‘Oh, bloody hell.’ I delved into my Marc Jacobs satchel, desperately trying to keep it out of the puke, and handed Lou a tissue to wipe her mouth. The bag was battered but it had yet to be christened with vom and when that time came, I at least hoped it would be my own. ‘OK, let’s get you out of here. It’s not far, it’ll be OK.’
‘I feel better now,’ she protested, wobbling all the way up to her feet. ‘And you want to watch your friend’s band. I’m better, honest.’
‘I know.’ I kept my arm wrapped tightly around her waist and shook my head silently at Jenny as soon as she opened her mouth. She closed it quickly into a tight cat’s arse of a pout. ‘But I’m really tired and we’ve got the day off tomorrow. I thought we might get up early and take Grace to Central Park so I reckon it’s bedtime. Is that OK?’
‘Oh yeah, that sounds nice,’ she agreed, blinking a couple of times before managing to stand almost entirely on her own. ‘I am actually quite tired.’
Hurrah. The sneaky ‘I know you’re OK but I’m not OK’ reverse psychology. It always worked. As long as you didn’t try it on Jenny.
‘Well, if you guys are pussying out, I’m going to stay here and watch the band,’ Jenny said, stroking Louisa’s hair back from her face. ‘Get some rest, OK?’
I’d expected Jenny to be more annoyed – she hated cutting a night short and she had little tolerance for a lightweight. It was amazing that we’d been friends as long as we had.
‘Text me when you get home?’ I asked, knowing full well that she wouldn’t. ‘And get a cab, don’t take the train.’
‘Of course I’m gonna take a cab.’ She gave me a hug and brushed Lou’s hair back from her face, looking for a puke-free spot to plant a kiss. Eventually she decided on the forehead before handing her back over to me. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Do you want to come to the park?’ I asked, feeling Louisa begin to waver at the side of me. I really had to get her home. ‘Or we could meet you for lunch?’
‘I have to be in the office tomorrow,’ she pulled a face. God forbid. ‘And I have a lunch thing already. But I wanna help with the move and I said I’d hang with Lou Lou and Gracie while you’re at your work party tomorrow night.’
Oh yeah, the office Christmas party. Sorry, holiday party. Hopefully Jesse wouldn’t have had time to tell every single person we worked with that I had snogged him and then had a complete psychotic breakdown when he mentioned a stroller before we had time to mix the punch.
‘OK.’ I inclined my giant hair towards Louisa, the helmet-like quality providing a last defence in case she decided to puke on me again. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Love you.’
‘Love you,’ Jenny replied with a jammy kiss to the cheek.
‘Ew, did someone throw up in here?’ A girl with Zooey Deschanel hair and Deirdre Barlow glasses baulked to the left of us.
‘And that’s our cue to leave,’ I muttered, dragging Lou through the crowds and out into the frigid, puke-free night.
‘Angela, I think I’m dying.’
‘You’re not dying.’
‘I am, I think I’m dying.’
I glared at my best friend. She didn’t look well but she was definitely still in the land of the living. Just.
For the briefest of moments, just before I’d slid underneath the crappy guest duvet the night before, I’d imagined that I might get a lie-in on Friday morning. Louisa had passed out the second I got her into bed and poured two Advil and a pint of water down her throat (she hadn’t even woken when I scrubbed her face clean with three face wipes. I was a sort of good friend), I finally had a whole day off and we were going to Christmas the shit out of the city. But no.
For the last twenty minutes, we’d been perched on a bench in Central Park watching Grace chase some very hardy squirrels while the sky tried to snow and Louisa tried not to throw up. I couldn’t believe there was anything left inside her. I had given up trying to sleep and had moved into the bathroom to be on hair-holding duties at about six a.m. when she’d decided to bring up everything she’d eaten or drunk since she’d arrived. Despite my best efforts to persuade him otherwise, Alex had excused himself from spending the day with me to get on with the packing. While I was sad, I knew I couldn’t really kick his ass – we did have to move after all. I just wished that I could have had my one perfect New York Christmas day.
Instead, I’d ridden in a cab on the way into Manhattan, while Louisa held her head out of the window like a bandana-wearing dog, clutching a sick bag made out of three Duane Reade bags ‘just in case’. It was all very traumatic, mostly for me. Grace seemed to find ‘silly mummy’ hilarious. Silly mummy was struggling to raise a chuckle.
