Graham Swift - Tomorrow

You yourselves may think, before you think any further: hey, come on, what was the great tragedy? Had some terrible accident occurred? You yourselves, putting yourselves in our position (though how exactly do you do that?), may think: but what had so drastically changed? Wasn’t life, weren’t we, just the same? Though wouldn’t that be — forgive me for thinking the next thought for you — only to cancel out yourselves?

These are the 1990s, I know, not the primitive Seventies. Sometimes I think you live in some cool and remedied world where every glitch has its fix, every shock its shrug. But we’ll see tomorrow.

It was a blow, my darlings, a true blow. And where it truly hurts. It turned out there was a problem and that the problem was your dad’s, not mine. To make matters worse, I got my all-clear first. I was reproductively A1. Your dad had been slower about things or he’d just got a later appointment. I think he’d assumed that, what with all the gynaecological complexities…Let’s see what they say about Paulie first. I think he was being a typical bloke. It surely couldn’t be anything so simple, so simple and deflating, as you know what. But now he had to go down to the clinic for some further testing and double-checking and to receive his final judgement.

If only he’d known — when he was screwing around at Sussex, before he met me, and being careful or, apparently, lucky. If only I ’d known. All those years on the pill. But, of course, that wasn’t the point. There were no real jokes to be made along those lines, none at all. If I’d known — well, I’d have known. And if he’d known, before he met me, then by some bizarre process of honourable self-sacrifice that is hard to imagine, he’d have had to tell me, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he? By all that’s fair and right, he’d have had to tell me, pretty soon. And I’d have had to respond, wouldn’t I? Pity your poor mum. And that moment in the sand dunes at Craiginish perhaps would never have happened. Mikey and me would never have been Mikey and me.

We didn’t use, we carefully avoided, the word “fault.” And if it was your dad’s problem, it was still, at least for a little while, not beyond all possible reprieve. It still might, depending on that final double-checking — depend. An unfortunate word, perhaps. My tests were at least just tests, passive tests. Poor Mike must have felt that his tests, even if he knew scientifically it wasn’t so, were tests at which he had to try harder, his very hardest, to do his upmost best.

One has to count so many things in life. Days, hours, minutes. Years, birthdays. Money. The miles between places. How many metres you’ll need for those new curtains. Calories, pounds, blood pressure, heart rate. Days since your last period. Your dad spends a lot of time, these days, counting sales figures. Once he counted baby snails. Is there a word for them: snailets?

But there’s one thing in my life I never thought I would be concerned with counting. You can’t see them, after all, though there are millions and millions of them, apparently, in any given — I don’t know what the right word is either — sample. It must be like counting shoals of herring, or hordes of frantic lemmings, but worse. How do you count them? I still don’t know. Ask your dad. And you’d think that if they were there by the million, you wouldn’t really have to count them all. You’d think that just one million or a good deal fewer than a million might be enough. Five, say.

But life is based, it seems, on this extraordinary percentage of waste. It would be like trying to count all these individual raindrops pattering down now outside, but blending into just one soft, continuous, murmuring gush. How many drops in just a minute, say, on just this house, on just its slippery roof and gurgling gutters, or on just the lawn below and the dripping garden leaves? And any given drop, potentially, life or death for some flower.

No, I’ve counted lots of things, but I never thought I’d become so keenly involved in counting sperm.

HE WENT TO SEE a man called Chivers. I don’t suppose he’ll give you these intimate details tomorrow. I never met Doctor Chivers. He made me think, inevitably, of jam jars. He made me think of Doctor Pope: all those visits for the opposite reason. Doctor Chivers said your dad was “less than two million per millilitre,” which still sounded like an awful lot to me. But your dad, who was a biologist and didn’t need a doctor to tell him, said, “Or about one chance every blue moon.”

So, there you are. You were a chance — two chances — in a blue moon.

Nothing changes, of course, nothing is outwardly different. When a man is given this news, nobody hangs a sign round his neck, or anywhere else, saying “Out of Order.” It’s true of so many things in life, perhaps. It was like, I couldn’t help thinking at the time, when a woman first becomes pregnant. No one would know, she may not even know herself, but no sign lights up for other people, even if it does for her. No one can tell if the girl or boy who was a virgin yesterday is no longer a virgin today. That’s an unfair example, perhaps. There are all kinds of ways in which life just carries on and no one would know.

But now you know. Now you know what the score was for us, over twenty years ago. It was under two million, but call it zero. Which doesn’t explain one very obvious fact, does it? Your dad will explain tomorrow, your dad will talk you through it. But there’s still a lot more of the story left which he won’t or can’t go into. And he can’t explain anything without explaining that for six years — it’s a strange way of putting it perhaps, but it’s how you yourselves might look at it, and it’s only fair you should know — we decided against you.

It was the option that won out, of the limited options that were available. Try not to blame us. Other options were discussed, and there was one that very nearly succeeded — and remained, as it happened, on the shelf. But the option that prevailed was to do nothing. No further action required. To be and to stay just as we were, a couple, a childless couple. It’s only a sad expression if you choose to see it that way. And anyone else, such as your grandparents-in-waiting, might have thought, impatient as they may have been getting: well, they’re just biding their time, they’re not “ready” yet. And then had the second, non-interfering thought: or perhaps — they’re just happy without.

Happy without. Isn’t that possible? Weren’t we happy with each other? That was surely, with us, a given. And isn’t one sorry reason for having children to make up for a deficiency of happiness, for something that doesn’t seem to be there any more? If happiness is a completeness, then what does it matter how many components go to make the whole? If two can complete the circle. Let it be just us.

We never thought of you, you’ll be pleased to know, as little remedies.

But first you must know that for a little while after Doctor Chivers’s pronouncement — Mike’s not going to tell you this and perhaps your mother shouldn’t — we simply couldn’t do it. Complete the circle. Make love, I mean. The very thing that should have been our comfort and mainstay, the very thing we’d always done a lot of and, recently, with a good deal of application. That had never been our problem.

They say this is a common reaction, and Doctor Chivers may even have touched, gently, with your father on such possible repercussions. But I don’t mean just your father, for whom, I could see, there was a question of “manhood.” I had my own disinclination. There was a question of “womanhood” too. There’s a time for such big words. For quite a few nights we slept together, to use that ever ambiguous phrase, as if seized by sudden chastity. There was a gap between us, just a little gap of inches in our bed, but it might have widened like a crevasse — and what would you have ever known? I think Mike feared it would. I think he feared me. Judgement day. Marching orders. Cruel biology speaking.