Inconceivable

by Ben Elton

  For a little while I was thrilled, actually, because Lucy was being very positive about the whole idea. She seems to think that bringing the subject of infertility into the realms of normality via the medium of comedy is a very empowering thing. I could not agree more, of course, especially if I win a BAFTA.

  I was soon to be disappointed, though. She still hasn’t relented about her own privacy and I can see that it’ll be a little while before I can even think about telling her.

  Anyway, I was just getting the needle ready for the plunge, having prepared my target on the outer, upper quarter of her bum as I have done every night for a week, when she brought up the subject of casting. She said that there’d been an offer put in on Carl Phipps to play the husband. I gritted my teeth and resolved to change the subject when she started to eulogize about the bastard. Saying that she thought he would be superb, being such a nice man and a truly sensitive actor and of course so good looking. I swear I did not mean to jab the needle in so clumsily, well obviously I didn’t, I’m not a thug. I just jerked involuntarily, hearing her being so nice about the snake. It brought back all the memories of what I’d read and shouldn’t have read and reminded me that although Lucy had maintained her honour she had done so reluctantly and that she still fancies him.

  Anyway, I feel terrible now for being such a clod with the needle and have just brought her Horlicks and some toast in bed. God, she looks gorgeous, sitting there under the duvet cupping her mug in both hands. I resolve this night to look after her for ever and never let her be hurt. After, that is, I’ve broken her heart by revealing my black treachery. But she’ll understand, won’t she? I mean surely.

  Dear Penny,

  I did something today that I swore I wouldn’t do. I went to Mothercare. Only for a few minutes at lunchtime, but it was probably not a good idea. Everything looks so lovely. The clothes, the toys, all these amazing new buggies with their great big fat wheels. I love all that stuff. I don’t know why. I bought some things too. Well, why the hell shouldn’t I? Just a couple of baby-gros and a fluffy ball with a bell inside it. I don’t see how it can do any harm to have a positive attitude and if the IVF does fail then my cousin’s just had one and I can send it all to her.

  Dear Sam,

  Things are moving at an incredible pace on the film. One of the good things about it being produced by a television company is that they’re not afraid of tight schedules. And with Ewan set to begin pre-production on his first US feature in only five months, the schedule could not be tighter. It’s all cast now; Carl Phipps as Colin (my God, fate has a sick sense of humour) and Nimnh Tubbs as Rachel. Nimnh is not as big a star as Carl but she’s very highly regarded, having played most of the younger Shakespeare totty at the RSC and recently a ‘Hedda Gabler for the Millennium generation’ (Daily Telegraph) at the National. I have not yet discovered how to pronounce Nimnh but I must make sure I do before rehearsals begin which, believe it or not, is at the beginning of next week. Normally you don’t rehearse much with film, but apparently Ewan always does a week with the principals ‘Just to create a sense of community,’ he says.

  Snow White,

  Dear Penny,

  I went to the Disney store in Regent Street in my lunch break today. I really must stop this. Except actually I’ve always wanted to own the video of

  which is a genuine movie classic. As for the other toys and videos and the little Pocahontas outfit I bought, well, they’ll be useful to have around when friends come over with their children, even if I don’t have one of my own. I’ve been thinking a lot about where we’ll put the nursery if we succeed (which I know is statistically unlikely). The spare bedroom is the obvious place. We only ever use it occasionally when Sam gets drunk and snores so loudly I make him go away. It’s got a lovely tree outside it so it’ll be possible to watch the seasons change and with a bit of encouragement I’m sure we could get birds to nest in it. One of those hanging bags of nuts from a pet shop, I should imagine. I’ll buy a book.

  Look, Penny, I know what you’re thinking, or what you would be thinking if you existed, in fact I know what I’m thinking and you’re wrong. I mean I’m wrong. There’s nothing sad or unhealthy about me occasionally buying toys. Why shouldn’t I dream? Why shouldn’t I indulge in a few delicious fantasies? And just supposing they’re not fantasies. Supposing they come true, eh? Oh dear, it would be so wonderful I can hardly bear to think about it.

