I Heart Christmas. Lindsey Kelk

multiple Saw movies, but this was something else. She was literally asking me to bleed for her. And it wasn’t even because she needed the blood.

      ‘Obviously, this is all between us.’ Laura stood up and rearranged her white coat. ‘Just a friendly favour to you guys. It doesn’t need to go on your records, it’s just a fun thing to try.’

      ‘How is getting a needle jabbed in my arm a fun thing?’ I asked both of them. ‘Ever? Unless you’re a smackhead?’

      ‘That … that’s a joke, right?’ Laura suddenly looked very concerned. ‘Because that kind of thing definitely affects these tests.’

      ‘I’m not a smackhead,’ I groaned. ‘I just don’t think I need these tests.’

      ‘Do it for me,’ Jenny pleaded, gripping my hand in hers and practically dragging me out of the lovely, calming office and following Laura into an altogether less artfully lit room full of medieval-looking medical equipment. And there it was. The chair. With the stirrups. I felt my vagina seize up in protest.

      ‘I’m just going to take a little blood,’ Laura said over the not at all reassuring sound of snapping rubber gloves. ‘And then we’ll do a urine test. You don’t need my help with that. The results will be back in a couple of weeks and they’ll show us generally how you’re looking, what your hormone levels are like and how many eggs we’re dealing with.’

      While eager beaver Lopez shrugged off her blazer and rolled up her sleeve, I took a moment to think about my eggs. I couldn’t say I’d given them the time of day before, unless I was cursing one of them for chaining me to the sofa with a hot-water bottle and an entire jar of Nutella while it took its own sweet time to mosey on out of my cramping uterus. But people talked about bad eggs all the time. What if I only had bad eggs? Sure, they had half a chance, they were going to be fertilised with Alex’s super sperm, but there was still every possibility they’d get my dad’s indigestion and my mum’s asthma and my fallen arches. High heels hurt me. I didn’t wish that on my future child. But what if that was all that was left? Asthmatic, gassy babies who couldn’t walk in anything over a three-inch heel. That took modelling and prostitution off the table for future career choices. What if my next period was the last decent egg? My last chance at birthing a professional footballer or Nobel peace prize winner or X-Factor semi-finalist?

      ‘Angela, your turn.’

      Jenny was carefully prodding a tiny round plaster on the inside of her elbow as Laura advanced on me with a length of rubber tubing and a hypodermic needle.

      ‘You ready?’ she asked.

      ‘No,’ I replied.

      And, dear God, was that the truth.

       CHAPTER THREE

      One of the most common phrases I heard in New York was ‘go big or go home’. Usually, this made me very happy. Everything was more over the top here – the people worked harder, the bars opened later and there was bacon in everything – but today, even the weather was acting like a real New Yorker. Whoever had upset the wind and brought the brutal sleet shower that slapped me in the face when I stepped out of my apartment needed a kicking. It was days like this that I was reminded I was not a true New Yorker. A born-and-bred city gal would have pulled on her North Face jacket, muttered ‘fudgedaboudit’ and gone about her business. I stood on my doorstep in a duffel coat and a fancy scarf that became immediately sodden, and whimpered until a cab buzzed by. I couldn’t think of a day I’d been happier to stick out my arm and jump inside. This was an open-minded city but murdering commuters because you had had too many drinks and not enough hot dogs the night before was generally considered a no-no and, I imagined, it was especially frowned upon at Christmas time.

      As soon as we left the doctor’s office, Jenny and I had headed straight to the St Regis for ‘dinner’. Only dinner turned out to be a bowl of bar nuts and three martinis, a choice that was neither nutritious nor conducive to an easy morning commute. Thank God it was perfectly acceptable to wear sunglasses indoors in December in this city. My comfy, comfy leggings, cocoon-like Club Monaco sweater and battered old Uggs combo had been frowned upon by the girls in the office but I was fairly certain I’d got the greasy egg, bacon and cheese sandwich past them without anyone detecting it. My satchel was going to stink for weeks. Stink like heaven.

      No sooner had I sat down to take my first bite than my phone began to ring. I picked up as quickly as I could, just to stop the noise, fumbled with the handset for a moment and finally managed to answer.

      ‘Angela? It’s Mandy from human resources. The first interviewee for the assistant position is here. Are you on your way up?’

      The assistant position. Interviews. I had to sit in a room and talk to strangers about a job I didn’t really want to give them. I looked longingly at the greasy paper bundle in my handbag and sniffed.

      ‘I’ll be up in five minutes,’ I croaked into the phone. ‘How many are there?’

      ‘Eight,’ Mandy replied. ‘Five minutes.’

      For a moment I wondered if HR at Condé Nast spoke to Anna Wintour like that. Taking one delicious bite out of my sandwich before trudging back out of my office, I figured they must. Even a Prada-wearing devil had to hand in her appraisals on time, surely?

      Of course, the interviews were torture.

      Even if I hadn’t had a seventeen-piece orchestra tuning all their instruments at the same time inside my head while my stomach behaved like it was on a roller coaster, on the deck of a cruise ship, travelling through very choppy waters, it would have been unbearable. In fact, trying not to vomit was pretty much the only interesting thing I had to focus on throughout. One after another, shiny-haired, impeccably dressed and wildly overqualified boys and girls filed in, sat down and showed me the result of their very expensive childhood orthodontist work and even more expensive education. Not one of them had a single, solitary hair out of place and not a single one of them had woken up with a little bit of their own sick on them. Was it weird to feel intimidated by your own potential assistant? Alistair, Chessa, Tessa, Betsy, Beatrice, Sarah, Sarah and Sara were all exactly the same human being. Well, Alistair obviously had some differences from the girls but he was wearing very expensive designer shoes and did also like kissing boys, so not that many. They were fashionably put together but not making any sort of statement. They had all attended expensive, liberal arts colleges and had degrees that had great potential to be entirely useless in the outside world. They all lived on the Upper East Side with their families or had just moved out to Brooklyn and they all had an uncountable number of internships under their belt. Basically, everything added up to ‘they were all really rich’. It wasn’t like I’d grown up without two pennies to rub together, or like I hadn’t met some very rich people in my time in New York who weren’t entirely dreadful, but something about that soft-focus sheen that money gave a person made me nervous. The idea of having to ask someone to go and get me a coffee when they had never had to light up the inside of their handbag with their pay-as-you-go mobile looking for a last pound coin to pay for their kebab on the way home from Wetherspoons made me feel a bit, well, weird.

      As the interviews dragged on, I discovered that they were all perfectly nice and had excellent interview skills. They all wanted to work in journalism and they were all so excited about the opportunity to work on a magazine as fun and as fantastic as Gloss. Blah blah blah. Why hadn’t anyone thought to bring me a snack as a bribe? After the first hour, I would have given them my job if they’d have just given me a bag of Doritos. As soon as Tessa had finished telling me about her award-winning humanist-slash-beauty-slash-kitten fancier blog and wafted out of the room on a cloud of Chanel, I leapt to my feet and told Mandy I had an important conference call that meant I absolutely had to get back to my desk. There was no way I could sit and discuss the subtle differences between Sarah’s English major and feminist theory minor versus Sara’s English major and quite blatant cocaine addiction minor. I felt like I’d just interviewed the entire cast of Gossip Girl