously – not having it. Because other people waited years for their babies, whereas it felt like mine had dropped into my lap – or, to be more precise, my uterus – almost by chance. And this, in turn, made me feel shallow and guilty. Too frequently, a carousel of anxious thoughts turned in my mind.

  I am a bad person, I kept thinking, for not wanting this baby the way Nina did. I was a bad person for not really listening when people tried to tell me about pumping and burping and controlled crying and not caring at all what those things were. Nina would care. Nina would know. I was a bad person for not letting my mum enjoy this the way I knew she wanted to. And I was an especially bad person for not wanting to get back together with Jase for the sake of this baby.

  I’d told him that I was keeping the baby weeks before, and true to Jase’s reliably good nature he was genuinely excited. Happy. Said he was going to ring his mum, all that jazz. We had a brief discussion about money and whether he would like to spend time with the baby and how much time that might be and generally agreed that we’d chat about it later, when there was an actual baby to deal with.

  So you can imagine my surprise when he turned up at Ellie’s house a few days ago, ready to make a decent woman out of me.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, opening the door.

  Lucas wasn’t home, otherwise he would have had dibs on door-opening. I hadn’t expected to see Jase – we’d been messaging each other but we hadn’t seen each other since I’d told him about the baby status.

  ‘Hey – glad you’re home. Are Ellie and Simon here?’ />
  ‘No, Mandarin classes.’

  ‘Ellie and Simon are learning Chinese?’

  ‘If only. Lucas is.’

  Jase raised his eyebrows. ‘Isn’t he a little young?’

  ‘Oh no, Jase!’ I exclaimed exaggeratedly. ‘It’s the best time to learn a new language, because little ones just soak it all up in a way that our brains don’t let us.’ I knew all the words in Ellie’s ‘Reasons Why Language Classes Are Essential For Infants’ speech.

  ‘Riiiiight. Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course. Sorry,’ I said, motioning for him to come inside.

  ‘Tea?’

  Jase nodded, following me inside. He sat at Ellie and Simon’s kitchen table, and I instantly flashed back to Jase and I at our kitchen table – well, his – all those months ago, when he was so angry at me and I couldn’t quite understand why. So much had happened in the intervening months – I almost felt like it had been a different person at that table with Jase.

  ‘Earl Grey OK? Or do you want peppermint or something?’

  ‘Uh, Earl Grey’s good. Thanks George.’

  ‘No problem.’ I put the kettle on and found the teabags. When I looked back around at Jase, I saw him muttering something to himself, not unlike the way GreyBeard WizardMan did outside my office. Former office.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  He looked up. ‘Yeah, yeah … I just – can you sit down, please? Don’t worry about the tea.’

  Oh god. Jase is dying. My baby is going to be fatherless. Who will be his – her? – male role model? Kevin?!

  I sat down and slid my hands across the table to Jase, wrapping his fingers in mine. ‘Jase, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Just, uh, a bit nervous.’ Jase exhaled, looking away from me and at the stack of Lucas’s finger paintings at his feet.

  ‘About being a dad? We’ll be OK. I mean, how hard can it be? Teenagers do it all the time. Britney Spears has two kids! It can’t be rocket science, right?’

  ‘We’ll do better than fine, George. We’ll be great parents. But, uh, that’s not what I meant.’

  I stared at him, sensing what might come next but not quite believing it. That wasn’t Jase’s style. Was it? Nope. Absolutely not. Couldn’t be.

  ‘George,’ he began, in a tone that was a dead giveaway. I felt my heart start to beat faster. No, no, no, no, no. Please don’t, Jase, please don’t. ‘George, when we broke up, I was devastated. I thought that – well, I thought that we were heading towards something. You know, we’re not getting any younger, all that stuff.’ I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. ‘I know we never talked about having kids in so many words –’ or in any words, I silently added ‘– but I’m so happy we’re doing this together.’ Except we’re not doing it together, I wanted to interject. ‘You’re going to be a wonderful mum, and I can’t wait to be a dad. And I’ve been thinking – we’ve got to do right by this baby, you know? You only get one chance, and you can’t screw it up.’ He paused and looked at me as if he was on the verge of saying Something Significant. ‘A baby needs two parents.’

  I nodded. ‘This baby has two parents.’

  ‘Two parents who are a team. Together. Don’t you wish you had known your dad? Don’t you feel like you missed out by not having him around?’

  ‘No. I don’t, actually. I had Kevin. And my mum. Who, you know, is more than enough to deal with. But – this has nothing to do with our situation. You’re going to be around for this baby, Jase. We don’t need to –’

  ‘George, will you marry me?’

  Oh shit.

  I considered my options. Tell Jase a flat no now and deal with the consequences. Or go along with Jase’s little fantasy world and say yes. Get hitched. While pregnant. Did they even make maternity wedding dresses?

  ‘Jase …’

  His face looked so hopeful it was hard to keep going. But I knew I had to.

  ‘No. It’s not a good idea. I mean – aren’t you seeing someone else?’

