The Ex Factor (27 page)
Authors: Laura Greaves
Chocolates and expensive champagne for Destiny’s fearless leaders, Carol George and Sarah Fairhall, for saying yes please to this book. So thrilled to know the first one wasn’t a total fluke.
Thank-you Arwen Summers for your eagle-eyed editing, and also for being totally onboard with the Justin Timberlake references in my last novel.
Thanks to my fellow Destineers, who are an incredibly talented, lovely and supportive group of women. Extra hat-tips to Georgina Penney for ignoring more pressing things in order to read
The Ex-Factor
in one sitting and give such thoughtful, useful feedback.
Eternal gratitude to everyone, especially my family and friends, who read my first novel,
Be My Baby
, and took the time to say lovely things about it. You can’t imagine how much I treasure your support.
And most of all, thank-you to my endlessly patient husband, Mark, who doesn’t bat an eyelid when I insist he helps me untangle plot knots while we walk the dogs. He is also very handsome and an excellent cook. (Did I get that right, honey?)
Some people’s families try to discourage them from pursuing a career as a starving artist; Laura Greaves’s wouldn’t let her consider any other path (and she’s super grateful to them for it).
Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, Laura announced her intention to be a writer at the age of seven, largely because of her dual obsessions with
Anne of Green Gables
and
Murder, She Wrote
. She never deviated from her plan except for a brief period in her late teens when she inexplicably considered becoming an occupational therapist. Fortunately, her parents’ refrain of ‘don’t be so silly – you’re a writer’ quickly put paid to that idea. (No offence to occupational therapists.)
At 17 she landed a journalism cadetship on Adelaide’s daily newspaper,
The Advertiser
. In 2001, her work as the paper’s Youth Affairs Reporter earned her both the South Australian and National Young Journalist of the Year Awards. That was a good year.
Next, she did what so many young Aussies do and moved to London for a year – but accidentally stayed for five. Many of Laura’s experiences in the UK, including working as an entertainment reporter for several London newspapers and becoming (a somewhat inept) godmother to a close friend’s baby daughter, helped to inspire her debut novel,
Be My Baby
.
London also provided Laura with a dashing English husband, and together they moved to Sydney in 2007. She worked as a book publicist and editor of a women’s magazine before striking out as a freelance journalist in 2009. As well as continuing to write for many of Australia’s best-known magazines, Laura now spends her time matchmaking feisty fictional women with irresistibly sexy leading men.
Laura lives on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with her family, as well as two incorrigible (but seriously cute) dogs. Her continuing
Anne of Green Gables
fixation is matched only by her dog obsession, which is why you will always find at least one four-legged friend in Laura’s books.
The Ex-Factor
is Laura’s second book.
Connect with Laura:
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
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.
First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2015
Text copyright T Laura Greaves 2015.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Grace West © Penguin Group (Australia)
Cover photograph: Josh H./PeopleImages.com.
eISBN: 978-0-85-797990-2
I want to throttle her. I want to reach across the oceans and continents between us, grab her by her pudgy neck and squeeze it until her eyeballs bulge like a goldfish’s. I want to shake her by the shoulders until she’s dizzy. I want to slap her, scream at her, clench my fists and stamp my feet until she realises what a colossal idiot she is. Instead, I employ my extensive journalistic vocabulary and say, ‘Huh?’
‘I said I’m pregnant,’ Helena repeats patiently. ‘Sixteen weeks along.’
‘Sixteen weeks! And you’re only telling me now?’
Pregnant
. Just the word sends chills up my spine.
She sighs. ‘Well, I only found out myself at twelve weeks. And I’ve been trying to speak to you for a month. Haven’t you got my phone messages or my emails? You’re not the easiest person to get hold of, Anna.’
Helena, quite rightly, sounds peeved. I cringe inwardly, remembering the countless unreturned messages on my answering machine and ‘call me!’ emails in my inbox. I’d meant to phone her, really I had. Life had just got in the way.
‘Anyway,’ she goes on, ‘you’re going to be an aunty!’
