Inconceivable (22 page)

Dear Sam,

T
oday we went to see our consultant and got Lucy’s lapa results.

Good news and bad news. They found nothing wrong, which is good; on the other hand, they found nothing that they could ‘cure’, so to speak, so that’s bad. Poor Lucy now faces the prospect of IVF treatment and she is pretty down about it. Well, I can’t say I like the idea much myself. Of course it does mean that I’ll get first-hand knowledge of the whole horrible process for my film, which will be extremely useful, but that is absolutely and completely beside the point. In fact I want to make this quite clear, right now, lest in future years, when I’m a big Hollywood player, I ever look back and doubt the motives and feelings I had at this juncture. I’m aware that I’m secretly exploiting Lucy’s misery (and my own) for our future gain, but I’d happily give it away right now. Film or no film, if there was anything on earth I could do to make Lucy pregnant, I’d do it. Anything. I mean that.

But it just doesn’t seem that there is anything I can do, beyond shagging her when required and playing my part in the IVF business if it comes to that.

Honestly. It’s important that I set this down on record. The film means nothing. If tomorrow Lucy fell pregnant naturally I’d be the happiest man in the world.

I can research IVF stuff without her anyway.

Dear Penny,

D
espite the fact that we are now definitely on the road to IVF, I’ve decided to make love to Sam every day this month in the hope that the laparoscopy ‘tube clearing’ theory will bear fruit. We started last night and I have a dreadful confession to make. About halfway through I found myself thinking about Carl Phipps. I forced him from my mind, of course, but I’m afraid to say that my subconscious was being more honest than my conscience because I often find myself thinking about him.

I love Sam, of course, absolutely. But it’s different.

Dear Sam,

L
ucy has decided to begin a cycle of IVF after her next period (presuming we don’t score in the meantime with her newly flushed-out tubes). Dr Cooper, our GP, is writing to the people at Spannerfield Hospital, which is one of the top places for fertility treatment, to get us an appointment to see them.

I had a big meeting at Broadcasting House today. Infuriating, really, because I’m getting along splendidly with the script and the last thing I want to be bothered with is my actual job. The Beeb have now officially commissioned my film, by the way, which is absolutely wonderful. For the first time since I used to write sketches for radio when I was young and wild, I am a professional writer. It’s not a bad deal at all for a first film. Forty thousand, but in stages. Final payment to be made on completion of principal photography, so I’m only actually guaranteed ten thousand at the moment for the first draft. I’ve asked Aiden Fumet to look after my business. I must say, now he’s on my side I like him much better. I didn’t go in with him myself when the deal was made. George and Trevor didn’t feel that Nigel was quite ready yet for the news that the brilliant new writer they’d found is, in fact, the despised and sacked Sam Bell. Nigel probably imagines me as some spiky-haired punk, since Aiden Fumet normally only represents fashionable people.

Anyway, as I say, I’m now a professional writer with a script fully in development at the BBC, which is an absolutely thrilling thing to be. The only fly in my professional ointment is that I still have my job at Radio which I must keep up in order to avoid making Lucy suspicious, and of course for the cash. We can’t survive for the next six months on ten grand plus the minute sum Lucy makes at the agency.

So, bright and early this morning, after Lucy and I had had a three-minute quickie (‘Don’t worry about me, just get on with it,’ were her bleary, sleepy words), I left her lying in bed trying to eat toast with three pillows under her bum and her legs propped up against the wall and rushed off for my meeting. They like to start early in Radio because it’s very much a daytime medium, unlike TV, of course.

The meeting was fascinating in its banality. It was a seminar pertaining to the Director General’s Regional Diversity Directive (the DGRDD), which is called ‘The Glory of the Quilt’. I don’t know why it’s called ‘The Glory of the Quilt’. Somebody in the lift said they thought it related to Britain being a patchwork, but for all I know QUILT may be an acronym for Quasi Utilitarianism Initiative Long Term. Or something else altogether. Nobody ever knows these things. I don’t think we’re supposed to.

