Mrs Donoghue continues, ‘So, we’re going to be using ICSI, as you know.’
‘Mm.’
‘But I do have to remind you both that although ICSI has a good success rate, it doesn’t guarantee the formation of an embryo. There’s still a long way to go.’
‘We appreciate that,’ says Rich. He nods at Cath, as if to say these words of caution are aimed at her.
Caution be damned, thinks Cath. We’re over the first big hurdle!
* * *
‘Goodness!’ says Lou as Adam plonks several bags from the curry house on the table. ‘Sure you got enough?’
‘In for a penny,’ he grins. ‘Anyway, I imagine you’ll have all sorts of weird cravings if this works. We may as well get used to it. And, given that you’re not
supposed to drink for twenty-four hours, I got us some alcohol-free beer too.’
‘I wouldn’t mind you having the normal stuff.’
‘Nah.’ He cracks open a can and passes it to her. ‘You’re the one who deserves a reward. What you’ve done today is amazing.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I do. You’re bringing hope to a childless couple – that’s wonderful.’
‘She could be single,’ Lou points out. ‘They treat women who aren’t in relationships at the clinic, too.’
‘I don’t reckon she is,’ says Adam.
Nor does Lou, but she’s no idea why.
‘She could be gay . . . ’ he muses.
‘I don’t think that either. If she was in a relationship and had a problem with her eggs, it stands to reason her partner would use hers, don’t you think?’
‘See what you mean. Anyway, whoever she is, you’ve been beyond generous. Plus you’re giving me the chance to be a dad, which, frankly, I didn’t think I would ever get.
And – touch wood – I can’t wait to see the little bugger! So . . . ’ He raises his lager. ‘Here’s to you.’
‘Gosh, thanks.’ Lou blushes. She doesn’t feel she deserves this accolade: not yet. ‘I think we should take this a day at a time,’ she advises.
‘I know, I know, but I can feel it in my water; it’s going to be OK.’
‘Really?’ This is a new, more reckless, Adam speaking. Usually he’s pretty circumspect. The thrill seems to be getting to him.
‘Aw, come on, Lou, let’s look on the bright side, just for this evening. I know, I know, we shouldn’t get too hopeful, but fuck it! I want to! I was walking to the offie, you
know, past all the usual folk – the saddos outside the bars – and yes, yes, I know we’re drinking and it’s not yet six, but ours isn’t real booze – and some guy
wolf-whistled at me, bless him, and I thought, hey man, yes, yes, I know it’s great being in Kemptown and stuff, and yes, I know I’m cute, if you like middle-aged ginger gnomes, but
what you don’t know is this is a BIG day for me, so thanks for the compliment, but I’ve got more important things going on right now – I might well be on the way to being a
daddy!’ He stops, realizes she is not quite with him and adopts a more serious tone. ‘It’s just sometimes, with all the drugs and the clinic and the fact we’re not a couple
and so on, it’s easy not to remember the bigger part of this, which is you’ – he points at her – ‘and me.’ He thumps his chest. ‘We’re having a baby.
Or trying to. It’s absolutely unbelievable. I mean, I like men, you like women; for thousands of years, forever in fact, there was no
way
such a thing would have been possible. Not
without . . . ’ He shudders at the thought. ‘And now, thanks to science – and you – it is. I mean, just imagine, far up there’ – he waves in a vaguely northerly
direction – ‘sixty miles away, or however far it is, in Harley Street, our little friend Ian – who I’m convinced is gay too, as a matter of interest – is busy with his
miraculous Petri dish, making my halfwitted sperm meet with your fabulous eggs and produce a new life. It is nothing short of incredible!’ He takes a big swig from his can.
‘I suppose when you put it like that . . . ’
‘Let’s have a look online, see what it is they’re doing,’ Adam urges. ‘Where’s your laptop?’
‘On the coffee table.’
‘Go on, plug it in.’ It’s impossible not to be affected by his enthusiasm. A few moments later they’re peering at the screen. ‘YouTube,’ directs Adam.
At least he’s allowing me to operate the keyboard, thinks Lou.
ICSI,
she types into search, and there, almost within an instant, is a video of the procedure. Below it a comment has
been posted:
It’s messing with nature. I’m not religious but God intended for the sperm and egg to join INSIDE the body not be taken out and grown in a glass
dish!!
