On that day, I left the paragraph I’d been struggling with mid-sentence and started working through some phone calls from three years before from one of my older clients. Jonah was reaching seventy and he’d already approved the draft I had completed, but life documents were only considered finished when they included the circumstances of a client’s death.
I listened to him talking to his daughter. She sounded like she had something she wanted to tell him but there were so many noises in the background that I couldn’t decipher what they were saying. Their voices had dropped low, too, something which I noticed Jonah and Genevieve did when they had long conversations together. They were close, they always had been.
Most life document subjects had not had their families through induction but, like Jonah, had paid for an XC. I would have been a toddler at the time when XCs were first introduced but we’d learnt about it at school. Year on year, we were fed just a little more information. When I was in primary school, we were told you could have children through induction or by having an XC, although I didn’t fully understand either term back then. I can’t remember exactly which year at secondary school I was in when we were taught about the artificial wombs that would house the XC foetuses in specially-designed laboratories. After that, we learnt how manufactured eggs and sperm were created from a mix of genetic material, not solely that of their parents, and so the mother did not have to undergo induction. That lesson, I remember. I remember learning that.
It was a hot summer afternoon where the thick air slowed your thoughts and the post-lunch fogginess hung over us like heavy capes. Our teacher had started playing a film about XCs and then sat back on her chair, staring into the distance as though she was struck with the same lethargy as us. I was sure that one of my classmates had actually fallen asleep. They’d laid their head down on their arms on the table and were completely still. Diagrams and images flashed before us on the screen, I thought it was just a repeat of what I already knew, but then came the line the about mothers not having to go through induction.
At the time I’d been trying to understand the feelings I had around knowing that Evie and I had been born naturally, not through induction. Dad had warned us not to tell people, and I was at the fringes of understanding why that was now. It marked me out. I was aware that I was holding onto a guilt around it, knowing that our family had not had to suffer like so many others.
‘Any questions?’ the teacher had asked when the film had finished.
A girl named Morag who I remember as usually quite quiet, sat up taller in her chair and raised her hand. She had such long, thick hair it looked like it could aptly be described as a mane. I remember I was looking at it, at the way it stuck out, untamed by her ponytail, when she asked: ‘Why doesn’t everyone have XC children? Instead of going through induction?’
‘Well, that’s a good question actually Morag. I believe when the XC programme was developed that was the initial plan. But essentially it was not as successful in addressing infertility as was hoped. XC children have the same infertility issues as any other person nowadays. And, well, it’s an expensive process.’
‘So you have to be rich?’ Morag asked. ‘You have to be rich to do it.’
‘Yes,’ the teacher said.
‘But that’s not fair,’ Morag said.
‘Be that as it may,’ our teacher replied.
‘What does that even mean?’ Morag said back, her voice rising higher, close to breaking. At that moment, the bell had rung and most of the class slumped from the class, seemingly unaware of Morag’s distress.
I’d learnt later both her aunts had died during induction.
Genevieve was in fact one of the first XCs. It had been in the early days of the science and she’d become unwell as a toddler from a metabolic genetic disorder that had not been picked up in the initial screening for genetic abnormalities – something that, according to the Spheres at least, didn’t happen any more. Sometimes I would find myself replaying the footage of her returning home from hospital. She’d clung on to Jonah’s hand, taking faltering steps, but just a few days later, she was running with abandon. Her ease of movement was reflected in Jonah’s expression, his face was flooded with a relief that she was well again; it was almost as if a warm light was emanating from within him. His wife had contracted cancer when Genevieve was only a few months old and died before she turned one; his daughter was everything to him.
I played the call again but even after listening to it a few times, I couldn’t make out what Genevieve was telling her dad. But then Jonah had ended the call very quickly, all in a rush. I couldn’t work out what it was that Genevieve had said that made him react in that way.
One of the background noises was the sound of the puppy Genevieve had bought recently, skittering back and forth across the floor. I isolated the sound of the dog paws and then cleaned the file of it. But there was something else, too, clouding their voices.
Cleaning up files so you could hear what people are saying was a large part of the job. I liked doing it. There was something satisfying about being able to scrub a call
