by Tony Parsons
Then her star faded, and within a few short years the humour of More Tea, Vicar? swiftly seemed as though it came from some older England that was now embarrassing, racist, and ludicrously out of time.
The characters in it – the eye-rolling Jamaican, the goodness-gracious-me Indian, the bumbling Irishman and, yes, the plummy old crumpet from next door, who must have been a bit of a goer in her time – were all swept away on an angry tidal wave of jokes about Mrs Thatcher and bottoms.
Eventually the man in the back of the cab left Olivia alone in the rented St John’s Wood flat and went home to his wife and children. But somehow Olivia never seemed cowed by time and experience. The haughty grandeur she had mastered in the fifties had never deserted her. Megan believed in her.
‘What am I doing, Mum?’
‘You’re doing the right thing, dear.’
‘Am I? I am, aren’t I? What else can I do?’
‘You can’t be tied down, Megan. You’ve got your whole life in front of you. And what if you meet some young buck? Some handsome young surgeon?’ Olivia’s huge eyes twinkled with delight at the thought of this Harley Street hunk. Then she scowled, furiously stubbing out her cigarette, angry with her youngest daughter for throwing away this perfect match. ‘He’s not going to want to take on some other man’s child, is he?’
‘It’s not a baby yet,’ Megan said, more to herself than her mother. ‘Jessica wouldn’t understand that. That’s why I can’t tell her. Or even Cat. It still has a tail, for God’s sake. It’s more like a prawn than a baby. Admittedly, it would grow –’
Her mother sighed.
‘Darling, you can’t have some screaming little shit-machine holding you down. That’s what went wrong for me. No offence, dear. But you can’t have this brat.’
Megan’s eyes stung with unexpected tears.
‘I can’t, can I?’
‘Not now, darling. Not after passing all those exams. And being such a clever girl at medical school. And emptying bedpans in those horrid hospitals in the East End.’ Her mother looked pained. ‘Oh, Megan. A baby? Not now, chicken.’
Megan knew exactly what her mother would advise. That was why she had wanted to see her. To hear that she had absolutely no choice. To be told that there was no other way out. That there was nothing to even think about. Perhaps the reason that Megan was closest to their mother was because she remembered her the least.
The last meeting of Olivia and all of her daughters had been more than fifteen years ago. Megan was a bright-eyed, still boyish twelve-year-old, Jessica a shy, pretty sixteen, pale and quiet after getting mangled on some school skiing trip – at least, that’s what they told Megan – and Cat at twenty was clearly a young woman, emboldened by two years at university, openly bitter and keen to confront their mother over the designer pizzas.
When their mother casually informed them that she would not be attending the prize-giving day at Megan’s school – Megan was always the most academically gifted – because she had an audition to play a housewife in a gravy commercial (‘Too old,’ they said when she had left, ‘too posh.’), Cat exploded.
‘Why can’t you be like everybody else’s mother? Why can’t you be normal?’
‘If I was normal, then you three would be normal too.’
Megan didn’t like the sound of that. Her mother made normality sound scary. Maybe if she was normal then schoolwork wouldn’t come so easily to her. Maybe she wouldn’t be collecting a prize from the headmaster. Maybe she would be as slow and stupid as all the other children.
‘But I want us to be normal,’ Jessica sobbed, and their mother laughed as though that was the funniest thing in the world.
‘How is my little Jessica?’ said Olivia.
‘This is a tough time for her,’ Megan said. ‘She’s been trying for a baby for so long. She would feel terrible about – you know.’
‘Your abortion, yes.’
‘My procedure.’
Olivia never asked about Cat, although she sometimes offered an unsolicited, and unflattering, opinion on her eldest child.
‘I tried to speak to Jessica on the phone recently. Pablo said she was sleeping. Bit of tummy trouble, apparently.’
‘Paulo. His name is Paulo.’
‘Of course. Lovely Paulo with those gorgeous eyelashes. Like a girl, almost. I heard they were taking away her womb or something.’
‘That’s not it. She just needs some tests. She gets these excruciating periods. God, Mother, don’t you know that?’
Olivia looked vague. ‘I never really had much to do with Jessica’s cycle, dear. But you’re right, of course – you can’t talk to her about your, you know, condition.’
Megan stared out over the lake. ‘This should be happening to Jessica. This should be happening to her. She’ll be a terrific mum.’
‘Who’s the father?’ said Olivia, lighting a cigarette.
‘Nobody you know.’
And Megan thought – nobody I know, come to that. How could I have been so stupid?
‘My baby,’ Olivia said, and she touched her daughter’s face. Unlike her sisters, Megan had never doubted that her mother loved her. In her special way. ‘Get shot of the bloody thing, okay? You’re not like Jessica. The little woman who can’t be fulfilled until she has a couple of screaming brats sucking her tits to the floor. You’re not like that. And you’re not like Cat – determined to be a spinster wasting herself on some inappropriate man.’ Her mother smiled triumphantly. ‘You’re more like me.’
And Megan thought, is that really what I am?