‘Do you want some water?’ I asked, delving deep into my bag, rummaging through the assorted bits and pieces I’d collected on our way up to the park. ‘Or orange juice? Or Pepsi? Or a biscuit?’
Traditionally, poorly Louisa required options. And I often required biscuits.
‘Can I take more headache tablets yet?’ she asked, loosening the scarf around her neck as I tightened mine. I recognised the post-pukey sweats and while I sympathised, I didn’t want to have to explain to Gracie that mummy popped her clogs a week before Christmas because Auntie Jenny had the constitution of an ox and the liver of post-mortem Oliver Reed whereas mummy, it seemed, did not.
‘No, it’s only been two hours,’ I replied, shaking the bag to locate the Advil. God help me if we’d lost the Advil. ‘Have some water.’
Reluctantly, she did as she was told, happy to have an excuse to remove her leather gloves (technically my leather gloves), and sipped teeny tiny drops of water. While Louisa gathered herself, I looked around the park. New York really excelled itself when it came to Christmas. Everywhere you looked people were smiling, holding hands and wandering off on another winter adventure. Horse-drawn carriages rolled along the winding paths, the horses’ bells ringing as they trotted by, and the icing sugar sprinkling of snow covered the sparse winter grass with storybook perfection. I kept waiting for one of the snowmen in Sheep Meadow to spring to life and dance for us, possibly before revealing himself to be a maniacal serial killer.
‘She’s so excited about the ice skating.’ Lou pointed at her toddler who apparently had not noticed that she was still very much on solid ground and was already twirling and leaping like a loon, a one-legged pigeon playing the reluctant Dean to her enthusiastic Torvill. ‘I just need a minute. I don’t think I’m safe to be on skates yet.’
‘I don’t think you’re safe to be more than five feet away from the toilet yet but, you know,’ I said, ‘needs must when the devil shits in your teapot.’
‘I feel like he’s shit in my something,’ she replied, still a very fetching shade of green. My mother would have called it puce because she liked to sound fancy and superior whenever someone had a hangover who wasn’t her. I kept my opinions to myself. Just.
‘So …’ I shuffled deeper inside my big, padded coat and nosed my scarf up over my mouth. No time like the present for an uncomfortable conversation. ‘While you’re feeling so well, I’ll just ask. Have you spoken to Tim yet?’
‘No.’
It wasn’t really a reply that left itself open for debate but since she’d been in New York for almost five days and had apparently made zero plans to go home, it seemed to me as though she might need a bit of a push.
‘Not at all?’
‘He text me yesterday,’ she replied, the weakness in her voice transforming into steely resentment. ‘To see how Grace was.’
‘I know I’m not going to make myself popular,’ I said, turning towards her, pulling my scarf down to reveal my face. Fuck me, it was cold. ‘But you’ve got to talk to him. You can’t actually just be in a different country to your husband and hope he won’t notice. And maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of
Law & Order
but I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to take his baby out of the country without telling him.’
‘Ange, he hasn’t even noticed,’ she said, looking up at the heavy sky. ‘He genuinely believes I’m at my mother’s. I’ve been in America since Monday. It’s days until Christmas and he thinks I’m still at my mother’s. I bloody hate my mother. But he wants to believe me because then he doesn’t have to feel guilty, does he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. And until you talk to him, neither do you. Really, Lou, I’d have you stay forever if it was up to me …’
Her face lit up with a spark of colour.
‘But it isn’t.’
Poof. The spark was gone.
‘I want you to be happy and I want what’s best for you and Grace but that isn’t hiding here and pretending nothing’s wrong.’
‘You know, it’s really hard hearing that from you, don’t you?’ she said, slowly screwing the cap back on her water bottle. ‘Miss Successful Runaway of the Century?’
‘I wasn’t married and I didn’t have a baby,’ I said gently. Just like she was wavering on the line between reluctant acknowledgement and snarky chastisement, I was treading the fine line between supportive and patronising. ‘And you know I love Grace but I would make a horrible co-parent.’
‘Alex would be good, though,’ she mused with a sniff. ‘And you’d learn how to manage. And Jenny would help.’
‘Jenny would be drunk,’ I said with a smile and a gentle nudge. ‘I think she’s enjoyed having a new playmate a little bit too much.’
