half an hour, too nervous to make the call. Of course I couldn’t hang around for half an hour this morning because I had to go to work, but I did make Lucy open the envelope and read the letter for me. As she slid a knife along the crease of the paper everything seemed to be in slow motion. I can remember thinking that now at least the waiting was over, whatever fate might bring.
I must say things started pretty grimly. There was no personal element at all, no “Dear sir,” no “Brace yourself, mate,” no “Better get yourself a drink, you sad pathetic excuse for a man, because you have no sperm.” Just a printed form on which they fill in your results with a ballpoint pen. So much for our more caring society. They do not even offer counselling.
Well, Book, I am here to tell you that at first I thought that all was lost. The very opening line (under the deceptively bland heading “motility”) said “30% sluggish”. Honestly, that was the very word they used. Sluggish. A horrible, horrible word, reminiscent of slimy snail-like creatures that can’t be bothered moving their arses on garden paths in order to avoid being stamped on. Sluggish! It’s such a loaded term, not clinical at all. I wanted a doctor’s reaction, not a critic’s! And if they’re going to use unscientific language couldn’t they have thought of a more friendly expression? Like “relaxed”, perhaps, or “unhurried”? If they’d told me I had relaxed sperm I could have handled it. Cool, laid-back sperm, sperm that liked to hang out and chill with the other guys. That would be fine. But “sluggish”? It’s almost as if they were trying to be unpleasant.
Anyway, the next line was worse! Yes, worse! I nearly cried. It said “41% swimming in the wrong direction”! I mean, what a thing to say about the very stuff of a man’s loins! My head was spinning. I thought, I’ve got stupid sperm! The stuff’s backing away up my dick all these years! Then I thought, “Hang on, this is ridiculous!” This test is rigged. How are they supposed to know what’s the right direction, for heaven’s sake? They’re in a plastic pot! I had this vision of all my sperm desperately groping about hither and thither, banging their heads against the sides of the container, lashing their tails around like fish in a bucket, thinking, “We’re genetically programmed to find an egg here. Where is it?”
By the end of the letter I was ready to slit my wrists.
In conclusion it said, “90% useless”! Bad swimmers, poor motility. A load of rubbish in general.
So now the full and terrible truth was upon me. I’m not a man. I’ve failed my sperm test!
I was already asking myself whether they’d let me take it again. If it was like your driving test, I mean I had four goes at that when in actual fact I should have passed on the first time except that my examiners were a bunch of total Nazis. Then of course it dawned on me that the sperm tester must be a Nazi too! A jealous, small- minded petty official dedicated to ruining the lives of better men. A hopeless and inadequate man, embittered because his own sperm were small and sickly and couldn’t find their way out of his trousers. A man who took his revenge upon society by becoming a sperm tester and failing anyone who came up with the real goods.
That had to be it. Give a fellow a sperm tester’s uniform and suddenly he thinks he’s Hitler!
I was on the very point of phoning my MP and demanding a full recount when Lucy pointed out that stamped at the bottom of the form in big letters was the word NORMAL.
Oh, the relief! It turns out that my pathetic percentages are par for the course, that pretty much all sperm is 90 per cent rubbish. Apparently there’s only a couple of decent wrigglers in an entire wristful. For all the macho pride and posturing of us men, most sperms just simply aren’t up to it. They’re sluggish. They’re stupid. They’re always wandering off in the wrong direction. They don’t know where they’re going.
Lucy said they sound exactly like a pub full of blokes, which was quite funny, I suppose.
Anyway, that was it. Passed. Normal. I was so pleased I danced round the kitchen and spilt my coffee.
“Normal!” I shouted. “Oh yes! Normal! Ordinary! Run of the mill!” Then I thought, hang on, normal? Ordinary? A bit disappointing, really. I mean, let’s face it, “Superb” would have been a better result. Probably just an off day. Still, whatever, I’m off the hook.