‘Stupid cow,’ says Adam, and presses play.
A long needle, magnified to hundreds of times its actual size, rests in a liquid. Slowly, it approaches the almost perfect sphere of a human egg. There is a moment of resistance as it pushes
through the wall –
ouch,
Lou thinks, feeling for the egg: it looks so brutal – then the spike is inside. When it is right in the centre, a clear drop of liquid, presumably the
sperm, is ejected from the needle so that it enters the egg. Then the spike is gradually withdrawn and the video ends. It takes less than a minute.
‘That’s it, you and me having sex,’ says Adam. ‘So, how was penetration?’
‘Ooh, you, honestly! What are you like?’ Lou reaches for a cushion and thwacks him. ‘It’s the creation of a human life we’re witnessing,’ she reproaches him.
‘I find it rather moving, myself.’
* * *
‘God, I’m bushed,’ says Rich.
Cath looks over at him. His eyes are bloodshot, his face drawn. It’s early but, poor man, he is worn out. Driving yesterday after work, the stress of today; it’s not surprising. And,
no longer driven by adrenaline, she is yawning too. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
Rich heaves himself from the sofa.
‘You head on up,’ she says.
He mounts the stairs while she locks the front door and turns off the lights. On the landing outside her nephews’ room she stops and, on a whim, pushes the door ajar. The curtains are open
wide, a full moon provides a splash of illumination.
On the floor is a rug covered in bright-coloured circles; on the bunk beds are matching duvets: there’s Superman on one, Spiderman on the other, comic-book style. The walls are yellow, the
fitted furniture red. It’s all very jolly – maybe Mike cajoled Sukey into such brazen primary hues; she’s usually one for white and cream, purity. Certainly Alfie and Dom
don’t appear to want for much: two gleaming scooters rest against the radiator, the shelves are covered in toys. There are larger boxes: Junior Scrabble, a Meccano aeroplane set – now
there’s a blast from Cath’s past – a Horrible Practical Jokes kit, and a Super Stomp Rocket. She can imagine her brother having great fun with them all. There’s a neat line
of Wii games, a decent display of books – it’s good to see that her nephews read – and a long row of stuffed animals. So they’re still small enough to want that comfort, she
thinks, touched.
Given that they’re only eight and there are two of them, it’s ever so tidy, Cath observes. She’d not expect otherwise – her sister-in-law would never go away leaving any
kind of mess, even in here. But she suspects it’s like this all the time.
I wonder if having such a buttoned-up mother spoils their fun a little, she thinks. Most boys would be allowed to keep their scooters in the hall, and it must be hard to play with someone
clearing up after you the whole time. If I were their mum, I’d relax the rules. Or maybe it’s just envy, making me critical.
* * *
Eleven p.m., and Adam has fallen asleep on the sofa. The doctor has said that Lou mustn’t be on her own tonight after the sedative, so he’s staying over, but after
all the excitement of the day, the dear man was ready for bed before she was.
The laptop is still humming on the coffee table, a reminder she needs to shut it down. As she opens the lid to locate the off button, it flickers to life: the YouTube clip is still on screen,
paused at the final moment, along with the stranger’s irate post. Provoked, she clicks for more feedback.
Weird how the egg doesn’t become damaged or leak after the needle punctures it. Anyone know how they choose which sperm to use?
Operators select by looking under the microscope. Defective spermatozoa are discarded and, to put it simply, the person behind the microscope chooses a
good-looking one – that means no malformations, good motility, etc. He then breaks the tail and suctions the head into the needle.
Gosh, Lou thinks. More microscopic brutality. I do hope it won’t affect our baby. She continues reading:
IVF is God’s gift to an unfortunate couple – what an amazing video.
God has nothing to do with this. Please stop saying He does!
Definitely it’s God’s gift. There are so many unsuccessful procedures of IVF and ICSI, if he wishes he will bless you with success, if not, even
these modern-day treatments will fail.
I wonder what these people would say if they knew my setup, thinks Lou. She suspects when they refer to an ‘unfortunate couple’, she and Adam are not what these
viewers have in mind.
