Cara, Bree, babies

Not long before my birthday I was round at Cara and Bree’s for a lovely dinner of kipper soup and homemade turtle bread. I’d dreamed the night before that I’d been walking through an Indian village in the ink black night and almost stepped on a tiger. His eyes were about the only thing I could see as he padded menacingly towards me while I backed carefully away. It looked like a mauling was inevitable. But I mumbled the 23rd Psalm under my breath and that seemed to do the trick. I made it around the corner and there found a scene of carnage; earlier in the day the same tiger had made a mess of three or four Indian blokes and torn apart their palm leaf shack.

Anyway, that’s why I’d asked them to make turtle bread instead of the usual tiger. Didn’t need reminding of those eyes, that back. Though, since I’ve just done it now myself anyway, I suppose I could have saved them the bother.

Cara asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I think we all knew the idea of me wanting something material was moot but she asked it anyway. I had a think and then said what I’d been saying for a while in answer to questions like this: “a threesome.”

I was only joking, of course. It just seemed like the kind of joke someone with a personality like mine should make at a time like that.

Cara looked at Bree. Bree was laughing. Cara was looking sort of cross.

Bree began to say something. Cara stopped her.

I didn’t know what was going on.

“Not really,” I said, “I don’t think I could be bothered. It’s enough work pleasing one person, never mind two. Though maybe it’d take some of the burden off. But…nah. What about the intimacy? Two people, eyes locked together, the whole world disappeared. Whispered sweet nothings. It’d be a bit daft with someone else there, on the side.”

Bree was still laughing from before.

“What?” I said.

“It’s just that…you know our friend Robin? That’s exactly what he said just before his fortieth.”

“Fuckin’ hell, Bree,” said Cara.

“Oh,” I said, my brain suddenly clicking into gear, all manner of future scenario playing out in my mind.

“Never again,” said Cara, and that was all she said, and all she was ever going to say, by the sound of it.

Bree just laughed. And then the door opened and Florin walked in: the French guy from before.

“Well,” he said, flopping noisily in a chair, “it’s happened. She’s pregnant.”

“Who’s pregnant?”

“My friend Sophia. Up ze duff. That’s what you say, right?”

“Wow,” said Bree, “how do you feel about it?”

“Florin been helping his friend Sophia make a baby,” Cara says to me. “She’s like 42, no one else around to do it, feeling very much ‘last chance saloon.’”

“She didn’t want a donor,” he said, “and we used to date years ago. I felt I owed her one. Who knows? Maybe it should have happened back then. She really wanted it.”

“And you?”

“Non. Not at all. I mean, I thought I did at one point but…it just kind of went away.”

He sat for a moment staring at the table. I went to reach for a slice of turtle bread but he started talking again.

“Couldn’t handle the responsibility,” he said, “just couldn’t see myself doing the whole daddy thing, day in, day out. I told her that. It was such a relief, to be honest – years of pressure trying to be something I wasn’t, and then I found my actual truth, laid it out there, and everything was fine and understood. Having that conversation changed everything for me.”

“But he still wants to spread his seed,” laughed Bree. “Typical male bastard.”

“Oui, oui. C’est vrai,” laughed Florin, “I do. I thought about it a lot. It seems okay. Two people want something – sometimes a third, the other guy, who can’t, for whatever reason – and, as long as it’s not too psychologically weird, on we go.”

“This isn’t the first time?” I asked.

“Non. Number three,” he said. “Two were friends and one was a friend of a friend. Well, one a sort of friend, someone I knew a little, and then Sophia who I’ve known since long time.”

“Tell him about the first one,” said Bree, “what you told me, about the fish eggs.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, “the strangest thing. The first one was a couple of years ago, my friend Miriam’s friend in Paris. She told me what she wanted. She asked me all these questions, about my health, my parents, my grandparents, even, and I guess I passed the test. She was a beautiful woman, maybe thirty-eight. She wanted to do it the natural way, if you see what I mean. She had no man. She didn’t see a problem.”

“I went to hers one night and we kissed. Very beautiful. Very wonderful mouth. Soon I was inside her. Wonderful feeling. But when I came…ze strangest thing: it was as though I saw myself – experienced myself – as a fish, fertilising eggs. I can’t explain but, understand me, it wasn’t a thinking, a cognitive process, something I had intellectualised. It came like a flash. Almost a vision, I would say, if I believed in such things. It was clear as day. That was exactly what was going on. And maybe what had always been going on.”

“I don’t know,” he continued, “I really don’t know. I realised it was something totally new. I realised I had made love for all sorts of reasons – for pleasure, for bonding, for ego, for boredom – but never so purely biologically as this. It really shook me, you know? For all my ideas of what a man is, was I really nothing more than this blindly fertilising salmon merely following primitive urges to pass on my genes?”