The seminar was being chaired by the Head of Youth, BBC Radio, whose name is Tom. Tom and I had already met. He called me in to impress upon me that he did not mind jokes about drugs or even anal sex. In fact he positively encouraged ‘cutting edge’ material, as long as it was on after nine in the evening and was in no way exploitative or offensive to minority groups.

Anyway, Tom kicked off in pretty general terms.

‘Hi, yo. Welcome to this session of the ongoing series of seminars under the Director General’s Regional Diversity Directive. The Glory of the Quilt. As you all know, today’s ongoing subtopic is Regional Diversity and Youth.’

I hadn’t known, actually, but I let it go. Up until now all the seminars of the Director General’s Regional Diversity Directive had been bogged down in debating why all the regional diversity debates were taking place in London, but they had obviously bitten the bullet on this one and moved on.

‘So, BBC youth radio and the regions,’ said Tom. ‘As you all know, the Director General is one hundred per cent committed to the BBC diversifying into the regions and I fully support him in his view…Bill, I asked you to formulate a comprehensive decentralization strategy.’

I have not yet discovered what Bill’s post is. Nobody I asked knew either (including Tom). My theory is that Bill wandered into BH one day, possibly to be interviewed on Radio 4 about bird- watching or to deliver an envelope of money to the playlist compilers at Radio 1 and he never found his way out again.

Broadcasting House really is something of a warren.

‘The key to regional diversification,’ said Bill, ‘is accents. We need more accents about the place. Northern accents, Scottish accents, at least one Welsh accent.’

Tom leapt on this like a thirsty man hearing the bell at closing time.

‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Accents are the key and I think we need to stress right from the word go that wherever possible those accents should be genuine.’

Everybody nodded wisely at this, although Tom himself could see problems.

‘The BBC is, however,’ he continued, ‘an affirmative action employer. We have quotas and we’re not ashamed of it.’

The problem was that a vast percentage of BBC senior staff are of course from either Oxford or Cambridge, people unlikely to possess overly strong regional accents. The choice, the meeting felt, was pretty stark. Either BBC executives stop giving jobs to their old university friends, or some of those friends will have to pretend that they come from Llandudno.

‘I’m not entirely unhappy with that,’ said Tom. ‘If we’re going to teach the kids to speak badly let’s at least have people doing it who know the rules that are being broken.’

Dear Penny,

I
got my period today. One more infertile month to add to the long long line of them that stretch back into my distant past. Sam and I will go and see the people at Spannerfield tomorrow. He’s dreading it, I know, although strangely he seems to have suddenly become a lot more interested in the process. During the last day or two he’s asked me really quite a lot of questions about ovulation and LH surges and things like that. It’s good that he asks, but I’m sure he’s only trying to be nice. Still, that’s better than nothing, I suppose.

Dear Sam,

We’re going to Spannerfield tomorrow. I’m pretty nervous and a bit depressed about it. I’ve been using some of these feelings in my script (just as Lucy always wanted me to, I might add), and it’s working out rather well. Interestingly, the film is going to be less of an absolutely full-on comedy than I originally thought. Not that it won’t be funny. You couldn’t avoid it with that many knob gags at your disposal, but it’s also going to have its serious side.

I tried a bit out on Trevor and George today. I was really nervous because I’ve never attempted anything but jokes with them before but I wanted to give Colin (that’s the name of my lead bloke) something of what I’m feeling. I’m going to paste the speech straight across from my Film Document because I think it’s relevant to this book too.

