Page 13 of The Mother-in-Law

‘The girls will want champagne,’ Eamon tells the waitress in the black pants and crisp white shirt. ‘If there’s one thing I know about girls, it’s that they always want champagne.’

Eamon’s wife, Julia, nods enthusiastically. She calls over the waitress and selects a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

‘Lovely choice,’ the waitress says.

The blood drains from Ollie’s face. Even before we arrived, he was nervous about how much this meal was going to cost (meals with Eamon were never cheap), but when we arrived at Arabella’s and saw the white tablecloths and the menu with no prices, I could see he was panicking. Now Dom Pérignon. It’s a choice made even more frustrating by the fact that I’m eight weeks pregnant, thus neither able to drink it nor disclose that I’m not drinking it, which means leaving a very expensive glass of champagne undrunk at the end of the night.

‘So how’s the house hunting going?’ Julia asks us once the waitress has disappeared. Her face creases with worry, as if she is asking about a rare disease with which one of us has been recently diagnosed. ‘You know, we used a great buyer’s advocate when we bought our place in South Yarra. Why don’t we give you his details?’

The fact that Ollie and I rent a home is an endlessly perplexing fact to all of Ollie’s friends. At some point it seems to have been universally accepted that we simply can’t find the right place, the assumption being that Ollie’s parents would foot the bill for the place of our choosing. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Instead, in the year since we married, Ollie and I have been saving hard for a down payment. Currently, with both of us working, we earn a good income but soon, fingers crossed, I’ll be home with a baby. And sadly, no buyer’s advocate will be able to help us if we don’t have any money.

If it were up to me, I’d simply point out the fact that Ollie’s parents aren’t footing the bill, but Ollie can be oddly coy about these things. And so I say nothing and play along.

‘Why not?’ Ollie says. ‘Can’t hurt, can it?’

Julia nods, delighted she can be of assistance, and Eamon fumbles with his phone, firing off the contact to Ollie. I really don’t understand the games Ollie’s friends play, spinning every failure or downturn as ‘a wonderful opportunity to go in a new direction’. I’d love to see Eamon’s and Julia’s faces if we were to say,Actually I can guarantee your buyer’s advocate would not be advocating properties in the areas we’re looking at! Ha, ha, ha.

‘Anyway,’ Eamon says, sliding his phone back into his jacket pocket. ‘S’meals!’

Eamon has been trying in vain to explain his new business to Ollie from the moment we arrived. Lord knows why! Every time I see him, Eamon appears to be cooking up a new business idea, claiming it is going to be the next big thing, talking about how people need to get on board early. For a while he franchised mobile spray tan businesses, then he manufactured children’s fingerprinting kits. He’d had varied success, according to Ollie, and you couldn’t fault his tenacity. I just wished he’d stop discussing it all in painstaking detail over dinner, when anyone could see Ollie was entirely focused on figuring out how we could get out of the restaurant for less than five hundred bucks.

‘They’re a smoothie for a meal. Chock full of superfoods. The fresh food is delivered to your door in ziplock bags, you just have to stick it all in your Nutribullet and voilà!’

I blink. ‘So . . . fruit and vegetables? In bags? That’s what it is?’

‘Not fruit and vegetables.’ There’s a note of triumph in Eamon’s voice. ‘Nutritionally balancedmeals. You can drink it at your desk and call it lunch.’

‘Like meal replacement shakes?’

‘But with actual fresh food instead of chemicals.Superfoods.’

Eamon has said ‘superfoods’ at least seventeen times since we arrived and I find myself desperate to ask him what a superfood is because I suspect he doesn’t know. But again, for Ollie’s sake, because they have been friends since kindergarten, and their parents know each other, I force myself to abstain.

‘Interesting. Well good luck!’ I say.

He’ll need it.

But Eamon isn’t listening to me, he’s too focused on Ollie. ‘How are things with you then, old boy? How are things in the recruitment world?’

‘Things are good,’ Ollie says. ‘Did a great placement last week, actually. The guy, Ron, was sixty, and he’d been out of work for six months. He really needed to work for another five years before he could retire, but everyone was telling him he had no hope because his entire specialty was in a system that was now obsolete. I promised him I’d find him something and then boom, last week, I found a client who was upgrading their ERP from a system that Ron virtually wrote during the eighties. Now he’s the head of data conversion. Neither Ron nor the client could believe their luck.’

Ollie beams. I love seeing him like this. Helivesfor putting the right candidate in the right job, particularly the ones that are hard to place. He listens to candidates during interviews and by the time they leave they are usually friends. Unfortunately it is an asset that is rarely rewarded in an industry that values goals and targets above human relationships, and for this reason most of Ollie’s colleagues have risen ahead of him into management while he has stayed exactly where he started, agonising over placements for candidates like Ron.

‘Cool, cool,’ Eamon says. ‘You’ve been there a while though, right? Don’t suppose you’ve thought about extending your wings a bit? You’ve got some pretty valuable contacts now. The world’s your oyster. You can’t keep working for the man forever.’

This little speech reeks of someone who wants something. I feel myself brace.

‘All right, spit it out,’ Ollie says, clearly interpreting Eamon’s speech as I did. ‘You want me to join your business, is that it? Or start a new business with you? Or invest in a business?’

Eamon tries to look insulted. ‘Can’t a guy be interested in his old mate’s career? But, since you mention it, I might be looking for a business partner.’ He grins.

‘In your smoothie business?’

‘Meal replacements,’ Eamon corrects. ‘Withsuperfoods!’

‘How could I possibly help you with that?’ Ollie asks.

You could give him money, I think to myself.Or, rather, your father could. At least that is what Eamon is thinking.