The Road from Midnight Page 5

  After three months, when I was sure I wasn’t dreaming and convinced he didn’t mind the stretch marks on my arse or the dimples at the top of my thighs and the sex was taking longer than 30 seconds, we agreed that he would break off his engagement to Cindy. Without a glimmer of regret I scored the break-up exclusive for Fabulous Day, writing it myself. Unfortunately two weeks later my competitor New Week ran Cindy’s comeback including a thinly veiled reference to me as the other woman.

  And sure enough, right on cue, Lawrence got the trade mark call from Jim Craig.

  “Who the fuck is this guy Jim who rang me today?” asked Lawrence, clearly distressed. “He sounds old enough to be your father and he demanded that he meet me for a drink to ‘have a word.’”

  “Shit.”

  I did my best to fill Lawrence in on Jim Craig and his obsession with me, leaving out the bit about Lawrence being a tool to break that obsession.

  “Don’t meet with him, he’s a bit unhinged at the moment,” I suggested.

  “Bugger it, I’ll meet him. Sounds like he needs a bit of a talking to.”

  Jim had confronted several men over the years, mistakenly thinking I was dating them in secret, which I wasn’t but Lawrence was the only one who hit him and broke his nose. In the pub, in front of all Jim’s newspaper mates. Lawrence arrived home pumped up with victory and described for me in graphic detail the sight of Jim picking himself up off the floor of the pub while his mates roared with laughter.

  If I had any doubts about Lawrence being in my life they were erased by that one image of him standing over a defeated and bleeding Jim Craig. Finally someone had come along who could erase Jim out of my life completely. While I had Lawrence, Jim couldn’t get to me. These days I look back at my relationship with Jim, which stretched over so many years, and see it as a form of abuse. I had become powerless against Jim and his manipulative behaviour. He was a bully and I had never stood up to him. What I didn’t realise at the time was that the day Lawrence thumped him in the pub, was the day that Jim Craig’s fixation with me went up another notch closer to insanity.

  7

  Lawrence and I were out as a couple and we were well matched to begin with. We both had demanding jobs, we both understood the celebrity world and we both loved sex. We fast became the hot couple around town and I loved it. Being hooked up with a “toy boy” made me feel invigorated somehow and Lawrence was always fun to be around, even if he wasn’t the most stimulating conversationalist. He didn’t like to read books, barely read newspapers or magazines unless he was in them, and when I took him to corporate functions he clammed up when any conversation lurched into the world of politics or philosophy. But to counter his obvious shortcomings in the brain department he did amazingly gorgeous things for me, such as feigning an interest in Joni Mitchell and not wincing when I played Blue over and over. He also learned to cook beautiful meals for me and took me shopping for new clothes when I couldn’t be bothered. I had no choice but to accept that his love was genuine and he was prepared to make an effort to prove it to me.

  But after just 12 months of restaurant openings, weekends away and our picture in the gossip pages every weekend I woke up one morning and looked at his beautiful profile and realised I was lying next to a show pony.

  “Darling, what are you going to do today?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’ll go for a run, then I need to top up my tan at the sun clinic, then I said I’d turn up at some charity event at the shopping mall and sign a few ‘graphs, and I think I can hook us up for that Bob Dylan concert tonight if you want,” came his reply.

  “Darling, you’re boring me stupid.”

  “What?”

  “You never have anything going on in that pretty little head of yours except you. And quite frankly there’s not a lot going on in your world that fascinates me.”

  “But you love my dick.”

  “Yes, I do, but where did your brain go when you were born?”

  “Ha ha, smartarse. Is that me in the gossip section?” he screeched grabbing the newspaper off me.

  Attaching himself to a magazine editor had only increased Lawrence’s profile and his own idea of his self-importance. Fame is a hungry beast and you can never feed it too much of its favourite food: attention. It had only been a year and I realised I had made a very bad mistake.