“But it was also kind of liberating. And it was funny. I had so much sex in my life, mon ami, and I think I was about tired of it by that point. Have you heard of Osho? He says we should be done with it by forty-two, over the thrill. I was forty-one then; and I tell you, I think he’s about right.”

“My libido,” he said, drawing a descending line in the air, “has been on the slide since I was twenty-two.”

He laughed. He obviously didn’t care.

“Over-rated,” he said, “you watch all these Hollywood films and they put this bug in your head that it’s the everything of everything, you know? The whole point, le climax of the movie. It seemed like some holy grail. I was looking for that my whole life. But now I realise it’s just a very nice way for two people to spend time together. Like a good game of tennis, non? Except maybe not as fun.”

We all have a laugh at this: what feels like a ‘laughter break’. The Frenchman is enjoying his audience. He’s been talking a long time now, and it suddenly strikes me how very un-English this is, to discourse for so long. We much prefer the quick back and forth. There would have been a lot more joking and interjecting. Somebody else would have taken over, wanted to have their say.

I enjoy that too, but I’ve often thought how, underneath it, there’s perhaps a sense of unease, an anxiety that seems to drive the rapidity and frivolity of the conversation. We don’t seem comfortable talking, or listening, or being with the silence in between. Maybe that’s why we can only generally socialise when drunk. But these Europeans, with their long dinners and incidental bottles of wine…I remember being in Italy once and marvelling at the tables of young adults sharing pizza and conversing deep into the night. I wondered what the hell they had to talk about, that it could fill so much time. I couldn’t imagine a table of young Englishmen doing likewise.

“Did she get pregnant?” I asked, eager to hear the rest of the story.

“Eventually,” he said, shaking his head with a smile, “but it took six months, and I was sick of it by the end. Mon Dieu! Sex has never been so desultory. She would have this list of dates each month I had to meet her on. By the third month I was completely bored. But I was committed to see it through. In the beginning, of course, it was very amusing to me, and liberating, to have realised myself nothing more than a spawning, spurting fish. It took all the pressure off. All she wanted was my seed. You understand? No orgasm, no foreplay, no pressure to pleasure. I liked that, after so many years of striving to please another. I mean, she wanted pleasure but I left that to her; that wasn’t part of the bargain. I suppose there are better circumstances to conceive a child in, but there you are. She had a son. She sends me a picture on his birthday. She moved to the south and met a man who wanted to marry her.”

“Are you okay with that?” asked Cara. “Another guy bringing up your child?”

“You know, C, I want to say yes, I am, I’m totally fine with that because all I was was the donor and nothing more, but I know that isn’t true. There’s something about it that bothers me, and I’m not quite sure what. But it was the right thing to do at the time. It was what she truly wanted, and not something I did. But I had the means. It didn’t seem like it would cost me much: it’s just an expression of bodily fluid, right? No more significant than giving away to someone your tears, your snot. And yet…I do feel something, but I’ve agreed to stay out of their lives. To stay out of all their lives. Perhaps it is the lesser of two evils.”

“Two evils?”

“The evil of feeling slightly unsettled at these offspring I will never see, and the evil of being woken every day by screaming little monsters having traded in the life I have now for that of a harangued and harassed slave to someone who will only resent me for it one day anyway. Either way, it’s screwed.”

Another laughter break. Some pouring of tea. A chance to butter some bread.

“I know what you mean,” I said, chewing on my slice, “about it being screwed either way. I remember a few years back I spent the day with a friend and her two daughters. We went to the park. Played a bunch. Rode on a mini-train. The whole thing. It was exhausting. It took so much constant energy. All the tugging on me, both literally and mentally. All the attention and listening and being pulled this way and that. The constant chatter. The noise. I was so glad to get back to my empty, quiet flat at the end of it. And yet…it was only a matter of minutes before that empty, quiet flat began to feel truly devoid and empty. The day had been intense, but there was richness about it. And my flat had the peace I had craved, and loved, but it suddenly seemed totally lacking in life.”

“Do you want children then?” said Bree.

“I think so,” I said, “I always thought I would. Though lately I’ve had to question that, having made it this far without really coming that close. Maybe it’s just an idea I have. Actions speak louder than words and all that. If a man gets to forty and hasn’t really made any great strides towards this thing he thinks and says he wants, does he really want it? And, in any case, it kind of depends on meeting the right person first, so it’s a bit like, one step at a time, you know?”

“But if you met the right person?”

“And she wanted to make babies? Yeah, I probably would. I mean, I think I definitely would. Why not?”

“‘Why not?’” said Cara, staring at her plate and playing idly with her knife, “do you really think that’s a good enough reason to bring a life into this world?”

