LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

asked me to report backstage at London Fashion Week the week I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, I was like, obviously, yes. At the time they were THE authority on the shows, I’d be mad to turn it down. And if I stepped aside for even one season I’d be quickly replaced by someone who wasn’t inconveniently breeding.

      It was just a shame I felt so sick.

      I decided to keep my ‘condition’ top secret from those around me.

      The first show was at the top of a very high, very glass building, and as I’d over-planned I arrived about an hour early. I stepped out of the elevator, into a vast warehouse-style room, with all the action focused in one corner of rails and pop-up hairdressing stations. I took in the view and as I swayed aboard my ridiculous 4-inch heels, my mouth began to froth. NOT NOW, NOT NOW! I reached for a cracker and scoffed it down like the Cookie Monster, spraying flecks all around me. Then the lift pinged again and out stepped La Wintour. Maker and breaker of careers. Editor-in-chief of the magazine at the top of my wishlist, the doyenne of cut-throat fashion-ism. On any other day, had I not left the top button of my jeans undone and just sprayed water biscuit down my front, I would have approached her. I knew it could be a terrible idea, for sure – she had a brutal way of dismissing people, I’d heard – but her daughter had interned with me at Vogue and I’d met her again on a trip not long after and she was lovely, warm and generous. I had an opener. I wanted it so badly. I wasn’t scared, I was ballsy.

      I’ll just go up to her and be all, HEY, ANNA! I know your daughter! Super-casual, just one professional to another. So I straightened my shirt, smoothed my hair down. I got ready to make the ultimate career move.

      But instead? I burped. Like, really loudly. Loud enough that the people to the rear of her entourage cloud turned around. I turned around too, as if to ask, WHO WAS THAT?! Then I lurched forward, stumbled backwards, and then hid behind a rail of clothes for the next 40 minutes, dry heaving.

      Well, this is new, I thought. Not the dry heaving at work – we’ve all done the morning-after-the-Christmas-party-retch – but the complete lack of control and professionalism in the face of a potentially big career moment. Being pregnant was definitely jamming my work mode and it scared me – what if, no matter how much I try to stay the same, it would actually be impossible? It was so frustrating and terrifying to feel the bit of me that got my mortgage paid and fulfilled my ambitions was under fire.

      I managed to write the reports and by staying away from the other beauty editors who would have known what was up when they smelt my acrid breath and the fact that I wasn’t stealing the models’ croissants, nobody was any the wiser. And I decided that once the morning sickness had completely stopped, I’d be able to continue unchanged. The fact is, I’d been in the room with Anna and co., I was still allowed in. I just needed to rein in the impulse to vomit.

      We need a new nest

      OK, so I was still adamant that nothing had to change. But one thing really did – where we lived. Yes, quite a big thing, actually. The flat that we’d scrimped and saved for, and made our mark on by way of two floating shelves and a new catch on the shower door, had to go. It had been perfect, pre-fertilised-egg – a living room with giant sofas that doubled as a large dormitory for friends to crash out in, and a windowsill over the tub, for stacking candles, books and the occasional bathtime sandwich.

      The summer before I’d got up the stick, we decided to put the flat on the market because we thought it might be time to splash out on a garden of our own. Somewhere to drink coffee on a Sunday morning, maybe a box room I could make my office now that I worked from home. It sold at the first viewing (and that shower catch made us £15,000 – snap!) but we couldn’t find anything nice we could actually afford. We dawdled and ummed and ahhed, because we were under zero pressure – so what if the buyer pulls out, we don’t HAVE to move, and we’ll just get another buyer.

      But at the end of February, as I entered my eighth week of pregnancy from my mum’s sofa in Chichester, our buyer finally threatened to pull out if we didn’t vacate within four weeks. Rich started to rush over to Brighton after work to check out other flats and back to me in Chichester each evening to endure my rants about his breath. One evening he arrived back from our flat, another bag of my clothes slung over his back, and slumped down next to me on the sofa. I didn’t mention his personal stank because he looked so broken. I’d basically been ignoring him for a month and hadn’t noticed how the commuting and lack of support was getting to him.

      ‘Look, we need a plan. Nothing new is coming up, we can’t afford anything suitable in Brighton. We have to be realistic.’

       Nonononononononono!

      ‘I think we ought to start looking outside of Brighton. We’ll get more for our money. And I won’t have to commute as far, which means I’ll be back before the baby goes to bed. Brighton is not going to work for us, not right now.’

      He’d said it. It was out there. Our life was going to change. But there was a caveat – NOT RIGHT NOW. Once we’d saved a bit of money, maybe we would be able to go back to Brighton, to a proper house. This wasn’t forever, this was for now.

      ‘And I think the most sensible choice is right here, because I won’t be far from work, you won’t be far from the hospital and your parents will be nearby to help out.’

      Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! I’d no longer be the city girl, living a stone’s throw from her favourite bar, the beach and an ATM machine. I’d be back to where I started, back to bad phone signals, no nightclubs and a lot of fields. Back to socialising with my mum and wider family without having a cool flat and glamorous job to jet back to afterwards. Back to feeling gawky and isolated and frustrated.

      ‘OK,’ I say, in the tiniest voice, hoping he might not hear and we can just pretend this hasn’t happened. I have no fight in me, and I’m pleased that he seems buoyed by this decision at least. I can deal with the finer details later. At least I wouldn’t have to meet another set of midwives either, or try to navigate a new set of roundabouts, my bête noir as a driver.

      My mum was delighted, Rich was grim, and I was escaping it all on Rightmove. It had replaced ASOS as my favourite virtual shopping basket. I was already changing, OH GOD, NO! Ooh, but wait, look, a double garage!

      I was supposed to start my job in six weeks’ time, and we would have to have moved before that. And actually, there was a whole bunch of small houses – HOUSES – for the amount of money we’d saved for a one-bed garden flat in Hove. They were mostly new builds – small Tardis houses with boxy rooms and a manicured lawn of fake grass. Then behind door number four was a 122-year-old tiny cottage, with pink roses and a rambling garden full of wild flowers. We both had to duck as we entered and quickly calculated we’d have to ditch both of our sofas. The owners had a baby, so a metre from the main bedroom on a floor that inexplicably sloped and creaked was a tiny box room, barely big enough for a single bed, but already decked out with a cot and shelves of stuffed toys. My mum warned us off it – ‘It’s old! It probably has damp! And what about the sloping floors?!’ – and Rich scraped the skin off his scalp by head-butting the doorframe, but I was in love.

      Rich was less keen.

      ‘There’s no room for our sofas. And what about the floating shelves, where will they go?’

      ‘It’s bigger than a flat though, isn’t it? And there’s a garden.’

      ‘Well, we wouldn’t be able to have the Wii out. It would have to go in a box or something.’

      ‘Um, OK. Or we could plug it in upstairs in the loft? Hey, you could have your own game room, bubs!’

      ‘Hmm … But what about my bar? Where would I put my bar?’

      DEEP BREATH.

      ‘Rich, I’m not sure we can discount a house on the sole fact that your bar – which maaaaybe isn’t the priority when we have a baby on the way – doesn’t fit in. AMIRIGHT?’

      ‘Fuck.’

Скачать книгу