Now is not the time to point out that, as we’re not actually related, I’ll only ever be an aunty in the ‘sad, moustache-like-a-chimney-brush spinster friend of your mother’ sense of the word.
‘But Hel, are you sure you’re pregnant? You don’t even have a boyfriend.’ Because obviously this makes all the difference.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she says, giggling. ‘Just because you inhabit a haven of, ahem, domestic bliss, Anna, doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t getting a bit occasionally. It’s Dave’s.’
Dave . . . Dave. The nightclub bouncer with the lazy eye? No, that was Darren. The brickie’s labourer who lived above the chip shop? But he was well over sixteen weeks past his use-by date. Dave. The removals bloke with the —
‘Oh God, you don’t mean the removals bloke with the souped-up Escort? The one who claimed to be half French but thought Versailles was a type of conjunctivitis? The one —’ I lower my voice to a whisper, ‘Helena, he’s not the one with the teenage girlfriend?’ Even through 24 000 kilometres of ocean and fibre-optic cable, I can feel my best friend’s shame.
‘She was nineteen, Anna, not thirteen. He told me he’d finished with her so I agreed to see him. And it just . . . happened,’ Helena says sadly. ‘It was New Year’s Eve and it was only the second time I’d slept with him. I guess I just didn’t realise I’m so damn fertile.’
I’d also put money on the fact that she didn’t want to ruin the moment by asking him to put a condom on his adolescent-shagging appendage, but this isn’t the time to point that out either.
‘So . . . what are you going to do?’ I ask, gritting my teeth and praying she’s not going to tell me she wants to —
‘Keep it,’ Helena says.
Again, my thoughts swing to violence. Perhaps a swift kick to the shin will bring her to her senses. How is it that she can’t see what a truly ludicrous idea this is? Of course she wants to keep it. Helena has wanted children as long as I’ve known her and her desire to spawn has only grown stronger as she’s grown older. This is despite the fact that she’s never had a successful relationship, lives with her parents and once near-drowned a guinea pig trying to give it an aromatherapy bath. She can’t make toast but she can make whole people. How about that.
‘Are you sure it’s the best thing, Hel?’ I say, trying to be diplomatic when I really want to scream ‘Abort! Abort!’ space shuttle-style. ‘You’re only twenty-five and you have so many plans. What about going back to university? What about travelling?’
What about not ending up on a housing commission estate with only toothless women called Chardonnay-Krystle for company? I want to add.
‘I can still do all those things. I’ll just have a child in tow. We’ll be citizens of the world,’ she says dreamily.
I can only sigh. Helena has never been one to let reality get in the way of her lofty ambitions. At last count she’d embarked on – and dropped out of – four separate university degrees. Apparently her desire to be a photographer/lawyer/economist/photographer wasn’t quite so powerful as her desire to avoid doing any actual work.
‘Okay, so what about Dave? Have you told him?’
‘Er . . . yeah. He’s not quite so optimistic about impending parenthood.’
‘What does that mean, Helena?’
Silence.
‘Hel?’
‘Look, he’s told me to get rid of it, okay? In fact, he’s . . . oh, it’s not important. What
is
important is I’m going to have this baby no matter what anyone says, including Dave and including my mother,’ she snaps.
Oh God. Her mother. Frosty isn’t the word for Brigitta Stanley. When Helena was thirteen and carrying a bit of puppy fat, Brigitta kindly suggested she familiarise herself with the ancient art of thrusting her fingers down her throat after every meal. She’s made it abundantly clear Helena’s entire life that her love for her daughter is very much conditional. The woman makes Al-Qaeda seem forgiving.
‘How did you tell her?’ I whisper, as though merely discussing Brigitta will conjure her up at my desk.
‘I didn’t. I told Dad on the condition he didn’t breathe a word to Mum,’ she says.
‘And?’
‘He immediately told her.’
‘How did she take it?’
‘It was fairly predictable. She called me a slut, a failure, demanded I terminate the pregnancy. Said if I go through with it she’ll disown me. You know how she is.’
