I Heart Christmas

‘Yeah, Delia’s,’ I said, torn between wanting to give her a big hug and wanting to cling to her leg and beg her not to go.

‘And yours,’ Mary said. ‘As weird as it feels saying this, I’m not worried about Gloss or you. You’re smart, you’re driven and you care more about this magazine than anyone. Plus, you’ve been working for me for nearly four years. If you haven’t picked up what you need in that time, you never will.’

I suddenly regretted dedicating so much time to beating my high score on Candy Crush Saga during all those editorial meetings.

‘You’ll be fine,’ she went on. ‘And I’m only ever as far away as the end of the phone. Or more likely an email – I might be overseas. Bob is talking about chartering a boat.’

A sudden vision of silver fox Bob and his blushing bride giving it the full Titanic on the front of some mega-yacht popped into my head. I’m flying, Bob! And try as I might, it would not go away.

‘You can’t fuck this up, Angela.’ Mary snapped her fingers in front of my distressed-looking face. ‘This magazine is idiot proof. I’m not going to sit here and puff up your ego by telling you how amazing you are, desperately trying to convince you that you can do a job you know perfectly well that you’re capable of.’

‘I am capable,’ I repeated. Only I wasn’t sure of what.

‘Exactly,’ Mary agreed. ‘This magazine might have been your idea but I’ve been the editor since launch. It’s my baby. There’s no way I’d sit back and watch someone run it into the ground for fun.’

It was the closest thing to a compliment she’d ever given me.

‘Any other concerns?’ she asked, turning her attention back to her computer.

‘So, you and Bob, eh?’ I said, standing and making a clucking noise. ‘That old devil.’

‘Go get a coffee and try not to speak to anyone until you’re properly caffeinated.’ She raised a hand to wave me away. ‘And don’t slam the door on the way out or I’ll fire you before you can take over.’

I assumed she was joking but that didn’t stop me closing the door extra quietly, just in case.

By the end of the day, I was ready to jack it all in, let Alex knock me up seventeen times, move to a farm in the middle of nowhere and be milked like a cow until the end of my days. Even though I hadn’t technically accepted the job, it seemed the entire office already knew what was going on and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. There were cover lines to come up with, future features to approve, freelancers to look at and now apparently I needed to attend lots of exciting circulation meetings and schedule all sorts of thrilling executive appointments that almost all involved Excel spreadsheets. I hated Excel spreadsheets. Someone in finance had emailed me about something called a pivot table three times and I’d already come out in a rash. On the upside, I now had hot and cold running coffee, morning, noon and night, hand-delivered by writers who had barely acknowledged my existence before today, and someone from an entirely different magazine who was looking to make a move to ‘the most exciting publication in the company’ brought me a bagel. Power, it turned out, was delicious but exhausting. I was fairly certain, if it weren’t for the three and a half venti Starbucks I’d put away, I’d have passed out at my desk by five p.m.

My brain was buzzing with numbers and pictures and Taylor Swift’s love life and I desperately needed to hear the voice of someone normal. Reaching for my phone, I dialled the only number I knew would help me make sense of such a ridiculous twenty-four hours.

‘You’ve reached Louisa. I’m not around to take your call right now but leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

With an audible sob, I replaced the handset and cursed the Atlantic Ocean. I couldn’t really complain when Lou wasn’t able to take my calls – she had an actual baby to keep her busy and, to her credit, she had never been one of those mothers who made it sound easy. I’d known Louisa my whole life and no one had ever been better suited to motherhood – her mum used to joke that she would have changed her own nappies if she’d been able – but even she couldn’t paint parenthood as a walk in the park. Lou was obsessed with baby Grace. Since the second she had popped out of her vajay-jay, she had been her everything. Lou had left her job when she got pregnant and now it even felt like her husband, Tim, barely got a look-in. The last time we had spoken, she didn’t even know what had happened in the last season of True Blood. It was that serious. But she was pragmatic and honest and she always knew just what to say to make me feel better. When she answered her phone.

‘Hey, only me,’ I told the beep. ‘Just feel like we haven’t talked in ages. Give me a call when you can. Love you.’

The second I hung up, the phone rang again.

‘Louisa?’ I was almost too excited.

‘Angela?’ a confused voice, not Louisa, replied. ‘It’s me. I’m waiting in the lobby?’

