OMG Baby! (4 page)

‘Well, there you are, then!’ I say. ‘And that’s not all – you’re getting married next week!’

C
hristie is waiting
beside the huge double doors of our building. She’s in work mode, wearing high-heeled thigh boots, black skinny jeans and a bumble bee-striped jumper dress. Her hair is piled inside a straw cap with a pompom. This is understated for her. She waves as a passing truck beeps.

‘Christie!’ I call.

‘Oh, hi, Viv!’ She air-kisses both sides. ‘How was Spain?’

‘Yeah, it was great . . .’ I trail off as I stare up at the building. Its red brick walls and huge window frames remind me of a prison. It crouches amid the traffic and noise. Some sort of flyover seems to appear from its roof, spilling cars onto three swirling lanes behind. I look at the front window of our office, and as I do, the light glances off the glass like a wink.

‘It’s bloody noisy!’ I shout into the wind, and she nods.

Then her eyes flick beyond my head and I know someone is behind me. I whirl round and come face to belly with a giant. I look up at the meaty jowls of the man who must be Damon, our landlord.

‘Are you Viv?’ he says, pumping my hand in his hairy paw. To say he’s ugly doesn’t do his face justice. It’s an incredible face, looking as if the features were thrown with force and caught in the doughy boxing glove of his head from which the eyes now pop and goggle and wiry black hairs sprout at random.

He leads us through the door and I notice the straggly shorn pelt on his head continues down the back of his neck and disappears under his shirt. Once inside the building, he introduces himself and pulls back the cage door of a lift. We step inside gingerly.

‘It’s very simple. You won’t find cheaper premises, but you pay cash up front every month and you have a key and a code for the front door. You don’t pay, you’re out.’ His left eye drifts like a hard-boiled-egg searchlight as he speaks. Christie keeps trying to follow its gaze. He leads us out of the cranking cage towards the door of the corner office. We trail behind with the waft of sweaty nylon. Christie mouths, ‘Oh my God,’ and holds her nose behind his back as he fiddles with keys at the door. I turn my gaze on the burgundy carpet tiles.

Inside, the office is painted white, and light floods through the huge window. Two desks and chairs form an L-shape, and there are floor-to-ceiling shelves.

‘It’s perfect, Damon. Thank you. We’ll take it,’ I say.

‘The price includes broadband, cleaner, use of the meeting room and shared kitchen,’ he says to the cornices, hands moving as if he’s polishing a mantelpiece with two dusters.

‘Wonderful. Thanks, Damon. We’ll take it,’ I say again.

‘Toilet facilities are included, but you provide your own tea and coffee and bog roll.’

I look despairingly at Christie, who’s already sitting at the desk I thought would be mine. I look back at Damon.

‘Pull the cage door shut on the lift or it won’t work. The fire exit is out back. Do not use the lift if there’s a fire. No staying on the premises overnight. No painting or other permanent decorating of office space without prior permission from me. No animals on the premises without prior permission from me.’

‘Damon,’ I say loudly before he can draw another breath. He stops. The eye floats. ‘I’m pleased to tell you we’ll take the office.’ I press an envelope in his hand, containing Lucy’s money. ‘Here’s a deposit. We’ll drop the rest off when we move in this afternoon. OK?’

He opens the envelope and counts the money. ‘There’s only two forty here, Viv.’

‘Can that be a deposit?’

‘Nah, Viv, it’s a month up front or no key.’

‘Right, well, Christie, do you have any cash on you?’

She empties her bag on the table. A tampon, a Chupa Chup and a two-pound coin roll across its surface.

‘I’d give you this,’ she says, picking up the coin, ‘but it’s my lucky charm.’

‘OK. Damon, can you wait while I nip to the cashpoint?’

‘Viv, if you don’t come back with the readies within the half-hour, I’ll let the space go,’ he says, seemingly polishing windows now.

‘We will. We’ll be back in a sec. Come on, Christie.’

O
ut on the noisy
, dusty street, Christie’s hat is blown off. It sails upwards, lands in the road and is immediately flattened by a truck.

‘No, Christie! It’s not worth it!’ I cry, pulling her back from diving headlong into rushing traffic.

‘It’s Burberry, Viv!’ she shrieks, trying to make a run for it. I struggle with her, eventually managing to grab her about the waist, swing her round using her own momentum and haul her onto the pavement as the flattened hat is caught up in the wheels of a van. Scraps of straw fly.

