Babyville Page 0,7
way down Madison Avenue in a pair of lethal skyscraper slingbacks is now second nature to her.
She comes back rarely. Sam and Julia almost failed to recognize her on her last fleeting visit. They had arranged to meet her in the lobby of the Sanderson, and walked straight past the skinny girl dressed in black, huge Jackie O–style sunglasses obliterating her face.
Most of all Bella adores her work. She is passionate about the show, about the way Americans work, and loves her colleagues to distraction. (Quite literally at one point, given that she was seeing one of the big cheeses at the network for a while, but he was married and that's quite another story. A whole book in itself, in fact.)
We get the show here, if you're lucky enough to have Sky, Cable, or Digital. It's on every day at 2 P.M., so Julia only ever manages to catch it if she's ill or working from home, which she is tending to do rather more often these days, her career taking definite second place to her desire to have a baby.
So Bella. Bella who would like to find the perfect man but does not believe he really exists. Bella who has not the slightest desire to have children. Not yet anyway.
Bella who is genuinely happy. At least that's what she says.
But then again, people say that about Julia, and who knows what goes on behind closed doors?
“Work is as boring as usual,” Sam says, hoisting herself up from the sofa with great difficulty to put the empty pizza boxes in the kitchen. Julia considers offering to do it for her, but desists, knowing how insulted Sam gets. “I'm pregnant,” she will say, “not a bloody invalid.”
Of course God forbid no one offers her a seat on the tube in rush hour. “Hello?” she shouts, sticking her stomach out as far as it will go and making sure she catches the eye of some businessman sitting down. “Can't you see I'm eight months pregnant?” They always stand up for her.
Incidentally she isn't eight months pregnant. She's five months. But she could pass for eight. Especially when she sticks her stomach out.
“Can't talk about work,” she returns, huffing and puffing from her walk of ten feet. “Just can't wait to leave the bloody place. Chris thinks I'll be going back after four months' maternity leave and I haven't got the heart to tell him he's got another thing coming. But what about you? Any news on the pregnancy front?”
“Too early to tell. Not due for another two weeks.”
“I hope you're having sex for Britain, then, because you're at the height of the fertile season.”
“Actually we're not. We're trying to have sex every other day, because apparently if you do it every day the sperm get weaker, so it's best to give it a rest, and someone told me Day Thirteen is the important day, which was the day before yesterday, and we did it, so now it's the waiting game again.”
“God. Sex. I remember what that was like.”
“Sam! You're only five months pregnant. What do you mean, you remember what that was like? You can still have sex, for heaven's sake.”
“Julia, not only do I not want to have sex, I can't even stand the bloody smell of him at the moment.”
“What?”
Sam sighs. “It's true. He rolls over to face the middle of the bed about thirty times a night and each time he does it I'm awake and I can smell his breath and I want to vomit.”
“So what do you do?”
“I hiss at him to roll over and most of the time he just does it automatically without even waking up.”
“And if he wakes up?”
“Then he starts shouting at me and I start crying. And as far as I'm concerned right now, actually having sex would be a fate worse than death. Apparently it's a hormonal thing. Chris was dead excited because most of the women we know were like rabbits, but sod's law, I'm the bloody one who gets turned off.”
“At least he still wants to have sex with you. Mark says he feels like a machine. He can't stand how sex has become so mechanical, just a means to an end.”
“Is he right? Has it?”
Julia thinks back to the day before yesterday. How excited she was because it was Day 13, how she was convinced that tonight would be the night. They ate in front of the television, as they do so often these days, passing the