‘Everything’s fine,’ she said, grabbing a bottle of water from the open fridge and whipping off the top. ‘Why wouldn’t it be fine?’
‘Because you’re in Williamsburg in the middle of the afternoon on a Monday,’ I said. No reaction. ‘And you work on Mondays. And you hate coming to Williamsburg.’
‘I like coming to see you,’ she replied with a bright Jenny smile. ‘And I like bagels. What’s good?’
‘You came to see me?’ Now I was confused. ‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘Jesus – chill, Miss Ego.’ She necked half her bottle of water in one gulp. ‘As much as I love you, I am prepared to cross water for other reasons than to see your sweet ass.’
My ass was not sweet. And by January it would be even less sweet following my annual Christmas pig-out. ‘Such as?’
‘That nail place.’ She waved an unpolished hand in the general direction of ‘over there’. ‘It’s supposed to be awesome. I took a long lunch, figured I’d drop in on you on the way and talk Vegas.’
‘Which nail place?’ There were a million nail places in Williamsburg and I couldn’t have named one of them. ‘I don’t have a nail place.’
‘And again, I do know people other than yourself.’ She grabbed half my bagel as soon as Ronnie put it down in front of me. ‘One of the girls in the office swears by it. She won’t go anywhere else and, you know, I want to look extra awesome for fabulous Las Vegas.’
Brilliant. Something else to add to the list, which already had on it buy a swimsuit in the dead of winter, steal all the quarters from the laundry jar and endure the horror of a bikini wax. The last time Jenny and I had entered bikini territory, she had put me through a DIY waxing horror and made me wear one of her Brazilian beauties. This time I was hoping for a professional wax and a bikini that covered more than fifteen per cent of my arse. It was a big ask, but I was confident it could be achieved.
‘Ew, tuna fish.’ Jenny made a face at the first bite of my bagel but, curiously, kept on eating. ‘I told myself no carbs before Thursday. What are you doing to me, Clark?’
‘Expanding your horizons,’ I said, snatching the second half before it disappeared. ‘So, viva las Vegas. Did you talk to the hotel?’
Jenny, a former hotel concierge, had fingers in all kinds of hospitality industry pies and had promised to arrange the whole thing during the after-party party at Scottie’s Diner on Saturday night. Obviously she was aware that I was on a clock with regards to travel plans inside the US of A despite my very confident (if baseless) declarations that everything was going to be fine.
‘I did talk to the hotel, and I talked to the airline, and I talked to Erin, and I have news,’ she nodded, picking apart her half of the bagel. ‘We’re going on Thursday.’
‘This Thursday?’
‘Uh-huh. We’re staying at the De Lujo, we’re flying in the morning and we’ll be back by Sunday night. Monday you recover, and Tuesday we get our asses into gear. I made you another appointment with the lawyer and this time I told him you don’t leave the office until he has sorted his shit out. So, viva la visa. I hope you’re feeling lucky, Angie.’
I pushed the rest of my bagel towards my friend. I’d love to know what I’d done in a former life to deserve a friend like Jenny. Lucky wasn’t the word for it.
‘You’re going to Vegas?’
‘Yes, Louisa,’
‘Without me?’
‘Yes, Louisa.’
‘I’m so jealous. It’s not fair. You’re going to Las Vegas and I’m stuck here.’
I made a face into my webcam.
‘You’re stuck in your beautiful home, with your wonderful husband, pregnant with your first, no doubt glorious, child,’ I replied. ‘I reckon it’s a fair trade that I get three nights in what is essentially a debauched Alton Towers.’
She made a face right back. This was the problem with Skype. Having people able to see your expressions made it really hard to pretend not to be pissed off with the person you were talking to. Not that Louisa was trying. She never had before; why start with the civilities now, just because technology demanded it? My oldest friend and I tried to get a good Skype chat/bitch in once a fortnight, at least. Ever since she had got knocked up, we were up to a weekly date. I had a morbid fascination with the bump. Louisa had always been the skinny one, and I was damned if I was going to miss this. And so, on Monday night, I lay on my belly in front of the Christmas tree, looking at the truly hideous sleety shitty weather through the window and happily scarfed a carton of Goldfish crackers for my lunch while we chatted. At home, Christmas meant bag upon bag of Mini Cheddars, and this was the closest I could get. Plus they were shaped like fish and no one loved a novelty snack like I did.