I’m sure my heart actually shatters at the resigned tone in Helena’s voice. She would have expected nothing better from her mother.
‘Oh Hel, I’m so sorry,’ I offer.
‘It’s fine, Anna. I can do this by myself. I know I can.’
‘You won’t have to. I may be 24 000 kilometres away but I’ll do anything and everything I can for you.’ I’m not quite sure where this strength of resolve has suddenly bubbled up from, but I’m running with it.
‘Actually,’ Helena says. ‘There is something I wanted to ask you. When she’s born, would you —’
‘Wait –
she
?’ The pitch of my voice causes several colleagues to turn and stare. ‘You’re having a girl?’
‘Oh my God, didn’t I tell you that? I just found out,’ she says, and I can hear the excitement in her voice. ‘They usually can’t tell you ‘til twenty weeks, but the woman doing the scan said she could see the gender and asked if I wanted to know. I was so sure I didn’t, but as I looked at this tiny blob moving around on the screen I just had to know whether it was my first glimpse of my son or my daughter.’
In spite of myself, I’m visualising pink Babygro suits and a pair of adorable miniature Reebok trainers I’m sure I saw in the fashion editor’s cupboard.
‘But listen, Anna,’ Helena continues, ‘I wanted to ask you if you would be her godmother.’
In my shocked state, I seem to have slipped into some alternate universe, a surreal place where my best friend has just asked me to assume partial responsibility for a child’s spiritual wellbeing. A creeping panic rises like bile in my throat.
‘I’m sorry – what?’
‘Come on, Anna. You’re my best friend in the whole wide world and the only person I knew I could count on to support my decision to have this baby,’ Helena pleads. ‘I can’t think of a better woman to warn my daughter off dodgy guys and teach her the difference between Galliano and McQueen.’
This is interesting. It reminds me of a terminally dull airline pilot I dated briefly. I quickly learned to tune out his sleep-inducing droning about aircraft technicalities, but one tidbit did stick in my mind: the Collision Avoidance System. Basically, if you’re thundering through the sky in a pressurised tin can, also known as a 747, and another 747 is about to slice through the cabin, a computerised voice in the cockpit will politely ask the captain to ‘climb, climb’.
I had always liked to think of my ability to steer clear of children as my own Collision Avoidance System. Kids always seem to be in my airspace – friends’ bubs, screeching brats on the Tube – but whenever one gets close enough to interrupt the in-flight movie I ‘climb, climb’ as fast as humanly possible. I am not a ‘kid person’. Never have been. And now here’s Helena, trying to force one such missile directly into my flight path.
‘Uh, Hel, are you sure about this? I mean, I hardly have a child-friendly lifestyle. I never get to bed before two a.m., I’m constantly surrounded by coke-snorting degenerates —’
‘Also known as celebrities,’ Helena interrupts with a giggle.
‘Whatever. And I spend all my money on cocktails and clothes. I can barely look after myself. Are you sure you want to let me within corrupting distance of a child?
Your
child?’ She has to realise what a mistake this would be.
There’s a pause. ‘Well . . . yes. While you’re in London, all those things are true, but one day you’ll come back to Adelaide and that will change,’ Helena says softly.
I roll my eyes. This is how my mother’s ‘When are you going to come home and settle down’ speech always starts.
‘And in the meantime you’ll be the fabulous London godmother who sends her tiny Ralph Lauren twin-sets and sparkly Dolce & Gabbana party shoes. But you won’t have to be here to watch her throw up on them.’
Her tone is upbeat but suddenly Helena sounds so far away, so frightened, that I want to cry for her – and kick myself for being so callous. Whatever my own feelings about children may be, they’re no justification for abandoning my best friend.
‘Of course I’ll be her godmother, Hel. I’d be honoured,’ I say, valiantly ignoring the little voice in my head whispering,
What are you
thinking?
Right, there’s work to be done. Must stop trawling eBay for some sort of manual on how not to scar a godchild for life and focus on more pressing issues.