‘Jenny?’

Of course. I suddenly remembered, the doctor’s appointment.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll be right down.’

There was no rest for the wicked, or for friends of Jenny Lopez.

Although she was wearing her ‘take me seriously’ shoes and most resolute face, I could tell Jenny was nervous. She talked about her plans for Jenny Junior all the way up Madison but I couldn’t quite tell whether she was trying to convince me or herself that it was a good idea. I listened quietly, making encouraging noises often enough to sound supportive but not regularly enough to sound thoroughly enthused. Because I wasn’t. I heard my phone chiming inside my Marc Jacobs satchel just as we arrived but since Jenny had turned absolutely ashen, I decided to let it ring through to the answer phone.

‘It’s just a doctor’s appointment, nothing to worry about,’ I reminded her, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze.

‘I know,’ she said with absolutely zero conviction. ‘I just want to ask some questions.’

She stopped outside the building and looked up at the skyscraper.

‘Can we get drinks afterwards?’ she asked.

‘We can,’ I agreed.

‘Because I won’t be able to drink once I’m pregnant, right?’ her voice shook a little, even as she laughed. ‘Better make the most of me while you can.’

‘Let’s go in.’ I pulled her through the fancy gold and glass doors and smiled at the doorman. If she was this nervous going in to ask questions, maybe Alex was right, maybe this phase would be over before New Year’s. ‘We’ll be late for the doctor.’

The doctor in question was in fact Erin’s gynaecologist and former college roommate, Dr Laura, and her surgery looked more like a spa than any office I’d ever had the pleasure of visiting on the NHS. There were orchids where there should have been browning rubber plants, copies of Vogue and W instead of a 1996 Take a Break summer special and I couldn’t see a single broken Etch A Sketch anywhere. I kept waiting for someone to offer me a manicure.

‘Jenny?’ Dr Laura Morgan opened a frosted-glass door into the plush waiting room almost as soon as we had sat down. ‘And Angela! Wonderful. Come this way, ladies.’

Obviously, I’d heard that doctors in America were loaded and I’d met Laura a couple of times before, at Erin’s wedding and then at assorted baby-related events, but I hadn’t realised quite how, well, glossy she would be at work. Her hair was tied back in a perfect shiny black ponytail and underneath her slim-fitting white coat, she was wearing a gorgeous white silk shirt and camel-coloured skinny trousers. As a general rule, I hated women who looked good in trousers, primarily because I didn’t, and she looked amazing. The nude patent Louboutins didn’t hurt either. I had a minor sulk about my Topshop ankle boots and then reminded myself that I had owned Louboutins once upon a time, and I would again. Just as soon as I considered myself enough of a grown-up not to fuck them up the first time I wore them. Besides, as I reminded myself every time Delia pranced into the office wearing them, there were other shoes in this world. Just none that were quite so pretty.

‘So, Erin said you wanted to see me.’ Laura waved us into her cushy office, all pale greys, fresh whites and soft pinks, and called out to her assistant for coffee. Her assistant was dressed head to toe in flowered scrubs, topped off with a your-last-minute-appointment-is-keeping-me-here-after-hours scowl. I noted that the designer shoes weren’t uniform for everyone. Poor cow. ‘Or at least she said Jenny wanted to see me. What can I do for you?’

‘I want to have a baby,’ Jenny declared, leaning forward in her overstuffed armchair, confidence back ten-fold. ‘And I just want to make sure everything’s in working order.’

‘That’s exciting news,’ Laura replied, glancing at my worried expression and then back at Jenny’s wild-eyed mania. ‘I just want to check, I’m not going crazy, am I? You two aren’t a couple?’

‘Jesus Christ, us?’ Jenny looked at me in horror. ‘Shit, can you imagine?’

‘I think what she’s trying to say is no,’ I translated. ‘I’m here for moral support.’

‘And her husband wants to put a baby in her too,’ Jenny added. ‘But she’s all “la la la, I don’t need a baby right now”, right, Angie?’

‘Shall we deal with one crisis at a time?’ I asked, giving Jenny my best ‘behave yourself’ glare. She ignored it, as usual. ‘We don’t need to worry about me.’

