Inconceivable

by Ben Elton

  Sam reminded me that the chances are that these ones won’t either and I know that, of course, but I’m sure that mental attitude has an effect on the physical self. I know I can’t will it to happen, but the least I can do is give Dick and Debbie the most positive start in life that I can.

  Yes, all right, I’ve given them names! And I’m not embarrassed about it either. They’re mine, aren’t they? They exist, don’t they? At least they did when the picture was taken. And now? Who knows? I could see that Sam was not at all sure about personalizing things in this way. But why not? They’re fertilized embryos! That’s a huge step for us. Something we might easily not have been able to do. We

  to be positive, we’re so far down the road.

  Sam reminded me yet again that it’s only a one in five chance. Well, I know! I know. Of course the odds are long, but they’re not impossible. Twenty per cent isn’t a bad shot. When my photo was taken they were alive.

  ‘Think about that, Sam,’ I said. ‘Two living entities created from you and me. All they have to do now is hang on inside for a few days. They just have to hang on.’

  It’s funny, but Lucy’s enthusiasm, the strength of her will, is infectious. Because the more I looked at that photo, the more real those two little translucent splodges became. They are, after all, already embryos. They’ve already passed the beginning of life. And I couldn’t deny that in a way they looked pretty tough, I mean for three-celled organisms, that is, obviously.

  ‘Of course they’re tough,’ said Lucy. ‘Think what they’ve been through already! Sucked out of me by vacuum cleaner, pumped out of you into a cold plastic pot. Whirled around in a centrifuge, shaken up until they bash into each other, smeared on a microscope slide then sucked up again and squirted through a syringe. It’s a positive assault course. Dick and Debbie are SAS material!’

  She’s right, of course. If they do make it back out of her they’re going to be either commandos or circus performers. And they might make it. They could make it. I mean, why the hell shouldn’t they? If they can just hang on for a few more days while they grow a few more cells.

  Then Lucy whispered at her stomach.

  ‘Come on, Dick and Debbie,’ she said. It was sort of as a joke, but I could see that she meant it, so I said it too but louder.

  ‘Come on, Dick and Debbie!’

  Then we started shouting it.

  Funny, really, the two of us sitting there, laughing and shouting at Lucy’s stomach.

  Whatever happens now, that was a good thing to do.

  Dear Penny,

  I wonder if this will be the last sad letter that I ever write you? The long wait is coming to an end. One more vaginal suppository is all I have to take (there’s been nine, plus three more spikes in the bum). I hope Dick and Debbie realize what I’m going through for them. Sam says that if they’re as tough as we hope they are, in eight and a half months I’ll be able to tell them. I hope we’re not hoping too much. It’s only a one in five chance, after all.

  Sam said that any child of mine would be one in a million.

  Then we kissed for ages.

  I can’t deny that I feel good. I’m not even slightly periodic and normally I can feel my period coming for a week. Sam agrees that that has to be a very good sign.

  Oh well, the day after tomorrow we’ll have the blood test and then we’ll know. I’ve made Sam promise that he’ll take the day off. He’s been working so hard recently (God knows what on Charlie Stone just seems to say the first thing that comes into his head, which is usually ‘knob’). Anyway, I definitely don’t want to get the news alone.

  After we had kissed, Sam got very serious and said that when it’s all over, for better or…well, hopefully for better, he wants to talk. I said fine and he said, ‘No, really talk, about the last few months, and all that we’ve been feeling and going through together.’ This is a very encouraging sign for me because as I’ve said before, Sam is not always the most communicative of people. He says he wants to talk about where he wants to go as a writer and what sacrifices we would both have to make for it and, well, lots of other things.

  He says he wants to go away this weekend. Whatever the news is and…well, talk.

  I said that I thought it was a great idea. We can take Dick and Debbie on their first trip.

  We thought about that for a while and then we kissed again and then he said he loved me and I said I love him and there was more kissing and Sam put his head on my tummy, where it is now. One thing is for sure: whatever happens, whether Dick and Debbie make it or not, IVF has been good for Sam and me. It’s really brought us closer together.