  ‘George, we can’t not get married because I had a bit of a fling when we were broken up.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. There are lots of reasons. I just don’t think we’re meant to be together, Jase. We can be good parents without being married. I think it would be way, way worse for this baby if we got married and decided later we weren’t right for each other. Which, let’s be real, is probably what would happen.’

  Jase’s eyes had narrowed, hardened. ‘So that’s a no, is it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Don’t you want to be married?’

  Had Jase always been so conventional? Had I just ignored it before because I didn’t want to see it?

  ‘I have no idea, Jase. There’s so much ahead of me that I have to figure out. But I think we were both pretty clear on the fact that we were done. I betrayed you, remember? Lied? And I felt like you didn’t understand me. Pretty big differences. Pretty hard to overcome.’

  ‘But the baby –’

  ‘The baby won’t solve any of that. You know that, Jase.’

  I realised we were still holding hands and decided it was probably a good time to let go.

  He left.

  Mum pulled me back to the present. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  I nodded, knowing I didn’t have to offer any other instruction. Mum knew I liked my tea exactly how I didn’t like my coffee: weak and milky and sweet. I felt a jolt and wondered if, somehow, I’d know that about my own baby. There were ten weeks til this kid was due and that seemed like forever. How weird must it feel for my mum to see me as an adult – a fully formed human capable of having preferences when it came to tea, a lifetime away from the tiny, helpless infant she once knew.

  Fuck, life was weird.

  26

  Week 32

  ‘Where are we?’ Nina hissed.

  ‘1997?’

  It really did look like 1997 at the reunion, but not in a cool, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet way.

  ‘Who are all these people?’

  I shook my head. ‘No idea.’

  They were, in fact, people we had spent six years with, once upon a time. But like most people, we’d wiped those so-so memories, and now high school was only remembered in our minds as either beautifully sweet or horrifyingly bad. We remembered the great times we had had together and the awful things that bitches like Kelly Burns (nee Hooper) had done to us, but the rest of it, the ninety-five other people we’d graduated with, had faded into obscurity because they were neither too nice nor too nasty to leave an impression.

  It was like Jolie. I knew I’d remember all the amazing times – the times when big stars sent beautiful flowers to thank me for making them cover girls, the wonderful parties and the readers’ letters that made you realise there really were people out there buying the mag. And I’d remember the shit times – like the last three months – but everything else would just be days spent at work.

  ‘Aren’t there supposed to be, like, name-tags or something? So we know who we’re dealing with?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s just get a drink.’ I sighed, wondering if I was perhaps a closet alcoholic. Twice this week, I had almost ordered a drink before remembering my baby-ordered booze ban.

  Nina raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ll have one for you, hon.’

  We made our way to the bar but a tall red-headed man stopped us. He looked like the sort of person who should be thin, but wasn’t. His face and legs were the approximate diameter of cigarettes, but his waist looked more pregnant than mine. He looked like a cartoon version of himself.

  ‘’Allo, ’allo!’ Cartoon Guy bellowed our way.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. Who is this guy? I glanced at Nina, who was giving me the ‘beats me’ eyes.

  ‘How the bloody ’ell are you, Georgie Henderson and Nina Doherty?’ I stared, as if this might help me remember who this person was, while waiting for Nina to tell him that her married name was now Ingleton. Weird: she didn’t.

  ‘Good, good,’ I assured him, trying to r
esume our search for the bar.

  ‘Still thick as thieves then?’ Apparently somewhere between high school and the present day, Cartoon Guy had acquired an Irish brogue. I wondered if the Colin Farrell impression did it for anyone.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nina. ‘And you’re still …’

  ‘Still at the bank, yes. Slaving away,’ he said, smiling. ‘Still, I try to get back here whenever I can.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Well, Sydney,’ said Cartoon Guy. ‘Dublin’s great, but the weather’s shite.’

  ‘Right,’ I nodded. ‘Of course.’ I looked at Nina again, but she was no help. She was staring longingly towards the bar.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

  I laughed, possibly a little too heartily. ‘Oh no, of course we do. Of course we remember you … How could we forget …?’

  ‘Adam,’ said Nina, exaggeratedly. ‘Of course we remember you, Adam.’

  Adam? Adam, my next-door neighbour? Adam, who went to school with us and hadn’t even known that Nina’s mum had died?

  Adam. Who now lived in Dublin and apparently thought he was Bono.

  ‘You got me!’ said Adam, pointing his fingers in a move I recognised as belonging entirely to The Wiggles (thanks, Lucas). ‘I could never forget you two, of course.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Adam looked nothing like I had expected. I was right; he was once a thin person – a really, really thin person – but now he looked like he had been pumped up from the inside out. Even his head was bigger. How was that even possible?

  Adam nodded vigorously. ‘You were joined at the hip, you two. Best friends. We were all a bit jealous, actually.’

  I raised a brow. ‘You were jealous of two fourteen-year-old girls?’

  Adam nodded. ‘Yeah, a bit. I didn’t really have a friend like that. I mean, I had all my cricket mates, but … it’s not the same. Got a little girl of my own now, and I have to say, I think women are better at friendship than men. Even when they’re four!’