Accusing me of being too soft in my negotiations, Debbie, still spotty but no longer contagious, had taken over ordering the books while I finalised the designs. So a few days after we’d arrived home from Hong Kong, I left Sarah with her while I went to meet the designer. My house looked and sounded amazingly calm as I put the key in the lock on my return.
As soon as I walked inside I spotted what must have been two dozen red roses crammed haphazardly into a vase which was perched precariously on top of the television.
Debbie was sitting in the lounge room, Vogue in one hand, glass of champagne on the table, and Sarah kicking happily on a rug at her feet. When she saw me come in, she stood up. The look of glee on her face made my heart sink. Maybe she’d stolen the flowers from a neighbour or, my breath caught in my throat at the thought, maybe she’d found my credit card and decided she should celebrate her emergence from the social oblivion of chickenpox quarantine.
‘What have you done? Debbie, if you’ve bought all these with my money, I swear I’ll kill you.’
Her smile increased, which only made me more nervous. ‘Darling, how little you think of me. I understand perfectly that your days of fun are over. At least I had thought so until that nice deliveryman showed up. Who’ve you been sleeping with and, more importantly, why didn’t you tell me?’
I still didn’t believe her – she looked way too innocent. ‘Debbie, it’s not funny any more. Tell me what you’ve done.’
‘Sophie, read my lips. I haven’t done anything apart from accept your delivery. For once I’m perfectly innocent. You might find a clue in the flowers, though – they came with a card.’
Still not entirely sure what to believe, I pulled out the envelope stuffed in amongst the flowers.
As soon as I saw my name on the front of the envelope I knew Debbie had been telling the truth. I’d never seen David’s handwriting, but my name was written with the kind of flourish I would have expected from him. I tore open the envelope and scanned the white card inside.
Sophie. Thanks for a great night in Hong Kong. David.
Debbie was standing with Sarah on her hip and looking at me with raised eyebrows. Something, probably the fact that I suspected nothing would come of it, had stopped me telling Debbie about David. Figuring there was no point in trying to hide the truth now, I flicked the card across to her. Catching it deftly with her free hand she looked at it in puzzlement.
‘David . . .’ she mused. ‘Do you know a David?’ Her eyes widened suddenly as she made the connection. ‘Not David Fletcher!’ she exclaimed.
Seeing my guilty look she continued, ‘It is David Fletcher! No wonder he’s giving us a good deal if you’ve been bestowing your charms on him!’
Smiling bashfully I said, ‘We had dinner together in Hong Kong and I figured that I was in grave danger of being expelled from the King Street Cafe mornings if I let this celibacy thing continue any longer.’
Debbie’s jaw dropped. ‘You slept with him?’ she exclaimed. ‘But Sarah’s only three months old, what about . . .?’
She interrupted herself and held up a hand. ‘Nope, forget that, I don’t want to know. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, you dark horse. Have you seen him since you’ve been back?’
I shook my head, pleased by the look of grudging admiration on Debbie’s face. It wasn’t often that I managed to impress her where men were involved.
‘Well, he’s certainly making up for that now,’ Debbie crowed, examining the card again as if looking for further clues.
‘But what about the girlfriend? Don’t tell me he’s cheating on her.’
‘They broke up two months ago, apparently.’
‘Well, I have to hand it to you, Sophie,’ Debbie said. ‘You’ve only had a few months without a pregnant belly and you’re already dating one of the most eligible men in Sydney. Whatever will Max think?’ she continued mischievously.
Despite myself, I couldn’t help feel a flicker of guilt at the mention of Max. ‘This has got nothing to do with him, Debbie,’ I said fiercely.
She threw her free hand up in mock surrender. ‘Okay, okay, just joking. Are you really interested in David?’ she asked, suddenly serious.
‘I think maybe I am,’ I said. ‘He’s good fun and easy to be with.’
‘Not to mention drop-dead gorgeous,’ Debbie interrupted.
‘And he seems totally relaxed about Sarah,’ I continued. ‘It’s all taken me by surprise, though. A relationship was something I really hadn’t counted on, and it’s strange enough thinking about being with anybody, let alone someone who isn’t Max.’
‘Well, I think it’s great,’ Debbie said. ‘Don’t think too hard about it and just see what happens. If it’s not something that’s meant to last, then at least you’ll have had a good time.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Speaking of men, I’ve got to go.’ She handed Sarah to me, kissed my cheek and headed out the door.
Things were looking up, I thought, as I punched David’s number into the phone. I’d just received fabulous flowers from a man I was definitely interested in, and we now had a supplier as well as a buyer for our baby books.