‘Oh!’ she whimpers.

‘Leave it, Christie.’ She lurches forward one last time before slumping into my arms. ‘It’s over. There’ll be other hats,’ I shout as I lead her away.

Where the hell is the nearest bank? We hobble round the mirrored curve of an office building, trying to get away from the traffic, only to find a whole other street of mirrored surface. Just then I’m hit by a wall of dizzying nausea and the angel voice starts up with a kind of bossy robot overtone, ‘
Flapjack now. Flapjack. Get flap
—’

‘I think I need a flapjack, Christie! Have you seen a newsagent’s?’

She doesn’t bat an eye at this weird declaration and we turn back towards Old Street Station, remembering a cluster of shops there. We scurry along holding on to each other until finally we find a retail oasis and emerge with cash and flapjacks before struggling back again past the hat-carnage scene, where Christie slumps once more into my arms. I pat her back, muttering, ‘Don’t look,’ as I see a pompom roll to the kerb, and then we head on through the heavy doors of our new office building.

We’re scared of the lift, but the door to the stairs needs a code to open, and anyway, I’m wiped out by the cash run, so we battle with the cage door. It slides shut with limb-severing force, and we’re winched up and down a couple of times before staggering out on the third floor. We open the office door to find Damon seated at the best desk, palms down on the table, as still as a sphinx.

‘You made it with two minutes to spare, Viv,’ he says.

‘I didn’t realise you were timing us. I’d have asked for directions.’ I smile at Christie, who’s smoothing her windswept hair.

‘I did say, Viv, “Within the half-hour.”’

‘Are these offices in demand, then?’ I ask. ‘I mean, it seems a bit empty round here to me.’

The stray eye wanders slowly left and pops back. He’s thinking.

‘Do you have the money, Viv?’ he sing-songs.

I hand him the cash. He counts it twice before giving me keys and codes and a handbook containing rules and instructions for appliances. He writes his mobile number on the top and underlines it twice. ‘Anything you need, Viv, you call that number.’

‘I will, Damon,’ I say solemnly, and, satisfied, he lumbers out.

Christie spritzes Chloé perfume into the air. She’s sitting once again at the desk I would have preferred, but I decide not to battle it out after the hat incident. In any case, I need to eat a lot of stuff immediately, so I take the flapjacks and settle at the desk with the back to the door.

‘Oh my God. He actually had hairy palms,’ says Christie.

‘No, he didn’t.’

‘What’s
wrong
with him, though?’

My mind shoots to my fears about alcohol abuse and unborn babies.

‘Nothing’s wrong with him!’

‘That weird eye! I didn’t know where to look, Viv!’

‘He’s somebody’s baby.’

‘What?’

‘His mother loves him.’

‘Er, he probably strangled her.’

This puts a whole new slant on things. I nibble round the edge of the flapjack while thinking about it. This is the kind of prejudice my baby might have to put up with. This received attitude that humans must look a certain way in order to be acceptable.

‘So hold on, do you think that because he looks weir— unconventional, he’s a murderer?’

‘Ye-huh!’

‘You actually think he murdered his own mother?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past him.’

‘Christie, you know what? I hope you never get called for jury duty. Think about what you’ve just said. You are pretty and young.’ She looks pleased. ‘But imagine if you weren’t. If the genetic lottery had not fallen in your favour, would you like to be accused of murder because of how you look?’ Her face falls and I’m proud of myself for making her think just that little bit deeper. ‘See? Damon is not a murderer, just very, very,
very
different-looking.’ She’s staring. I smell something not nice. ‘Is he behind me, Christie?’

She begins to nod as an almighty thud hits my desk and I jump into the air.

‘I forgot to leave the back-door keys,’ booms Damon close to my ear. I spin round in my seat and horrifically we’re eye to eye. Flapjacks topple. I’m aware of my hands flying to my throat, and a small cry escapes me.

‘All right?’ he growls, lifting a giant werewolf hand to reveal a bunch of keys.

I nod manically. ‘Thank you,’ I squeak, and with a gleeful glint in his good eye, he stomps out, leaving me clutching my chest where my heart is trying to escape.

‘Like I said . . . weird,’ says Christie, calmly taking out her laptop.