  Dear Sam,

  Whatever I may think about Ewan casting Carl Phipps, I can’t fault him with Nimnh Tubbs. She’s wonderful. Beautiful and heart- breaking. She was going through some of the stuff I pinched from Lucy’s book today and you could have heard a pin drop. She manages to make it funny and sad at the same time. When she read out that stuff about praying and feeling guilty for only believing in God when she wants something, people clapped, as indeed did I.

  And I suppose if I’m absolutely honest, Carl Phipps isn’t bad either. He does seem to have a kind of natural intensity which doesn’t look forced or anything. When he does the lines it’s possible for me to almost forget it’s me talking. They were looking at the part where Colin tries to explain to Rachel about what she thinks is his indifference towards the idea of kids and he admits that in the abstract sense he doesn’t want children…

  ‘ ‘But as a part of you, as an extension and expression of our love, that I do want and if it happened, I’d be delighted. No, I’d be more than delighted. I’d be in Heaven.’’ Phipps sort of paused here and looked into Nimnh’s eyes. I swear they’d both gone a bit teary, both the actors, that is, not both Nimnh’s eyes, although that as well, obviously. I’d heard that actors achieve the watery-eyed look by pulling at the hairs in their noses but if they did that they did it bloody slyly because I didn’t notice. Anyway, then Carl took Nimnh’s hand and said, ‘But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t. That’s how I see it. If we have children it’ll be another part of us, our love. If we don’t then we’ll still have us and our love will be no less whole.’

  Well, it’s exactly how I feel about Lucy. Not surprising, really, seeing as how I wrote it, but still, it was very moving. Even George, who’s a tough, thick-skinned bastard, seemed quite emotional. He told me that it was good stuff and I told him that I’d meant every word of it.

  After that Ewan called a short break and went off to sit in magnificent, moody isolation while cute girls with spiky hair and yellow-tinted glasses brought him coffee. All the actors and crew made a beeline for the tea and biscuit table as actors and crew always do. I decided to introduce myself to Nimnh who, being an actress, was holding a cup of hot water into which she was jiggling some noxious herbal teabag or other.

  ‘Hi, I’m the writer. I’m so glad you’ve decided to do this, Nimnn…Nhimmn…Nmnhm…’

  Of course it was only then that I realized I’d forgotten to check up on how to pronounce the woman’s name and that I had absolutely no idea. I think she was used to it. Well she would be, wouldn’t she?

  ‘It’s pronounced Nahve. It’s ancient Celtic,’ she said and there was a delightful hint of Irish in her voice which I could tell she was rather proud of. ‘I feel my Celtic roots very deeply. My family hail from the bleak and beautiful Western Isles of the Isle of Ireland. My blood is deep, deep green.’

  Well there’s no answer to that, as they say. As it happens, I didn’t need one because just then Carl came up, all blokey and matey.

  ‘I’m Carl. You’re Sam, aren’t you? I know your wife slightly. She works at my agency.’

  Yes, you know her slightly, mate, I thought, and slightly is as much as you’re ever going to know her, you lying sneaking bastard.

  ‘Tremendous script, mate,’ Carl continued. ‘Really tremendous.’

  I thanked him and then when his back was turned managed to surreptitiously put ketchup in his tea. A small but important victory. Then the PA called the company back to rehearse. As Nimnh passed me she pointed to the script and the speech Ewan wanted to look at.

  �
�I cried when I first read it,’ she said.

  The terrible thing is, so did I.

  I’d only just put it into the script that morning. I couldn’t put it in earlier because Lucy hadn’t written it. She takes her book to Spannerfield and if the queue’s long, which it normally is, she sometimes jots down her thoughts.

  Nimnh sat on a chair in the middle of the rehearsal room, with a pen and a book in her hand (I’ve even used that device in the film. It acts as a sort of narration), and read the speech.