Suddenly I changed my mind and put the phone down before it connected. ‘Come on, Sarah,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and thank David in person.’
Even though I knew that buying fake designer clothes was theft of copyright, I hadn’t been able to resist picking up some fabulous pieces for Sarah in Hong Kong which had cost me about a tenth of the amount of the real thing. Deciding that a trip into the city justified a change of outfit for her, I pulled off her white cotton grow suit and slipped on a bright pink pinafore of a brand I was sure would have impressed even Debbie.
My wardrobe was still in its pre-pregnancy time warp. The few maternity clothes I had reluctantly bought certainly didn’t count, and since Sarah’s birth, the mind games involved in choosing which of my existing clothes I’d try for size had given me enough traumas without venturing into the world of shops, pushy salespeople and full-length fluorescent-lit mirrors.
The only piece of clothing I’d bought since Sarah’s birth was an orange and white striped sleeveless top. I’d found it in a store that boasted of selling no item for more than ten dollars and had felt proud of my budgetary inspiration the first time I wore it with a pair of trousers I’d paid about twenty times as much for. However, the next time I’d gone to wear it, I’d discovered that the intervening wash had caused it to shrink so that it only reached halfway down my stomach and that the arm and neck holes now sagged towards the bottom of my bra. As a result I’d abandoned my trawling of bargain bins and decided to give up clothes shopping altogether until my finances improved.
The sun was beating down out of a cloudless sky, leaving no doubt that the heat of summer wasn’t far away, and so I changed my jeans and T-shirt for a pair of black three-quarter length trousers (which admittedly had always been rather loose) and a sleeveless lime green top that hadn’t seen the light of day for at least a year.
I pushed away the vague recollection that the ‘Hot and Cold’ section in last month’s Cosmopolitan had identified both Capri pants and lime green as definitely ‘cold’. Sliding my feet into a pair of black mules, I picked up Sarah and my bag and headed for the door. Catching a glimpse in a mirror on the wall, I paused for a moment. We looked pretty good, I acknowledged with a burst of optimism.
My attention to what I wore when out and about with Sarah had been sharpened by a recent episode in the nearby park.
Needing a change of scenery one afternoon, I had put Sarah in the pram and wandered down. Given that Sarah couldn’t move, she wasn’t exactly old enough to make the most of the play equipment the park had to offer, but I figured that she should see more of nature than our little back garden could provide.
The park was fringed by gum trees and on the street side was an area of play equipment which had brightly coloured swings, tunnels and climbing platforms. Without making a conscious decision, I drifted around the edge of the park and ended up at the play area, where I propped Sarah up in her pram so she could see what was going on.
Looking around, I noticed three other mothers. They had their backs to me and were playing with their children on the plastic play equipment. Except they couldn’t be real mothers, I thought, they all looked too good.
The woman closest to me had on a light pink linen top and a pair of straight black trousers, which tapered beautifully over her high-heeled black boots. Even in my most ambitious moments since Sarah’s birth, I hadn’t considered wearing any of my linen clothes, having no doubt that I would look as though I’d slept in them for three days before I even left the house.
The second woman was wearing a brightly patterned skirt, black lycra top and patent leather sandals with a small heel. The third woman had on tailored cream trousers, tan boots and a top that simply had to be dry-clean only.
I swivelled my head to see if I could spot a TV crew, thinking that maybe I had stumbled across the filming of an American sitcom. Unable to see anything, I resumed my inspection of the women and moved closer on the pretext of showing Sarah a nonexistent butterfly. As I did so, two of them turned slightly towards me so that I could see what I’d suspected, but had been hoping wasn’t the case – they were wearing full faces of makeup, including foundation and glistening lipstick.
The articles featuring movie stars and models looking fabulous with their angelic babies hadn’t prepared me for seeing glamorous mothers in Erskineville. In LA maybe, or Central Park, but not the Lion’s memorial park at the back of the local supermarket. These women had definitely never arrived home after several hours in public to discover a trail of vomit over their shoulder and down their back, as I had the week before.
I’d felt underdressed at restaurants, bars and parties, but feeling underdressed in the playground was a new one for me. Oh well, I comforted myself. They were obviously all friends who felt they had to compete with one another for the position of best groomed mother on the block. However, this last illusion was shattered as I caught some of their conversation and realised that the three of them had only just met and were making small talk.
The woman in the skirt caught sight of me and smiled welcomingly. ‘Hi, how old’s your little girl?’ she asked (I had figured out recently that ‘How old is your boy/girl?’ was the baby group conversational equivalent of ‘So what do you do?’).
