Inconceivable

by Ben Elton

  George and Trevor took me out to lunch today. We begin shooting tomorrow and they absolutely insisted that I join them for a final conference. I was delighted to. Now that I’m no longer a BBC exec and on a budget to boot I don’t get to dine at Quark quite as regularly as I used to and I thought it would be almost like old times.

  They were both already seated when I arrived and looking very serious. George didn’t even bother to stare at the waitress’s backside, which must have been a first for him, and Trevor refrained from commenting on the fact that though he did not require wine himself he had no hesitation whatsoever in encouraging us to imbibe.

  All in all, it was not like old times one bit. They got straight to the point.

  ‘Sam,’ said George, but I could see that he spoke for both of them. ‘You’re going to have to tell Lucy about this.’

  It took me completely aback. Silly, really. George and Trevor are both good friends of Lucy and it should have occurred to me that they would be worrying about the obvious autobiographical details that I was exploiting even if they were ignorant about the depths of my betrayal.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Not now. We’re just about to complete a cycle of IVF.’

  ‘Yes, do tell us how it turns out,’ said Trevor, slightly acidly. ‘Or perhaps we should wait to read it in the script.’

  They were both genuinely concerned. It was as obvious to them as it was to me that a pseudonym would not disguise me for ever.

  ‘People are very excited about this project,’ George insisted.

  ‘What are you going to do if it’s a hit? You won’t be able to hide from the media, you know. My God! Imagine if they found out before she did and she read it in the papers, or, worse, got doorstepped by a hack?’

  ‘Even if it’s a flop you can’t possibly keep the fact that you’ve written a movie a secret,’ Trevor insisted. ‘She’s your wife, for heaven’s sake.’

  They’re right, of course, and I certainly didn’t need a fifty-quid lunch (courtesy of the licence payer) for anybody to tell me. They meant well, of course, but in the long run it’s my business, mine and Lucy’s.

  I told them that I’d tell her when I know how the story ends.

  Dear Penny,

  Sam gave me the last injection tonight before egg collection, which we go in for at seven a.m. the day after tomorrow. Rather dramatically, the injection had to be done at midnight. It’s now twelve fifteen but I know I shall have trouble sleeping. Sam’s been very good about the injections. Apart from that one time, they haven’t hurt at all. Talking to some of the women at the hospital, it seems that some husbands (partners, I should say) can’t bring themselves to do it at all, so the poor women have to go in at seven every morning for weeks. Imagine that. It’s boring enough just going in to keep them topped up with the endless amounts of blood they seem to require. Sam told me that he was scared at first but he’d got used to it. I know that I wouldn’t like to have had to inject him with huge needles. I think he’s been quite brave. In fact I think he’s been very good about the whole vile business which I know he would never have got into at all without my insistence. He’s given me a lot of strength. Taking such an interest and always being around when I need him. Some husbands hate it all so much that they try to pretend it isn’t happening. Sam hasn’t been like that at all. Quite the opposite. He’s been fascinated, which has made things much easier for me. I tried to thank him a bit tonight because I know he’s never really, really wanted children. I mean not really.

  She’s wrong about me not really wanting children and I told her so. I told her I really do want us to have children, that I want it with all my heart, and I do. I told her I wanted it because I love her and that our children would be an extension and expression of that love. Another part of us. But if it doesn’t happen then we’ll still have us, that our love will be no less whole…and then I realized that I was quoting the bloody script! And I couldn’t remember whether I’d said it before, or written it in my book, or made it up for the film, or nicked it from Lucy’s book! I suddenly realized that I no longer knew whose emotions were whose. I thought I’ve got to tell her, right now. And I did try. I started to, but I couldn’t. Not now. She’s having her eggs collected tomorrow.

  Sam was a bit distracted, actually. Probably the fact that he’s got to have another hospital wank tomorrow. He hates that so much. Oh well, maybe it’ll be for the last time. Who knows? If we could only score. Anyway, he didn’t say much. I think he wanted to but he didn’t and I didn’t press him. We just held each other. In fact it got quite heated for a minute, but I reminded him that if we made love tonight we could end up with twelve. So we stopped. I feel incredibly close to Sam tonight. I told him that I love him and that it gives me strength to know that whatever happens I’m safe in that love.

  I thought he was going to cry. Then I thought he was going to tell me something. Then he didn’t say anything.

  Dear Sam,

  This morning Lucy and I went to Spannerfield for the big day of egg and sperm collection. We got there at 6.50 a.m. for 7 as instructed, to find a lengthy queue of cold, sheepish-looking people already there. Most of them were women in for injections because they don’t have husbands like me who have the sheer iron guts to do it themselves. Some of us, however, about ten couples, were in for the full business and we were duly led off to a ward with a row of curtained-off beds in it.

  There was a rather nice nurse called Charles. Lucy knew him already but it was all new for us husbands (or partners).

  ‘All right, Lucy,’ said Charles. ‘We’ll just pop this on and hop into bo-bos and, Sam, we’ll be wanting a little deposit from you for the sperm bank, so I’ll just leave a paying-in pot here and I’ll call you when there’s a service till free.’

