By Janet
Cassy looked at the pictures filling the screen, the latest celebrity couple smiling broadly, their white teeth gleaming as they presented their stunningly beautiful new baby to the World. They’d used a surrogate, of course, why ruin your figure when somebody else would take one for the team, at a price.
George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan came into her mind. Duncan had apparently suggested to him that if they had a child together, it would have the perfect combination of her beauty and his brains. He had countered this, however, by saying that the opposite was also just as likely to happen, which would be far from ideal. There would have been no such chances taken with this baby, though, Cassy thought.
Cassy’s interest in celebrity babies had started some months earlier with a chance meeting with a man in a pub. Okay, it was a blind date; she’d swiped right for him on a dating app. In his profile, he said he worked in a hospital. It wasn’t until a few dates in that she discovered Josh worked in a private hospital with very wealthy clients. She’d said she was a travel agent, and no, the discount wasn’t great, so all’s fair in love and war. He was coy about what he did, but using her journalist skills, she deduced that it was something to do with helping couples get the baby they wanted via IVF. With further help from half a bottle of Tequila, she discovered that he was a geneticist and, from the other half, that he edited the genes of celebrity embryos to order. They had a menu for clients to choose from, for God’s sake, eye colour, height, hair colour, intelligence and so on. He’d slunk into a drunken stupor at this point, waking the next day none the wiser but with a banging headache. This discovery didn’t bother her as much as she thought it would, as it was all legal and above board, but it was a chance remark a few days later that piqued her interest.
They’d arranged to see a rerun of Terminator 2, which Josh loved, surprising for such a nerdy guy. He’d rung to cancel shortly after six. He’d had a hell of a day and just wanted to chill with a few beers and some indie rock, another surprise. This guy was full of surprises. He hoped she didn’t mind. No problem, she said, but suggested a Chinese, they both had to eat, didn’t they? She’d pick it up from Yan’s on her way. And don’t worry, she’d leave early; they both had work the next day. Besides, she loved a bit of the Arctic Monkeys. Chilling on the sofa, listening to D is for Dangerous, Cassy gently pressed Josh about his day. They’d had a return, he said. Something had gone wrong, and the client hadn’t got what they wanted. The boss had dealt with it; he didn’t know how and didn’t want to know, but he was furious. This had been the sixth return this month. They had spent the day reviewing protocols and practising procedures. Not his mistake, Carl’s, again, that slapdash idiot, and they had all paid for it.
It wasn’t until Cassy got home that the enormity of what Josh had said hit her. They’d had a return, and the boss had dealt with it, he’d said. That meant that a child had been returned, but how had it been dealt with? Cassy knew this was the scoop she had been waiting for to transform her career. She rang in the pitch to her editor straightaway, an exposé on the sinister side of the trade in designer babies. He lapped it up. You’ve got it, he said, I’ll give you Mark, he’s the best for covert filming. And be careful.
Josh got really annoyed when she brought up the topic of the return, a few days later, and she knew she wouldn’t get any more out of him. She told him she would be away for work for the next few months. They were expanding their reach into Africa, and she’d been asked to secure deals with hotels and tour operators. It might be best if they cooled it for a while; she’d catch up when she got back. He looked a bit crestfallen, but it didn’t take him much time to change his status on the app to single.
What they don’t tell you when you study journalism is that most of it involves hours, days, and months of desk research before any real action takes place. Painstakingly trawling through office waste from the hospital, which the cleaners were happy to collect for her, they were just going to chuck it out anyway, so didn’t see any harm in it; gave Cassy a few interesting leads. It never ceased to amaze her how little care was taken by organisations like the hospital in the way they disposed of their confidential information. She was sure that their celebrity clients would be filing suit after suit if they found out what she had uncovered. Most of it wasn’t for now, but she had stored away a few choice bits for the future. It seemed that the hospital owned a remote, disused RAF base in the north of Scotland that they were doing building work on. There were also a few nursery nurses and a paediatrician working there. Why would you need childcare staff in such a place?
***
This is the start of an idea that I am working on. I’d like to know:
- Is the idea interesting enough?
- Do you like the characters?
- Style is quite conversational, is that OK?
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