Sometimes I wonder how Libby and I are friends. She is hugely, indubitably cooler than me. There’s no way around it. Today she’s wearing a pink jumpsuit that would make me look like a deranged plumber. I turned up at Oxford with a bag full of crocheted cushions and bunting for my room, wearing a cardigan, and she arrived wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt and with a vinyl record player in tow. Despite my shortcomings, she’s a steady, devoted friend and I feel the relief of her presence.
“God it’s good to see you,” I mutter into her hair as I hug her.
“A lot easier to arrange to meet up now that we’re in the same country, huh?”
“Just a bit.”
Libby beams at me, that broad smile that makes me feel like the world is about 20 percent less scary than it was a moment before.
“Have you seen the article?” she asks as she pours me a glass of cider from the bottle on the table.
“Absolutely mad, isn’t it?” I reply.
“Are you going to write a paper on it?” Libby asks, knowing that before the Plague I found the search for research topics painful. “Surely how we’re all having children is pretty high up on the lists of things for anthropologists to study at the moment.”
I nod. “For once there’s too much for me to be studying. I don’t have time to do a paper on this specifically, although I’m teaching a new course, ‘The Ethics of Reproductive Choice in a Post-Plague World,’ in the new year, so I’ll have to write something up on it.”
“That sounds fascinating,” Peter says, his voice practically dripping with longing. “Being an actuary has never seemed like such a bad call.”
“You live in a four-bedroom house in Zone 1, you can walk to work and you have a garden,” Libby says with an eye roll. “Being an actuary pays.”
“What else are you going to include in the course?” Peter asks, and I remember that part of the reason I like him so much is that he’s one of the four people I’ve ever met outside of academic circles who’s seemed genuinely interested in my work.
“In the first lecture I’m covering New Zealand and the ethics of their whole ‘taking children and putting them in isolation’ thing. Some of the parents have posted videos online of the children being released once they’d been vaccinated and you’d have to be heartless not to cry at that.”
“Always good to pluck the heartstrings in the first lecture.” Libby smiles knowingly. “Then you can be a cool lecturer.”
“One lives in hope. Then in the second lecture we’ll dig into the meat of Norway as a case study. They’ve set up the Norwegian Demographic Institute, which researches policies around maintaining population numbers and increasing the speed of a return to equal numbers of men and women.”
“How?” Libby asks with a raised eyebrow. “Encouraging men not to be fuckboys?”
Peter laughs and I try to figure out the best way to answer “Yes” without just saying “Yes.” And wonder if I can include the word “fuckboys” in my lecture notes without getting fired. Somehow, I suspect not.
“They have three public aims. Make sure as many babies are born as possible without affecting the economy, manage fertility treatment so in IVF male embryos are selected, which led to an additional four thousand baby boys last year and, well.”
“Is this the fuckboy bit?”
I reel off the spiel from the Institute’s website. “‘Ensure in the longer term, over the next ten to twenty years, young Norwegians form stable partnerships in which they have children.’”
Libby hoots with laughter. “Oh my God, it literally is.” She pauses. “I could do with that here, to be honest. There’s an epidemic of fuckboys in London.”