Dear Penny
Well, I must say I did laugh at Sam’s letter and not just because it nearly made him cry either. The bit about 41 per cent swimming in the wrong direction! Well, I ask you. I’m surprised it wasn’t 100 pet cent. What woman doesn’t know that sperm swims in the wrong direction? We certainly don’t need to invoke the hard-pressed resources of the National Health Service to find that out. Not if you happen to cough half an hour after a bonk and ten million of the little swine headbutt your gusset.
Anyway, armed with both our test results I took an hour off work and went to see Dr Cooper and he said that having established that nothing obvious is wrong with either of us, the problem might be that we are incompatible (I felt like saying that this thought hod crossed my mind too, but I didn’t). Dr Cooper says that my juices and Sam’s sperm may simply not like each other. That my body may be poisoning his tadpoles as they try to “swim up my Amazon” as Sam calls it. All this sounds completely gruesome but Dr Cooper assures me that it’s absolutely fine and normal, normal, that is, in sad infertile old bags like me. Actually he didn’t say that last bit but it’s how I feel sometimes. I have this vision of my insides as a wrinkled old prune. It’s funny. Sometimes it all seems so unreal, like a dream. Me? Possibly infertile? Surely not. There must be some mistake. I want kids, I’ve always wanted kids, my whole life has been built round the anticipation of bringing up kids, this can’t be happening. Why me? Why bloody me! Oh well, I suppose we all think that, don’t we? We desperate ones.
Anyway, back to Dr Cooper and his incompatibility test. I must say I was a bit taken aback at the thought. The idea of all Sam’s seed drowning in agony in the hell waters of my poisonous vagina made me quite teary. Like a murderess. Well, it seems that in order to discover whether this horrible possibility is in fact the case we must do a postcoital test. Which basically means Sam and me having it off and then a doctor having a look at the aftermath. Quite frankly, one of the most horrible suggestions anyone has ever put to me.
When Doc Cooper first explained it I thought he wanted us to have it off at his surgery which would be not on. I just couldn’t do it. However, Dr Cooper said that he would not be doing the test, for which small mercy I should think he is eternally grateful. I imagine that he’s absolutely sick of the sight of my nether regions by now, he’s been up them that many times over the years. And the thought of encountering them while they are gorged with Sam’s sperm is almost too horrible to contemplate.
Anyway, what has to happen is that Sam and I must get up early on the appointed day and get straight down to business. This is not regular morning practice for us, I hasten to add, both of us preferring a cup of tea and a slice of toast first thing. Besides which, the memory of Sam’s efforts at morning masturbation are still painfully fresh. Once I’ve been properly serviced and stonked up, so to speak, I have to go to some ghastly specialist clinic or other (which will no doubt look like something out of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward) and up me the doctors will go. Surprise, surprise. Who would be a woman? Looking back over the years of smear tests, non-specific infections, fertility bizzo and all, my poor old muff has definitely been a well-trodden path for the medical profession. Sometimes I think I should have a revolving door fitted. Anyway, as I was saying, the specialist, having had a jolly good poke around (with what will no doubt be a piece of frozen metal the size of a grill pan), will then be able to inform me whether or not my insides are filled with dead sperm.
Ugh!
God, I hate this. Why can’t I just get pregnant!?
I rang Drusilla from work and asked her when exactly she’d said that the next full moon was. I’m not going to do it, but I can’t afford to discount anything.
Dear Sam
Going to dinner at Trevor and Kit’s tonight. Had the usual hoo-hah about what to wear. Not me, of course. I know what to wear. Trousers and a shirt. But Lucy finds these decisions much more perplexing. What’s more, she insists on dragging me into her dilemmas and then blaming me for them! She stands there in her underwear and says “Which do you think, the red or the blue?” Well, I know of course the clever thing would be to refuse to answer, because there’s no chance in this world or the next of saying the right thing. Nonetheless, inevitably I have a stab at it.
“Uhm, the red?”