COLIN (
Reflective. Depressed
): ‘So it seems that we’ve reached the end of the fertility road and we’re going to have to try IVF. I know it’s a positive thing and all that, but it just feels so sad and…well…grown up…Funny how the penny finally drops that you’re not young any more. That moment when all the cliches that affected your parents and their friends start happening to people you know. All those dreadful, embarrassing, failure-type things that were for older people. Alcoholism [Trevor nodded wisely at this], divorce, loneliness, money-troubles…or childlessness like Rachel [that’s the girl’s name] and me, childless and trying for a test-tube baby…’

I must say when I read it out to them I thought it sounded far too mawkish and indulgent, but George and Trevor were very supportive. They think that a bit of emotion will really add depth to the piece and that it will play well against the comedy, which I agree with absolutely.

They still love the comedy. George nearly fell off his chair when he read the bit about me taking in my sperm sample and having to dig it out from down the back of my trousers in front of the nurse. He thinks I made it up and simply will not accept that it really happened.

Dear Penny,

W
ell, we’ve had our meeting at Spannerfield. Our new consultant’s name is Mr Agnew and he seems very nice. He explained that there are two more tests he’d like to carry out before we commit to an IVF cycle. A hysterosalpingogram (HSG) for me and another sperm test for Sam. His old test is no good because apparently the Spannerfield IVF people always test the sperm themselves. The hysterosalpingogram is an X-ray of the uterus and Fallopian tubes. This involves injecting dye into my cervix (again), which I am

looking forward to. Sam’s test involves him having another wank
. But,
yet again, he is the one who’s kicking up a fuss! I can’t believe we’re back to all that again. I said to him, I said, ‘My God, Sam, it’s not the end of the world! I’m asking you to have a quick one off the wrist, not fuck a hedgehog!’ He laughed a lot at that and jotted it down on a piece of paper. I don’t know why he did that but somehow I thought it was quite touching.

Dear Sam,

L
ucy says it’s just a quick one off the wrist like the last time. Oh yes, just like the last time, except this time they won’t let me do it at home! I have to go and masturbate at the hospital! Christ, I can’t imagine a more horrible prospect. Unfortunately I made the mistake of saying this to Lucy and she said that she could imagine a more horrible prospect as a matter of fact…having long telescopes pushed through your bellybutton, having dye injected into you, having your gut pumped full of air and photographed internally, and above all having every doctor in Britain staring up your fanny on a day-to-day basis.

Well, if she’s going to play the woman’s card then there’s nothing I can say, is there?

She said a great line about a hedgehog which I’ll definitely use.

Dear Penny,

C
arl came into work today. He had to sign some contracts. We hardly spoke. He smiled a nice smile but then went straight into Sheila’s office. It’s what he said he’d do in his note and absolutely the right and proper thing, but I can’t deny it gave me a jolt. A very large part of me desperately wished he’d stopped and had a chat, you know, just about inconsequential things. Of course, I must never forget that the last time we saw each other we kissed, long and hard, in fact. And Carl is right: that’s a fire which must definitely not be fed. All the same, I did wish he’d felt able to say more than a perfunctory ‘hello’. Except he

right, I know that. I mean basically I’ve already been a bit unfaithful to Sam. I mean not
really,
of course, but a bit, and that’s terrible. Let’s face it, if I discovered that he’d been pashing on with someone at work, even if it was only once, and totally out of character, I’d still be pretty bloody angry, to say the least. I don’t know what I’d do but I do know I’d be terribly upset.

Dear Book,

W
ell, I must say that this morning has to rank as one of the more gruesome mornings of my life.

Communal masturbation in West London.

Actually that makes it sound better than it was. It makes it sound friendly and inclusive, like a dance or a musical. Dale Winton and Bonnie Langford in
Communal Masturbation in West London
.

It wasn’t friendly or inclusive at all.

My God, it was grim. They say they’ll see you any time between nine and twelve but Trevor told me to get there at least fifteen minutes before the place opened, as a queue develops. Trevor is an old hand at the sperm test game (ha ha ha), because when he donated to those lesbians they insisted that he have his sperm checked out first. Actually Trevor felt slightly offended about that and accused them of social engineering and trying to create a lesbian master race. The lesbians said that before they wasted a perfectly good turkey baster they wanted to check that his sperm weren’t all immotile, two-headed or dead. Charming, I must say, but I believe people can be very frank in the lesbian community.