  It’s twelve-thirty at night. Lucy and I have had a lovely evening together and we’ve agreed to go away together next weekend.

  I’ll tell her everything then.

  She’s been asleep for an hour now. But I couldn’t sleep because as I lay there thinking about Dick and Debbie I decided on the way my film is going to end. I’ve just written it up and faxed it to Ewan, who, as far as I know, never goes to bed.

  INT. DAY. COLIN AND RACHEL’S HOUSE.

  The news comes in the afternoon. Colin and Rachel are sitting, anxiously awaiting a phonecall. They take strength from each other’s presence. They hold hands. The phone rings. Colin tries to answer it but Rachel is holding his hands too tightly. There’s a moment of comedy and emotion as Colin has to remove a hand from Rachel’s traumatized grip in order to pick up the receiver.

  He listens for a moment. In Rachel’s eyes we see the hope and the fear of her entire life. Colin smiles, a smile so big, so broad it seems to fill the screen. He says, ‘Thank you,’ and puts the phone down. He looks at Rachel, she looks at him, he says, ‘They made it.’ The End.

  That’s it. Whatever happens to Lucy and me, that’s the end of my movie. It’s the ending I felt tonight, the ending I want.

  Ewan just phoned. I hope he didn’t wake Lucy.

  ‘It’s mawkish, over-sentimental, middle-class English shite,’ he said. ‘I love it.’

  Everybody seems to have been up late tonight. Petra called as well and George, who never sleeps at all any more because of Cuthbert.

  Petra was hugely relieved. ‘The right decision, Sam,’ she said. ‘I might as well tell you now. If I’d gone to LA with anything other than a developing foetus, they’d have withdrawn their funding.’

  I’d unplugged the phone in our bedroom and was having a last whisky (which I’ve been allowed since making my last deposit) when George phoned.

  ‘Well done, mate,’ he said.

  I told him it was what I felt like writing.

  Somehow I think that now everything will be all right.

  Dear Penny,

  Today I got my period.

  It started at about eleven this morning. It came without warning but it’s a heavy one and it means that all my dreams are dead.

  I’m not pregnant. I’ve never been pregnant. The two embryos I called Dick and Debbie died a week ago.

  I sat on the lavatory for about an hour, crying. I don’t believe I’ve ever cried as much in my whole life as I did today. My eyes are swollen and sore. They feel like they have daggers in them.

  I wasn’t just crying for the loss of the babies that never existed. That was only the beginning of my trouble, the beginning of the nightmare that was today. I’ve been crying for the loss of my whole life, a life I thought I knew but it turns out I didn’t know at all.

  I’m writing this alone in bed. I’ll be on my own from now on. Sam isn’t here and he won’t be coming back. I don’t know where he is and I don’t care. I’ve left him.

  I’m going to write down what happened so that I never forget.

  After I’d cried so much that I thought I would dehydrate I knew that I should tell Sam. We’d been through it all together and I felt that he’d want to be with me at the end of it. Besides, I needed him. Having gone about for a week half believing that I had a child inside me, or even two, I suddenly felt more desperately alone than I
could have imagined possible.

  But when I spoke to his office at Broadcasting House I was amazed to discover that Sam no longer worked there. The woman I was speaking to said that he’d left weeks ago. She didn’t want to tell me where he was, either, as she said it was very private. I told her that I was his wife and I was ill and that she had to tell me where he was. She gave in in the end but she didn’t want to. I could tell that she was wondering why Sam’s wife didn’t know where he was, or that he’d changed his job. I was wondering that too.

  When I was riding in the taxi I think I believed he was having an affair. That’s what I expected to find at the address the woman had given me. Sam in the arms of another woman. I wish that that’s what I had found.