‘She’s three months,’ I answered, pleased to see that dressing Sarah from head to toe in pink was finally making her recognisable as a female.
‘Duncan is eight months,’ she said, gesturing towards the baby crawling around the ground picking up cigarette butts and attempting to swallow them.
Despite their friendliness and willingness to tell me exactly what Sarah would be doing shortly (I was hoping she might miss the cigarette butt obsession), I felt somewhat out of place in my washed-out jeans, old T-shirt and deck shoes, and shortly after made my excuses and headed off. However, the incident had stayed in my mind and I had been trying at least to iron my clothes since then.
Sarah gurgled happily the whole way into town. In an inspired move the previous week I had hung one of her toys from the top of her capsule and it still hadn’t lost its fascination. Debbie was convinced that the ‘goldfish theory’, which maintains that goldfish have such short memories that every trip around the bowl is a completely new experience, applied equally to Sarah. While hoping that my daughter’s brain power was significantly larger than that of a small fish, I had to admit there seemed at least some truth to what she said.
There was always a fair degree of luck involved in just where I ended up when I drove into the centre of Sydney. Even after five years, the maze of one-way streets still confounded me. Today I not only ended up exactly where I wanted, but a free parking space (the existence of which in Sydney was significant enough to be a topic of conversation at dinner parties) appeared in front of me. As I reversed into the spot on my first attempt, I made a mental note to buy a lottery ticket and make the most of this purple patch.
Sarah and I set off down the street to do the shopping I was trying to convince myself was my main reason for coming to town. After drifting through a few shops and making a couple of totally unnecessary purchases, I headed for Handley Smith.
The receptionist looked at me without any sign of recognition.
‘Sophie Anderson here to see David Fletcher,’ I said in response to her raised eyebrows and questioning look. ‘I don’t have an appointment,’ I continued as she looked at the diary in front of her. ‘But if you could just tell him I’m here, I think he’ll see me.’
‘He has someone with him at the moment, Ms Anderson,’ she replied. ‘I’ll let him know you’re here just as soon as he’s free.’
With a sudden flash I remembered that people in the non-baby universe actually worked and for the first time I wondered whether it was a good idea to drop in unannounced. As I paused, considering whether I should manufacture an excuse and leave, the door to David’s office snapped open and a tall, thin girl with long fire-red curls marched out and down the corridor.
Framed in his office doorway, watching her go, was David. Obviously feeling eyes on him, he turned towards the receptionist and gave a visible start as he registered my presence.
‘Sophie . . . Hello,’ he said lamely, managing a watery smile. ‘How lovely to see you; come on in.’
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the girl must have been Angela, and as I pushed Sarah’s pram into David’s office, I cursed the whim that had propelled me into the city to thank him in person. Once inside I paused awkwardly, uncertain how I should greet him. Shaking hands was clearly inappropriate given the events of Hong Kong, but bridging the acres of beige carpet which separated us and attempting a kiss didn’t seem right either.
Taking the cowardly option, I bent over Sarah’s pram to totally unnecessarily rearrange her toys. When I looked up, David, who was no doubt as grateful for the reprieve as I, had settled himself behind his desk. Following his lead, I perched awkwardly on the edge of the chair opposite him.
We both started speaking at once, stopped, then started again.
‘You go,’ David smiled.
‘I was just in town doing some shopping,’ I said with crossed fingers, ‘and thought I’d drop in to say thank you for the flowers.’
‘I’m glad you liked them,’ he said, sounding anything but glad and looking at the desk in front of him rather than meet my eyes.
He’s changed his mind, I thought glumly, concluding that the reality of having a relationship with someone with a baby had sunk in and that he was trying to work out how to get out of the situation he now found himself in.
Right on cue Sarah started crying. Not now, I thought fiercely. Our telepathic thought channels obviously weren’t working, though, and she increased her volume sharply.
Picking Sarah up, I held her over my shoulder, rocking her from side to side. ‘Look, I should go. I just dropped in to say thanks but I don’t want to hold you up.’
‘No, it’s fine, Sophie. Actually I need,’ David paused to let a particularly loud cry of Sarah’s subside, ‘to talk to you.’
‘Okay,’ I said, jiggling Sarah vigorously. She seemed to be quietening so I sat down, which caused an immediate resumption of her full-throttle crying.
Bouncing up again I said with forced cheerfulness, ‘I don’t think this is going to get much better. Why don’t you just go ahead?’
‘Sorry?’ he asked with his hand behind his ear.
‘Go ahead,’ I repeated louder.
‘Well . . .’ he yelled. ‘There’s a problem with the order for your books.’
