Page 27 of Rock Paper Scissors
Two young dogs were rescued last night from a flat in South London. They were brought to Battersea and I was one of the first to see them. Despite all my years in this job, even I was shocked. The beagles had been left alone for a long time. The on-call vet guessed at least a week. If they hadn’t drunk water from the toilet they would have been dead already. Their emaciated bodies made them look like toys with all the stuffing pulled out. We did everything we could to try and save them, but they died this morning. In the end there was nothing more we could do and it was kinder to put them down. Their owner was on holiday in Spain and I wish we could have given her a lethal injection instead. Sometimes I despise human beings, so maybe it is just as well we’ve never been able to make one.
We were supposed to meet at London Bridge at one o’clock this afternoon. I’ve been having problems sleeping recently, I’m exhausted, but I was still there and on time. Because the appointment at the fertility clinic was important to me. I thought it was important to us, but you’ve been moreselfishdistracted than ever lately. I was worried you might forget, so I texted to remind you.
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 passersby that I eavesdropped on, it is going to be thetallest 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 egomaniacs 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 counselors 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 feltlike 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 afterward, 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 okay. 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 Ihad 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 checkbooks.
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.
I didn’t believe him at first.
I made him repeat it. Then made him check the file, convinced he was reading the results from someone else’s notes. But it was true.
Doctor Doom even got me to lie on the bed and scanned my tummy. He pointed out a tiny speck on the screen and said it was our embryo. The contents of your sample pot and my egg, grown together in a lab, had been successfully implanted in my womb, and it was there on the screen. Alive and growing inside me.
You missed it.
You arrived in the reception of the clinic just as I was leaving, and when you started trying to explain, I told you not to bother. I’m sick of hearing you talk about your work as if it’s the only thing that matters. You make shit up for a living and your agent sells it. I think it’s about time you all got over yourselves. The producers, directors, actors, and authors you tell me stories about sound like a class of spoiled children, and I don’t understand why you indulge them, or their temper tantrums. You’ve been truly hornswoggled by at least one of them, even if you are too blind to see it.
I’m sorry. I hope you never find this letter and in the unlikely event that you do, I didn’t mean what I said. I’m just hurting too much right now; and that hurt needs somewhereto go. It breaks my heart sometimes, the way you give these people all of your time and save none of yourself for me. I’m your wife. My stories are real. Does that make them not worth listening to?
I wanted to get the tube, but you insisted we take a cab. I refused to speak to you for the first half of the journey. I’m sorry for that now too, but I’ve never been one to wash my dirty linen in public. I do wish I’d told you sooner, though. We could have been happier for longer than we were.
I didn’t tell you until we got home. I’d already laid the kitchen table with a linen cloth—an anniversary should always be celebrated—but my face gave the news away when I took a bottle of champagne from the new Smeg fridge. Renovating the house has helped keep me busy and take my mind off other things. The ground floor is finally finished, and I’m proud that I did most of the work myself: sanding floors, plastering walls, making roman blinds—it’s amazing what you can learn just by watching a few videos on YouTube.
You cried when I told you I was pregnant. I cried when I showed you the scan. Having dreamed of that moment for so long, that black-and-white image was the only thing that made any of it feel real. Because you weren’t there to hear it, I kept worrying that I might have imagined what the doctor said.
“I hope it’s a girl,” I whispered.
“Why? I hope it’s a boy. Let’s rock paper scissors for it.”
I laughed. “You want to play rock paper scissors to determine the sex of our unborn child?”
