mean how moisturized can she get, for heaven’s sake? Any more and I shall be able to pour her into a glass and drink her.
What the hell is she writing about? I’m not allowed to ask. Apparently, if we read each other’s books we’ll be writing them for each other, which is not the purpose of the exercise.
I expect Lucy’s writing about what an emotionally retarded shit I am. That’ll be it. She can never forgive me for being more relaxed than her about whether we have children or not. I know that secretly she thinks this attitude has infected my sperm. She thinks that their refusal to leap like wild salmon straight up the river of her fertility and headbutt great holes in the walls of her eggs is down to a belligerently slack attitude which they’ve caught off me. She imagines them gently doing backstroke and diving for coins in the idle juices of her uterus saying, “Well, the boss doesn’t care either way about kids, so why should we?”
Dear Penny
Sam hates this. I’m looking at him now, hunched over his laptop, resentment radiating from his every pore. If ever a person’s body language said “This is airy-fairy New Age bollocks,” his does now. I really don’t see why he has to be so negative. Perhaps it’s because the exercise is making him confront his own shallowness. After all, it must be very difficult to become a partner with your emotions if you have absolutely no interest in what those emotions are. I don’t think he even knows whether he wants children. I’m going to ask him. I don’t think I’ve ever really properly confronted him with the question.
Lucy just stopped writing and asked me for the millionth time whether I was sure that I even wanted children because she didn’t think I did. God, we keep having these conversations. I think we should just tape one and put it on a loop. It’s not that I don’t want children. I’m not made of stone, for heaven’s sake, but children are not the only thing I want. I happen to believe that when God made me he made me for a purpose beyond that of devoting my entire life to reproducing myself. To which Lucy replied that when God made me he made a million other people the same day and probably doesn’t even remember my name, which I thought was bloody hurtful actually. So I suggested to her that if my presence on this planet is so insignificant then there can be no reasonable justification for me aspiring to procreation. In fact I should probably just kill myself right now, relieving our overstretched planet of a pointless waste of its resources. She said I was just being pompous and unpleasant and then started to look a bit teary, which is of course a very easy and entirely unfair way of winning an argument. Actually, sometimes, I think I’d quite like to die young. That way I could avoid failing to fulfil my potential.
What he dresses up as self-doubt and humility is actually frustrated arrogance. He only gets depressed about himself because he doesn’t write any more. But it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. He says he can’t write, so he doesn’t write. It’s as simple as that. I told him he’d get a lot further as a writer if he spent less time moaning about it and more time doing it. To which he said he’d like to but that I was taking up all his spare time making him write a stupid book of letters to himself. Which is just ridiculous. At least I’ve made him write something, as opposed to nothing, which is what he usually writes. Actually, I think it might do him good as a writer to get in touch with his feelings occasionally. All he seems to do as a commissioning editor at the BBC is encourage people to write ever ruder jokes. This must surely eventually coarsen his creative soul.
Anyway, he didn’t answer that because he knew I was right. He just snorted unpleasantly and now there’s an atmosphere.
It’s all very well her telling me to write. I can’t bloody write. I’m a creativity-free zone. The only thing about me less fertile than my imagination is my bollocks. She is wrong about my attitude to kids, though. Of course I want children. Well, I think I do. There’s been so much angst surrounding the subject for so long now that I’ve forgotten what I originally felt. But I’m sure that if I do want children it’s because I love Lucy. That’s the only way I can think about it. If I try to think of kids in the abstract I very quickly come up against no sleep and vomit in my personal stereo. Having kids seems to me like the end of life as I know it, and I like life as I know it. I like to work, I like to drink, I like to sleep in and have clothes and furniture with no dribble and sick on them. Viewed dispassionately, I’m not keen on the idea of having children at all and I’m not going to lie to Lucy about it no matter what a cold, heartless shit she thinks that makes me.
Kids, however, as a part of Lucy, as an extension and expression of our love, I can relate to, and if it happened I’d be delighted. No, I’d be more than delighted, I’d be in heaven. It would be the greatest thing in the world, but if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t. That’s how I see it. If we have children it will be another part of us, of our love. If we don’t, then we’ll still have us. Our love will be no less whole. I don’t want to get soppy here, but it’s how I feel.
I’ve just said all this to Lucy and she went all teary again, which at first made me think I’d won her over but it turned out that she was crying because she thinks I’ve already resigned myself to not having kids and that we’re going to end up sad, bitter and unfulfilled and destined to a pathetic, lonely old age.
Dearest Pen Pal
I was talking to Drusilla today at work. Sheila (my boss, the one who told me to write to you) had rushed out of the office (she’d heard there was a bloke on Oxford Street selling dodgy fags at a pound a box), so Joanna and I were being slack. In fact we were playing the Spotlight game, which is great fun. What you do is you get the Actor’s Spotlight (which is a book full of photographs of actors) and open it at random. Whoever you pick on, you have to sleep with. Not actually, obviously, but just as a thought.
I’d just been landed with Sir Ian McKellen and was rather thinking that I had my work cut out there when Drusilla popped in. Drusilla is an actress, hence her connection to herbal and fruit teabags is almost mystical. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her when her hand has not been jiggling a little string over a cup of hot water. She’s convinced that I only have to get the right combination of herbal teabags and I shall instantly have triplets.
I’m not sure. Fruit-flavoured teabags are a mystery to me because they’re not fruit-flavoured at all. They smell of fruit, but quite frankly they taste of bugger-all. The strange thing is, no matter how much I know this to be a fact, I’m always disappointed. You get that terrific whiff of blackcurrant, or orange and ginger and you think “Surely this time the goods will be delivered.” But no. Yet another mug of hot coloured water to nurse till it goes cold.
Drusilla recently played a mad mystic in an episode of Casualty and I’m here to tell you that she was typecast. We’d hoped that it might turn into a semi-regular but sadly it was not to be. Shame. I think Casualty could do with a witch in it. Anyway, the point is that Drusilla has got very interested in my fears about being barren and is convinced that the answer lies in the runes. She’s been reading up on some ancient Druid-like fertility rites or other and came in today waving a crystal about. She says that Western society is the only society which has dispensed with its fertility rites and the only society in which the birth rate is falling. “Hallo-o,” she said. “Obvious connection, I think.” Then she suggested an impromptu fertility ceremony.
Well, I knew she was mad, but this took even me aback. Unbelievably, she wanted me to lie on the floor while she and Joanna squatted over me. I swear I’m not making this up. Then she wanted us all to make some sort of appalling vaginal symbol with our thumbs and forefingers. Whilst doing this we had to chant the words “womb” and “flow” in low rich tones so that the sounds reverberated deep within us.
Well, I ask you. The whole idea was absolutely absurd and I said so.
Let me tell you I felt a right fool when Sheila came back with her fags and found us.
If Restricted Bonking Month works and I do finally get pregnant, Drusilla will of course claim victory for her fertility ritual, but I shan’t mind. I’m that desperate I’d give credit to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Dear Book
Lucy decided that the optimum moment of Restricted Bonking Month had arrived during lunch. My lunch, not