Paulo hadn’t been expecting the magazines. They were a surprise. Who would have thought the NHS would provide you with a bit of porn to help you fill your little plastic jug?
Their attempt for a baby had been so overwhelmingly unsexy, so stripped of anything resembling passion or lust – saving up your sperm as though they were points in Sainsbury’s, only doing it when the ovulation test decreed, his wife’s tears when it turned out that the act had all been in vain – that Paulo was stunned by the sight of what he thought of as dirty magazines.
Blushing like a teenager, he grabbed one called Fifty Plus and headed for his cubicle, wondering if that was their chest size, their age or their IQ.
The doctor had assured Paulo that his sperm test wasn’t really a test at all.
‘I don’t want you to feel under any pressure. Nobody expects you to actually fill the little plastic jug.’
But just like any other exam, a sperm test came with the promise of either success or failure. Or it wouldn’t be a test, would it?
So Paulo prepared. But instead of practising three-point turns or studying the Highway Code, he did everything to increase the number of potential lives swimming about inside him, and everything he could to ensure that they would be heading in vaguely the right direction.
Loose pants. Cold baths. Zinc, vitamin E and selenium, all purchased in health shops where both the staff and the clientele looked uniformly and spectacularly unhealthy.
He read all the literature. And there was an amazing amount of it. The human race was forgetting how to reproduce itself. Tap in ‘sperm’ on the search engine, and you almost drowned in the stuff.
The vitamin pills, the roomy pants, the nut-shrinking cold baths – apparently all these were good for the number of sperm, and their motility – their ability to wiggle around in the required fashion. But what was the pass mark? How many million did you need to get the nod?
Surely, Paulo thought, when the sperm hits the egg, all you really need is one?
The examination room was the toilet in an NHS hospital. Paulo had heard rumours that if you had your sperm test done in Harley Street, your wife was allowed to go in there with you and give you a hand.
But in this sprawling NHS hospital, which felt more like some untamed frontier town than a place of healing, where cancer patients in their dressing gowns hungrily sucked cigarettes outside the main reception, and tattooed men with head wounds regularly attack
ed the young nurses who were caring for them for not caring quite quickly enough, you just went in the toilets and made sad love to your little plastic jug.
And yet the event seemed momentous to Paulo. This was something new. This was masturbation for some greater good. After years of doing it behind locked doors – and how he recalled the shame and the fear that his parents would catch him red-handed emerging from the bathroom with a copy of a Sunday paper stuffed down his shirt – he was actually being encouraged to strangle the one-eyed trouser snake, choke the monkey and beat the meat. The world was saying, go ahead, Paulo. Wank yourself stupid.
There was a list of instructions – as if any man needed advice on how to fiddle about with himself – but basically it was just you, your jug, and some pornography, provided by the state.
So much was riding on this ridiculous act. It didn’t feel like his sperm they were testing. It felt like his future, and the future he might have with Jessica. He unzipped his trousers, then immediately zipped them up again, taking deep breaths.
He had it easy. He knew that. He had to ejaculate into a little plastic jug, and he was allowed to do it in the privacy of an NHS toilet. Jessica had had so many examinations that she said she felt like her private parts were now in the public domain.
All these tests, all these judgements – as if it wasn’t up to them if they loved each other, but to some much higher power, ancient and cruel.
Paulo flicked through the pages of Fifty Plus. He hadn’t seen any of this stuff for years. At school, there was a boy known as Spud Face, a cackling, habitual masturbator – thick specs, red cheeks, always giggling inanely by the corner flag during games – who had regularly brought to class what he pronounced ‘good wank fodder’.
Paulo, a shy, thoughtful boy who preferred magazines featuring motors, had always stayed at his desk, reading the latest edition of Car. But one day Spud Face had called Paulo across to the leering, cheering mob that always surrounded his dirty magazines during break.
‘Oy, Baresi, come and look at this, you big poof. Here’s something you can’t get from cars.’
Paulo had caught a glimpse of the magazine and almost fainted – a bearded Asian man with no clothes on was doing something unbelievable to a goat who clearly couldn’t believe his luck. While all the other goats in the neighbourhood were no doubt being beaten and mistreated, this goat was getting a blow job. That goat must have felt like he had won the goat lottery.
It was enough pornography to last Paulo a lifetime. He didn’t like it then, and he didn’t like it now. There was just something a bit too gynaecological about it for his straightforward tastes.
Paulo closed his copy of Fifty Plus. Although he felt like he was semi-retired from his sex life – making love and making babies were clearly two very different things – the women in Fifty Plus did not remotely stir him.
Paulo closed his eyes. He got a grip of himself. And he thought about his wife.
Which made him a different man to all the other wankers in there.
The way Megan found out that her boyfriend was sleeping with somebody else was that she caught him with his hand on her arse. And Megan couldn’t say that he looked exactly unfamiliar with the territory.
Will and Katie were on the up escalator at Selfridges just as Megan was coming down – perfectly placed for a view of Will’s hand casually exploring the valley of the little tart’s bottom. Katie had the decency to gasp when she saw Megan. Will went white, his hand frozen on Katie’s rear, like someone caught with his fingers in the till.
