‘We ought to be drinking mulled wine.’ I frowned at the bottle of Brooklyn lager, changing the subject. ‘Or at least eggnog.’
‘Mulled wine takes too long and eggnog tastes like shit,’ Jenny pointed out. While my old Topshop jeans and Splendid T-shirt were speckled with a year’s worth of dust from the tree ornament boxes, Jenny’s black leather leggings and white cashmere sweater looked like she had just slipped them on. Probably because she’d been about as much help as a chocolate teapot as soon as she’d taken her coat off. ‘Besides, you’re the one who insists on living in hipsterville. I don’t think you would find either of those things on Bedford Avenue.’
‘I can sniff out Christmas like Rudolph the red-nosed bloodhound,’ I said, sipping the cool, bubbly goodness. ‘Christmas makes everything better, even hipsters.’
‘Nothing makes hipsters better,’ Jenny disagreed. ‘Give me a man in a suit any day.’
‘Aren’t you dating a hipster?’ I reminded her, putting my beer down and grabbing my handbag while I was still sober enough to climb the stepladder. ‘And haven’t you been doing so for some time?’
‘Yeah, I think that might have come to a natural end, you know?’ she said, watching me drag the stepladder away from the wonky Christmas tree and position it underneath the air-conditioning vent. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘I’m going to hide a copy of The Great Gatsby in the ceiling,’ I explained, holding up a small padded envelope. ‘It’s Alex’s Christmas present and I know he’ll go looking for it if I don’t hide it.’
‘I think you’re confusing Alex with yourself.’ Jenny eyed my climb up the ladder with badly hidden nerves but didn’t offer to get off her arse and help. ‘Never had him pegged for a reader.’
‘Unlike you, he reads all the time,’ I replied, straining to open the vent cover. There was a reason I let boys do things like this, feminism be damned. ‘I’ve tried to get him to watch telly like normal people but he won’t have it.’
‘I read,’ she protested, flat on her back across the sofa. ‘Like, every day.’
‘I don’t know if self-help books actually count as reading.’ I finally got the vent open enough to slide the book inside without trapping my fingers. ‘And have you read them all yet? When do you know if you’re self-helped?’
‘Self-improvement is a process, Angela,’ Jenny announced. ‘It’s a journey without a destination.’
‘It’s a journey that’s keeping Barnes & Noble in business,’ I replied. ‘What’s going on with Craig?’
‘Nothing. Ever. That’s kind of the issue.’ She pulled a thick strand of shiny hair upwards until the curl straightened out, then let it spring back down onto her face. ‘I think I’m ready to date a guy who wants to take me out for dinner instead of ordering pizza. There are only so many evenings a girl can spend watching Breaking Bad until three a.m. without going totally crazy.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, wondering whether or not that number was as high for Jenny as it was for me.
‘Dude, can you believe Erin has two babies? Two of them. It’s crazy.’
‘It is weird.’ I pretended not to notice that she’d changed the subject. I figured we’d get around to whatever was really bothering her sooner or later. ‘One minute there were no babies, now there are two babies. It feels like she moved away or something.’
Our friend Erin had recently rebranded herself from a super-hot PR maven into a baby-making machine. As soon as she was married, she got pregnant with Arianna and as soon as Arianna was sitting up straight, she was pregnant with Thomas Junior. Obviously, she wasn’t quite so available for manicure dates and spur-of-the-moment cocktails as she used to be.
‘I know, I talked to her yesterday for the first time in a week. Says she’s coming back to work super soon.’ Jenny made a clucking noise. ‘But, dude, one baby and your own business is one thing, but two? It’s not going to be easy.’
‘Erin has two babies.’ I rested my head on the cool steel of the stepladder and shuddered. ‘I can’t even process the fact that she has one. It’s madness. It’s like you having a baby.’
‘And why wouldn’t I have a baby?’ Jenny looked up sharply. I saw her tightly drawn mouth and arched eyebrow and closed my eyes. Oh bollocks. ‘What? I’m fundamentally unbabyable?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ I was too tired to pick my words as carefully as they needed to be picked. It had been a long day, I’d just put up a Christmas tree and I was halfway inside an air-conditioning vent. Me and my bright ideas. ‘I only meant that it’s strange that when I moved here, we were all single and going out and dating different guys and stuff and now Erin’s got two babies, you’ve been dating Craig forever, I’m married to a boy and it just seems weird when you think about it.’
There. That should do it. And now to shuffle backwards out of the air-conditioning vent and safely back down the ladder. Piece of piss.
‘So you think it would be weird for me to have a baby? You think I wouldn’t be a good mom?’
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
‘No, I’m sure you would be amazing,’ I said, shuffling half an inch at a time, clenching my hands into tiny, tight fists and then stretching out my fingers as far as they would go. A yoga teacher had once told me it would calm me down in stressful situations. She was incorrect. ‘What’s this all about? Where’s it coming from?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking,’ Jenny said, sitting up and fluffing out her hair. ‘I want to have a kid.’
I paused on the ladder, took a moment and considered my response.
‘You mean you want to have a baby at some point in the distant future?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘I mean I want to have a baby now.’
I breathed out slowly, puffing up more dust, and spun my wedding ring round and round on my finger. Maybe if I rubbed it hard enough a genie would appear and I could wish some common sense into my best friend.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Jenny said, launching into her clearly prepared speech before I had a chance to get a word in. ‘There’s never going to be a better time. I’ve got a great job with great maternity benefits and I’d absolutely be able to work around my pregnancy. So many of the girls in the office are pregnant right now, Erin’s been talking about opening a day care centre in the building.’
‘In the building?’ I asked.
‘Next to the gym,’ Jenny nodded.
‘Of course.’ I raised my eyebrows and tried to restrain the tutting noise I was desperate to make. ‘Where else?’
Sometimes I forgot Erin was obscenely wealthy. Most people would just get a childminder but why bother with that when you could open your own nursery?
Jenny had been working for Erin’s PR company for a couple of years and she was good at it. She was also good at making rash decisions without thinking about the long-term effects on her life. Usually it meant spending a month’s rent on shoes, dip-dying her hair badly or indulging in the odd love affair with a complete dickhead, but a baby? This was a worry.
‘I’ve got a great apartment, great friends, I’m healthy, financially stable and I want a baby.’ She sounded so pleased with herself, I didn’t quite know what to do. ‘Why wouldn’t I do it? The longer I wait, the harder it’s going to be.’
‘I’m going to say something controversial now,’ I said, shuffling down the ladder with three drinks’ worth of utter grace. ‘But is Craig, who is still technically your boyfriend as far as I know, the best candidate for Father of the Year?’
I