As the nurse handed me my four-day-old baby, I barely resisted the urge to handcuff myself to the hospital bed and make her promise not to make me leave until this helpless little bundle was a teenager.
But it was too late. Sarah was already dressed in her street wear (a purple and red grow suit, which had received some disapproving stares from the older members of the hospital staff) and it was time to go home.
So, putting on a face I hoped resembled that of a cool, calm and collected mother, I laid Sarah in her pram, loaded the net carrier underneath with flowers, hung some more baskets of flowers over the handles, grabbed my suitcase with the other hand and headed for the lifts. Debbie chattered away next to me, carrying only her designer handbag and a small pink teddy bear someone had given Sarah.
As we entered the car park and I spotted the familiar red car, I stopped in my tracks.
‘Debbie, you said you were going to go and pick up my car. I cannot fit two thousand flowers and a newborn baby in your tiny convertible,’ I exclaimed.
Debbie had the good grace to look slightly shamefaced as she tried to explain. ‘I meant to pick up your car last night but everyone was going for cocktails and then we went to this great little French restaurant for dinner and I know you don’t approve of drink-driving and –’
‘Enough, Debbie,’ I interrupted. ‘Just explain to me how you were planning to take Sarah without her capsule?’
‘Ah,’ she brightened. ‘Her capsule was still at my place from when we bought it, and Alexander discovered that there was already a hole in the back seat to hook it into. So it’s all safely installed ready for Sarah’s first trip.’
I stifled a smile. Alexander, Debbie’s latest love, struck me as someone who had never done anything more practical than change a light bulb, and I could picture him being reluctantly pushed out of bed to install Sarah’s capsule this morning.
‘There’s heaps of room,’ Debbie continued. ‘If I can fit the bags from a day’s shopping in, then a baby and a few flowers will be easy.’
Debbie had a point, given that the results of her shopping trips could usually fill a small truck. However, I looked enviously at the couple on the other side of the car park who were carefully strapping their baby into its capsule in their station wagon, stopping when they’d finished to gaze in wonder and then kiss it tenderly. I’d never been accused of doing things the traditional way, and usually that was fine with me, but sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice if things weren’t always so . . . untraditional.
I sighed and gingerly picked Sarah up. Debbie leant against the car, reapplying her lipstick as I lowered Sarah into her capsule, and after a few false starts I had my tiny daughter securely strapped in.
Finally we were off, and I had to admit Sarah did seem pretty pleased about her first road trip. Warm in her capsule, a little flannel rug dotted with pink bears tucked around her, she stared wide-eyed in wonder at the blue Sydney sky.
Debbie, meanwhile, seemed to have suddenly learnt how to drive. Normally she was a menace to other drivers, cutting in and out of lanes with reckless abandon and braking without warning. Today she was driving as though I was an examiner and she was hoping to get her licence.
I hadn’t made it to the age of thirty, however, without learning that sometimes it is best to say nothing, and we sat in silence.
My friendship with Debbie had been cemented forever when we were eleven years old and she took pity on me and showed me how to kiss.
It was the afternoon of our first school social and Mark Johnson had asked me if we could ‘see’ each other that night. Even the lapse of almost two decades hasn’t allowed me to delude myself that he was the coolest guy in the school, and I recall all too clearly that he was short and spotty with greasy blond hair and carried his school books in a vinyl briefcase.
But at eleven years old, it was shaping up to be the most intimate moment I’d ever had with a man.
Somehow, even at such a tender age, Debbie knew about such things, so it was natural that I turned to her for advice. To her credit, she treated the matter with the seriousness I thought it deserved and I spent two hours alternating between slobbering over a mirror (to observe how I looked) and a sliced rockmelon (Debbie thought it best that I be prepared for the worst possible scenario).
The night itself was less than momentous as Mark lost his nerve and we didn’t even speak to each other, let alone join the other kissing couples on the school football oval.
In fact, despite my preparations, I didn’t actually score my first kiss until I was nearly fourteen, by which time Debbie was threatening to disown me and find a best friend who had done more than hold hands with a boy on the train on the way home from school.
Despite vowing to be friends forever, we lost track of each other after high school until I ran into her in a bar a week after I’d moved to Sydney.
