I Heart Christmas (14 page)

‘We’ll work it out,’ he said. ‘But whatever, we’ve got this afternoon, right?’

‘Right,’ I said, hugging him tightly and smiling over his shoulder. ‘Want to stop packing and eat the secret box of Jaffa Cakes?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Alex replied, a smile in his voice. ‘It’s all going to be OK. By New Year’s, you’ll wonder why you were getting so worked up.’

‘I hope so,’ I said as he dragged me to my feet and carried me into the kitchen.

‘Now, where are you hiding those goddamn Jaffa Cakes?’ he asked, dropping me in front of the fridge.

I laughed, climbing onto the kitchen counter and rifling through a cupboard, retrieving the secret snacks. OK, so this wasn’t quite the same as the entire week I’d planned to spend snuggled up on the sofa with him but it was better than nothing. Jaffa Cakes made everything better.

Wednesday morning saw me back at work, entirely against my will. Alex, Louisa and Grace had bundled themselves up and trotted off to Prospect Park to meet some actual reindeer. It had literally taken every ounce of restraint not to call Mary, quit my job and trot off with them. Gutted wasn’t the word. And so, instead of singing ‘Rudolph’ at a bunch of very confused deer who probably weren’t really enjoying lots of random people singing ‘Rudolph’ at them for eight hours a day, I was getting ready for the arrival of my new assistant.

Louisa and Grace had slept right up until tea time and we’d spent the evening as a happy bunch, eating pizza and watching
The Muppet Christmas Carol
, never once mentioning Tim’s alleged infidelity. It had been a happy evening and the whole time I was stuffing my face with pizza I was at peace, but as soon as the girls turned in and me and Alex took to the airbed, I became restless. It was all well and good for Alex to tell me my problems weren’t really problems but the more I thought about them, the more I was relatively certain that they were.

Taking an A4 pad out of my desk drawer, I drew up a quick list. Number one, moving house. Number two, Cici. Number three, my parents. Number four, Louisa and Tim. Number five, Jenny’s baby fever. I quickly drew a line through number five. Jenny hadn’t mentioned anything the whole time we were together on Tuesday so I figured she’d already forgotten about her baby crazies. The chime of a credit card machine was louder than her biological clock after all. The rest of the list needed some consideration. Number one was starting to give me a rash. Alex had booked movers for Saturday morning and not only had we only packed up one box of records and one box of books, we had number four to take into consideration. What if Louisa was still here on Saturday? She certainly wasn’t showing any signs of packing up and going home, despite Alex’s assurances that she’d be ready to jump back on the plane. But what could I do, other than be a good friend? I couldn’t call Tim and grass her up. I couldn’t force her to leave when she wasn’t ready. This one was tricky. Almost as tricky as number three. My parents. Try as I might, I couldn’t get excited about their unexpected visit. I’d tossed and turned all night long, trying to think of a nice and inoffensive way I could suggest they not bother but I had nothing. It wasn’t as if I never wanted to see them again, I just hadn’t prepared. The house wouldn’t be ready – the house or my nerves. If they had wanted to come for Christmas, I needed a good six-month warning to make sure I had an adequate number of guest towels. My mother would be mortified if she knew I hadn’t changed the sheets for Louisa and Grace but, quite frankly, the laundry needed doing and I just didn’t have that many sheets.

And that left number two. On cue, my borrowed-from-Alex ancient iPhone 3 buzzed into life, revealing a text message made up of nothing but fifteen different happy emojis and an exclamation mark. I wasn’t quite sure what the ghost with a sticky out tongue meant but mostly I took this to mean that Cici was on her way.

‘Hey,’ Jesse stuck his head around my door. ‘You OK, boss?’

‘Oh God, don’t call me that,’ I groaned, shoving the notepad underneath my keyboard. ‘I’m fine. Just waiting for the devil to show its horns.’

Jesse was well aware of my history with Cici. He’d heard all of my war stories over the last few months and I would be hard-pushed to say whether he was more scared or excited about her impending arrival. I had a suspicion that he was nursing a crush on Delia and the prospect of her slutty, bitchy twin had to be a little bit exciting to the straight male staffers, i.e. Jesse. Of course, if I’d told him she was a saint who nursed sick children back to health on her weekends, he wouldn’t have been even slightly interested. Men were strange creatures.