  Which is exactly when I found out I was pregnant. The very morning I had the realisation that I was living with a boring buffoon I also bought a pregnancy kit. My period was two weeks late, which was very out of character for me.

  While Lawrence was out I sat in the bathroom and glared at the thin blue line confirming the presence of our baby. Daisy was no help when I called her in Sydney.

  “Well you had better keep this one,” she ordered. “I’m not doing another fake test for you, and quite frankly it’s about time you settled down and stopped working so hard. Motherhood is a great leveller.”

  “What would you know?” I bit back. “You don’t even have a boyfriend,” I added unkindly.

  “He’s out there somewhere, Jane, so no need to be like that. And I’ve just finished a very interesting article about how giving birth reduces your risk of all sorts of cancers and connects you to the earth cycles. Something you could do with a little more of.”

  As I watched Bob Dylan drawl his way through “Times They Are a Changin’ ” I looked at Lawrence and decided he’d make a good dad. He’d have to, I was officially up the duff.

  When I told him the next morning in bed I will never forget his first reaction:

  “Oh my God that is the best thing to happen. I was just thinking I needed a publicity kick and with a baby on the way, well there’s three stories right there, in the can, sweetheart.”

  To Lawrence our baby was a conduit to more fame. There was nothing he wouldn’t do with our baby from the moment she was born.

  She was loved, right from the start. I would be lying if I said I enjoyed the pregnancy as so many women seem to. At first I felt as sick as a dog and would spend the morning at my desk drinking ginger ale and munching on dry crackers. And I seemed to be constantly tired, even in the second trimester when everyone says you get an amazing energetic glow. I suppose it was because I kept working and had so much to do. By the time I went into labour I was huge, with people actually stopping in the street to stare at me. I went into labour the night I had scored an amazing exclusive with a rugby league star’s mistress who was pregnant with his twins. I remember thinking that at least I had next week’s cover story sorted and then when the labour pains hit I could think of nothing else except why the fuck didn’t someone tell me it would hurt so much?

  “This is all your fault,” I screamed at Lawrence. “You did this to me, you bastard.”

  Lawrence looked up briefly from behind the video camera and said, “There, there,” before pausing briefly to change tapes.

  “Are you going to rub my back or something? I’m really regretting not doing those birth classes now, you are being totally useless.”

  “There, there,” he said as a nurse popped in to check the foetal heart monitor.

  “How are you doing?” she asked cautiously.

  “She’s doing fine,” he answered for me.

  “No, I’m bloody not – get me drugs, please, anything.”

  Nine hours later Charlotte was born, a whopping 10 pounds 4 ounces, dwarfing all the other babies in the hospital nursery.

  For someone who preyed on celebrity births, deaths and marriages, I found myself extremely reluctant to parade this child in front of the cameras but there I was in my hospital bed, cradling our two-hour-old baby daughter, Charlotte, live on his show, Two Twonight. I didn’t say a word. Christ I didn’t need to with Lawrence hogging the camera and describing in embarrassing detail every minute of her birth and his reaction to every emotional moment of it.

  “Isn’t Mother Nature such an amazing force?” he wondered out loud to the cameras. “A force to be reckoned with because she makes such beautif
ul creatures.”

  He continued: “When I held my daughter for the first time I felt powerless. I was so overwhelmed at her beauty. Ha, to be honest I was a sobbing wreck!”

  Lawrence was rarely seen without Charlotte. She grew into a plump little child with big blue eyes. She was the most amenable child, coming into the world with a calm and contented disposition, which meant she was sleeping through the night at four weeks old and we’d go in to get her in the morning and find her staring up at us smiling and waving her chubby little fists in the air. Charlotte was more than happy to be passed from one person to another and photographed endlessly with her father. Fortunately for her, and Lawrence, she was also the most astonishingly beautiful child I had ever seen. All parents think their children are beautiful but Charlotte seriously was. People stopped and stared at her with her olive skin, bright blue eyes and lock after lock of golden curly hair which eventually grew on her perfectly shaped head. As a career woman who never envisaged having a family, I was won over by her immediately. I felt truly blessed to have such a perfect child.