‘Well, I’m not worried about either of you.’ Laura tapped her pen against her desk and remained impressively calm. ‘You both look pretty healthy, you’re not an age risk, I can’t really see any issues. But I’m super happy to do a physical, get some blood work done. There are a couple of tests I can run to make sure your hormone levels are where we’d want them and then after that it’s really all down to you and the baby daddy. Or daddies in this case.’

‘That sounds great,’ Jenny breathed out, her shoulders slumping inside her black blazer. ‘I mean, I don’t technically have a baby daddy right now but I want to know that everything’s working as it should be.’

‘Uh, that’s OK.’ Laura looked slightly puzzled for half a second and then went back to tapping her pen. ‘But this is something you’re looking into imminently?’

‘Yes.’

On cue, Laura’s assistant opened the door with three cups, a coffee pot, a jug of boiling water and assorted teabags, cream and sugar options. I was so far away from home. The best I’d ever got at my doctor’s at home was a paper cup of tap water when I needed to do a urine test and couldn’t go. Somehow I was certain it was all Margaret Thatcher’s fault.

‘I see a lot of single women in their thirties who just want to check things out and, you know, there are a lot of options these days,’ Laura said, taking a cup and pouring herself a stiff black coffee, into which she emptied three packets of Splenda. ‘I can always refer you to a therapist if you want to talk through your feelings. Before you start any kind of process.’

Clever Dr Laura. I gave her a small, thankful smile as I made myself a cup of Earl Grey. Send Jenny to a psychiatrist who would take one look at her before forcibly applying a chastity belt and throwing the key into the East River.

‘Maybe.’ Jenny ignored the drinks and started drumming her fingers against her folded arms. ‘Can we do the blood and hormone tests now?’

‘Sure we can.’ Laura took a calm sip from her cup before setting it down and pressing a button on her phone. ‘I’ll have Theresa set everything up in the next room. We can do both of you at once.’

‘Both of us?’ I immediately poured boiling water all over the floor. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

‘I want you to,’ Jenny said, turning on me in a heartbeat. ‘And it can’t hurt to know everything’s OK, surely?’

‘What’s to know?’ I whispered with a smile. It was hard to be startled, pissed off and still polite to a doctor all at the same time. But you had to be polite to doctors, my mum said. ‘I don’t need this. I’m not doing it.’

I was prepared to do a lot of things for my friends, including and not limited to doctor’s visits on a Friday night, holding back their hair while they vomited into my lap and even watching multiple Saw movies, but this was something else. She was literally asking me to bleed for her. And it wasn’t even because she needed the blood.

‘Obviously, this is all between us.’ Laura stood up and rearranged her white coat. ‘Just a friendly favour to you guys. It doesn’t need to go on your records, it’s just a fun thing to try.’

‘How is getting a needle jabbed in my arm a fun thing?’ I asked both of them. ‘Ever? Unless you’re a smackhead?’

‘That … that’s a joke, right?’ Laura suddenly looked very concerned. ‘Because that kind of thing definitely affects these tests.’

‘I’m not a smackhead,’ I groaned. ‘I just don’t think I need these tests.’

‘Do it for me,’ Jenny pleaded, gripping my hand in hers and practically dragging me out of the lovely, calming office and following Laura into an altogether less artfully lit room full of medieval-looking medical equipment. And there it was. The chair. With the stirrups. I felt my vagina seize up in protest.

‘I’m just going to take a little blood,’ Laura said over the not at all reassuring sound of snapping rubber gloves. ‘And then we’ll do a urine test. You don’t need my help with that. The results will be back in a couple of weeks and they’ll show us generally how you’re looking, what your hormone levels are like and how many eggs we’re dealing with.’

While eager beaver Lopez shrugged off her blazer and rolled up her sleeve, I took a moment to think about my eggs. I couldn’t say I’d given them the time of day before, unless I was cursing one of them for chaining me to the sofa with a hot-water bottle and an entire jar of Nutella while it took its own sweet time to mosey on out of my cramping uterus. But people talked about bad eggs all the time. What if I only had bad eggs? Sure, they had half a chance, they were going to be fertilised with Alex’s super sperm, but there was still every possibility they’d get my dad’s indigestion and my mum’s asthma and my fallen arches. High heels hurt me. I didn’t wish that on my future child. But what if that was all that was left? Asthmatic, gassy babies who couldn’t walk in anything over a three-inch heel. That took modelling and prostitution off the table for future career choices. What if my next period was the last decent egg? My last chance at birthing a professional footballer or Nobel peace prize winner or X-Factor semi-finalist?

