It's 2.50am. I'm staring at a white page, this screen. Yes, one of those. I'm heavy-eyed, listening to Radio Paradise (Mumford & Sons' Awake My Soul currently playing) and going outside every 10 minutes to drink tea and smoke under the palm tree, the flickering panorama of Durban's city and harbour winking at me up on the ridge. An owl is wheezing in the trees that surround me in night-green. But I'm not really taking it in. I'm staring into my future and, as usual, not a lot of it looks familiar. "You were made to meet your maker" is what Mumford & Sons sing. Yesterday I made an investment for my future.
I gave a doctor a small plastic bottle with a whitish-grey viscous gloop in it. My semen. It crossed my mind to walk out of the room, throw the bottle into the bank of sub-tropical greenery and return to what is familiar. Susan. Back in my home village in the Western Cape where she waits, wondering whether I will go ahead with this. Project Egg.
I am. It is on my life path. And I simply cannot step around it. I give the bottle to the doctor and, while her mother prepares to lie back, have her legs locked high in stirrups for the "insertion", to have her follicles fed with the future, I take Keira to the hospital restaurant for croissants and coffee.
She selects cheese with her croissant, I jam. I look into her child-wise grey-blue eyes and ask her: "Keira, when my sister was born I was three and my mom tells me I was really unhappy that this baby came along and took away all the attention I had been getting. Do you think you might feel like that when Egg arrives?"
The nine-year-old looked at me, smiled and answered: "Yes. Because when mom or dad take me shopping or whatever, people say 'wow, your daughter is so pretty' and I think when the new baby is here, people will say things about it and forget to say that I'm pretty."
"I understand. It will probably be like that." I don't know what else to say. I am smiling at her. She looks up at me and smiles. She understands. And she looks so pretty. And her eyes speak of wisdom.
She shows me the book she is reading. One of three books she is currently reading. I want to read it. To better understand the mind of a child I once was. It feels like time to go back. To the doctor's rooms. Perfect timing. Keira's mother is coming out of the doctor's office. Beaming. "The doctor said he got me at just the right time. We don't need to do another insertion on Monday. The second follicle was open and receptive."
It takes me a while to absorb this. A girl? The talk at the previous night's birthday dinner was about a daughter invariably being the result of a first, shallow, insertion using unfiltered semen and a second, deeper, insertion using cleaned and carefully selected sperm more likely to produce a son.
What, we're not going to bother trying for a boy? Caroline says, "How about a coffee at The Corner?" Fantastic idea.
We bump into friends. Old Durban friends of mine, friends of Caroline's. A unicyclist and tree feller. A vintage clothing shop owner. A fellow journalist with a razor-sharp sense of the absurd. He makes me laugh. And he has his two-year-old daughter playing on the ground at his feet. I feel paternity. My phone rings. It's Susan.
I had said to her that Caroline would be at the peak of her ovulating powers this weekend. Susan has sensed that the job has been done. I haven't been completely open. Or communicative. Protecting. No, deceiving. I confirm this. I feel selfish. I tell her. She soothes instead of seethes. "You're not being selfish. You have done what you needed to do." So rational. I think I would understand anger better. I deserve her anger.
Susan is sorry. Sorry that she can't share my excitement. "I'm not big enough to deal with this," she says. My head is spinning, swimming. Words are hard to find. The noise of plates clattering in the sink of the nearby kitchen has become deafening. I'm not hearing Susan. We agree to talk later. I go back to another coffee in the bright sunshine. Bright faces. My cloudy mind.
I feel an overwhelming tiredness. The tree feller gives me a lift home. I am toppled. I can't breathe. I can't sleep. I watch rugby. It hurts. Susan phones again. We talk. and talk. And talk. but the pain doesn't go away. She wants me to be excited about the new life I am creating. She just can't feel the same. "I don't want to spoil your excitement," she says. Nor do I. But I am holding back any elation. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right to celebrate the possible birth of something beautiful at the expense of the possible end of something that is beautiful.
After we have finished, I think of the analogy I didn't think of while we were talking. I feel like a man who has parachuted from a plane for the first time. He should feel excited after the jump. But the broken legs he sustained upon landing means that pain is all that he is feeling.
My head swims again when I try to catch up on sleep in the late afternoon. Before I can sink into oblivion, Susan phones again. She wants to know how I am feeling. I say the same things. I am wondering how she is feeling. "You don't know how I felt physically when you told me Caroline and you had gone to the hospital to do the insemination." "Stomach?" I say. "I felt an intense pain in my uterus." Wow. I thought, "Wow." That's the best I could come up with. I think I might have said it. But both of us heard silence. Felt the chasm yawn between us. How else could it be?
I smoke and drink tea. And I cannot sleep. 3.57am. And this, right now, is just as it is. It is as it is. Lay Me Down, by The Audreys, is playing on Radio Paradise. "Just lay me down, lay me down, lay me down, lay me down... down... down..."
I go outside for one last smoke. The owl is still calling out to the darkness. I'm not breathing in. I stretch to get a lungful of fresh, cool night air. My shoulders slump. I am so, so tired. It feels like I don't belong in my body. It's been emptied.
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