  Another wanking pot. Great. When I was a kid blithely spanking the plank at any opportunity that arose I never would have even dreamt that I was in fact rehearsing for what would one day be perhaps the most important day of my life.

  Lucy had to put on a sort of nightie-smock that was entirely open at the back. She made a comment about it that nearly made me drop the tossing instructions that I was idly perusing, as if I didn’t know them by heart by now.

  ‘Dignified little number,’ she said. ‘Think I’ll wear it to a première.’

  For a moment I was completely thrown.

  ‘Première!’ I said with what could only have been incriminating alarm. ‘Première of what?’

  ‘Nothing, just any old première,’ she replied, looking at me rather strangely. ‘I was joking.’

  Just then Charles returned and summoned me to do my duty. He did this by poking his head round the curtain and beckoning me with an ominous-looking finger.

  ‘Your chamber awaits,’ he said. And with grim resignation I took up my pot and went.

  There are at least two rooms at the actual unit so the pressure of the queue was somewhat alleviated. In fact Charles told me that I had as much time as I liked because we were all in for the whole day anyway.

  Well, that was some small comfort, but having said it you’ve said everything, because this was the most pressurized visit to Mrs Hand of them all. This, as they say, was shit or bust time and as I sat there alone, in the little room, trousers round my ankles (having duly washed my knob as instructed) I contemplated the awesome nature of my responsibilities. My wife, whom I love very very much, has just gone through six weeks of the most appallingly intrusive therapy. Drugs have been pumped into her at every hour of the day, forcing her body to shut down in a premature menopause prior to it being taken over and coerced into a grotesque fertility, over-producing eggs until her ovaries have become heavy, bloated and painful. Every other day for weeks she has traipsed across London to sit in queues with other desperate women, waiting to have various body fluids taken from her and to have her most intimate womanly self probed and manipulated. The reason for all this is of course her desperate, heart-rending longing for a child, a longing which this day may possibly h
eal.

  Now if at this point I fail to ejaculate successfully into a pot, making absolutely sure that I catch the first spurt, this whole dreadful business will have been a total waste of time. So there I sat with all that pressure, alone in a room, attempting to coax my penis into a firm enough condition for me to masturbate successfully and fulfil the trust and the dreams of the woman I love.

  Sam looked quite pale when he returned from doing his duty. He said he thought he’d got enough. I said I damn well hoped so. They only need one.

  The egg extraction was a rather weird experience. Being there with Lucy while the doctors take over makes you feel like an awkward guest at your own party. When our time came they wheeled Lucy into the theatre, while I padded along behind feeling a complete prat in my green gown, raincap and plastic galoshes.

  I sat up at the non-business end and Lucy was soon snoring rather fitfully, having been put out for the count. They had her legs up in stirrups and a doctor lost no time in getting down to business. There was a little television screen on which he could see what he was doing through some ultrasound technique or other and he talked me through it.

  ‘So the white dot on the screen is the needle. Can you see it moving? I’m lining it up with the follicle, which I pierce. Can you see it deflating?’

  I didn’t answer because it was clearly more of a statement than a question. Besides, I felt too intimidated to speak. I didn’t wish to distract anybody by word or deed. Nonetheless, I could see what he was describing shadowy translucent bubbles being popped by the little white dot and then collapsing as he sucked them out.

  ‘Now we’re removing the fluid from inside the follicle, within which should be the eggs.’

  Sure enough, they were siphoning out test tube after test tube of pale red liquid and then handing them through a little kitchen hatch into what I presumed was the lab.

  It was extraordinary. The lady through the hatch kept shouting, ‘One egg…two more eggs…another egg,’ like a dinner lady. It reminded me of that scene in 101 Dalmatians where the nurse keeps rushing out excitedly saying ‘More puppies!’ Anyway, in the end the doctor had got the lot and so he backed up the Pickford’s removal van between Lucy’s legs and started to dismantle the scaffolding rig he’d put up her.

  On the way home in the car Sam told me all about it. I was feeling pretty woozy anyway and I can’t say that stories of doctors sucking eggs out of my vagina made me feel much better. Still, at least it’s over. Sam says they told him they got twelve eggs, which was about what they wanted. He said he hoped he’d managed to provide twelve sperm, but I think he was joking.

  It was so strange to think that at that very moment, as we drove home, back in the hospital his sperm were being whirled round in a centrifuge prior to being shaken up in a tube with my eggs.

  We both agreed that the whole experience was one that we were not anxious to repeat. I said that perhaps we wouldn’t have to. After all, twins are quite common with IVF, even triplets (my God!). Sam told me not to jinx us, but I don’t know. I just have this funny feeling that it’s going to work.

  ‘I feel good inside,’ I told him, and then I was sick into the glove compartment, but it’s all right, the doctors said that might happen. All right for me, that is, not Sam, who had to clear it out.

  Dear Sam,

  We began principal photography today. God, it was exciting.

  We’re filming in an old warehouse in Docklands, which they’ve done out as the hospital. I took the light railway which is not a bad service. They offered to send a car for me but I said no. Lucy might have wondered why commissioning editors of Radio were suddenly being treated so grandly. When I left she was still in bed. I took her a cup of herbal and longed to tell her where I was going. It would have been so wonderful.

