She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  ‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly bashful. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s really nice to see you’re still friends, that’s all.’ Wow. Adam had gained twenty kilos but also, it seemed, a new and improved personality. Thank god for that.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Nina.

  We looked at each other with a sort of ‘WTF?’ brow, but both smiled. After the events of the past few months, it really was a miracle we were still friends. But I knew that friendship with Nina was like a warm, familiar jumper I could slip on even years later and it would still fit, like I’d worn it just yesterday. Not that I ever intended to take the jumper off again, of course.

  ‘Uh, yeah. We’re getting a drink – do you want one?’

  Adam shook his head. ‘Don’t drink anymore. Went a bit nuts for it my first year in Dublin. Decided it wasn’t for me.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  Nina and I walked to the bar in silence.

  ‘He seems nice now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s weird, right? That he’s nice?’ Nina gave me that look I knew so well, where her brow crinkled and her eyes asked for what we both knew was the truth.

  ‘Yeah, definitely.’

  ‘OK, so it’s not just me then.’ She turned her attention to the bar, fishing in her handbag for our drink vouchers. ‘Mineral water for her, please, and a glass of the house white for me,’ Nina said to the bartender, who I vaguely recognised as a woman who used to work at the McDonald’s near our school. She nodded and poured a glass of flat soda water from a bottle for me and a glass of cask Fruity Lexia for Nina.

  Nina looked at my drink. ‘Do you have any lemon?’ she asked the bartender, who looked like she cared less about adding lemon to my drink than she did about catching up on the latest NPR podcast.

  I rolled my eyes at Nina. ‘Thank you,’ I said to the bartender.

  ‘What? Like it’s too much to ask to put lemon in somebody’s drink?’

  I shook my head. ‘Look around you, Princess Grace of Monaco. You’re back in Kansas.’ I purposely mixed my metaphors because I knew Nina would get both of them.

  Nina smirked.

  ‘Tell me again how Matt got out of this,’ I said.

  Nina’s smile fell. ‘He’s not feeling well,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Oh. Yeah, I know. Sorry, I was just making a joke. Is he OK?’

  Nina rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Man flu?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She had finished two-thirds of her drink already. We were barely six foot from the bar.

  ‘Easy up, soldier. You’re turning into Princess Stephanie.’

  Nina either didn’t get the joke or she didn’t want to. She stood, still as a post, staring out into a sea of people we used to know.

  ‘You OK?’

  She shook her head wordlessly.

  ‘You want to go outside?’

  A nod, brief and small.

  We made our way to the balcony but turned back once we realised it was sardines-in-a-tin filled with our ex-classmates, some of whom were busily lighting up beer bongs.

  ‘Come here,’ I said, pointing to the coat check.

  I shut the door and Nina sat down on the table in the middle of the room, surrounded by two racks of coats of all shapes, sizes and shopping-mall brands.

  ‘What’s up? Did you and Matt have a fight?’

  Nina shook her head. ‘No … I think we had The Fight.’

  I sat down next to her. ‘What’s “The Fight”?’

  ‘The Fight. The Fight that decides it.’

  ‘Decides what?’

  ‘It. Whether we’re going to break up or not.’

  ‘What?’ I stood up. How could Nina and Matt break up? If Nina and Matt broke up … what hope was there for anyone, anywhere? They were perfect together in every way. Everybody loved them. Everybody wanted to be them. They were the white Jay-Z and Beyoncé of Marrickville. So to speak.

  ‘I know. Big shock, huh?’ Nina smiled ruefully.

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m sure you’re making too much of it. Nothing could break you guys up. You’re Ross and Rachel. You’re Donna and Josh. You’re … Angela and Jordan.’

  ‘Angela and Jordan broke up.’

  ‘Well, they shouldn’t have. They were perfect for each other.’

  ‘No, they weren’t. She was a self-centred fifteen-year-old and he was a loser who couldn’t spell. Some of my Year 1 kids have more emotional maturity than those two.’

  ‘How dare you?’ For a second I forgot that Nina was in deep, emotional hot water and had switched to defending My So-Called Life as if I’d created it. ‘Look, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about you and Matt. What happened?’