I froze midrock. ‘Pardon?’ I asked, hoping that I’d misheard.
‘We’ve got a problem with the order for your books,’ David repeated. ‘I’ve just had notice that Handley Smith is under huge pressure to drive the share price back up and so the top management have put a total freeze on all hiring.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘And all new purchases have been stopped too. That means I can’t add any new suppliers until the freeze comes off, Sophie, and I have no idea how long that could take.’
The enormity of what he had said hit me. ‘But we were so close to a deal,’ I stammered.
‘I know,’ David replied, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere but here. ‘But we hadn’t formalised it, and now this directive has come down, I can’t put the purchase through. I still think the books are a great product and they’ll sell, but there’s no way around it. I’m really sorry, Sophie.’
I slumped into the chair. Sarah was mercifully silent. My visions of a business empire slowly collapsed as I realised what had happened.
‘So that’s it?’ I asked David. ‘There’s nothing you can do to convince your management that they should make an exception?”
David shook his head. ‘There are no exceptions, Sophie. I’ve only seen this once before, about three years ago. It’s an across-the-board freeze that applies to everyone. We were about a day away from hiring another buyer, but the freeze has put an end to that too.’
Sarah had lost interest in the situation and started to cry again. I was about to speak but paused as I saw her take a deep breath in preparation for another yell. Both David and I watched her, wincing involuntarily as the silence stretched and was then abruptly shattered as she let her breath out in an ear-splitting wail.
‘Look, David, I can’t even think straight with this noise,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’
David watched silently as I dumped Sarah unceremoniously in her pram and pushed her to the door. Head down, I muttered my goodbyes and went straight to the lifts. After what seemed to be an agonisingly long time, one arrived. Once we were safely inside and the doors had shut, I breathed easier and smoothed Sarah’s cheek, which was red from crying.
The crowds in the mall, which had parted smoothly for us earlier, now forced us to move at a snail’s pace. When I was about fifty metres from the car I realised that the reason there had been no one parked there was because it was a no-standing zone. With a sigh, I spotted a parking inspector standing beside my car. As I watched, he completed the ticket, tore it off and carefully lifted the windscreen wiper to slip it underneath.
Having been through this a number of times, I knew that rule one of the parking inspector guidebook forbade them cancelling a ticket once they’d started writing it out. Several humiliating experiences had taught me that there was no point in throwing myself on their mercy. I briefly considered using Sarah to assist my case, but quickly concluded that wouldn’t help, given my firm belief that parking inspectors are grown-up versions of boys who play golf with cane toads.
Hanging back until the inspector was gone, I pulled the ticket free of the wipers and glared at it before stuffing it into my handbag.
Hardly conscious of where I was driving, I found myself heading to Debbie’s flat. Pulling up outside, I took Sarah out of her capsule and puffed up the four flights of stairs to Debbie’s door (another reason a move before Sarah’s arrival had been unavoidable).
Debbie had wanted me to keep my key when I moved out but I had insisted on giving it back – somehow, coming across Debbie with a male friend was one thing when we were flatmates but quite another when we weren’t (and I was likely to be bearing my innocent young daughter).
Hearing male laughter through the door I was doubly glad I had made that decision. But when Debbie opened up, It was Andrew and not one of her bevy of men I saw on the sofa behind her.
‘Hello, Andrew,’ I said in surprise. ‘What are you . . ?’ I began, before I noticed that Debbie was wearing running gear.
‘Unbelievable!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get Debbie to do some exercise?’
‘I’ve decided to get fit,’ Debbie announced.
‘You’re kidding,’ I said incredulously. ‘The only time I’ve even seen you walk fast is in the Boxing Day sales.’
‘Yes, well, things are different now,’ she said. ‘Now that I’m not devoting all of my energy to scouring the earth for self-cleaning soap dishes, it’s amazing what I’ve got time for.’
Upon reflection, I realised that it had been a while since Andrew had collected my weekly exercise summary sheets, which he had given me when Sarah was born. His finding another person to focus his energies on could only be a good thing for me.
Remembering why I was there, I suddenly stopped smiling. ‘Deb, we’ve got a big problem with the Handley Smith order.’
‘I’ll leave you both to it.’ Andrew leapt off the sofa. ‘I’ve got a client in half an hour.’
Debbie had heard the serious tone in my voice and didn’t take her eyes from my face as Andrew left. ‘What’s the problem, Sophie?’ she asked quietly.
‘There’s no order from Handley Smith,’ I stated flatly. ‘Apparently there’s a company-wide freeze on all expenditures, including new purchases. Something to do with pushing the share price up.’