‘I really thought you were going to come home this year,’ she sulked. ‘Being pregnant is shit. I’m fat, I’m miserable and I can’t bloody drink. Imagine Christmas without being able to have a drink. My mum and dad. Tim’s mum and dad! Jesus, I’m probably going to have to see your mum and dad. And without so much as a Baileys.’
‘While that does sound like the best argument I ever heard for sterilization,’ I replied, ‘I’m still going to Vegas. And you’re still going to be knocked up whether I come home or not, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe I’ll just have a drink anyway,’ she said, poking her bump. ‘See how she likes a couple of sweet sherries. My breast milk is going to be ninety per cent Sauvignon anyway.’
‘My mum will probably sort you out with a nice bit of crack,’ I suggested. ‘Or a lovely drop of meth. Since it’s Christmas.’
‘Don’t!’ She physically pulled away from the screen. ‘I cannot believe your mum and dad smoke weed. The baby cannot believe your mum and dad smoke weed, and she doesn’t even have a consciousness yet.’
Wait, she? I leapt up – it was a she now? How had I missed that memo?
‘She?’ I wanted to rap on the screen to get her attention. Sometimes I forgot that using Skype wasn’t the same as when I saw the neighbour’s cat licking its arse on the other side of a window; this was actually a human woman, thousands of miles away. ‘It’s a she? You know it’s a she?’
‘She’s never been an it. Only you call her “it”,’ she said tartly. ‘And no, we don’t know. We’re not finding out. I just, you know, have a feeling.’
Well, that was disappointing.
And until it was on Facebook, it was an ‘it’, wasn’t it?
‘Do you get lots of feelings?’ I asked. ‘Baby feelings?’
Pregnancy genuinely terrified me, and I was fascinated with Louisa’s experience. I considered it to be a condition somewhere between a nine-month-long debilitating hangover – the vomming, the cravings, the need for a nice sleep and a lovely sit-down – and being attacked by the face-hugger in Aliens. It was a living thing! Inside you! That you didn’t ask for! Well, I accept that bit is debatable, but you get the idea. No one wakes up and thinks, ‘I’d love to have a nine-pound screaming beast yanked out of my vagina today and then latched onto my boob for two years, cheers,’ do they? They think ‘Ooh, lovely babies’. They think they want to glow. They think they want the last seat on the tube. They don’t consider the middle part. At least not as much as I did. As far as I was concerned, my period was a monthly blessing, not a curse.
‘I do.’ Louisa scrunched up her nose. ‘Mostly horrible ones like sore boobs and haemorrhoids. But I’m excited, you know? In four months, I’ll have an actual baby.’
‘Christ.’
‘I know.’
We sat and stared at each other in silence for a moment. I didn’t know what Louisa was thinking about, but I was prepared to bet quite a lot of money that it wasn’t the time she wrapped the school guinea pig up in a blanket, pretended it was her baby and pushed it around in a pram for an entire afternoon before dropping it in the pond while nursing it to sleep.
‘So when are you coming back, anyway?’ She broke the silence first as always. It was clinically impossible for Louisa to be speechless
for more than one minute. Unless you were making a ‘bit of a scene’ at her wedding and breaking the groom’s hand. And in my defence, I only did that the once. ‘I really miss you, babe.’
‘If I don’t get the visa sorted, I’ll be back very soon for a very long time,’ I said, wrapping my hair into a ponytail, a sure sign it needed cutting, and then letting it droop around my shoulders. We’d already covered my least favourite topic and I just couldn’t bear to go over it again. ‘I know there’s nothing anyone can do, and I know no one wants me to leave, but I just … I don’t know – I feel like maybe they’re not taking it as seriously as they could be.’
Louisa did her best to look sympathetic to my cause instead of excited at the prospect of a cheap babysitter. Not that anyone would ever leave me alone with an infant. Or a toddler. Or anything really precious, like their Sky Plus box or iPhone.