I was out with people from my new job, and although they were trying hard to include me, I was feeling a bit like an interloper and was about to call it a night. I recognised Debbie immediately. She was dressed in a slinky orange dress (Debbie was never one for muted colours) and even at two a.m. looked spectacularly glamorous with her long hair falling seductively around her face and her makeup as perfect as if she had just left home. My black trousers and pin-striped shirt, which had looked all right when I left home, now felt incredibly boring and I was sure that after an evening in hot, smoky bars, my mascara had created raccoon rings around my eyes.
However, the bonds of first boyfriends and first kisses were too strong to ignore and I pushed my way across the crowded room to where Debbie was chatting to a very attractive man dressed from head to toe in black.
They were talking animatedly and I stood awkwardly behind Debbie for a few seconds before tapping her on the shoulder.
‘Hi, Debbie,’ I said as she turned around. ‘Do you remember me, I’m –’
‘Sophie!’ she screamed, throwing her arms around me. ‘How are you? I can’t believe we’ve actually run into each other again after all this time. What are you doing, are you living in Sydney?’
She suddenly remembered the man she’d been talking to and turned back to him with one arm still around me.
‘Peter, this is one of my oldest friends, Sophie. Sophie, meet Peter.’
Peter looked less than thrilled to have had his cosy chat with Debbie interrupted by my arrival and announced that he was heading to the bar.
‘A vodka, lime and soda for me, Peter,’ Debbie said.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I muttered in response to Peter’s raised eyebrow, which I gathered was a halfhearted attempt to offer me a drink.
‘Peter,’ Debbie called after him, ‘fresh lime, remember?’
Peter waved over his shoulder and headed into the throng surrounding the bar.
‘I’ve just moved to Sydney,’ I said, answering one of Debbie’s questions. ‘Dad married a really lovely English woman and they moved to London a couple of years ago. So there was nothing to keep me in Brisbane. I decided I wanted to live in a big city, applied for some jobs in Sydney and here I am.’
I had packed up to move into a flat with friends at the same time as Dad and Elizabeth sold the house to move to England. Even in a new job and new flat I’d felt their absence strongly and Brisbane had never really felt like home after they’d left. So after a couple of years I’d found a marketing job in Sydney, packed my worldly possessions into my little hatchback and headed south.
‘Well,’ Debbie told me with the kind of sincerity that comes from having consumed more than the recommended weekly alcohol intake in three hours, ‘you know, sometimes you have to believe in fate. I just kicked out my obsessive compulsive flatmate yesterday. Do you need a place to live?’
And so it was decided. Drunk and without knowing what suburb she lived in, I had agreed to move in, thinking that it would have to be better than sleeping on a distant cousin’s floor, which I had been doing for the past two weeks.
Despite its impromptu start, our flatting relationship turned out to be a huge success and Debbie and I lived together in various parts of Sydney until we moved to Coogee three years before Sarah was born.
Debbie is, to use a cliché, everything that I am not.
She is continually mystified by the fact that I will not spend $500 on a pair of designer shoes that were in the latest issue of Vogue when I can get a perfectly good copy at a chain store for $60. Having said that, I am definitely not above borrowing her Gucci loafers or Prada sandals.
Debbie always knows the cool bands and has the latest CDs as soon as they hit the market, while I still think that I am on the cutting edge of music because I own Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. She also knows all the musical legends of the last fifty years and can reel off the names of albums by artists I’ve never even heard of.
Debbie’s makeup bag looks like something a professional would carry around a movie set, and she has at least fifty lipsticks from the most exclusive cosmetic companies. My makeup bag contents consist of an eyeliner, mascara and foundation (all of which have come from bargain bins at chemists), and I own two lipsticks at latest count, one of which is so worn down I have to stick my finger in to get any out. I long ago came to the conclusion that I would make fewer mistakes if I didn’t use much makeup and my standard face for the day (which incidentally is the same as my special occasion one) can be applied in the time it takes me to go one stop on the bus on the way to work.
Debbie’s wardrobe is neatly arranged in colour groups, with trousers on the bottom rack, suits, skirts and blouses on the top, and dresses to the right. She is the only person I’ve ever met who can actually do the ‘From Work to Nightclub Transformation Using Only One Scarf and a Red Lipstick’ that women’s magazines exhort us to practise. I tried it once but decided that I looked like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.