‘Want a coffee or anything?’ he asked. ‘I’m going down to Starbies.’

‘I would love a coffee,’ I said. What would I do without him? ‘Thank you.’

‘Any time,’ he said with a salute, ducking back out the door.

Really he was a saint. Which made the next person to appear in my office the devil incarnate.

‘Good morning, boss.’

Looking up from my computer screen, I felt the blood drain from my face as I saw Cici stood in my doorway wearing a great big scarlet smile. The red of her lipstick matched the soles of her shoes, which immediately got my back up. Loubies on her first day. She couldn’t have stuck with her gap-year chic for her first day? Of course not. I forced myself to give her the benefit of the doubt – she probably hadn’t worn them purposely to piss me off, it just wouldn’t have occurred to her not to wear them. I wondered what kind of person I would have grown up to be if I’d popped straight out of the womb and into a Gucci babygro. If Gucci made babygros. I should ask Erin, she’d know.

The promise of gainful employment had clearly lured Cici out of the kibbutz collection couture and into the hairdresser’s. Gone was the braided strip, back was the manicure. Her hair looked so glossy, I assumed she’d had every strand coated with diamonds. The gems that hadn’t been ground down and sprinkled liberally about her person hung from her ears, her throat, her wrists and her fingers. Everything about her sparkled.

‘Our first day together!’ Cici squeezed her shoulders up around her ears in an effort to look cute and waited for me to exhale (it had been a minute, I must have been turning blue) before she stepped over my threshold. ‘So, I got your coffee. Caramel macchiato, right? I checked with Deedee.’

She held out a huge Starbucks cup, her nail polish matching her lipstick. Presumably it was so the blood didn’t show.

‘I already had HR reroute all of your calls to my phone and obviously I’ll have your inbox and your calendar from now on so anything you want me to handle, just tag it and I’ll reply for you.’

‘You have my inbox?’ I gingerly accepted the coffee and put it down on my desk, waiting for it to jump up and attack. No way she’d go for anything as subtle as poisoning. ‘There’s no need for that, really. I think I can answer my own emails.’

‘Relax,’ she said, sipping her own coffee, presumably black, presumably calorie-free. ‘I’m not going to be printing out Alex’s love letters and hanging them in the bathroom.’

She actually had the nerve to giggle.

‘The more you trust your intuition, the more empowered you become, the stronger you become, and the happier you become,’ Cici declared as though she was quoting some great philosopher as she brushed invisible lint from her snug black sweater. ‘I know trust takes time.’

‘Wise words,’ I replied. I wasn’t interested in playing games. I was even less interested in getting shanked in an alleyway outside the office but these were the chances we took in life. ‘Not yours?’

‘Gisele Bundchen.’

‘Aah, one of the great philosophers of our time,’ I commented.

‘No, she’s a supermodel,’ she corrected me. ‘She’s, like, Brazilian?’

‘Yeah.’ I tried to see if anyone was watching this but the office looked half empty. Why was there never a good material witness around when you needed one. I eyed the security camera, completely unconvinced.

‘I think we’re going to get along super well.’ Cici clicked her red nails together, not asking my imagination to work too hard turning them into claws. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble, Angela, I’m here to get ahead. I want to be part of the business, like my sister, and if I really put my mind to it, I don’t think it’s going to be too long before I’m exactly where I want to be.’

She clicked her fingers, gave me the guns and winked.

‘You’re going to have me shot?’

‘We are going to have some fun, huh?’ she laughed. ‘You and me. Give me a week and you’ll be calling me your BFF. Trust me, I’m way more fun than Deedee. We should get cocktails. Oh, let’s get cocktails tonight!’

‘I would love to but I’m planning on poking myself in the eye with a red-hot poker,’ I replied. ‘Maybe you should go and find your desk?’

‘You crack me up.’ She trotted out her over-the-top laugh again, pressing a hand into her side for good measure. Clearly, it was splitting. ‘We really are going to make a great team.’

‘A great team,’ I muttered, picking up the coffee and regarding it with caution. Maybe she had just spat in it, I thought, taking a sip. It tasted normal. But then, weren’t most laxatives taste-free these days?