‘I’ve enjoyed it too,’ Lou admitted. ‘I know it’s a terrible thing to say but sometimes I wonder if I didn’t rush into having kids. Not that I’d change it for anything.’
I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.
‘I know Alex is desperate for a baby but honestly, Ange, if you’re not one hundred per cent desperate, don’t do it. It’s so hard and it’s such a test. I wanted Grace so much, I used to wake up in the night, dreaming about being pregnant. It was all I could think about. But I knew Tim wasn’t totally into it at the time. I just assumed he’d come round once she got here.’
I opened my mouth to tell her about Dr Laura’s phone call. I knew this was the time to have her hold my hand while I returned one of the three messages she had left me so far that morning. And I also knew I wasn’t going to do it.
‘But he didn’t?’ I asked instead.
‘He did,’ she said, with reservation in her voice. ‘But it was overwhelming. Everything happened too quickly and it was so … so much more than I had anticipated.’
I looked over to Grace. She was now armed with a stick. Squirrels of Central Park beware. She was definitely a handful.
‘She took up all of my time and I let her. Everything else sort of slips if you let it.’
It wasn’t hard to imagine. Me the size of a house, covered in baby vom, the size of a house, wearing something delightful from the Kim Kardashian plus-plus-plus-size pregnancy line while Alex swanned around our beautiful brownstone looking like his regular god-like self. I couldn’t imagine it would take too long before his eyes started to wander, even if his hands and his penis took longer to follow. At which point I would obviously have no choice but to chop them off and keep them in a jar on top of the telly to teach my future daughter that all men are evil.
Hmm. There was a chance I’d got a little bit ahead of myself.
‘Ange?’
‘Sorry, I was just thinking how right you are,’ I said, reaching my mitten for her leather glove. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t realise. I should have. You’re my best friend, I should have known you weren’t happy.’
‘I wouldn’t have admitted it even if you’d asked me straight out,’ she said, looking a little more human and a little less sad. ‘But you’re right.’
‘About?’
It was something I heard so rarely, I needed it explaining.
‘Sorting this out. Calling Tim. Sorting myself out.’
‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I asked.
‘It turns out I’m right, that he is cheating on me, that the only man I’ve ever loved, the father of my child, the only relationship I’ve ever had is over because he’s replaced me with some slag from the office who likes
darts
.’ She really spat the word out. ‘And I’m alone with a mad baby who resents me for driving away her daddy and I never, ever find love again.’
‘That doesn’t sound brilliant,’ I said. ‘Best case scenario?’
‘That he’s a thoughtless tosspot who needs a kick up the arse?’ Louisa suggested. ‘Changing the subject entirely, what about Jenny?’
‘What about Jenny?’ I asked, readjusting my bobble hat. ‘He’s not knocking her off as well, is he?’
‘Ha ha. I think she’s serious about this baby thing, you know,’ Lou said, some strength returning to her voice. It was always easier for her to talk about anyone other than herself. ‘I know you think it’s a phase but I’m not sure. I’ve been through it.’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ I replied. ‘She was serious about moving to LA to be a stylist. She was serious about going back to school to study as a psychologist. She’s serious about working in PR for now. She was serious about marrying Jeff, about dating Sigge … It’s not like I don’t think she’d be a good mum, I just don’t think this is the right time.’
‘She’s lonely,’ Louisa said. ‘It’s hard. I understand.’
I leaned forward on the bench, wrapping my mittens around my hot chocolate and breathing in deeply. It was something I hadn’t really thought about and now that I did, I felt horrible. Of all the shitty, stressful things I went through – was going through – I was never lonely. I had Alex. I had my work. I had Jenny and Louisa and they had me, they knew that. Or at least I thought they did.
‘I’m not having a go at you,’ Louisa said.
It made my life so much easier when she read my mind.
‘Anyone can be lonely, no matter how good their friends are. You must have felt that way before.’
‘With Mark,’ I said, nodding. ‘But I feel bad that I didn’t realise it was that bad for you. Or for Jenny.’
‘Seems to me Jenny’s been playing her cards pretty close to her chest on this one,’ Lou said, placing a hand in the middle of my back. ‘And you know me, I like to fix my own problems.’
‘A baby isn’t going to fix Jenny’s problems.’ I closed my eyes and stamped my feet on the concrete to get the blood moving again. ‘But she doesn’t want to hear it.’