Anybody Out There?
Page 109

“Anna, it’s a toast to Aidan.” Gaz was scandalized.
“I know. I don’t care. He had a child with someone else.”
“But…”
“She’s angry with him for dying,” Rachel explained.
“Aidan couldn’t help that,” Gaz said.
“Her anger is illogical, but not invalid.”
At that point I really felt like I was in an episode of Star Trek.
“Aidan couldn’t help dying,” Gaz repeated.
“And Anna can’t help how she feels.”
“Oh, would the pair of you just shut up,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t hate Aidan for dying.”
“So why do you hate him?” Rachel said.
“I just do. Come on, Gaz. Set the curtains on fire, or something.”
Later on, Joey cornered me. “Hey, Anna.”
“Hey,” I muttered, looking at the floor. These days I did my best never to speak to him.
“How’s Jacqui doing?”
I looked up and stared in cold astonishment. I would have curled my lip if I’d been able, but when I try lifting one side of my mouth, both sides go up, so it looks like I’m being examined for gingivitis. “How’s Jacqui doing? If you want to know how Jacqui is doing, why don’t you pick up the phone and ask her yourself?”
He glared at me, a long, long one, but he was the first to look away; no one could outstare me these days. “Fine, then,” he said angrily, “I will.”
He got his cell phone out of his pocket and started punching buttons like they’d personally offended him.
“I hope you’re not trying her home phone because she’s in Bermuda, on Jessie Cheadle’s estate.”
He stopped punching numbers. “Jessie Cheadle’s estate?”
“Yes. Why? You thought she’d be spending Thanksgiving sitting alone in her apartment? Just her and her fatherless fetus?”
“What’s her cell number?”
I closed my mouth. I didn’t want to tell him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got it at home. You can tell me now or I can get it myself later.”
Defeated, I rattled it off.
Another series of button punching, possibly less aggressive this time, and he said, like he was Alexander Graham Bell making the first-ever phone call, “It’s ringing! It’s ringing!” Then his entire body slumped with anticlimax. “Voice mail.”
“Leave a message, you moron. That’s what it’s there for.”
“Nah.” He snapped the phone shut. “She probably wouldn’t want to speak to me anyway.” He gave me a coy look but I made my face stay expressionless. I didn’t know if she would want to speak to him (she probably would, I feared) and I didn’t know just how much he’d had to drink—if this sudden interest in Jacqui’s welfare would disappear just as soon as Thanksgiving was over and his hangover had kicked in.
The minute Jacqui got home I reported the entire episode verbatim and she put it down to the goodwill and overindulgence of the season. Her exact words were, “Pissed fool.”
91
Anna, this new ‘quantum leap’ skin care? What do you know about it? I coulda sworn you said something last time we had lunch.”
My phone was ringing off the hook: beauty journos, their curiosity piqued.
“What have you heard about it?” I asked.
“That it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
“Yes, I heard that, too.”
All through December the buzz around Formula Twelve built. Amid the craziness of Christmas drinks and parties and shopping, the whispers intensified. “I heard it was from the Brazilian rain forest.” “Is it true that Devereaux is doing it?” “They say it’s a supercream, like Crème de la Mer, to the power of ten.”
The time had almost arrived. I’d decided that Harper’s was the magazine we were going for and I set up a lunch with their beauty editor, Blythe Crisp, for early in the new year. “A very special lunch,” I promised her.
“End of January,” I told Devereaux. “That’s when we break it.”
The nurse moved the scanner over Jacqui’s gel-covered bump, paused, and said, “Looks like you’re having a little girl.”
“Cool!” Jacqui punched the air from her prone position, nearly braining the woman. “A girl! Much better clothes. What’ll we call her, Anna?”
“Joella? Jodi? Joanne? Jo?”
In a sappy voice Jacqui said, “So Narky Joey will know how much I stiiilll love him. Or better still! How about Nark-Ann? Or Narketta? Or Narkella?”
“Narkella!” The thought of calling the little girl Narkella struck us as so funny that we collapsed into convulsions; the more we laughed, the funnier it became, until we were clutching each other and apologizing weakly to the nurse for our unseemly behavior. Every time we thought we’d stopped, one of us would say, “Narkella, tidy your room,” or “Narkella, eat up your carrots,” and we’d explode again. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a belly laugh like it and it felt great, like two ten-pound weights had been lifted from my shoulders.
In the cab home, I said, “What if Rachel and Luke ask about the scan?”
“What do you—oh, you mean, they might tell Joey?”
“Mmm.”
She thought about it, then said, almost impatiently, “I suppose he’ll have to know at some stage that he’s having a girl. Yeah.” She was becoming defiant now. “I don’t care what he knows. Tell them what you like. Tell them all about Narkella.”
“Grand. Fine. I just didn’t want to do the wrong thing…” I let a little time elapse, then said, “In all fairness, though, Jacqui, no stupid names.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Foofoo, Pom-pom, Jiggy, that sort of thing. Call your baby something normal.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Normal. Jacqui. Rachel. Brigit. No Honey, Sugar, Treacle—”
“Treacle! That’s so cute. We could spell it with a K. And an il. Treakil. Ikkil Treakil.”
“Jacqui, no, that’s terrible, please…”
92
Where’s that invitation?” Mum shrieked. “Where’s that fecking invitation?”