She switches off the computer, rises to close the curtains. Out of the window, she can see a glittering path across the sea, formed by the light of the moon. It’s a bright circle in a
cloudless sky, an echo of the shape of the egg on the screen: pitted and cratered, not quite perfect. Eerie it should be full today, when the lunar cycle is an echo of a woman’s
twenty-eight-day waxing and waning. And by the time the moon is a half crescent, she will know whether or not what they have been through today has been successful – whether she is
pregnant.
She recalls the biology lessons she had as a girl, pictures the cells multiplying: two, four, eight, sixteen, in the Petri dish miles away. In a few days one embryo will have grown enough, with
luck, to put inside her.
Until then, all she can do is wait.
Lou is running along the prom. Adam has gone to work, and there was no way she could remain still this morning. It’s like when she was expecting her A level results. She
recalls sitting on the stairs, waiting for the postman, legs jiggling with anxiety. Eventually there was a
kerflup
through the letter box, a pile of envelopes; she’d grabbed the one
marked
Board of Cambridge
, ripped it open. And just as her sister had come to peer over her shoulder, wanting to know what the letter said before she’d even absorbed the results
herself, Adam has already texted her from the surgery to find out if she’s heard. She knows he means well, but it only made her jitters worse. The confines of her studio seemed horribly
claustrophobic, the walls hemming her in.
In comparison, pounding along the seafront in the open air, feeling the paving stones beneath her feet, is better. Once more, it’s warm and sunny. On the shingle, a young man is setting up
rows of green-and-white-striped deckchairs in preparation for another busy day.
Trip trip trip
go her trainers up the steps to the pier – she darts round a party of elderly sightseers
disembarking from a coach – and
trip trip trip
back down the other side.
She senses it before she hears it, vibrating against her tummy. She stops. Sure enough: her phone is ringing in her bumbag. She can hardly get the zip open fast enough. ‘Hello?’
‘Lou, it’s Ian again.’
She is panting. ‘Hi, hi, sorry, I was running.’
‘I’m impressed.’
She wipes sweat from her brow with the bottom of her T-shirt, walks with a crunch of pebbles towards the sea, away from the noise of traffic and the listening ears of strangers. ‘Well,
I’ll have to take a break from jogging if this works,’ she says. ‘So . . . ?’
‘Four of your eggs have fertilized,’ he says.
‘Oh.’ A stab of disappointment. That’s two gone already. Is that down to Adam, or her? Was it a mistake to give so many away? ‘Then we’ve lost some.’
‘You have, but we’d usually expect about a 70 per cent fertilization rate.’
Then perhaps four is not bad. At the fairground at the end of the pier, a swing as high as a crane is swooping out over the water and back again. She can just discern the people aboard the ride
– their stomachs must be churning. This is how she feels too: up one second, down the next, lurching from fear to relief.
Four little embryos
is
astonishing . . . Four microscopic beginnings of life, each with its cells multiplying: thirty-two, sixty-four . . .
Meanwhile Ian is still talking. ‘So, we’ll take all of them to blastocyst stage.’
‘Right.’ For a woman with a history of fibroids and internal scarring like Lou, the odds of successful implantation are greater if the cells are allowed to multiply further, and this
is the next stage of development. Yet it means waiting several more days before any of the embryos can be replaced in her womb, and – Lou’s heart plummets again – more might die
before they get there . . .
But all we need is one, she says to herself. Just one.
* * *
‘Mum?’
‘Hello, darling.’
‘I’ve got some news. I can’t get hold of Rich – he’s gone into town for an emergency work meeting, but I had to tell someone.’
‘Oh?’
‘All six of our eggs have fertilized! Isn’t that amazing? The clinic just rang to let me know.’
‘That’s wonderful. I’ll just tell your father.’ Judy repeats the information: Peter must be close by. ‘So now what happens?’
‘We’ve got this awful bloody waiting.’
‘More? Dear me, there seems such a lot.’
‘It’s agony. But basically they leave them to develop before putting them inside me.’
‘Well I never. I would have thought the best environment for a baby to develop in was a womb.’
‘Of course it is, eventually.’
‘They’re not putting all six in, are they?’
Cath laughs. ‘God, no. Two is the maximum, but they’re not keen on even doing that. The risk of complication in pregnancy is greater with multiple embryos.’
‘That makes sense. We humans simply aren’t designed to nurture so many.’
‘Anyway, who’d want six children at once?’ She’d be like Bessie the cat, having a litter.
‘No, exactly. Take it from me, two kids is plenty.’