‘When you say they, do you mean Alex?’ she asked. I pouted. She nodded. ‘And have you actually talked to him?’
My bottom lip was out so far she could have sat on it.
‘Angela.’ Louisa gave me a very stern stare. ‘You have to talk to him. As in actually tell him what thoughts are going through your tiny mind and not just make passing comments and hope he’ll pick up on them. What have you told him?’
‘That I need to get a new visa.’ This was true.
‘And what haven’t you told him?’
‘That I’m not technically eligible for any of them and if I don’t get one, they’re going to kick me out.’
‘So you haven’t talked at all?’ Annoyingly, this was also sort of true.
‘Yes, we have,’ I lied merrily. ‘We talk all the time.’
Of course we hadn’t bloody talked. I’d thought about talking. I’d tried talking. But ever since Jenny’s party he’d been out or asleep, and I could hardly pop my head around the bedroom door, give him a cheery grin and a quick ‘Ooh, I’m off to Vegas, love, but when I get back we need to have a wee chat about how I’m going to be deported in four weeks’ could I? Or at least that’s what I’d convinced myself.
‘Alex doesn’t deal well with pressure.’ I tried to talk the look off Louisa’s face. ‘He just wants to know it’s going to be OK. Which it is. All he’ll say is “we’ll work it out after Christmas”. So there’s no point in worrying him. He doesn’t need to know.’
‘I think you mean you don’t deal well with pressure,’ she replied. ‘And just what happens if you don’t get a new visa?’
‘Then I’m screwed.’
‘Oh, Angela.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Screwed? You’ve gone all American. You’ll be buggered. Maybe you should come back.’
‘I’m bilingual, you cow.’ Sticking my tongue out was a perfectly mature response, yes? ‘But yes. I’ll be buggered. I know Alex is always getting visas to play gigs in other countries, so maybe he doesn’t think it’s a big deal. And to be fair, I wasn’t that worried before he went to Japan. I was sure a job would come up before there was a problem, but now …’
I felt my stomach drop hard and fast. Probably a bit like Kylie, the year five guinea pig.
‘It might not feel like it helps, but I do believe you’ll be all right, honey,’ she said, flashing me a smile that had been getting me through tough situations for twenty-eight years. ‘This is you we’re talking about. Angela who up and moved to New York all on her own. Angela who met all these amazing friends that I’m insanely jealous of. Angela whose handbag I would swap my husband for. You can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.’
‘You wouldn’t trade me Tim for that handbag if you could see it now,’ I said, looking mournfully at the battered bag sitting sadly on the sofa. ‘And besides, a Marc Jacobs handbag isn’t going to help you with the three a.m. feed, is it?’
‘And Tim is?’ she asked.
‘Good point,’ I acknowledged. ‘Good point, well made.’
On my computer screen, gorgeous, glowing Louisa bit an already ragged nail.
‘Ange?’ She pressed her hand against her mouth.
‘Lou?’
‘I’m really scared about having the baby.’
‘Oh shut up.’ I wanted to reach out and slap her. ‘You’re going to be the best mum ever. What’s brought this on?’
‘It’s just …’ She looked behind her to check the coast was clear and leaned into the camera. ‘Do you remember when I dropped that guinea pig in the pond at school?’
‘Talking to Louisa?’ Alex wandered into the living room, elegantly attired in his boxers and an old Led Zeppelin T-shirt, hair rumpled from another afternoon nap. The jet lag was making his sleep patterns even more erratic than usual, and he paused for a moment, trying to work out his path through the epic pile of magazines, Post-it notes and highlighters I had spread out on the floor. The more mess I made, the more confident I was about securing my new visa and, man alive, there was a lot of mess. Torn-out mastheads, scribbled headline ideas and, well, quite a few circled shoes that weren’t going to get me a job per se, but were going to motivate me to do well.
After a couple of seconds, he gave up, kissed me on the top of the head and made a beeline for the tree. Sigh. He’d only been home a couple of days and already nearly all my candy canes were gone. I had tried to explain that tree candy was not for eating until after Christmas day, but he argued a very strong case against me. Primarily because he’d found two empty Cadbury’s advent calendars and a whole pack of chocolate tree ornaments hidden in the recycling. I was just going to have to buy more candy canes. That was $1.99 coming straight out of his Christmas present fund.
