Five times.
You didn’t reply.
On this occasion I really do think you should have put your wife before your writing.
London Bridge was busy and loud, and not just with commuters. Men in hard hats seemed to be everywhere when I stepped outside the station, and there was an impressive collection of cranes blocking my view of the sky. The Shard is very much under construction and, according to the passers-by that I eavesdropped on, it is going to be the tallest building in Europe. I’m sure it will be for a while. Until someone builds something taller. I’m willing to bet it won’t take long, because humans are always trying to outdo one another.
Even when they pretend to care.
I called you when I reached the entrance of the clinic. Your phone rang twice before being diverted to voicemail. I know who you were with. A producer who has shown an interest in your first ever screenplay: Rock Paper Scissors. It’s the manuscript I found in a drawer that inspired me to write secret letters of my own, to you. A flicker of attention from someone in the business about a story you have written, opposed to an adaptation of someone else’s, and you’re like a dog in heat. I wonder if all writers are ego maniacs with low self-esteem? Or is it just you? You said the lunch meeting with her wouldn’t take long, but I guess getting your firstborn into production was more important than us making a real child of our own.
Our GP referred us to the clinic in London Bridge. Eventually. Everything to do with us trying for a child has been a battle from day one. I just never thought it would result in us fighting with each other. I’ve become familiar with the sterile, soulless place over the last few months. If I were to add up all the hours that I sat in that waiting room – often alone – I suspect I must have spent several days of my life there. Waiting for something I always knew might never happen.
It took months to get an appointment, followed by several more months of being prodded, poked, and interviewed by counsellors who intruded into our most private sorrow. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how we managed to survive this long. Whenever I felt most alone, I told myself that you loved me and that I loved you. It became a silent mantra inside my head, there to steady me whenever it felt like I might fall. But our marriage isn’t as solid or stable as I thought.
I know you found the appointments difficult. I’m sure stepping into a private room, being able to lock the door, choose some porn to look at, and jerk off into a sample pot must be very stressful. Sorry. I don’t wish to belittle your experience, but I think most right-minded people would agree that your contribution to this process was less dramatic, albeit still psychologically invasive.
I’ve had to spread my legs, sometimes for a room full of doctors and nurses, and let them put metal instruments in my body. The same strangers have seen me naked, scanned me, felt me, touched me, some of them even put their hands inside me. I’ve been tested, repeatedly stuck with needles, pumped full of drugs, put to sleep and operated on. I’ve had my eggs harvested, pissed blood for days afterwards, and couldn’t stand, let alone walk due to crippling pain after a bungled operation. But we got through it, together. You said everything would be OK. You promised, and I believed you.
After all, other people have children.
People we know, people we don’t. They make it look so easy. Some of them even get pregnant by accident, they don’t even have to try. Some of them kill the children growing inside them, because they didn’t want them in the first place. Some people we know didn’t want to have children, but had them anyway. Because they could. Because everyone else does. Everyone except us. That’s how it feels: as though we are the only couple in history that this has happened to. Sometimes it’s even worse than that: it feels as if I am alone in the world, and that you are the one who abandoned me.
I wanted a baby so badly that it physically hurt. Then today, at our first appointment after our second – and possibly final – round of IVF, you weren’t there.
You weren’t there when the receptionist called us and I had to go into that room alone. Or when the man we nicknamed Doctor Doom sat down behind his desk, and gestured to the two empty chairs opposite him. Or while we waited for you in awkward silence, and he checked his folder to remind himself of our names. The clinic never really treated us like human beings, more like lonely walking chequebooks.
Worst of all, you weren’t there to hear the news we had been waiting for.
After everything we have been through, the doctor finally said that I was pregnant.