  Overnight Lawrence changed his image from “hot young newsreader” to “yummy Daddy.” It shames me to remember that my own magazine ran story after story about their special bond. He even wrote a column for a while about his “special angel.” I knew it was wrong but I found myself stuck in a dilemma. I wanted privacy for my little girl and the family I had created, but I also knew that every time she and Lawrence appeared on the cover of my magazine, it had huge sales. If I had nothing in the bag to pull in a much-needed sale, it was just so easy to set up another photo shoot with Lawrence and Charlotte. I was roundly criticised for it in the gossip columns who charged me with nepotism and lack of objectivity in my placing my own family on the covers of my magazines. But I knew, and my boss knew, that they were the biggest selling magazines we had ever had. Why stop? Lawrence was too thick to realise what he was doing, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I prostituted my daughter for the sake of my job. I will never, ever forgive myself.

  And of course, Jim Craig wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to claim me back. No sooner had Charlotte been born than he rang me on my private line. I didn’t even stop to wonder how he got my number. He always tracked me down eventually.

  “I know you’ve just got out of hospital, baby, but we need to talk, and we need to talk urgently,” he whispered.

  “Jim, fuck off out of my life. Who gave you this number?”

  “You don’t need to ask me that. You know I have the best contacts in the business, that’s what all the awards were for,” he chuckled.

  ‘Were. Being the operative word. What are you working on now? Mail order brides from Thailand or are you still raping those paedophile exposés?” I grumbled. “Stay out of my life Jim, I thought Lawrence gave you that message.”

  “Well, yes your new little pretty boy lost the plot a bit but I wonder how pleased he would be to learn that his darling ‘special angel’ isn’t his?”

  I broke out into a cold sweat, my chest clenched so tight I thought I would never breathe again.

  “Jim, you know that isn’t true,” I said in a voice I thought I’d never find again.

  “And you know that it is.”

  There had been one night and I’m deeply ashamed to admit it. Lawrence was out of town at some charity event, I was drinking with the girls at our local bar, Tuatara, I was pissed and out of the blue, as so often happened, in walked Jim. Sometimes I seriously wondered if he had me followed such was his accuracy at pinning me down at the exact bar at the right time.

  “Hello, gorgeous, you having a good night?” he said, looking for all the world like the coolest dude in the rock universe.

  “Can you just go away, please?”

  “You know you want it. You know we are the best together. Don’t give up on us, baby,” he laughed, his nose wrinkled, he bought me a drink.

  One drink, two drinks, three drinks, four. I met him back at my house. And we had sex for hours. It was fantastic.

  I was deeply disappointed with myself. I did my best to block it out of my mind because every time I thought about it I knew how truly weak I was. Why couldn’t I stand up to the prick for once?

  There was silence on the phone line as I quickly did some calculations in my head and I realised with horror that he could very well be right. Had we used condoms? I thought we had but I couldn’t swear to it.

  “You know if I had thought for a moment it was yours I would have aborted it, you fuckwit!”

  “Well why don’t we find out?” said Jim. “I want that baby Jane, it’s mine and she’s the baby I’ve always wanted to have with you. You are not going to deny me my right as her father.”

  “Please leave me alone. I can’t believe you are ruining such a special moment for me.”

  “Yes but you were quite happy to parade her in front of the nation on your halfwit partner’s TV show.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want a blood test and you’ll do it for me. Lawrence doesn’t have to know, I’ll go along with that. But she is my baby and I deserve her — and you.”

  With that he hung up.

  I told Christie I was going home early. I desperately needed to see my daughter. I grabbed Charlotte out of her bassinet and hugged her to me, crying long hormonal tears as I slowly realised how fucked up my life was and my part in fucking it up.