The rest of the day passed fairly uneventfully. I’d spent a couple of hours with Mary and Jesse, going over the online approvals system we had just installed to speed up the approvals process on press day, and a couple more going over features proposals that Mary refused to look at on the basis that I was going to have to learn how to make my own decisions sooner or later. I didn’t think she needed to know I made most of my decisions with the Magic 8 Ball app on my phone. Alex and Louisa had both sent hatefully adorable photos of the three of them visiting the reindeer and, at last count, I had eaten seven gingerbread Christmas trees. I’d tried to enforce a strict ‘all staffers must eat’ rule with the team but they were far more interested in fitting into designer sample sizes than baked goods. Fools.

‘Hey, boss!’

That really was going to start to grate very soon.

‘Cici,’ I replied without taking my eyes off my screen. I hoped that if I didn’t look directly into her eyes, she wouldn’t be able to steal my soul. ‘Are you leaving?’

‘Yeah, we’re going to get cocktails, right?’ She zipped up a tiny leather jacket and wiggled her hips in a little dance. ‘Cocktail time for the girls.’

‘Did you just sing at me?’ I asked, slightly stunned. ‘You didn’t really think we were going to go for drinks?’

I couldn’t work out if I was more shocked at the look of disappointment that flitted across Cici’s face or the fact that I almost felt a little bit guilty for causing it.

‘Yeah, no, right.’ She tossed her honey-blonde hair over her shoulder and fixed a blank expression. ‘You probably have plans.’

‘And so do you?’

‘Well, obvies,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Happily, before I could open my mouth and insert my foot directly inside, my phone rang.

‘I’d better get this,’ I said, snatching up the handset before she could. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ she mouthed, closing my office door behind her. It sounded so much like a threat.

‘Hello?’ I rubbed the heel of my hand across my forehead, hoping to erase the last three minutes of my day.

‘Hi, Angela? It’s Laura,’ a woman’s voice announced. ‘Dr Morgan?’

‘Of course, hi,’ I replied, a beat too late. ‘Sorry, bit of a mad moment.’

‘Oh, is now not a good time to talk?’ Laura asked.

I looked down at my desk, over at my messy meeting table covered in notes from the day’s meetings and then at all the emails lit up in big bold type in my inbox. When was there a good time to talk?

‘Now’s fine,’ I answered. ‘What’s up?’

‘I got your test results back today and I really just wanted to go over them with you,’ Laura’s voice trod a fine line between casual girlfriends and professional courtesy. I was immediately on edge. ‘Any chance you could come down to the office, maybe after you finish up at work?’

‘Not really.’ Without warning, a wave of nausea rushed right over me. I gripped the handset a little tighter and breathed out slowly through my mouth. ‘Can’t you just tell me now?’

‘I don’t really like to discuss test results over the phone,’ she replied, leaning further towards a more professional tone with every syllable. ‘It’s much better to explain everything in person.’

‘Without wanting to be a drama queen,’ I began. I absolutely wanted to be a drama queen. What was wrong? Was I pregnant? Was it triplets? Did I have some horrible symptomless disease? Oh God, this was from that time I dropped my Danish on the kitchen floor and ate it anyway. The ten-second rule didn’t exist after all! ‘I’d really rather know now. I just can’t make it over there today.’

‘OK,’ she said with a reluctant deep breath. ‘I don’t want you to panic about anything because, really, it’s nothing major.’

‘I’m not panicking at all,’ I said with a light laugh. Which was very strange because inside my head, all I could see were flashing red lights accompanied by sirens and the word ‘PANIC’ flashing over and over in ten-foot-high fluorescent letters.

‘Now, I want you to know, nothing is conclusive and none of the tests we did revealed any incredibly serious conditions, they just give us a guideline with regards to fertility,’ she said. I was trying to listen and ignore the big scary panic disco that was going on in my head. ‘Your overall health is great and you are ovulating which is fantastic.’

‘Fantastic,’ I repeated. Not a word I had applied to ovulation before.

‘But one of the tests did show your hormone levels were a little lower than I would like, given that you’re not immediately considering starting a family,’ Laura said carefully. ‘And that you have fewer eggs than might be considered typical at your age.’

‘I see. And what exactly does that mean?’ I asked, as though I was asking her how one might go about baking a Victoria sponge without the requisite ingredients.

‘It means you might have some fertility challenges,’ she replied. ‘And the longer you leave it, the harder it might be to conceive naturally.’

She let the news sink in for a moment but I wasn’t sure whether or not she was waiting for a response. If she was, I didn’t have one, so she was buggered.