Megan thought, what am I going to do? I just lost my best friend.
‘A woman’s biological destiny is to have a baby,’ Will said. ‘A man’s biological destiny is to plant his seed in as many women as he can. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’
This is what he told her. He told her all the other stuff too – that it didn’t mean a thing, that he loved her, that they had been together for too long to chuck it away because of one mistake. And they had been together for a long time. Megan and Will had been med school sweethearts, living together when most of their contemporaries were playing doctors and nurses at every opportunity. But what it came down to in the end was that he had slept with Katie because the survival of the human race depended upon it.
‘What can I do? I’m programmed to spread my seed. It’s the biological imperative.’
‘That’s on your hard drive, is it? Sticking your miserable dick in strangers?’
‘Katie’s hardly a stranger. You’ve known her since med school.’
‘She was a slapper there, too. Plenty of junior doctors did their advanced biology on Katie.’
‘We grew very close working in accident and emergency at the Homerton. These things happen. You get thrown together.’
‘You mean – oh, no, I’ve slipped! And now my penis has got stuck in Katie! How on earth did this happen? Is that what you mean, you rotten bastard?’
Megan thought that she should have expected something like this. She had noticed a sudden decline in Will’s sex drive when he was doing those six months’ vocational training at the Homerton, while she was off doing her six months’ VTS in paediatrics at the Royal Free.
She had put it down to Will witnessing stab wounds on a regular basis, for the Homerton is in Hackney, and their A & E is busy every night of the year. Now Megan felt she should have guessed that Katie was wagging her tail in the doctors’ mess during tea break. One of the first things that every medical student learns is that the average hospital has the sexual mores of a knocking shop when the fleet’s in. All those extremely young doctors and nurses working all hours of the day and night in a highly stressed environment, most of them too busy for a proper relationship – it did something to the hormones.
As part of her vocational training, Megan had done six months at the Homerton’s A & E herself, and it had done nothing for her libido. She had felt as though she was seeing the world as it really was for the first time in her life. But perhaps she had more imagination than Will and Katie.
He attempted to put his arms around her but she shrugged him off, almost baring her teeth. He really didn’t understand that it was over. How could he? He wasn’t like Megan. His parents had stayed together.
Nobody left in his home. Nobody decided to cut their losses and bolt. He had never seen the rotten, messy aftermath of fucking around.
Will had grown up as the youngest child in a tight, loving family in Hampstead Garden Suburb. That was one of the things she had loved about him. The intact, secure world that he came from, the long Sunday lunches and the gently mocking humour and the years of unbroken happiness. At weekends, and at Christmas, he took her home to his parents and they made her feel like she belonged, and she wanted to be a part of this other family, this other life, this better world.
These kids from their nuclear families made her laugh. Will thought he would always be forgiven, he thought that trust could never be broken and love could never be pissed away. Like all the saps from happy homes, Will believed in his right to a happy ending.
But she snapped the suitcase shut, hefted it from their bed and placed it at his feet.
‘Megan? Come on. Please.’
She saw him now as the rather pathetic figure he had always been. Will was one of those good-looking short guys who are destined to a life of discontent. Sweet enough but totally unreliable, bright but lazy, socially charming but academically listless, he truly wasn’t cut out for a career in medicine. He desperately wanted to be, and his parents – a silvery, gym-fit eye surgeon father and a blonde, well-preserved paediatrician mother – desperately wanted him to be, but during the long years of training their good-looking boy had struggled at every stage.
Will had been one of the unhappy minority of medical students who have to resit their finals, finally scraping a pass only to discover that dealing with death, sickness and gore on a daily basis gave him a funny tummy, and minor league depression. Even his depression was half-hearte
d. Now a part of Megan wanted to strangle him. But she also felt sorry for him. Poor Will. He was wrong for this life. Just as he was wrong for her.
And there was something else he was wrong about. It was true that she was not led around by a part of her anatomy, the way Will’s penis apparently dragged him around like an insane tour guide, taking him to places he had never in a million years planned to visit.
But there were times when Megan’s craving for that kind of human contact was just as urgent. There were days when her yearning – for love, for sex, for something better than both – was far stronger than anything Will could have felt when he bent Katie over in the darkened doctors’ mess at three in the morning. She had a biological imperative of her own.
The big difference was that Will’s craving was determined by a little pink courgette that was on call twenty-four hours a day, vulnerable to the whim of anything in a mini-skirt that took a shine to him. And when it came, Megan’s craving was determined by something far more powerful than that.
It was on one of those craving nights, about two weeks after she had sent Will home to his bitterly disappointed parents in Hampstead Garden Suburb, that Megan went to a party for the first time in ages, and met a young Australian who, after taking a look at the world, was soon to go home to sun and surf, Sydney and his girlfriend.
What was his name again? It didn’t really matter now. She was never going to see him again.
Where Will was small, dark, with cheekbones that really belonged on a woman, the man at the party was tall, athletic, with a nose that had been broken twice playing rugby in college, and once falling off a bar stool in Earls Court.
Not really Megan’s type at all.