‘Yeah,’ I said, snapping shut my MacBook. ‘I can’t believe she’s going to have a baby. She is a bloody baby.’
‘People do keep on doing that.’ He tore the wrapping from the sugary goodness with his teeth, tiptoed through my ‘office’ and sat down beside me. It was so good to have him home. So good, the little ‘I Love You’ butterflies fluttered into existence in my belly. Better butterflies than candy canes – less fattening. ‘She’s all good, though?’
‘All good,’ I nodded. It was still weird to me that two such important people in my life had never met. ‘Jealous of me going to Vegas without her. I think it’s fair; she’s having a baby without me.’
‘That’s not really something you could have helped with,’ he said, leaning his head back against the sofa and giving me a look. ‘Your mom didn’t tell you about the birds and the bees?’
‘No, of course she didn’t. At the time I thought she was being a prude, but now I’m thinking maybe she was too high to actually know herself.’
He nodded thoughtfully, sucking on his candy cane. ‘Well, when two people really love each other …’
It only took one bash with a cushion to shut him up.
‘About Vegas.’ He snatched the cushion from my weak and feeble hand and threw it across the room. ‘When are you going?’
‘Allegedly this weekend. On Thursday.’ I looked doubtful. ‘Jenny claims it’s all organized, but it’s just so last-minute. At least Erin’s coming. I’m sure she’ll keep us in line.’
‘Right.’ Alex sighed and turned to face me. ‘So, I saw Jeff in the elevator this morning.’
Uh-oh. Any story that involved Jeff ended badly. The former love of Jenny's life, current fiancé of a girl named Shannon and our next-door neighbour. Stories involving Jeff often ended in tears or at least drunken recriminations. Unless I bumped into him while I was taking the recycling out, in which case it all ended very well for me. I’d read everything by Germaine Greer (well, skimmed it at uni and seen her on Newsnight), and I had decided there was nothing anti-feminist about letting men carry heavy things. Especially heavy dirty things.
‘So yeah, we went to grab coffee and he got to talking about his bachelor party and how they had someone drop out at the last minute and, yeah, he kinda ended up inviting me along.’ He crunched off a piece of candy cane and chewed for a moment.
I did not have a good feeling about
this.
‘It’s in Vegas.’
Oh no.
‘This weekend.’
Oh, good God, no.
I really wanted to believe that Jenny had no idea her ex-boyfriend was going to be in Vegas at the exact time we were going to be there. I really wanted to believe that she was genuinely over him and moving on with Sigge. But then, I also still believed that if you went to sleep naked the house would burn down, and if you wore mismatched socks, you were guaranteed to get run over. Sometimes I was stupid. And sometimes I was not.
‘You think she knows?’ Alex asked.
‘You think she doesn’t?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. She’ll only deny it if I ask her, but there’s just no way it’s a coincidence. Someone is going to die on this trip, aren’t they? Someone’s going to die, and I’m going to prison.’
‘Right?’ Alex agreed. ‘Good thing I told Jeff I’d go, so you’ve got back-up.’
‘You did?’ I couldn’t remember a time I’d actually been happier in my entire life. Maybe when I found a Cadbury’s Creme Egg in my knicker drawer a month after Easter and I thought I’d eaten them all. Maybe. ‘You’re coming to Vegas?’
‘I did and I am,’ he nodded, and carried on crunching. ‘I haven’t been in the longest time. Vegas is the best.’
Vegas is the best? I sat back and observed my boyfriend. He was the last person on earth I’d have had pegged as a Las Vegas fanboy. What other secret passions did he have hidden away? Was he buying porcelain dolls from QVC every night after I went to sleep?
‘What do you do in Vegas?’ The words were out of my mouth with way too much emphasis on the ‘you’ before I could stop them. It was all I could do not to add ‘please don’t say hookers’.
‘Hookers?’ he shrugged. ‘And, you know, poker. I like to play sometimes.’
‘I don’t know which I’m more shocked about,’ I said. ‘Probably the poker.’
‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t played in a while but I’m pretty good. Maybe I’ll win big and buy you something pretty.’