“Well, that’s not the only reason,” I said, “I suppose there’s a bit more to it than that.”

“Like what?”

“Like…well, I have this idea that life is about learning love, and that doing the family thing is probably the best way to truly learn that. And I know I can be quite selfish, and so I suppose having to live for someone else would help me to be less selfish, more giving, thinking of others, for a change. That’s supposed to be a part of what life is about too. And then I think of it maybe just being the natural scheme of things. Like, how I’ve tried pretty hard to live alternatively, step outside society, challenge norms and find something different and better – and then when I get right down to it, having gone through all that, it really does seem that marriage and the family unit is the way to go, and that it’s not just conforming that has got cultures all over the globe pretty much universally agreeing that that’s the best way to live.”

“Not for me,” said Florin, “if I had the money I would have ten wives, a whole harem. They could have all the babies they wanted, live in luxury, and leave me to my music, except for the occasional conjugal visit. How can a man choose only one woman? It’s impossible! But, alas, I am but a poor artist, and destined to die alone, because of a lack of riches and the unwillingness of my lovers to share me – which is, of course, perfectly understandable.”

Florin finishes with a flourish, and his whole face winks. He pours some wine and smiles at Cara, who smiles back. Then she turns again to me.

“You know,” she says, “it strikes me that, though you say overcoming selfishness is one of the reasons you want to have children, isn’t that just another example of you being selfish? You want them as a learning tool? Something to help you grow? How does that benefit them?”

“Of course having children is selfish,” says Bree, “I didn’t think that was ever in question. We’re the ones who want them. We want something cute. We want something to fill a hole in our lives. We want to experience the joy they bring us, and the love. And we want purpose and meaning. But what’s wrong with that? Maybe that’s the whole point – an impulse built in by nature to keep the species going.”

“I’m guessing,” I said to Cara, “I mean – I’m going out on a limb here – but…the whole kids’ thing’s not for you?”

Bree puts her hand on my arm. Raises her eyebrows. Feigns sincerity.

“Are you sure you want to walk through this door?” she says.

Cara laughs. Bree continues looking at me.

“Well I’ve missed the last bus now,” I say, “nowhere else I have to be.”

“The thing is,” says Cara. “No, wait; I think we should make another pot of tea first, maybe get ourselves comfortable.”

“Go ahead, dear,” says Bree, “we’re all ears.”

“Well, okay,” says Cara, “the thing is, it’s not like I haven’t thought about this. And I did, when I was younger. Really loved the idea. Couldn’t wait, at certain points in my life. Tried, even, when I was with Ed. But things change, and I’m so glad it didn’t happen. Now I’m at this stage where…I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against what Florin’s doing, and I love my sister’s kids, all my friends’ children, have a blast when I’m with them, reckon I’m a good aunt, wouldn’t you say?”

Bree nods. “A great aunt,” she says. “Well, not yet. But…you know what I mean.”

“But the more I’ve thought about it, the more distasteful I find the whole business of procreation. It really does seem to me the cause of all the world’s problems. If starving peoples didn’t procreate, there’d be an end to famine. If people living in warzones and inhospitable lands didn’t insist on making little versions of themselves, sooner or later all the suffering would stop. One thing’s for sure: what this world does not need is more people in it. I have friends that…oh my God, you’ve got me started now but, you know, it’s all good, I can take all this with a pinch of salt – I have these friends that are always going on about carbon and the environment and blah blah blah – and then popping out babies! Like nobody ever told them the instant they do that they’re totally doubling or tripling or, if you take all the sudden possible descendents into account, just massively rendering pointless any little thing they might do by, you know, not flying one time when they go on their ski holiday or whatever. So one thing I’m very clear on is that making babies is not good for the planet.”

“Then,” she says, “I just can’t see how it’s good for them either. Buddha said that life was suffering, and the older I get the more I understand the terrifying, undeniable depth of that. I mean, sure, it has its joys – but when you get right down to the root of it…I just don’t think it’s fair to inflict ‘life’ on an otherwise non-existent being. It wouldn’t be right, knowing what I know, to do that to someone. Like, let’s say I do make a baby, and they grow up, and then they turn around to me one day and say, ‘Christ, mum, life is fuckin’ hard, and seems sort of horrifying and futile and I’m all depressed and my body’s falling to pieces and nothing much about the whole thing seems to work, no matter how much therapy I buy, no matter how many retreats I go on – did you not know it would be like this when you decided to make me?’ And I’d either have to lie or say, ‘yes, I totally knew that’s what you’d have in store for you, but I did it anyway’ – and that would suck. I think my parents were innocent – I think, in all honesty, like most people’s parents, they just wanted a shag, were probably drunk, and dealt with the consequences as best they could – but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve seen the edge of the abyss. I know it’s there. Why do that to someone you say you love?”

