Gucci Gucci Coo Read Online Free PDF Page B

seemed less and less likely, each remained the center of the other’s life.
    “Ironic, isn’t it?” Chanel often said. “I come from a family of six. Mum only had to look at me dad and she’d be knocked up. My sisters are the same. All breed like blinkin’ rabbits. Then there’s me: one miscarriage and that’s me lot.”
    Ruby once asked her how she could bear to work in a mother and baby shop where she was constantly surrounded by children and pregnant women. Chanel had shrugged. “Dunno, suppose by rights I should want to run a mile,” she said. “But I love babies and kids and I’m buggered if I’m gonna run away and let my problems get the better of me. I just know me and Craig ’ave to plow on with the IVF and that one day it will be me standing the other side of this counter trying to decide which Moses basket to choose.” Chanel paused. “Bloody hell, I must sound like some obsessed nutter.” Ruby told her she didn’t sound at all like a nutter, just utterly determined.
    Despite Chanel’s courage and bravado, there had been two or three occasions when Ruby had noticed her in the stockroom pressing a Babygro or tiny woolen cardigan to her cheek. Each time her eyes had been full of tears.
     
    “S O ,” C HANEL SAID now, “your checkup at the hospital go OK?”
    Ruby let out a tiny sigh. “You may as well know. You’ll only hear it from Fi the next time she comes in.” She explained about Dr. Double Barrel and the stamp.
    “You know,” Chanel said, apparently not in the least bit shocked by what she’d just heard, “I used to go out with this bloke who was really into sex toys. Only, because neither of us ’ad much money, we used to improvise. Instead of Chinese love balls I used to make do with an ’ard-boiled egg.”
    Ruby looked at her, incredulous.
    “Of course, you ’ad to keep the shell on,” Chanel went on. “If you’d peeled it, it would’ve disintegrated. Anyway, one day the egg got stuck and I ended up in the emergency room, so I know how you must’ve felt. It was the most embarrassing two hours of my life.”
    “I can see that,” Ruby said, “but I bet you didn’t have the added humiliation of some gorgeous American doctor overhearing you on the phone telling your friend that you had a stamp lodged in your vagina.”
    “Omigod. How gorgeous?”
    “Very.”
    “What on earth did you say?”
    Ruby told her. Chanel burst out laughing, but was nevertheless hugely impressed by Ruby’s quick thinking.
    Chanel was still commiserating between giggles, when a couple of customers came in. They were typical trustafarian mummies: ski-slope cheekbones, expensive highlights, each with a little Gucci bag slung over one shoulder. Even though it was cold and raining they were both wearing sunglasses—albeit as hair bands. One of them had really taken the early September chill to heart and was wearing a three-quarter-length fake fur coat.
    “Blimey,” Chanel muttered to Ruby. “I wonder ’ow many Muppets ’ad to die for that.” Ruby shushed her, but it was as much as she could do to stop herself bursting out laughing. The other thing Ruby loved about Chanel was her irreverence.
    From their slightly awkward body language and the unfamiliar way they were chatting, Ruby got the impression the women didn’t know each other that well and that they had probably bumped into each other outside the shop.
    The woman in the coat was about six months pregnant and had a toddler in tow. The other was carrying her newborn in a leather and sheepskin Bill Amberg papoose. The papoose hinted to Ruby that the woman was a natural-childbirth-St.-Luke’s mother. The too-posh-to-push brigade never used papooses because they spoiled the look of their clothes. Instead they favored the Porsche buggy.
    The toddler, a little boy, was whining and demanding to be given the packet of potato chips his mother was holding.
    “Not until you say the magic word, Finn. What is it? Pl…Pl…”
    Finn turned down