When Debbie buys a new blouse, it will produce seven different outfits when combined with her existing clothes. I, however, am an impulse buyer and my cupboard is dotted with expensive items that look fabulous on the rack but go with absolutely nothing else I own.
Debbie has always been surrounded by men who fall over themselves to get her attention. Our flats all had a revolving parade of men who each lasted anywhere from one night to three months. Debbie looks mystified when women complain bitterly about the fact that Sydney is full of gay men. A drought for Debbie is a Monday night in with a video.
In stark contrast I had had only two serious boyfriends before I met Max (Mark Johnson was not one of them, I am glad to say) and have spent considerable periods of my adult life without a man.
Debbie is five foot nine and has long hair which is always impeccably coloured a rich auburn with just enough wave to keep it back off her face. Although she scorns all forms of exercise, she never seems to waver from a perfect size ten. While I’m the same height (and fortuitously the same shoe size) as Debbie, my short blonde hair is often overdue for both a cut and a colour and I tend to fluctuate between a size twelve and a size fourteen (although in a fruitless act of denial, I refuse to buy anything bigger than size twelve).
The glaring inconsistency in Debbie’s life is her job. She should have been a senior executive at a major fashion house or a globetrotting business consultant mingling with the world’s beautiful and exciting people. Instead, she is in fact the buyer for a chain of stores called ‘Mr Cheapy’ that sell no item for more than five dollars and are crammed with very unglamorous items like toilet doilies and cans of air freshener. Debbie goes to great lengths not to divulge the nature of her job and only rarely admits to working for a ‘discount retail chain’. For the last five years she has been combing Asia for the bargains that made the company a household name and, despite her frequent tirades about the rubbish she has to buy, shows no signs of leaving for more exciting but less lucrative pastures.
Debbie pulled up outside my house and hovered while I took everything inside.
My house is a sandstone terrace with a small patch of grass behind it. In an effort to become more motherly during the later stages of my pregnancy, I’d tried to cultivate some herbs in one of the garden beds. While they had never actually died, neither did they seem to get any bigger. Given that picking enough herbs for one pasta sauce would have decimated my entire crop, I had continued buying my herbs from the local fruit shop, leaving my crop to its own devices.
I had always known that living with someone else’s baby was way too much to expect of any friend, let alone someone who lived like Debbie, and that eventually I would have to move. That had become crystal clear to me one Saturday morning as I lay in bed listening to Debbie have sex with her latest conquest.
I was trying to concentrate on that week’s instalment of ‘What appalling things are going to happen to your body next’ in the pregnancy book I had bought after my traumatic experience with the tomes Karen had lent me. Operating on a strictly need-to-know basis, I was only reading one week ahead of my rapidly expanding body. I was starting to feel like an elephant, and as my spatial awareness hadn’t changed quickly enough to keep up with my shape, I was constantly knocking things off shelves and desks.
As the noises from the next room floated through the air, I happened to read that the baby’s ears were open and could hear sounds from the outside world. I remembered hearing that children who had classical music played to them in the womb had grown up to be concert pianists and I didn’t even want to think about what hearing Debbie’s sounds of passion could do to my baby.
Piling all my pillows on my bump, I tried to go back to sleep. However, the sounds in the next room began to reach a crescendo. Five years of living with Debbie in various flats with thin walls had taught me that this could go on for quite some time, so I gave up all thoughts of sleep, dressed and headed out to find the real estate section of that morning’s newspaper.
House-hunting in Sydney is not something to be undertaken lightly (or at seven months pregnant). One of Sydney’s miracles is that you can live literally on the beach and only be thirty minutes from the city centre. One of its realities is that you have to be a millionaire to be able to do it.
For we mere mortals who can’t afford $1000 a week in rent, understanding real estate ads is a fine art. ‘A water view’ means you have to lie on top of the bathroom cupboard to catch a glimpse of the horizon, and ‘easy walk to cafes and beach’ means take some change because you’ll need to get a bus.
So by eleven that morning, when I and my bump-that-could-hear were headed for Saturday morning coffee at the King Street Cafe in Newtown, I had seen two flats which smelt so bad I couldn’t get in the door and one that was so dark I couldn’t even tell how many bedrooms it had.