“You think non-existence is preferable to life?” Florin says. “I have no idea how you can say that. You’re one of the most joyful people I know. Of course there’s suffering – but is it right to deny the joy your child would experience? You’d be a great mother, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank you,” she says, “I’d like to think so, that I’d have done my best. But my mind’s made up on this. I know when you spend time with someone’s kids it’s impossible to imagine them not existing, and you wouldn’t wish that on anyone – well, on hardly anyone – but then, couldn’t you say that to any parent? Even if they’ve got two or three – or more – ‘what about the ones they didn’t have?’ The ones waiting up in there in ‘spirit realm’ unable to get in because of condoms and vasectomies and pills and good old pulling out and coming on someone’s belly? The number of children who were never born is infinite – and yet the world still turns, nothing seems to be lacking.”

We ponder for a while: it seems like the sort of thing that needs thinking about. The contemplation of what isn’t. The idea that, though we might find our lives unimaginable without specific others, we live them quite happily without a whole massive array of characters and potential loved ones who simply never were.

“That’s bleak,” I say, “I’m not sure I want to think about that.”

“Well, don’t,” she says, “you totally don’t have to. This is why I keep my opinions to myself. They don’t tend to have everyone in stitches. Although,” she says, lifting her mug to her lips and smiling through twinkling eyes, “I rather enjoy them myself. I don’t know why. Contemplating meaningless makes me feel light.”

“Do you remember when I took that mescaline?” I say, “with my friend Shawn. We both had the exact same experience at the exact same time. It could have lasted like a minute or an hour, I have no idea. But I looked at him and he said, ‘I just lived and died a thousand times,’ and I was like, me too. It was the maddest thing. I would close my eyes and live entire lifetimes, as some woman, some little Chinese guy, some Arab, whatever. Born and growing up and dying and born again. It went on for thousands of years. It was so intense. He said his was just the same, but we had one major difference: he felt it gave him a gratitude for life, an appreciation of his wife and kids, whereas I was just totally exhausted by it all, a sense of ‘when will it ever end?’ I felt so clearly I was on that Buddhist wheel of life and death, and I really wanted to get off. No more lives please. Can we just be done?”

“I had that on mescaline too,” says Cara, “and with the same response. I think of it as a good thing: that I’m through with this planet. That I’m ready to move on. The appeal’s not there anymore. The ties and desires exhausted.”

“It is a bit bleak though, isn’t it? And, being as we’re still here…well, we’ve got to do something with our time.”

“Just breathe,” she says, “that’s my plan. Just breathe and enjoy the scenery until the breathing has all gone. And then I guess we’ll see what’s what.”

“I get so bored,” I say, “I still have this sense that there’s something I should be doing. But I don’t seem to be able to find out what.”

“Maybe you should have kids,” says Cara, “then you’ll never be bored again. No time! And all the organising and busyness and shoe buying and working to give them things you’ve already decided you don’t actually need; that’ll feel like purpose, like meaning – for a couple of decades, at least…”

“Maybe I will,” I say, “just to piss you off. Have about ten of them. Little carbon-generating machines swallowing up the Earth’s resources, shitting out pollutants, two cars each. And out of those ten a hundred little grandkids, and on, and on, and – ”

“Yeah, that’s how we got here,” she says, “and you know what? It ain’t so bad. Not tonight, anyway, with good company, good food, and – oh! I just remembered: there’s some leftover Christmas Stilton in the fridge. Cheese board anyone? Then we can pretend we’re proper middle class problem-solvers waxing all philosophical and putting the world to rights – and not just confused ants trapped on a strange rock spinning through cold, empty space.”

“And after the cheese, the orgy?” says Bree.

“After the cheese, a bit of telly and then bed,” says Cara. “My orgy days are long gone. For the most part.”

“How about you, Florin? Wanna make Rory’s birthday present wish come true?”

“Steady on,” I say, “that’s not what – ”

“I know,” says Bree, “don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that to you. I know what you meant: Florin’ll get his mate George over and we can leave the three of you alone.”

And what else is there? Guffaws. Cheese. Hugs on the sofa in front of the excellent Matt Berry. Falling asleep and waking up to realise we’ve all missed the end of the episode but at least have each other, how nice the proximity of another human body, and how rare sometimes as well.

Cara takes me by the hand and leads me up the stairs.

“I don’t really feel like that, you know. Not all the time.”

“I know,” I say, “the lady doth protest too much.”

“No more protesting tonight,” she says, “I promise.”

And then: lights out. Darkness. And two little children hold one another, and hold on tight.