‘Well. This has been lovely, but Mummy has to go to the gym now,’ I announce, jumping off the bed and catching sight of myself in the full-length mirror in grey leggings and a blue tank top, pausing for a moment of self-doubt. Nothing is quite where it used to be. There’s just a little bit more here. A little bit less there. General deference to motherhood and gravity all over.
Cam props himself on one elbow on the bed, resting his blond head in his hand and admiring me. ‘Best decision of my life, passing you a love note in that lecture.’
‘Best decision of mine, overlooking how unoriginal it was and going out with you anyway.’
I thwack him on the shoe, and he picks up Charlie and chases me out of the bedroom, suddenly joined by our excitable black spaniel, Mr Knightley, as we tear down the hall, through the kitchen and towards the front door, which I throw open, squealing, only to run right into Grace, who is standing on the porch like a Lorna Jane model.
‘Remind me how long you two have been together?’ she asks, shaking her head and smiling.
‘Sixteen years,’ Cam brags. ‘Don’t break her on the Skillmill!’
There are only two free treadmills. They’re in the corner beside each other, and I step onto the one next to a guy who’s running at a pace I’d personally resort to only if I was being chased by a wild animal. He’s intimidatingly fit and so focused he doesn’t even glance my way as I step up beside him. If he missed his step he’d be shot clean through the back wall of the gym at this speed.
Grace hits ‘Quick start’ and immediately accelerates and sets an incline. She’s one of those people with absolutely no time to waste. Seconds later, not only is she already jogging, but she’s kicking straight into a life update, the likes of which you’d normally reserve for a less public setting, unless, like us, you rarely had toddler-free chat time.
‘The doctor said I have a poor ovarian reserve,’ she reports.
‘Oh! I’m sorry. What does that mean, really?’
‘Fewer eggs, lower quality, higher rates of chromosomal abnormalities and miscarriage, failure to fertilise, failure to implant, failure to thrive . . .’ With every point she makes, she gives the speed button a corresponding push, until she’s sprinting. ‘Basically, it’s a five per cent chance,’ she practically shouts over the sound of the machine. ‘She said it would take a miracle.’
It’s hard to know what to say. I know the IVF struggle well, but I’m one of its success stories. I feel like Charlie and I should come with one of those warning labels, saying RESULTS MAY VARY.
‘It’s a good thing I believe in miracles,’ Grace goes on between quick breaths, and I can’t decide whether it’s kind or cruel to buy into her hope. ‘Obviously I need to ditch the man.’
Her long-term partner, Max, has wielded smoke and mirrors year after year to distract her from his consistently unfulfilled promises to ‘get serious’。 He’s a man-child with a commitment phobia and no intention of giving her the baby-making opportunity he’s been falsely advertising for nearly a decade.
‘It’s the sunk cost that got me,’ she explains. ‘Like when you stick with a movie you hate because your former self invested so much time in the first act. I kept hoping he’d change his mind. Ugh. So over it. Let’s talk about you.’
What to say, though? Cam and I got six straight hours’ sleep last night? Charlie tried his first ice cream at a mums’ group party the other weekend?
‘Gosh, let me think.’ I increase the speed on the treadmill slightly as I rack my brain for non-baby-related content. ‘All Cam and I do lately is talk about how tired we are, whose turn it is to wash up and whether it’s too early for two adults to go to bed yet. And not for any fun reason.’
I know I shouldn’t be traitorously whingeing about our sex drought in public, but something about Grace’s romantic and reproductive plight drives me to underplay how great things actually are between Cam and I, temporary lack of sex notwithstanding.
‘I don’t buy it,’ she says. ‘As if you can keep your hands off that delicious man, even after sixteen years.’
‘It’s seventeen, actually. My so-called delicious husband forgot our anniversary last month and I haven’t had the heart to tell him.’
She’s right, though. He is delicious. And funny, and kind, and intelligent, and a great dad . . . We might try each other’s patience at times, but he is a jackpot of a husband and I was lucky enough to hold the golden ticket.
‘Anyway, Grace, I’m applying for a job.’
She glances at me to check I’m not joking. ‘Okay, wow!’
‘Sensible, right? I mean I can barely function without a job, so . . .’
‘You’ll eat it for breakfast. You won an Australian Philanthropy Award, Kate – own it!’
The pre-Charlie, award-winning me feels like a whole different person. ‘All I can envisage is Charlie starting childcare and coming down with every illness in the paediatric encyclopaedia. And then I’ll use up all my leave and be forced to bring hand, foot and mouth disease into the office . . .’
‘Isn’t that for cows?’
‘No, that’s a different thing. And you know how women typically undersell themselves? I get so nervous in interviews I go the other way.’
‘You don’t!’
‘I don’t mean to, but I lose my cool and slightly inflate my abilities. I’m worried I’ll get the job and then spend the whole time trying to live up to the slightly better version of myself that they’re all expecting.’
The runner beside me starts reducing his speed to a walk, and then to a stop. He wipes the treadmill down with a towel and takes a big swig of water from his drink bottle.
‘I’m pretty sure the correct answer to “What motivated you to apply for this job?” isn’t “So I can go to the toilet in peace”，’ I admit, and I’m musing on that when the sudden arrival of a seriously magnificent young woman knocks us all for six. She’s curvy and fit, in matching, bright purple designer gym gear, with a sleek black ponytail and a complexion so flawless it seems to come with its own filter.
I don’t mean to stare. But everything about her is perfect. And very unlikely to be rejected by a future baby. Or by anyone.
The woman catches me staring and rightly scowls.
‘Sorry! It’s just . . .’ But before I can defend myself by explaining the whole nursing strike situation, I’ve lost my balance.
Grace slams the emergency stop button on my treadmill. It’s too late though, and I’m flung violently off the back of it onto the carpeted floor in an ungainly heap, derriere first, a la Downward Dog, right at the feet of the guy who’d been running so capably beside me.
‘I’m so sorry!’ I say, rolling over into a sit. Sorry for what, I’m not sure, unless it’s about offending him with the general spectacle.
After taking a moment to gather himself, he offers a hand to haul me up, and I take it and scramble to my feet, then dust myself off.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
He’s giving off serious Derek Shepherd vibes, what with his dark hair and attentive bedside manner. Concerned blue eyes conduct a full body sweep of my potentially injured skeleton. Things do hurt, here and there, but I’m not going to make any more of a fuss than I already have. Then I watch as the man’s attention snags, briefly, on my left breast. Then the right.