  ‘ ‘I don’t know. As we get closer to the day that will either see me reborn or on which I’ll just die a bit more, the longing inside me seems to become almost physical, as if I’ve swallowed something big and heavy and very slightly poisonous. A sort of morning sickness for the barren and unfulfilled. Do I dare to hope that perhaps soon the longing will end?’’

  I could hardly bear it. Nimnh was reading the speech (and reading it very well), but all I could hear was Lucy. All I could see was Lucy, sitting in a crowded waiting room all alone. Scribbling down her thoughts, thoughts I was now making public.

  ‘ ‘…every mother and child I see begs that question, a simultaneous moment of exultation and despair. Every pregnancy is a beacon of hope and also a cruel reminder that for the present at least there is nothing inside me except the longing. And perhaps there never will be. I don’t know why it is that women feel such a deep need to create life from within themselves, to yearn for a time in which their own flesh will bring them comfort, but I know that they do. That’s the one experience that women who have children easily miss out on in life…The intensely female grief which accompanies the fear that those children might never exist.’’

  Everyone was very positive about the speech. Ewan loves the way I’m ‘building the script in layers’, as he calls it. George said that he really felt I’d cracked the female protagonist.

  ‘Nothing to do with me, mate,’ I told him. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I took on a woman co-writer.’

  Dear Penny,

  I’ve just re-read some of the stuff I’ve been writing recently and quite frankly I’m a bit embarrassed. Mawkish, self-pitying drivel. I’m sorry I bored you with it. All that stuff about the ‘longing within’ and ‘morning sickness for the barren’. Great Christ, three-quarters of the world is starving! How can I be so self-indulgent? All I can say is thank GOD no one will ever, ever read it. Still, it does help to get it all out, even if I do sound like an absolute whinger.

  I went for another blood test today as per. That’s about it. Nothing else to tell.

  Not long now. My ovaries feel like sacks of potatoes having got about fifty eggs on them apiece.

  Dear Sam,

  I’ve now officially handed in my notice at BBC Radio. It’ll mean going into debt because the advance they’ve given me for my film is nothing like enough to keep us, but it has to be done. I’ve taken so many days off in the last couple of months that they’d even begun to notice at Broadcasting House. Normally, if you don’t push your luck they’ll let you bumble on until you retire but even they have limits so I thought I’d better go before I was pushed.

  I dropped in on Charlie Stone’s studio on my last morning, to say goodbye.

  ‘Right, OK, nice one,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

  Which is, I think, a fitting epitaph for my career in youth broadcasting.

  I haven’t told Lucy about me chucking my job. How can I? She hasn’t got the faintest idea what I’m up to. Oh well, one lie more or less won’t hurt.

  There was a big script conference today prior to commencement of principal photography. It was held at Above The Line in Soho because Ewan didn’t want to schlep all the way out to White City.

  Therefore George and Trevor and even Nigel had to schlep into town. Interesting, that. It strikes me that Nigel’s not as tough as he’d like to think he is. The BBC are putting up most of the money but Nigel lets the Corporation get treated like junior partners to three haircuts with half a rented floor in Soho.

  And why?

  Film, that’s why. The whole world is bewitched by film, the inimitable glamour of the silver screen. Or at least the whole of the London media world, which is the whole world as far as we who live in it are concerned. All other narrative art forms have come to be seen as drab and joyless compared to film. Novels, theatre, TV? All right in their way, but in the final analysis boring.

  Boring and old-fashioned, to be seen as a stepping stone, no more than that, a stepping stone into the only real place to be, the glorious world of film! If a novelist writes a novel the first question his first interviewer will ask is, ‘Will it be made into a movie?’ If an actor gets a part in a ten-million-pound TV mini series they’ll say to their friends, ‘Of course it’s only telly.’ The directors of subsidized art theatres sweat out their time commissioning plays which are as much like movies as four actors and a chair will allow them to be, waiting for that longed- for day when they’ll have amassed enough credibility to get out of theatre and into film. It’s Hollywood, you see. After ninety years we’re all still mesmerized. We still want to get there.