‘Angela, your turn.’

Jenny was carefully prodding a tiny round plaster on the inside of her elbow as Laura advanced on me with a length of rubber tubing and a hypodermic needle.

‘You ready?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

And, dear God, was that the truth.

CHAPTER THREE

One of the most common phrases I heard in New York was ‘go big or go home’. Usually, this made me very happy. Everything was more over the top here – the people worked harder, the bars opened later and there was bacon in everything – but today, even the weather was acting like a real New Yorker. Whoever had upset the wind and brought the brutal sleet shower that slapped me in the face when I stepped out of my apartment needed a kicking. It was days like this that I was reminded I was not a true New Yorker. A born-and-bred city gal would have pulled on her North Face jacket, muttered ‘fudgedaboudit’ and gone about her business. I stood on my doorstep in a duffel coat and a fancy scarf that became immediately sodden, and whimpered until a cab buzzed by. I couldn’t think of a day I’d been happier to stick out my arm and jump inside. This was an open-minded city but murdering commuters because you had had too many drinks and not enough hot dogs the night before was generally considered a no-no and, I imagined, it was especially frowned upon at Christmas time.

As soon as we left the doctor’s office, Jenny and I had headed straight to the St Regis for ‘dinner’. Only dinner turned out to be a bowl of bar nuts and three martinis, a choice that was neither nutritious nor conducive to an easy morning commute. Thank God it was perfectly acceptable to wear sunglasses indoors in December in this city. My comfy, comfy leggings, cocoon-like Club Monaco sweater and battered old Uggs combo had been frowned upon by the girls in the office but I was fairly certain I’d got the greasy egg, bacon and cheese sandwich past them without anyone detecting it. My satchel was going to stink for weeks. Stink like heaven.

No sooner had I sat down to take my first bite than my phone began to ring. I picked up as quickly as I could, just to stop the noise, fumbled with the handset for a moment and finally managed to answer.

‘Angela? It’s Mandy from human resources. The first interviewee for the assistant position is here. Are you on your way up?’

The assistant position. Interviews. I had to sit in a room and talk to strangers about a job I didn’t really want to give them. I looked longingly at the greasy paper bundle in my handbag and sniffed.

‘I’ll be up in five minutes,’ I croaked into the phone. ‘How many are there?’

‘Eight,’ Mandy replied. ‘Five minutes.’

For a moment I wondered if HR at Condé Nast spoke to Anna Wintour like that. Taking one delicious bite out of my sandwich before trudging back out of my office, I figured they must. Even a Prada-wearing devil had to hand in her appraisals on time, surely?

Of course, the interviews were torture.

Even if I hadn’t had a seventeen-piece orchestra tuning all their instruments at the same time inside my head while my stomach behaved like it was on a roller coaster, on the deck of a cruise ship, travelling through very choppy waters, it would have been unbearable. In fact, trying not to vomit was pretty much the only interesting thing I had to focus on throughout. One after another, shiny-haired, impeccably dressed and wildly overqualified boys and girls filed in, sat down and showed me the result of their very expensive childhood orthodontist work and even more expensive education. Not one of them had a single, solitary hair out of place and not a single one of them had woken up with a little bit of their own sick on them. Was it weird to feel intimidated by your own potential assistant? Alistair, Chessa, Tessa, Betsy, Beatrice, Sarah, Sarah and Sara were all exactly the same human being. Well, Alistair obviously had some differences from the girls but he was wearing very expensive designer shoes and did also like kissing boys, so not that many. They were fashionably put together but not making any sort of statement. They had all attended expensive, liberal arts colleges and had degrees that had great potential to be entirely useless in the outside world. They all lived on the Upper East Side with their families or had just moved out to Brooklyn and they all had an uncountable number of internships under their belt. Basically, everything added up to ‘they were all really rich’. It wasn’t like I’d grown up without two pennies to rub together, or like I hadn’t met some very rich people in my time in New York who weren’t entirely dreadful, but something about that soft-focus sheen that money gave a person made me nervous. The idea of having to ask someone to go and get me a coffee when they had never had to light up the inside of their handbag with their pay-as-you-go mobile looking for a last pound coin to pay for their kebab on the way home from Wetherspoons made me feel a bit, well, weird.

