Chapter Two: Lots of Eggs, Not Much Time

I was born with roughly fifty thousand eggs. And looking down into the toilet bowl, I realised one had just fallen out.
Fertilisation Attempt Number One had not been a success.
How many did I have left? How many others had fallen out over the years? I sighed as I sat on the toilet, picturing all those little eggs clustered together like freshly laid frog spawn. Each one shiny, glistening. Each with a tiny pair of black eyes. I know, I know, they’re just molecules, elements, bits of sticky goo. But I couldn’t help imagining that they were squinting through the beginning of their eyes, through the glassy, soft membranes and they were staring upwards at the fallopian tube which looked like a giant halo made of fuzzy felt and they were thinking.
Let me out of here.
I want to come out.

I’m thirty-five years old.
Thirty-five means you’re already too old to stay out all night and do drugs and dance and actually still think you look cool but you’re too young to stay in every night and watch re-runs of Dad’s Army. Sometimes you decide to stay in, reach some sort of compromise - yes I’m staying in but look I’m watching young people’s TV so then you switch over to MTV but quickly realise you don’t understand it. You start worrying that all the girls in the videos aren’t wearing enough clothes, that the songs are all about sex, that the music sounds repetitive. Five hundred ways to say ‘Hump me’. Where do all these lascivious, busty women come from? Do they never stop gyrating? Everything is a source of deep eroticism – standing next to an expensive car, sitting on a leather sofa, walking down the street. And at thirty-five, the fact that you feel disgusted by these girls makes you feel uneasy, it makes you realise that you’re actually no longer ‘with it’ at all. Just as the screen flashes to the next sexy music clip, it fades to black. You catch your reflection. You look tired. You have too many clothes on.
YOU NEED TO BE SEXY!

Then you worry that you should get out more. So in essence when you’re in, you feel trapped like you should be out, should be exploring, meeting people, the clock’s ticking… YOU SHOULD BE SEXY! And don’t you realise you can spend all the time you like watching TV when you’re in your SEVENTIES?! Except seventy’s not really old anymore. Even at seventy you’re expected to have firm, tight flesh and be sexy. You need to be sexy right up until the point when you breath your final puff and fall back onto the pillow for the very last time.
‘No more sexy,’ you say with your dry, dying lips, your face finally relaxed, allowed to be what it really is which is old.
But the rest of us have to keep on. Making the most out of ourselves and our lives.

So having a baby feels like a good idea. Because babies don’t talk much, certainly not in the beginning. And they give you a purpose so you aren’t faced with the option of staying in or going out. It’s more complicated. And presumably there’s also less time to worry about how un-sexy you are, how out the loop you are, how you don’t like modern music and wish it was 1991 all over again.
Babies absorb time.
I know this.
All my friends who have babies never have any time.

These may seem like selfish reasons to have a child and I won’t kid you they are. But I also know I’d make a good Mum. I know all the rudimentary stuff like eating five pieces of fruit and veg a day, being kind to animals, not fighting, war is bad, exercise is good, avoid too much TV, eat lots of nuts unless you have some sort of allergy, a bath before bedtime calms you down, try and be positive, read books, make plans for the future. I know all that stuff. I’m not insane.

And like most women I’d always planned to be a mother by the time I was thirty. Just like I’d always planned to become a ballerina with a five-storey house in Brighton and a vintage VW Beetle. But when you start looking at men, not seeing them through the lens of being the next potential partner, instead as somebody you would have to live with for the rest of your life and then ON TOP OF THAT try to imagine them as the father of your precious black - eyed frog spawn, well it’s really tough. And whilst it would have been nice to have settled down with a partner by now, had someone who would watch MTV with me, nodding in agreement at all the ridiculous sexy everywhere, someone who also enjoyed reading, cooking, staying in, blah blah blah.
But it just hasn’t happened.

I met one person, lived with them for two years. We got on each other’s nerves. This repeated itself one more time. Hot, warm, cold. That’s been my experience. It’s not the stuff of dreams, I know. But it’s just easier to go it alone.

I’m relatively successful. I work in a bookshop. I have three or four great friends. I have enough money to bring a baby into this world. I have a family. I have support. So it’s not like I’m being reckless. And it’s not like it’s just occurred to me all of a sudden. This baby thing has been on the slow burn. It started with the odd sideways glance when I spotted one on the tube. Then it moved to actively seeking them out, crossing the road so I could eyeball them as they span past in their buggy, drooling and gurgling and also slightly scared by the crazy-eyed woman marching purposefully towards them. Now I stare at every baby I meet. I size them up. Is that one just like mine? Will my one have the same dappled fur over its eyes, the same cupids bow, the same tiny hands with tiny fingernails? I think about their sweet scent. I want to curl up on the sofa with my baby and feed it, cuddle it, talk to it.
What’s so wrong with that?

So that’s when my plan came about. One day at work, before Attempt Number One, I sat down whilst I was on my lunch break and made a list of every man I knew, every single man that could be a potential father to my baby. I wanted a broad spectrum, a full gamut of different types, potent genes, genes which would provide the foundation for greatness- scholars, creative-types, musicians, athletes. King men, ruler men, powerful, insightful, decision makers.