  Nina’s shoulders slumped forward. ‘We don’t know what to do.’

  ‘About …?’

  ‘The baby. Or, you know, getting pregnant. God, I keep thinking that. ‘The baby’, like there’s an actual baby out there that’s mine. Like it’s lost and I just have to find it.’ She shook her head. ‘What I mean is, we don’t know if we’ll keep trying.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to appear too supportive of the decision – Nina might interpret that like I thought it was foolhardy to try in the first place. But I didn’t want to question her choice, either. I did, however, want to slap Matt quite vigorously for a sustained period of time for being such a fuckwit to Neen. Matt, who hadn’t replied to any of my texts since the day of the would-be transfer, who had unfriended me on Facebook and apparently had no interest in knowing me anymore. How dare he want to stop now, after all they’d been through? Nina needed a baby now more than ever.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do it again.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, my brows lifting. Nina doesn’t want a baby anymore?

  ‘I just … I just cannot keep doing this, George. I want to. I really do. I still want a baby. But it’s been seven years now. Do you know how many days that is? I added it up last night. It’s 2556 days. Two and a half thousand days I’ve spent thinking about this, wanting this. I’ve done everything. Well, almost everything: you ruined my surrogacy plans, of course.’ She smiled wryly but I felt my heart flinch anyway. ‘I can’t keep going on a sniff of hope like this. I’m so tired.’

  I nodded and sat back down. Nina and I rarely hugged but I decided it would be OK to do it now. I leaned my head against Nina’s and looped my arm over her back. She leaned in to me.

  ‘I don’t know what I should say.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Nina, her face buried in her hands. ‘I feel awful but … I think I’m done. The thought of trying something else and failing … it’s too much to even think about.’

  I nodded. ‘What does Matt think?’

  Nina shook her head, still wrapped in her hands. ‘He hates me.’

  ‘Neen, that’s not true. Matt loves you. Actually, that’s not true. He adores you.’ Even though it had surprised me that Nina and Matt were dating way back when, now it seemed like they didn’t make any sense without each other. I’d never seen Matt even look at another woman; he was beyond heterosexual: he was Ninasexual.

  Nina was silent.

  ‘You guys can work this out,’ I said. Even as I said it, it began to dawn on me that perhaps we had reached that age when, no, it wasn’t always possible to work things out.

  Nina turned to me and smiled through her hands. ‘I don’t know. He wants to keep going. There’s a new procedure we could try, but …’ Nina threw up her hands. ‘We have no money left. And I don’t mean that in an ‘I’ll have to cut down on takeaway coffee’ way, I mean it like ‘We could lose our house’. I’ve had to ask Dad for a loan. Matt doesn’t even know. I can’t tell him; he’d be furious. We barely have a relationship anymore. I can’t remember the last time we had a conversation that wasn’t about babies or pregnancy or money. And, look, I know a lot of that is my fault. I wanted a baby. I want a baby. I just don’t want to keep doing this anymore. And this new tech
nique, the new procedure Matt wants to try … I just keep thinking it’ll be just like the others. We’ll go to the clinic and they’ll tell us how it’ll work and get our hopes up and then, right at the end, they’ll mention how there’s only a 30 per cent chance of it actually being successful, but by that stage we’ll be so sure there’s a baby in our future that we’ll say, yes, sure, let’s do it, let’s go for it, but … I can’t live on 30 per cent anymore. It’s not enough.’

  Outside, I heard the first chords of that awful Green Day song they play at funerals and high-school reunions and the accompanying cheers of delight from the crowd.

  ‘So you … you don’t think you’ll ever have a baby?’ And the winner of Ms Insensitivity 2015 is … Georgie Henderson! Well done, George, we’re all so proud. You’ve won a lifetime supply of socks to cover your feet as you jam them in your mouth.

  Nina shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  I waited for the signature Nina joke to follow, but it didn’t.

  ‘Things don’t always work out the way we plan, huh?’

  ‘Thanks, Lifetime Movie of the Week.’