As the interviews dragged on, I discovered that they were all perfectly nice and had excellent interview skills. They all wanted to work in journalism and they were all so excited about the opportunity to work on a magazine as fun and as fantastic as Gloss. Blah blah blah. Why hadn’t anyone thought to bring me a snack as a bribe? After the first hour, I would have given them my job if they’d have just given me a bag of Doritos. As soon as Tessa had finished telling me about her award-winning humanist-slash-beauty-slash-kitten fancier blog and wafted out of the room on a cloud of Chanel, I leapt to my feet and told Mandy I had an important conference call that meant I absolutely had to get back to my desk. There was no way I could sit and discuss the subtle differences between Sarah’s English major and feminist theory minor versus Sara’s English major and quite blatant cocaine addiction minor. I felt like I’d just interviewed the entire cast of Gossip Girl and I needed a quiet sit-down.

And so that was exactly what I was not about to get. As I sloped back to my desk, I spotted a blonde head poking up from the chair in front of my desk. Delia. At least she might take sympathy on me, I thought, cheering slightly at the thought of some empathetic nodding. And most importantly, she wouldn’t judge me when I ate the shit out of that cold egg sandwich.

‘Fuck me,’ I announced, pushing the glass door open and letting it close loudly behind me. ‘Interviewing is too hard. All I want to do is bury myself in a vat of Ben & Jerry’s and eat my way out.’

‘Ew.’ Delia wrinkled up her tiny, surgery-free nose and gave me the filthiest look she could muster. Which would have been a strange response for Delia, if it had in fact been Delia. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t, because today was turning out to be a day of complete and utter shittiness and that could only mean one thing. Delia’s twin sister Cici had come to pay me a visit.

Fucking. Brilliant.

I sank down in my chair and stared at her. It was like being in the same room as a spider – I wanted it to go away but I didn’t dare take my eyes off it in case it came to get me when I wasn’t looking.

‘Cici,’ I said eventually.

‘Angela,’ she replied, wiping off the look of disgust and replacing it with a bland, easy smile I recognised from the poor little rich girls I’d just interviewed.

‘I am too tired today.’ I prayed she would make it quick. ‘Can you just punch me in the face and leave?’

Cici looked at me blankly for a moment and then threw her head back in a terrifying laugh that I’d previously only seen written down in Jenny’s most manic text messages. ‘Oh, hahahahahaha. That’s funny.’

‘Is it?’

Just for a moment, I really wished I’d had a panic button installed under my desk.

‘Yes?’

I breathed in, breathed out and waited but apparently she really didn’t know what I was talking about. Cici sounded the same but, while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, something was very slightly off. Her super-trendy outfits had been replaced by a pair of bootcut jeans and a regular-looking sweatshirt and her hair, gorgeous as it was, didn’t look like it had seen a straightening iron in, well, at least five seconds. Maybe she was dying? I peered under the table. She was wearing trainers. No heels. Perfect for a speedy getaway.

‘Oh.’ Finally, she clicked. ‘Because you think I hate you and, you know, all that stuff that happened.’

When Cici said ‘all that stuff that happened’ I assumed what she meant was the time she’d had my suitcase blown up at the airport in Paris and tried to sabotage my career by blackmailing my assistant into screwing me over. Or maybe when she got me fired, which meant I almost lost my visa and could have been deported. Or maybe it was the time she tried to destroy Gloss, the magazine her very own sister was working on, before it had even launched. Of course, I had responded to this evildoing with grace and maturity and had risen above the whole thing. Aside from the time Louisa almost beat the living shit out of her. But that was totally by the by.

‘If you’re not here to ruin my life, or at the very least Christmas, what do you want?’ I asked. I was too weak to get into a scrap again, although throwing up on her would be new and, I imagined, quite effective.

‘So, Deedee told me you need a new assistant.’ She flicked her hands out to the side in a kind of jazz hands gesture. Her nails were all chipped and bitten down. Cici Spencer hadn’t had a manicure … OK, she was definitely dying. ‘So, like, I’m here to be your new assistant.’