  The address was a film location. A big warehouse in Docklands with the usual trucks and trailers and generators outside and inside, a vast darkened hangar where a number of sets had been constructed. There were people everywhere. I passed a group dressed as nurses and as I walked in I could see immediately that one of the sets was a hospital operating room for women, with stirrups and that sort of thing. I stood there for a while, hidden in the shadows, not knowing what to think, not really thinking at all. Everything was so confused, and I felt scared. Scared of what I was about to discover. Slowly it all began to swim into focus. I could see that all the lights and the attention were concentrated on what was a bedroom set, a bedroom very like my own, in fact. There were two actors on the set, one of them, to my astonishment, Carl Phipps. The other was a woman I recognized as Nimnh Tubbs from the RSC. Someone called for quiet and the two of them began to play out a scene. It was a rehearsal. I knew that because I could see that the camera was not being operated. Carl sat at a desk and pretended to type into a laptop.

  ‘What the hell do you find to write about?’ he said. ‘What an emotionally retarded shit I am, I suppose. I know you secretly think I’m holding my sperm back. You think their refusal to leap like wild salmon up the river of your fertility and headbutt great holes in your eggs is down to a belligerently slack attitude which they’ve caught off me.’

  I could feel myself going cold. Surely that was exactly the sort of thing that Sam always used to say to me? What was going on? Why was Nimnh Tubbs sitting on the bed holding a journal just like I do every night? Just like I’m doing now, in fact.

  Then a young Scottish man who was clearly the director stepped into the scene.

  ‘Obviously we’ll pick up a reaction from you there, Nimnh,’ he said. ‘Semi-distraught, emotionally dysfunctional, pathetic little woman stuff OK?’

  Nimnh nodded wisely. She knew that type.

  Perhaps I’m stupid. Maybe the last few months have made me stupid, but at this point I still didn’t know what was going on. I just stood there, convinced that I was in some horrible dream. They started rehearsing again, more words I knew.

  ‘I just happen to believe that when God made me he made me for a purpose beyond that of devoting my entire life to reproducing myself.’

  And she replied, ‘When God made you he made a million other people on the same day. He probably doesn’t even remember your name.’

  Then I knew. Those were my words! My actual verbatim words! Just then I saw Sam. I don’t know whether I’d realized what was going on before or after he appeared, but either way I was no longer confused. I knew what had been done to me.

  The director had called Sam over. Nimnh was having trouble with the motivation behind the scene and the director wanted her to hear it from the writer.

  The writer. I was the bloody writer.

  ‘You see, to me, Nimnh,’ said the man who had been my husband, ‘this scene represents the beginnings of her descent into a sort of sad madness, a kind of vain obsession. To me the line about not crying outside Mothercare on the way to the off licence is crucial…’

  Then I realized the full extent of his betrayal. I’d never told Sam about Mothercare and the off licence. I’d only told you, Penny. He’d read my book.

  Sam wittered on, posing importantly, loving himself.

  ‘Don’t forget that this woman is beginning a journey that will see her lose all dignity and sense of previous self,’ he said. ‘Before she knows it she’ll be making a fool of herself at hippy visualization classes, adopting a baby gorilla and claiming it’s got nothing to do with her infertility. She’ll have reduced her sex life to a series of joyless, soulless, cynically calculated servicings, treating her poor, hapless hubby as some kind of farmyard animal, brutally milked for its sperm…’

  They laughed at this. They laughed at it all. Why wouldn’t they? It’s funny, I suppose.

  It was then that I walked forward on to the set. I still can’t decide whether it was a good idea, but I was in a daze. Some young woman with blue hair and a walkie-talkie tried to stop me, but I was not to be stopped. They all heard the young woman’s protests and turned and saw me. I don’t know what Sam thought.

  But I knew what I thought. One word.

  ‘Bastard,’ I said. It was all I could say. ‘Bastard.’

  Carl was nearly as surprised as Sam was, but I had no time for him. My whole being was taken up absorbing this new Sam, this Sam whom I’d never known.

  ‘You bastard, Sam, you utter, fucking bastard.’

  I hated him and I still hate him. He tried to speak, but I wouldn’t let him.

  ‘I got my period if you’re interested,’ I said. ‘We failed. Dick and Debbie didn’t make it.’

  I didn’t care that the director and Carl and Nimnh and the woman with blue hair could hear me. I didn’t care about anything. They all began to turn away with embarrassment, but I told them to stay. I told them that they might as well listen now because they’d hear it all soon anyway, that Nimnh would be saying it all tomorrow.