  Having exhausted the baby stories Lawrence now felt his image needed the boost of a wedding. Some of his more conservative fans, including his mother, who was a devout Catholic, had been pressuring him to relieve baby Charlotte of her bastard status. I wasn’t interested. Ever since Jim’s call I had been living with the knowledge that one day, any day he could turn up and turn my whole life upside down. I knew that if I rubbed Jim’s nose in it by marrying Lawrence that day could come a lot earlier. And let’s face it, not that long ago I had woken up with the realisation that I wasn’t too happy about living with a show pony. For now I was happy to stay in my new family but marriage was something I had no intention of entering into. Lawrence had other plans.

  When Charlotte was about six months old I was picking her up from daycare when suddenly we were surrounded by Lawrence’s producer, the very scrawny, badly dressed and unlikeable Annie Walker, and a camera crew.

  “Hi, Annie, you here to do a story?” I asked, trying to keep hold of Charlotte and her backpack which was slowly falling out of my hands.

  “Yes, darling we’re doing a story on you … look at the monitor.”

  And there was Lawrence, grinning at me from his studio, and I realised that we were live.

  “Hi, hon, it’s me. Hi, Charlotte, say hello to Daddy!” he gurgled at us.

  “Hi,” I said slowly trying to back away, which I would have if Annie hadn’t put her scrawny arse between me and my escape route.

  “Darling, I wanted to ask you something very special and I wanted to do it so that my fans could share in this moment … wait for it … will you marry me?”

  At that moment Annie showered poor Charlotte and I with confetti and out of the back of a van parked across the road emerged a team of cheerleaders who started to chant around us.

  “Give us an L, give us a J, who loves Lawrence who loves Jane. Yeahhhhhhhh.”

  At which point Charlotte started whimpering into my neck and I could think of nothing else to do except smile sweetly and say, “yes, of course, honey.” Just to make the horrible nightmare go away.

  “You won’t regret, it you gorgeous thing,’ he replied as a recording of “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” screamed out. And that was it. He changed camera angles and delivered the unforgettable line: “There you have it ladies, lovely Lawrence is taken and you saw it right here, on Two Twonight, don’t go away.”

  When the commercials played I ran for the car, but not before I told Annie she was a sick, fucking bitch and wondered when Lawrence started referring to himself in the third person.

  “It’s nothing you
wouldn’t do for your precious magazine, Jane,” Annie squawked as I drove off, narrowly missing her.

  “How dare you put me in that position?” I screamed at Lawrence later. “I am sick and tired of Charlotte and now me being your ticket to the next story. There is more to life than your bloody profile.”

  “That’s rich coming from someone who used her own partner and daughter to sell her magazines,” he shot back.

  “Yes but I’m not a celebrity, there’s an important distinction. I don’t want to be one, I never wanted to be one and just because I’m reluctantly marrying one, doesn’t mean I have to be one of you shallow, thoughtless arseholes.”

  It wasn’t the most romantic way to agree to get married, I admit. And deep down I realised that we had a baby daughter together, we were co-habiting, and so there wasn’t really any difference between that and being married. And Lawrence was right. It was my magazine running all the stories.

  Somewhere along the way I had created the nightmare that Lawrence had become and was sitting in the backseat going along for the ride.

  After years of editing a celebrity magazine you’d think I would have seen it coming, but there I was, Lawrence’s other half, with my baby daughter on her way to becoming a mini-star and I was powerless to stop it. I now had two men running my life. Jim Craig and my fiancé.

  8

  The more Lawrence became devoted to his daughter the more I was haunted by the prospect that Charlotte might not be his. What if Jim Craig was the father? How could I look at her each day wondering if the man who had stalked me for most of my life was actually her father? And Jim kept calling. If I didn’t give him a blood sample then he would go to the Sunday newspapers, he said. I managed to keep him away for that first year by agreeing to meet him and using delay tactics. I reasoned keeping him onside was buying me some time. He got increasingly angry. Gone were the days when he was simply trying to coerce me into bed with his “baby” language. His obsession had turned hostile and he seemed to hate me more than life itself. One day he turned up at the office, a bit the worse for wear.