W
e spend
the rest of the day setting up equipment and planning a strategy. We’re sorting Lucy’s wedding crackers and producing a few more as samples to show to retailers, and since Lucy’s wedding is next weekend, that’s going to be all we have time for at the moment. I think after that we’ll soon decide what our strengths and skills are, and which of them are likely to make us the most money, whether it is the public-relations side of things or product management or promotions. We have many strings to our bows, we decide, and as long as neither of us is ever left alone with that Damon creature, whom Christie is now calling ‘Demon’, we think the office could work out well, chiefly because it’s cheap.

I decide not to tell Christie about the baby until things take off a bit workwise: I don’t want to make her feel insecure about our venture. Actually, I don’t want to admit that I’m insecure about our venture. In my more self-sabotaging moments I’ve seen myself penniless, foraging for roadkill and felting my own hair to make baby outfits. But then I tune in to that angel voice. ‘
All will be well
,’ it whispers, I think. Or hold on, could it be ‘
All will be hell
’?

No, Christie and I, we’ve just got to make this work. We’ve just got to, I think in a
Wizard of Oz
/
Gone With the Wind
way. We are experienced, savvy and clever – I mean, just look at Christie placing an order for the cracker contents in China right now.

‘
Duōshǎoqián? Yil? Duōxiè!
’ she says, writing on a pad. ‘We wan’ one hundred!’ she shouts in her version of a Cantonese accent. I feel a burst of pride for her and glance back at my laptop, which has finally fired itself into action and shows the results of my last internet search: a birth website. An apple is being pushed through a skeletal pelvis.

‘Also one hundred! Same. Same,’ screeches Christie.

She dealt with our Chinese suppliers when we worked at Barnes and Worth, so she really knows what she’s doing. I hope. Anyway, I have to trust her to do things.

‘Thursday, ahh?
Shi. Shi!
’ she says, and puts the phone down and starts typing.

‘Everything all right?’ I ask mildly.

‘Oh yeah, they promised we’ll get the crackers as soon as. They don’t have time to send a sample, so we just have to trust them and go with whatever arrives.’

Hmm, this trusting, it makes me nervous. And wasn’t she supposed to order samples while I was away? I look at her, my employee, and think about having a chat about roles and responsibilities, but actually, it’s our first day and I don’t really know how it’s going to work yet, and it may even work out OK without samples. I’ll try not to worry. ‘Stress is not good for the baby,’ it says here. I scroll down the website and click on ‘What to expect from an episiotomy.’ I open the video link and blanch. Oh, no way. That is not happening! I close the site quickly, inwardly clenching. Jesus, that poor, poor woman. She was . . . and then they just . . . Urghh. What kind of torturous hell have I stumbled into? Surely having a baby can’t be that bad or why the population boom? There must be a way of doing it while you read
Grazia
and have a biscuit.

I click on a site with photos of babies dressed as things: flowers where the centre is a baby’s face. They have caterpillars and bees too, and a rabbit. I add them to my pregnancy Pinterest board. I’m about to email some over to Lucy but don’t at the last minute, reasoning that if she’s upset about not being pregnant, she might not feel like being made to look at pictures of babies dressed as garden wildlife. I don’t worry about Lucy: she always gets what she wants. She’ll be pregnant soon, and in the meantime I’m actually in the process of growing my very own baby. That is the maddest idea ever. I can’t get my head round it, but it doesn’t even matter what I think – it’s happening right now inside me, like the
Starship Enterprise
and the Klingons. My baby already is a fully formed. It has a heartbeat. I gaze at Christie, considering whether to tell her or not, and she looks up and asks, ‘Are you pregnant or something?’ shocking the life out of me.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Just the way you’re stuffing your face, Viv,’ she says, adding in a hushed voice, ‘Have you ever thought you might have tapeworm? My dog had one. He sicked up the head. There was this head looking around and my dad grabbed it and pulled and it was about a metre long! Honestly, we were all gagging.’ I blink at her, imagining the scene. ‘Yeah . . . so . . .’ She scrutinises me for a bit.

I push the flapjacks away. ‘I’d better stop, actually. I have to fit into a very tight dress and dance at Lucy’s wedding next week,’ I laugh.

‘You?’

‘I’m a bit nervous about it.’

‘Dancing?’

‘Yes, Christie, me dancing.’

She purses her lips.

‘What?’ I ask.