I can honestly say too that I’d never intended you more, never wanted to conceive you more — if, hot with lust for your father, I’d never have quite put it to myself in such cool terms — as on the evening after Uncle Eddie was buried. I really thought it was going to happen. In which case, it would have been our bedroom in Herne Hill. Or, very nearly, the upstairs landing. Did your father have the same sense of propitiousness too? He was grieving for his Uncle Eddie. On the other hand, he was definitely up for it.
But, obviously, it didn’t work. Just think, if it had, you’d have been born in 1973. You’d have been January babies, just like your dad. A tough month, on the purse, for me. By now (just think) you’d be twenty-two. Though why am I assuming — it’s simply a habit I can’t ever get out of — that you would always have been two?
It plainly didn’t work, then or for another six years: things you must surely have considered. Four years until we married, starting from that fabled meeting on Brighton beach, then another period, twice as long, before we got round to having you. But we didn’t leave it too late, clearly, and parents like to have a little time before they enslave themselves to the next generation. All the same, you must know — which puts a very different colour on it — that we were very much meaning and intending and trying, at least as long ago as that spring of 1972.
We were definitely trying. I wouldn’t like to say for exactly how long. I would have kept a note, at least a mental one, of when exactly we went “ex-contraception,” but it’s gone. It had been a long while anyway. You don’t expect that it will be bingo, first time, you try again, but how long is a trial period? Or periods?
What was significant about that year of Uncle Eddie’s death, even for your lives, even right back then, was that it was the year, the summer, in which we made a solemn, slightly shamefaced, but apparently necessary agreement that we would each go to the appropriate clinical facility, to have ourselves tested. We looked sadly and sympathetically at each other, as if one of us might have to choose, heads or tails, and one of us might have to lose. At this stage we still hoped.
But I have to say — and you must both be starting to muster an intense interest — that this was, in all we’d known so far, the worst moment of our lives. Little war babies to whom nothing especially dreadful, let alone warlike, had happened. The divorce of your parents, the death of an uncle — these things, for God’s sake, aren’t the end of the world. But this little crisis, even before we knew it was insuperable, was like a not so small end of the world. In one, strictly procreative sense, it might be exactly that.
You yourselves may think, before you think any further: hey, come on, what was the great tragedy? Had some terrible accident occurred? You yourselves, putting yourselves in our position (though how exactly do you do that?), may think: but what had so drastically changed? Wasn’t life, weren’t we, just the same? Though wouldn’t that be — forgive me for thinking the next thought for you — only to cancel out yourselves?
These are the 1990s, I know, not the primitive Seventies. Sometimes I think you live in some cool and remedied world where every glitch has its fix, every shock its shrug. But we’ll see tomorrow.
It was a blow, my darlings, a true blow. And where it truly hurts. It turned out there was a problem and that the problem was your dad’s, not mine. To make matters worse, I got my all-clear first. I was reproductively A1. Your dad had been slower about things or he’d just got a later appointment. I think he’d assumed that, what with all the gynaecological complexities…Let’s see what they say about Paulie first. I think he was being a typical bloke. It surely couldn’t be anything so simple, so simple and deflating, as you know what. But now he had to go down to the clinic for some further testing and double-checking and to receive his final judgement.
If only he’d known — when he was screwing around at Sussex, before he met me, and being careful or, apparently, lucky. If only I ’d known. All those years on the pill. But, of course, that wasn’t the point. There were no real jokes to be made along those lines, none at all. If I’d known — well, I’d have known. And if he’d known, before he met me, then by some bizarre process of honourable self-sacrifice that is hard to imagine, he’d have had to tell me, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he? By all that’s fair and right, he’d have had to tell me, pretty soon. And I’d have had to respond, wouldn’t I? Pity your poor mum. And that moment in the sand dunes at Craiginish perhaps would never have happened. Mikey and me would never have been Mikey and me.
We didn’t use, we carefully avoided, the word “fault.” And if it was your dad’s problem, it was still, at least for a little while, not beyond all possible reprieve. It still might, depending on that final double-checking — depend. An unfortunate word, perhaps. My tests were at least just tests, passive tests. Poor Mike must have felt that his tests, even if he knew scientifically it wasn’t so, were tests at which he had to try harder, his very hardest, to do his upmost best.
One has to count so many things in life. Days, hours, minutes. Years, birthdays. Money. The miles between places. How many metres you’ll need for those new curtains. Calories, pounds, blood pressure, heart rate. Days since your last period. Your dad spends a lot of time, these days, counting sales figures. Once he counted baby snails. Is there a word for them: snailets?
But there’s one thing in my life I never thought I would be concerned with counting. You can’t see them, after all, though there are millions and millions of them, apparently, in any given — I don’t know what the right word is either — sample. It must be like counting shoals of herring, or hordes of frantic lemmings, but worse. How do you count them? I still don’t know. Ask your dad. And you’d think that if they were there by the million, you wouldn’t really have to count them all. You’d think that just one million or a good deal fewer than a million might be enough. Five, say.
But life is based, it seems, on this extraordinary percentage of waste. It would be like trying to count all these individual raindrops pattering down now outside, but blending into just one soft, continuous, murmuring gush. How many drops in just a minute, say, on just this house, on just its slippery roof and gurgling gutters, or on just the lawn below and the dripping garden leaves? And any given drop, potentially, life or death for some flower.
No, I’ve counted lots of things, but I never thought I’d become so keenly involved in counting sperm.
15
HE WENT TO SEE a man called Chivers. I don’t suppose he’ll give you these intimate details tomorrow. I never met Doctor Chivers. He made me think, inevitably, of jam jars. He made me think of Doctor Pope: all those visits for the opposite reason. Doctor Chivers said your dad was “less than two million per millilitre,” which still sounded like an awful lot to me. But your dad, who was a biologist and didn’t need a doctor to tell him, said, “Or about one chance every blue moon.”
So, there you are. You were a chance — two chances — in a blue moon.
Nothing changes, of course, nothing is outwardly different. When a man is given this news, nobody hangs a sign round his neck, or anywhere else, saying “Out of Order.” It’s true of so many things in life, perhaps. It was like, I couldn’t help thinking at the time, when a woman first becomes pregnant. No one would know, she may not even know herself, but no sign lights up for other people, even if it does for her. No one can tell if the girl or boy who was a virgin yesterday is no longer a virgin today. That’s an unfair example, perhaps. There are all kinds of ways in which life just carries on and no one would know.