  George ran up. My God, George! They were all in on it. I remember wondering if Melinda knew as well.

  Carl seized the moment to ask me what I was doing, what was going on.

  ‘Ask him!’ I said, and all eyes turned from me to Sam. ‘He’s told you everything else about me…My God, Sam, you’ve been stealing my book. Stealing my thoughts and feelings, like a thief!’

  I don’t know whether I actually said all that or whether I just stuttered at him. I do know that I was crying, which astonishes me, looking back on it. I’m certainly not a person who makes scenes in front of strangers lightly. I think that failing IVF had already pretty much destroyed what emotional defences I had. And then all this.

  Then both Sam and Carl tried to take my arm to lead me away. Sam was stuttering apologies. Carl was trying to get me to calm down and explain. Then Sam rounded on Carl.

  ‘You keep out of this!’ he said, and he looked like he was going to cry too. ‘I know all about you!’

  Carl was astonished. It was the last thing he expected.

  ‘Now look here…‘ he started to say, but I didn’t let him get the chance, I just went for Sam.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Sam!’ I shouted. Everyone really was backing away now, even the Scottish director, who did not look like a man who would embarrass easily. ‘You know all about Carl! That he took me out and that I kissed him. You know everything about me, don’t you? Because you’ve stolen my bloody thoughts! Well, here’s another little piece of me and you can have it for nothing. You won’t have to sneak about picking locks on people’s diaries for this! I hate you! I hate you more than I ever believed I could hate anyone, and I never want to see or speak to you again…’

  That’s what I told him, in that or so many other words, and I meant it. I still do.

  Then I ran out of the building with both Carl and Sam running after me. If it wasn’t the worst thing that has ever happened to me it would be funny.

  We stood there, the three of us, on a pavement in the Docklands, Sam desperately protesting that he’d never meant it to be like this, Carl hanging back wondering whether to intervene or not.

  ‘I meant it, Sam, what I said,’ I told him. I was calmer by this time, calm e
nough to look him in the eye. ‘I told you once that if you did this thing I’d leave you and that’s what I’m going to do.’

  He tried to say that I wasn’t myself, that I was over-reacting because we’d failed IVF. Over-reacting. That’s a phrase I won’t forget in a hurry.

  ‘You’ve read my book, Sam,’ I told him. ‘You know that having a child with you was the thing I wanted most in the world. Well, it isn’t any more, it’s the thing I want least. I’m glad Dick and Debbie are dead! Do you hear! I’m glad they never fucking lived!’

  He looked at me for a moment. He was numb, I could see that. Then he started to cry. He knew he’d lost me.

  Tonight is the first time I’ve opened this ‘book’ document on my computer since that night when I finished my script and Lucy and I held each other for the last time and I was happy for the last time.

  That was three months ago and not one minute has gone by since then, waking or sleeping, when I haven’t missed Lucy with all my soul.

  I don’t know why I’ve decided to write something in this book now, I just thought I would. I suppose the truth is that I’ve bored my friends enough with how unhappy I am and the only person left whom I can safely bore without risk of further increasing my solitude and isolation is myself.

  I made the biggest mistake of my life when I did what I did to Lucy. Every day I’ve asked myself how I could have been so stupid and I still don’t have an answer. I suppose that I just never thought Lucy really meant it when she said that she’d leave me. I keep going over it all in my mind and I still think that if she hadn’t found out about it in such a terrible, brutal way she might not have reacted quite as she did. I don’t know, maybe she would. Either way it’s academic now, and one thing’s for sure: it’s all my fault.

  We haven’t started divorce proceedings yet, but I imagine that it won’t be long. We’ve scarcely even spoken, although there have been numerous exchanges of notes, just practical stuff, not nasty but very cold. I imagine that the final separation when it does come will happen in that tired inevitable modern way. No court case, no drama, no dreadful scenes or confrontations, just the required passage of the allotted amount of time. Lucy won’t have to stand up in court and cite my pathetic career and ambition as a co-respondent. The fact that I betrayed and deserted her is of no concern to the law. It’s enough that Lucy no longer wishes to be my wife. These days marriages just fade away.