‘Shit!’ Debbie exclaimed with great force. ‘And we were so close.
‘I’ve come across this before,’ she continued as she paced across the room. ‘Some big companies’ top management get bonuses based on share price increases and profits. If they can’t increase revenue, the only other way they can increase profits is to reduce expenses. It’s incredibly short-sighted, but it keeps happening.’
I sat down on the couch Andrew had just vacated. Debbie sat down beside me and reached over to take Sarah, who smiled up at her endearingly. Sarah had recently taken to dribbling in large quantities. A middle-aged lady, a harassed-looking woman trailing two kids and, bizarrely, a thirtyish man with dreadlocks and a ring through his lip, had each stopped me on the street to tell me that the dribbling meant Sarah was teething. As a breastfeeding mother, the thought sent shivers up my spine, but I had explained clearly to Sarah that one bite and she was on the bottle, and I hoped we had an understanding.
Another dribble was threatening to drip off Sarah’s chin and I watched as Debbie absently wiped it on her purple Nike running singlet. However, even the sight of the change Sarah had wrought on Debbie couldn’t take my mind off the depressing development in our business venture.
‘The good news is that we haven’t placed the order yet,’ I said in an effort to be positive. ‘At least we don’t have a container-load of baby books arriving tomorrow.’
‘Sophie . . .’ Debbie began awkwardly, staring at the top of Sarah’s head.
‘What?’ I asked, my voice rising with worry. ‘What don’t I know?’
‘Well . . .’ Debbie continued, lifting her head to look at me. ‘I spoke to Kim the day you arrived home. He said that they were backed up with orders and that if they didn’t put ours through straightaway then it would be five weeks before they could start, which would have been too late.’
She paused and took a deep breath before saying what I’d already guessed. ‘So I told them to go ahead.’
Closing my eyes, I leant forward and put my head on my knees.
‘Sophie, I’m so sorry,’ Debbie continued. ‘I know I should have told you but I was so sure it was a done deal and I knew you’d just worry about it.’
I only vaguely heard Debbie’s words through the roar of blood in my ears. My share of the amount we owed for the books was more than the savings I had left. We needed to pay for the books before they left Vietnam and there was no way a bank would lend money to a single mother with no assets who wasn’t currently working. So I’d decided the only option was to cover my share using my credit card. Although the concept of paying horrendous interest on a large amount of money terrified me, I’d decided that as it would only be for the couple of weeks until we delivered the books to Handley Smith and received payment, it would be all right.
But this changed everything.
‘What on earth are we going to do?’ I asked, my voice trembling.
‘Sophie, please look at me,’ Debbie implored. ‘I know how much that money means to you. It was my decision to place the order, I’ll pay for it all. Committing ourselves without having Handley Smith tied up was a bad business decision, but the other option was losing the order and I really thought we weren’t taking too much of a risk. I guess I was wrong,’ she finished glumly.
After a few more seconds I looked up. ‘No, that’s not fair. If I’m honest, I would have made the same decision you did and I understand why you didn’t tell me. You’ve worked as hard for your money as I have and this is going to wipe you out too. I’ll cover my share, I’ve just got to figure out how.
‘Maybe we can reduce the order if they haven’t started producing all of them yet,’ I said with sudden inspiration.
Debbie shook her head. ‘Kim explained that they’d be producing all the books at the same time. Each one has heaps of different layers of lacquer and it’s putting all those layers on that takes the time.’
‘So we’re stuck with four thousand baby books and no one to sell them to. God, what a mess,’ I said morosely.
‘Look, let’s not give up yet,’ Debbie said briskly. ‘You know, this all happened so quickly and easily that we haven’t looked at the business economics as closely as we should have. The shipment is due to leave Vietnam in ten days, so we’ve got until then to come up with the cash for the books themselves and then another two weeks before they arrive here. As I see it we have two options. We either try to offload the covers to someone in Australia and hope to cover our costs, or we spend the money to get the pages printed and the books packaged and try to sell them ourselves.’
The thought of spending more money I didn’t have on printing and packaging sounded like madness and my feelings must have shown on my face, as Debbie went on quickly, ‘But we don’t have to decide yet. Let’s at least investigate other buyers before we go making any drastic decisions.’
‘All right,’ I said slowly, figuring we had nothing more to lose.
‘I’m sure that one of the other big stores will jump at the chance to take the books,’ Debbie said positively, and it was only because I knew her so well that I could hear the unfamiliar ring of uncertainty in her voice.
I tried not to think about my savings being turned into a pile of useless books, and forced myself to concentrate as Debbie outlined what we should each do over the next couple of days.