Page 62 of Consider Yourself Kissed

Upstairs,Florence was sleeping like a baby (on her back, with her arms in a triangle above her head).

In bed, Adam folded himself around Coralie, both of them lying on their sides. “I can’t believe tomorrow’s the last normal pickup.”

It would be the last Friday of Zora’s primary-school life, although school continued till Wednesday of the following week. After the summer holidays, they’d agreed with Marina that she’d catch the train to Wilton Way each weekend on her own. The change couldn’t be more significant.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Coralie said. “She has to stop growing right now.”

Inside her, her new baby kicked and swirled. A boy this time. His face had been perfect in the sonogram, pointy-nosed and elegant like Dan’s. She still had years of children being children in her house. Decades. Sometimes it was a terrifying thought. But that night she found it a comfort.

•••

The weekend wasso fucking horrible it was a relief to drop Florence at nursery on Monday and get the bus to work. Coralie had never seen Zora act like that before. A friend’s party had been in the diary for weeks, and the present (lip balms in four flavors and a book token) was wrapped and ready on the mantelpiece. But when the time had come, Zora had refused to go. She’d screamed at Coralie and Adam, stomped up the stairs, and slammed the door. Just as they thought they’d calmed her down, some other little thing had set her off. She’d been unrecognizable—either shouting or in tears for two days. She was due to be at Wilton Way for the first two weeks of the school holidays. Coralie was starting to dread it.

At work, perhaps fortunately, there was no time to think about Zora. Stefan nabbed her before she had time to put her bag down: “Vanessa Andorra’s having second thoughts.”

She hadn’t wanted to waste any maternity leave before the baby, but thirty-two weeks, on the cusp of thirty-three, was far too far along to still be expected to work. It was inhumane. She wished she’d never had the shrooms by mistake. In the days that followed, before she knew she was pregnant, something else was also gestating, an answer to a problem: the three-year sponsorship deal signed by Futurum, the gallery, and the agency under Antoinette. It was inconceivable the parties would renew the agreement when it ended this summer. Per the contract, however, the final event still had to be held. In those heady post-shroom days, when parts of her brain lit up and connected in new ways, Coralie had come up with what she believed could be a solution: Feel Tank. Get it? Like riffing on a think tank? (Sadly, when she googled it, she found it was not original.) Anyway, Futurum would be paying for a weekend festival of interactive exhibitions, workshops, and events on the topic of emotional dynamics in public life.

It hadn’t been difficult to persuade high-minded intellectuals and principled activists to speak, for a large fee, at a much-admired contemporary art gallery. It had been a lot harder once it was revealed that the event’s sponsor was Futurum. The agency promised zero interference, no topic off the table, no restrictions on what might be said about climate, fossil fuels, even the company itself. Slowly, the program built up and filled out into something she could almost be proud of. The merch was also great. Tote bags, patches, badges, posters—all covered in the wordFeelings.The launch on Friday night would be catered by a Syrian refugee charity kitchen (the foodwas stunning; Coralie had tested it). So what was Vanessa’s fucking problem?

Stefan was walking and talking like someone onThe West Wing. “We’re doing this in my office.”

My office.

Stefan’s iPhone was on his desk. He took it off mute. “Vanessa, I’ve got Coralie.”

“Hi, Vanessa,” Coralie said in a way that was polite but also mildly puzzled, because the launch was this coming Friday, and everything was in the can.

“I don’t know about this, Coralie,” Vanessa said. “I didn’t think it would be so big.”

“Seven hundred thousand pounds,” Coralie said. “Seven months’ work. Ha-ha! Yes, it’s quite big.”

“People on Instagram are annoyed. And so are my friends. Look at the program, I say. All that left-wing, Goldsmiths, hipster academic shit! But they can’t get behind the sponsor. I’m getting emails. My niece says I’m the problem!”

The baby kicked high up near Coralie’s heart. For a moment, it mimicked the feeling of fear, her heartbeat ratcheting up a notch. But she didn’t feel scared, not really. The event would be over on Sunday. In two weeks, she’d be on mat leave. Nothing mattered as much as her baby, not even, for the moment, the fate of the earth. (Let alone Vanessa’s finer feelings about a problem of her own making.)

“Let’s think about where we were in December,” Coralie said in a soothing voice. “Locked into the Futurum contract, unable to pull the pin. But we chose to focus on what the gallery does best, sparking conversations and transforming culture. That’s the path we chosetogether. Now you have a program of events that embraces complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas of life—where art happens! Artandchange.”

This was easy for her to say as a copywriter for a brand agency solving a comms problem. There’s no way she’d boldly advocate for this approach asherself. She’d stopped posting on Twitter altogether, so great was her fear she’d be seen as too radical, not radical enough, or (this was also bad now) toomedium.

Vanessa gave an anxious moan. “But what if protestors show up?”

“Let them! Discuss it! Invite them in!”

The chat went on for a few minutes, but Vanessa’s wobble was over. Stefan hung up with a sigh of relief. “So!” he said loudly. “What do you think ofthat?”

As Coralie stared at him in surprise, a funny sound came from the work landline on his desk.Clap, clap, clap.

“Brava,” came a familiar voice on speaker. “Coralie! Brava.”

Her chest was an ice shelf, and a crack ran through the middle.

“Your protégée, Richard,” Stefan said.

“Well,” Richard purred down the line from Sydney, “she certainly learned from the best.”

Coralie didn’t hear anything else. She walked to her desk, unplugged her laptop, picked up her bag, and left.

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