  ‘Hey, it’s what you told me a few days ago!’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘And you were right, which is unusual for you.’

  Nina rolled her eyes.

  ‘You’ll work it out with Matt.’

  ‘I really want him to have a baby. He deserves that.’

  ‘So do you. But life isn’t always fair. Matt has to understand that, too. And you’re the one this is actually, physically happening to. They’re your eggs and it’s your body. If you want to stop, he should be fine with that.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘I know.’ I paused. ‘I’m sorry, Neen.’ It was what I should have said in the first place. We sat there for a minute, not speaking. What’s the right way to say, ‘I’m sorry your marriage is breaking up and your dream of having a baby seems futile but oops, looks like I’m pregnant, so please try to be happy for me if possible’?

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said eventually, even though it really wasn’t. ‘Come on, let’s go back out there. I want to see Kelly and all her loser netball friends and place bets on how much they’ve stacked it on.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yep. Let’s go ask them which flavour of Bacardi Breezer is their favourite. Still the purple one?’

  ‘You can be such a bitch, you know that?’

  Nina smirked. ‘Takes one, you know …’

  ‘I know.’

  Out in the conference-room-turned-dancefloor, our former classmates were drunkenly bouncing away to a song I vaguely recognised. Someone called Ashanti or Aaliyah might have sung it. I tried to match faces to names but it was hard because, well, these people had aged. They had spread and greyed and, in some cases, seemed to have shrunk as well. It suddenly occurred to me that they might be looking at me, thinking the same thing, making the same judgements.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’

  Nina shook her head. ‘No way.’

  ‘Well, what are we here for then?’

  ‘To validate our life choices, George. Obviously.’

  ‘Right.’

  A group of women, some of whom I recognised, had dropped their handbags and clutches next to them on the dancefloor, to better facilitate their moves. They’d formed a dance circle and one woman, who may have been a Jessica or a Sarah, or perhaps neither, gyrated in the centre while the others cheered her on. It made me nervous just looking at her. I hated dance circles because I always felt sorry for the person in the middle and wanted to applaud them as loudly and vehemently as possible, as if their success at dancing in the middle of the circle was somehow indicative of their success in life, and was also dependent on my cheering them on. It was exhausting and not at all fun. High-school discos were torturous.

  ‘Well, look who it is!’ I heard a shrill but broad voice sing out behind us. I glanced at Nina. It had to be her. Nina cast her eyes behind her and grimaced, nodding. I hated Kelly, but Nina truly could not stand her. And fair enough. Kelly had treated her position as Official School Bitch like she had been appointed by a board and had company shares. She acted like she had KPIs to meet: ‘bully Georgie Henderson mercilessly until she cries during PE one day … every month’, ‘be a total arse about Nina Doherty’s mum dying’, ‘pick on five random people each day, just because you can’, et cetera, et cetera. The only thing that comforted me about Kelly’s existence was that there was one of her kind at every high school, everywhere in the world, and they were all as meaningless as each other.

  ‘Georgie! Nina! Hellooooooooooo!’ She flung her Tracy Anderson Method–toned arms around the both of us and reined us in for a hug. She wasn’t fat. That was annoying. Somewhere between Kelly’s shoulder and her left earlobe – adorned with three sets of earrings from Diva’s latest collection – I found Nina and shared a look with her. Arsehole alert, arsehole alert.

  I pulled away. ‘Hi, Kelly. How are you?’ I tried to feign some enthusiasm, but it was tough. The woman had once put one of our classmates up to ringing my house and leaving a message on the machine – my family’s machine, let it be known – asking me to the movies. If I hadn’t listened to the whole thing, it wouldn’t have been forever marked in my memory as the first time my heart felt broken. At the end of the message, after suggesting a movie (Can’t Hardly Wait) and time (the 7.15 showing on Saturday night) he had sighed and said, ‘Kelly, I can’t do this. It’s too mean.’ He’d stopped talking but the message had played out with Kelly’s laughter.

  ‘I’m amazing! What a great night, am I right? Are you girls having a good time?’ When Kelly spoke, her whole face spoke with her. She was perpetually in Year 7 drama class.