But unfortunately my list was rather short and much more limited than I’d first imagined.

Dad.
George.
Simon.

Dad was obviously immediately disqualified. George was also disqualified, as he was my nineteen-year-old brother. That left Simon. Simon had once been a heterosexual. In fact he’d once had a girlfriend, back when he was at school. But now he was unreservedly gay. He would vomit at the idea of having sex with me. In fact I would vomit first. It was too horrible to think about. That left ex-boyfriends. I picked up my pen.

Jody – a big, fat boy who enjoyed burping. When had I last seen him? 1985? There’d been a party, I remembered listening to the Beastie Boys. In fact that had been the only soundtrack to every party I went to back then. I remembered Jody had got off with my friend Nila and then what happened? Then we’d snogged. And we’d dry humped next to some bunk beds. Then Nila had come back in and got off with him again. In fact it had been just like an MTV video. We’d all been highly eroticised back then. Then Jody and I had gone out for a while. We’d dry humped all the time, every opportunity we got. It was like we hadn’t realised that we could actually take our clothes off and have sex. So we never did. I seemed to remember he was good looking. He’d had a fat face with lovely round blue eyes. He’d looked like a toddler. In fact his arms had been really short now I thought about it. And I hadn’t seen him for twenty-four years. So that left…

Dan - the love of my life. The one man who’d broken my heart. I’d been nineteen when we met. Of course there’d been other people before him. But that had just been snogging. You do a lot of snogging when you’re in your late teens. Snogging, dry humping. I think I enjoyed the dry humping the most - you could be a really excellent dry-humper and crap at sex. I learnt that later. But that isn’t fair, Dan wasn’t crap. He was very intense. He liked The Smiths. He drove a Morris Minor. He never did up his shoe laces. I loved him I really did. He was a lovely, lovely melancholy man. But he was hard work. And his constant melancholy was worrying. There was enough in this world to get depressed about without giving them depressed genes to start off with.

Then there’d been a string of one - offs. I can’t remember all their faces and bodies in minute detail. A whiff of Aramis aftershave here, a hairy armpit there, one that screwed up his face and made a noise like a dying chicken when he came. One was called Juan. How clichéd was that! JUAN! He’d had curly hair and wore dungarees with no top underneath. It was the nineties. It was allowed. I cringe just thinking about Juan in his denim dungarees with his curly perm and his bare chest. But he was a good dancer. One secret - if you’re a good dancer you can get away with murder. You can wear damn near enough anything and get away with it. Once I think he wore cycling shorts with braces. But I don’t even have Juan’s number anymore.

So that left Pete. And Pete was too raw. And I hated him. In fact just thinking about his self- satisfied smirk and the way he always held his head at an angle like he was part of the Royal family or something. Pete was out of the question.

So in essence I’d emerged from this exercise with absolutely nothing. There was no one from my past and no one in my close vicinity who could be the potential father of my baby. That meant only one thing. I’d have to start from scratch. I would scour the bars, the theatres, the discos of the land and I’d find the man who would fertilise my spawn. And to be absolutely clear, I did not want someone who was going to stick around. I had no delusions about settling down. Hot, warm, cold remember? So hairy man was where it started. Hairy, scary, beary man.
Luckily enough it hadn’t worked.

As I sat on the toilet I thought how lucky it was that I wasn’t carrying a hairy, beady-eyed frog inside. I needed to be pickier. More discerning. I certainly needed to stay sober enough that I could inspect them properly. Attempt Number Two would be different. Attempt Number Two would be someone who was hairless, not in a freak-ish way, sure he’d have hair on the parts where you were supposed to. He would also be highly intelligent. And intuitive. He’d be intelligent, intuitive and adventurous. Those were all good adjectives. He’d have a creative job, he’d like animals, he’d have sperm that produced babies who were kind, thoughtful yet also bold and go-getters.

So what if the first one hadn’t worked.
It was just as well.

The tiny frog eyes all swayed in their collective sticky membrane, one or two jostled to the front, pretending it was spontaneous, like they weren’t really pushing themselves forwards but they were. They’d seen the last one exit, had known there was a high chance this time it would happen and knew that if that were the case, there chances were blown. They’d never end up being anyone. They’d just sit in the goo until their time was up. But then the word had got out. It hadn’t happened. The conditions weren’t right. It had been too hot and those things with the tails had been spinning off in the craziest of directions. And these two were determined, they’d come out next whatever happened. Together if they had to. But then there was also this other one, probably about three hundred and seventy eight eggs along from the right and this one had exactly the right ingredients - all the cells inside were in perfect alignment – the whispering curve of a lip here, the shadow of an eyebrow there. Oh that one was SWEET! So much potential jiggling inside something so miniscule that you wouldn’t even notice it if it landed on your shirt. Such perfect nearly eyes. If this one could just get further forward, could just push that tiny millionth of a millimetre to the right, then it might just be the next one out.
Not that the other two were having it.
Not just yet anyway.
Which was just as well really.