  ‘Bye, darling, I’m just off to a film location where about a hundred people are working on MY FILM.’

  It’s the thing I’ve dreamt of all my life. What’s more, Lucy has shared so many of those dreams, and now they’ve come true I can’t even share it with her. How cruel is that? Fate can be an absolute bugger.

  I’ll tell her soon, I swear it. The moment we’re through this IVF cycle. George says it’s pointless to put it off and that there’ll never be a good time, but I can’t possibly tell her now, she’s too fragile. She’s taken the week off work (although they say you don’t have to) and seems to be in a world of her own. Sort of serene, but very delicate. She says she’s trying to be entirely relaxed and meditative. Aspiring, apparently, to an absolute calmness within. Well, I don’t think she’d be very calm within if I said to her, ‘Oh, by the way, darling, I’ve turned our mutual agony into a movie and what’s more you’ve unwittingly written half of it’

  How did I get into this? I can’t believe it’s such a mess. I’m sure I had no choice. Didn’t I? I definitely seem to remember having no choice, but it’s all gone a bit hazy.

  I must say, though, that the day was wonderful. Incredibly exciting. Just seeing all the cameras and cables and trucks and catering and actors and crew, and all because of me. It felt fantastic. People kept coming up to me and asking if I was OK for coffee and saying, ‘It’s a wonderful script. When I read it I cried.’

  Ewan was starting with Rachel’s laparoscopy and at first I thought he must have sacked Nimnh because an entirely different actress was on set in the operation smock. I was just getting up the courage to protest to Ewan because I think Nimnh is wonderful when I noticed Nimnh sitting in a folding chair smoking a cigarette. On further investigation it turned out that the new actress was a bottom double! Imagine it! Grand, or what?

  It seems there’d been a row earlier that morning when despite Nimnh’s protests Ewan had been adamant about filming Rachel from behind getting into bed with the open-backed smock on.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s not about perving on her arse! It’s about her vulnerability! Can’t you see that?’ he exclaimed. ‘This woman is a piece of meat, stripped of dignity. Her arse is quite literally on the line and we need to see it!’

  Well, Nimnh had simply folded her arms and refused point blank.

  She said she did not do two Desdemonas and a Rosalind at the RSC in order to have her bum used to sell videos. I thought she was absolutely right, actually, although like every man on the set I would have loved to see the bum under discussion.

  Thinking about it, that’s probably another good reason why she shouldn’t have to show it. Frankly, I find balancing my sexual politics with my sexual desires is a constant struggle.

  Dear Penny,

  It’s three days now since the egg extraction and today was the day to have it all put back in. That is if there’s anything to put back, which was the first anxiety. All the way in in the car we were quiet, both of us wondering if our eggs and sperm had even managed to conceive at all, which they might very well not have done.

  Well it turned out all right, in that we had managed to create seven embryos, which they said was good. A doctor took us aside into a little room and it all got very serious as she explained that some of the embryos are good and some are not so good, and one was useless because although the egg had been fertilized the embryo had already gone wrong, etc., etc.

  Anyway, the long and the short of it was that we had two very good and two pretty good. The doctor said that they were prepared to insert three if we insisted, but she strongly recommended that we do only two, which I was very happy to go along with. I mean the possibility of triplets is pretty daunting. I had been hoping that they would freeze the other two good ones but they don’t seem to encourage that at Spannerfield. I don’t know why. Anyway, although the consultation was presented as a series of choices for us, in the long run, let’s face it, you do what you’re told, don’t you? I mean I don’t know one end of a two-celled embryo from another (if indeed they have ends). That’s why you have doctors. Anyway, that was it. We agreed that two embryos be reinserted and the rest would be donated to the hospital for research, which is apparentl
y their usual procedure if the donors have no objections, which we didn’t.

  The reinsertion was very quick indeed. No anaesthetic or anything. They just wheel you in, spread your legs, and squirt them up. It’s incredibly low tech really when you consider the dazzling medical science that has led up to it. First they show you the fertilized embryos on a little telly screen, then a big tube appears on the screen (actually it’s about a hair’s breadth) and sucks them up. Then a nurse brings the tube through to the doctor (it’s like a very long thin syringe). The doctor puts it up your fanny and, guided by an ultrasound picture, she injects the embryos into your womb. It takes about a minute unless the embryos get stuck in the tube, which they didn’t with us.

  It’s a hell of a lot easier than the egg extraction. The only real discomfort is that they make you do it with a full bladder because for some reason this makes for a clearer picture. Afterwards they won’t let you wee for about three quarters of an hour, which is absolutely excruciating and you keep feeling that the terrible pressure must be crushing the life out of your poor embryos.

  Then they let you go home. As we were getting ready to leave, Charles, the nurse, came in with a printout of the computer image of our two embryos, both of which were already dividing into further cells.

  ‘This is them,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

  When we got home Sam made some tea and I just sat in the sitting room staring at the photo, thinking that this could be the first photo in an album of our children’s lives. It’s not many kids who get to see themselves when they were only two or three cells big.