  Nina and I nodded. Nina, on her third glass of Fruity Lexia now, took a large sip. It’s called a gulp, actually, when it’s that big.

  ‘And Georgie, I had no idea you were even married. Congratulations!’

  ‘Huh?’

  Kelly pointed at my bump. ‘Congratulations. On the baby.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you. But, uh, I’m not married.’

  ‘Oh!’ She actually fake-slapped her wrist. ‘Silly me. I know you live in the city – people there probably do that all the time.’

  Live in the city? We lived exactly an hour away from each other and this woman was talking about it like I’d spanned centuries to get here tonight.

  ‘Do what?’ Nina asked.

  Kelly smiled, a little uncomfortably I thought. ‘You know … have a baby … out of, uh, wedlock.’

  Nina burst into laughter. ‘Wedlock? What is this, 1950? She’s a grown woman, Burns, she can do whatever she likes.’

  Kelly shifted on the spot, her eyes darting from me to Nina. ‘Oh, I know. I – I mean, I’m a mum, too, Georgie. I didn’t mean to offend you. I guess I was just a bit surprised that you … I mean, of all people, I never would have imagined you with a baby. I don’t know why, I just …’ she trailed off. ‘You can understand why I never thought of you as maternal, right?’

  I cocked my head to one side and played along. ‘No, not really.’

  I let it hang, knowing that Kelly would sniff the bait and decide she was still hungry.

  She gave me a nervous smile now. ‘Oh, I mean, it’s just … you were always really into your, um, your career and, um, being smart and getting good marks. So I just never saw you as a mum. I s’pose that’s it, really.’ I couldn’t see Nina’s face, but I had a feeling her eyebrows were becoming one with her hairline. But Kelly barrelled on. ‘And … you never seemed to, like, care about people or things or … you were like, really tough, and I could never figure you out, you know? But I think it’s great that someone like you is having a baby. Even if it is a sort of change-of-life thing.’

  I opened my mouth, ready to reach my hand down Kelly’s throat and permanently remove her larynx so she could never say such idiotic things again when Nina came to my rescue. Again.

  ‘R
eally?’ Nina asked sarcastically. ‘Because, the funny thing is, it’s really weird for me to think of you as a mum, Kelly. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I mean, you know …’ She was really into the act now, copying Kelly’s bewildered facial expressions and hand gestures. ‘Maybe I can’t see you as, like, a caring and nurturing person because you’re such a massive cunt.’

  Whoa. Even I was not expecting that.

  Kelly’s mouth fell wide, wide open. ‘What did you say to me?’

  ‘You heard me,’ said Nina. ‘You’re a cunt. You’re a cunty cunt cunt cunt. And you know what the crazy thing is? I can’t believe I waited all these years to say it. Because you have always been one.’ She paused, just long enough to survey the circle that was beginning to form around us. ‘A total, grade-A, capital-C cunt.’

  We walked away to the sound of rapturous applause.

  My best friend’s back. I hadn’t felt happier in months.

  27

  Week 34

  ‘Oh my god, is she for real?’ Nina asked me as we stared at a heavily pregnant woman spread-eagled over a fitball, moaning and banging two stress balls together as a form of ‘pain management’. In between the moans, she was repeating the words ‘my body knows how’, over and over.

  ‘Uh, I think so. I told you not to come.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Like I would miss this.’

  We were at our first birth class. I had asked Nina to be my birth partner, so she wanted to come to the classes too. Ever since I’d told Jase I wasn’t up for a shotgun wedding, I was unsure where he stood in regards to the baby. I’d decided to give him some time and a little distance to figure out how involved he wanted to be. I’d gone into this thinking I would do it alone; I could go back to that if I needed to.

  I had wondered if Nina would be able to handle coming to the classes, but she’d assured me she wanted to, and that she’d be fine. Truthfully, I think she wanted a distraction. Matt had moved out, leaving Nina alone in their house. I’d suggested that Matt and Jase form a support group for Men Screwed Over By Georgie and Nina, but Neen hadn’t warmed to the idea.