  Nobody working at the BBC is going to get to Hollywood but somebody from Above The Line might and in Ewan’s case will.

  Which is why we come to him.

  Fortunately for me it was a very positive meeting indeed.

  Everybody agreed that the current draft of the script is good.

  Superb, actually, was the word being bandied about. Ewan made it clear that he was very happy.

  Taking her cue from Ewan, Petra produced sheaves of faxes and declared that LA and New York are also very happy, that everyone in fact is very happy.

  It was an absolute love fest.

  Then of course came the inevitable caveat. This is a thing that always happens to writers in script discussions, no matter how enthusiastic those discussions might be. Somebody says ‘except for’. I’ve done it to hundreds myself; ‘Everybody is absolutely delighted, except for…’

  ‘The ending,’ Nigel said, and they all nodded.

  It was a fair call, I had to admit.

  ‘Vis-a-vis the absence thereof,’ said Petra putting the unspoken doubt into words.

  I knew I would have to stick to my guns. With Lucy and me so close to a conclusion for better or for worse, I just don’t feel that I have it in me yet to decide how my story ends. It turns out that Lucy was right all along. You do need to write from the heart. It does have to come from within, and at the moment I don’t have the heart to decide on the fate of my characters. I don’t know how I’ll feel when the news comes through, so I don’t know how they’ll feel. That doesn’t mean I’m going to make Colin and Rachel’s result the same as Lucy’s and mine. I might but I just don’t know yet.

  ‘It’s only the last page,’ I said. ‘The last few lines, in fact. I’ll hand it in when I said, in a few days.’

  ‘But Sam,’ Nigel protested. ‘Ewan starts filming next week.’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t need to start with the end, does he?’ I said, looking at Ewan, who stared into his Aqua Libra in a suitable ‘I shall pronounce my conclusions in my own time’ manner.

  ‘With respect,’ Petra said in fact very nearly snapped ‘it’s a bit difficult keeping the American distributors and their money in place when we don’t know how the story comes out.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how the story comes out,’ I protested. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t.’

  Ewan hauled himself from the depths of his futon and reached for an olive.

  ‘Look, it’s my movie, you ken?’ he said, which is directors all over for you. I’d written it. Various people were paying for it.

  Hundreds of people were going to be involved in making it. But it would, of course, be ‘his’ movie, a ‘Ewan Proclaimer Film’. On another occasion I might have said something (although I doubt it), but it turned out that Ewan was on my side so I let it go.

  ‘As I’ve made clear before,’ he continued, ‘if Sam wants to hold back on th
e ending then that’s fine. It’s good motivation for the actors and it keeps us all on our toes. They’re playing two people over whom hangs a life or no-life situation. I’m very happy to help them to maintain that ambiguity. Improvisation is the life blood of creative endeavour.’

  Well, that shut them up, let me tell you.

  There’s a church in Hammersmith next to the flyover which I call ‘the lonely church’. I call it that because it’s been almost completely cut off by roads from the community it was built to serve. Millions of people see it every year but only at fifty miles an hour. Its spire pokes up beside the flyover as the M4 starts to turn back into the A4. It’s a beautiful church, although you wouldn’t know it until you were about ten feet away from it. I found myself there today. I’d just sort of wandered off after my appointment at the hospital and I must have walked two or three miles because suddenly there I was standing outside the lonely church of Saint Paul’s as I now know it to be called. I’d never seen the bottom two thirds of it before but I knew it by the vast elevated roads that roar and fume around it. I didn’t go in, but I sat in the grounds trying to find the faith to pray. I don’t know whether I managed it. I don’t know what it would feel like to really believe in a prayer, I don’t suppose many people do. I mean, you’d have to be pretty majorly religious. I do know that I concentrated very hard and tried to think why I deserved a child and came up with the answer that I deserved one because it was the thing that I wanted more than anything else on earth. I suppose in a way that was a prayer, whatever that means. A prayer to fate, at any rate. Not long now. A couple of weeks at most and then we’ll know.