Newtown is Sydney’s answer to London’s Camden. When I’d first moved to Sydney, it hadn’t rated at all on the list of cool places to be, but in the last couple of years the young professionals had begun moving in and I’d recently discovered that, despite the suburb’s grungy feel, even the Newtown rental market was out of my league.
As usual, finding a park near the cafe was almost impossible. I was forced to drive several blocks down King Street and was almost in the next suburb by the time I spotted a park in a side street. As I pulled up, I noticed an old ivy-covered terrace house with a ‘For Rent’ sign. A real estate agent was showing a couple through and, on impulse, I followed them in.
Although the house was certainly not palatial, it had a good feel (if you managed to ignore the bathroom, which looked as though it had been stuck in a seventies time warp), and it was certainly big enough for me. I had no idea how much space a baby needed, but as it wouldn’t even be able to sit up for the first few months, I figured it couldn’t be too demanding.
The whole of the lower floor was open-plan, with the lounge leading into the kitchen which led into the garden out the back. Upstairs were three small bedrooms and a bathroom. I had recently read with horror that babies weren’t toilet-trained until they were about two, so I figured I had a fair while before I had to worry about sharing a bathroom. That was probably a good thing, I reflected as I looked around, because it would take at least that long to get rid of the mould lurking in the corners.
‘How much is the rent?’ I asked the agent after a quick look.
My heart sank at the answer. I had decided to use the money I’d been saving for a deposit on a house to finance some time off with the baby before I faced the reality of going back to work. The amount had seemed like a lot when it was a figure on a bank statement, but the rough (and very depressing) budget I’d drafted showed that I’d be lucky if the money lasted much more than three or four months.
I’d always thought that owning a bed, sofa, fridge and washing machine was very grown up, but now realised that I’d need to buy more furniture if any new home of mine wasn’t going to look like a student’s flat. After putting aside money for the least amount of furniture I figured I could get away with, I’d decided that three hundred dollars a week was the most I could spend on rent, and the landlord was asking four hundred.
Obviously, moving away from the beach and into a relatively unknown suburb didn’t mean the dip in rental prices I’d optimistically expected. Nevertheless, I told the agent that I’d like to make an application for the property, figuring that the landlord could only reject my offer.
This irritated the couple on whose inspection I had gatecrashed, but they were still arguing about who cleaned the bathroom more often. That was one advantage of being single – at least I didn’t have to confer with anyone on my decisions.
The real estate agent looked at me uncertainly. My pregnant belly gave me an initial aura of respectability, but that was lost as soon as he looked at my bare ring-finger. Still, I was well-dressed (although by Newtown standards that only meant I wasn’t liable for arrest for indecent exposure) and he gave me an application form to return to his office on Monday.
After deciding that I could manage three hundred and twenty dollars at a push, I lodged an application for that amount, together with glowing references from our current landlord and my boss. Even in my more positive moments I didn’t hold out much hope that my application would be accepted and I continued looking at dingy places that no amount of bright paint and plants could redeem.
The following Wednesday I had just hung up the phone after a very tense discussion with a printer who was trying to renegotiate the pricing for a run of posters for our next event, when it rang again.
‘Yes,’ I snapped into the receiver, assuming it was the printer again.
‘Sophie Anderson, please?’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.
‘Yes, speaking,’ I replied more warmly as soon as I realised the print cost war wasn’t about to be immediately resumed.
‘Sophie, this is Adrian Henry from Barker & Henderson Real Estate. We met last Saturday.’
I tried to recall an Adrian in the line-up of real estate agents I’d met, but failed. Eyeing the stack of agents’ cards I’d collected, I replied in what I hoped was a convincing tone, ‘Yes, Adrian, how are you?’
‘Very well, thanks, and I’m calling with good news,’ he continued. ‘Your application for the house at 32 Henry Street has been accepted.’
‘Are you serious?’ I asked incredulously, never having heard of a landlord taking that kind of rent drop.
‘Certainly am,’ he replied cheerily. ‘The landlord decided that you sounded like the perfect tenant and so is prepared to compromise on the rent.’
I pushed my chair back and gazed out the window, unable to stop the smile spreading across my face. Maybe we didn’t have much else, but at least my baby and I now had a home.