Issue
du jour
is Cat Hubbard, singer, songwriter and current darling of the Primrose Hill social set, who dragged herself up from apparently nowhere to land at the top of the charts with her first album. She seems too good to be true and, as
The Mirror
’s crack showbiz correspondent, it’s my job to prove that she is.
I try to ignore the uncomfortable sensation in my stomach as I pull up Cat’s file on my computer. I know what it is: guilt. Despite having spent the past three years gleefully laying bare celebrities’ misdeeds for the benefit of a ravenous British public, I’ve never quite managed to shake the feeling that my job is, well, a bit icky. I’m hardly making the world a better place, am I? Revealing to Vera Housewife that Katie Price has got hitched yet again or that Jeremy Clarkson has said some new boneheaded thing isn’t going to end world hunger or bring peace to the Middle East. Unlike some of my colleagues, who genuinely seem to believe they’re performing some sort of benevolent public service, I know what I do is a bit scummy.
It wasn’t where I saw my career going as a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old the day I started my cadetship on the local rag in my Aussie hometown, Adelaide. I thought I’d become a hard-nosed news reporter, uncovering corruption in big business and blowing the lid off political conspiracies left, right and centre. But after five years of working almost constant graveyard crime shifts, I’d brought down no governments and caused the collapse of precisely zero multinational conglomerates. What I did have, however, were far too many memories of mangled car wrecks, family homes reduced to ash and decomposing bodies uncovered by dog walkers in lonely fields.
Arriving in London and observing its zealous worship of celebrities – talented or otherwise – was a breath of fresh air. I developed an appetite for glitz and glamour that couldn’t be sated, no matter how many copies of
Heat
magazine I bought or how long I spent debating whether the latest D-list celebrity hook-up was the real deal. I took the first vaguely celeb-oriented job I was offered, running the entertainment pages on a newspaper in London’s leafy commuter belt. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the sort of place that attracted the uber-famous. Instead of writing about Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, my bread and butter was people like notorious comedian Jim Davidson and whichever former
EastEnders
actor was starring in the local panto at Christmas. After two years of it, and having spent every Sunday freelancing at
The Mirror
, I practically French-kissed Girish Thakkar when he offered me my job on the showbiz desk.
I’m good at what I do, there’s no doubt about that. But the longer I do it, the less enticing the boozy lunches and free tickets and trips away become. No matter how much I try to deny it, I’m becoming uncomfortably aware of the fact that the celebrities I write about are people, too.
I shake my head, trying to chase away my maudlin thoughts. It’s Helena’s news that’s made me all introspective. How will I explain to my goddaughter that I revel in others’ misfortune – for a living?
‘Anna?’ The hairs on the back of my neck bristle at the singsong voice. Nicki Ford-Smith perches one firm buttock on the corner of my desk, sweeps her white-blonde hair over one shoulder as if she’s in a Herbal Essences commercial and fixes me with her vacuous gaze. Ugh.
‘Yeah?’ I tap furiously away at my keyboard, trying to give the impression of productivity.
‘Um, I was just wondering how you’re, like, getting on with the Cat Hubbard piece?’
‘Oh fine,’ I lie breezily, not looking at her. The mere sight of Nicki’s five foot ten bronzed frame makes me want to dive for a packet of chocolate digestives. ‘I’ve got a couple of good leads on former classmates and the woman who works in her local drycleaner reckons she once brought in a dress with a dubious stain.’
Nicki bares her perfect teeth – I couldn’t really call it a smile. ‘Great,’ she says flatly. ‘Look, I hope you don’t mind but I made a few calls of my own and I’ve, like, come across a couple of bits and pieces.’
Here it comes: the stiletto in the back.
‘I’m sure you’ll dig up something much better but, just in case, I could always put together a few paragraphs on her, uh, husband.’
Bullseye. ‘She’s married?’
‘Not any more,’ Nicki says with a toss of her mane. I’m reminded how long it’s been since I’ve had a haircut. ‘But she was, back when she was, like, nineteen. I mentioned it to Girish and he’s keen to run with it if, you know, you haven’t got anything better.’