It comes from years of having to be politically and socially assertive.

Anyway, there must be a lot more wankers around than in Trevor’s day, because although I slunk in at eight-forty there were already four blokes ahead of me. All sitting about in this depressing waiting room with posters about the dangers of smoking all over the place. I can’t imagine why they have such an obsession with smoking in a masturbating facility. Perhaps some blokes have been having a cigarette after they ejaculated?

Anyway, as I say, I slunk in and sat down as far away from any of the others as I could and almost immediately another man arrived. Luckily for me he must have done it before because the first thing he did was go to the empty desk and sign something before sitting down. Instantly I was on the alert! Was there some queueing system of which I was unaware? Did one clock in for a toss? On sneaking over and inspecting the desk I realized that there was indeed a system. ‘Please sign list on arrival and wait for your name to come up,’ it said on the form. On the form, that is, not on a big poster on the wall, but on a poxy little form on a clipboard on a desk. Couldn’t they have put ‘Smoking may harm your unborn child’ on the little form and ‘Sign up!’ on a great big poster?

So now, instead of being fifth man in, I was sixth. I thought for a moment about appealing to the man who came in after me, explaining that I had in fact been there before him but did not know about signing the form. I didn’t, of course. Let me tell you now that one thing I learned today is that
nobody
talks to anybody in the wanking queue. The hospital could be burning down and we’d all rather burn to death than shout ‘Fire!’ You sit, and you wait.

Anyway, the long minutes ticked by and at nine o’clock a couple of nurses emerged from various corridors and began to take an interest in things. By this time three more men had turned up and we were being forced to sit right next to each other on the little square of chairs, which nobody liked at all. One of the nurses went to the desk and called out the first name. Up gets the bloke, goes to the desk, gets his pot and is directed down the corridor to the wanking room.

So now we all know the score. One room. One fucking room.

We’re going in one at a time in a slow, agonizing tosser chain.

Each of us realizes that the amount of time that we’re going to have to spend in that hellhole is entirely dependent on those in front of us in the queue. The chain moves at the speed of the slowest wanker.

After about ten minutes the door at the end of the corridor opened and the first man hurried out. He dropped his pot off at a little hatch in the wall, handed some kind of plastic-coated form back to the nurse and he was out, lucky swine. After what I considered an unnecessary minute or two of faffing about, the nurse called out the next name and up got another man, picked up his pot and the plastic-coated form and trundled down the corridor to the masturbation chamber. I must say I found this plastic-coated form a bit disconcerting. What was it? Wanking instructions? Surely most men were up to speed on that one?

And
plastic-coated. T
hat was a bit of a gross touch, I must say.

It’s always struck me as a strange thing about instructions in general, the way people feel the need to give them out whatever the circumstances. Perhaps it makes us feel more in control, like the way we still give all the details on an outgoing answerphone message: ‘If you’d like to leave a message please speak clearly after the tone.’ I mean, we all know that, don’t we? Perhaps we should add, ‘Oh, and don’t forget to put the receiver back afterwards or your phone will be rendered useless.’ Lucy and I had a frozen pie last night and on the box it said ‘Remove cardboard box before putting in the oven.’ I mean I suppose some people might make a mistake with that, but surely it’s better to let them learn by experience or else one day they’ll be near a fire with some cardboard and no instructions and hurt themselves.

The ballpoint pens they give us at work have a warning embossed on the plastic tops advising us not to put them in our mouths as choking might ensue. That is a fact. I’m not making it up. Surely the same thing could be said for eggcups or toilet roll tubes or carpets? The world is definitely going mad.

Anyway, back to the tosser queue. The next bloke in took nearly fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes
to have a wank! I mean I’ve pulled them off in fifteen seconds in my time! I could see I was not the only one who thought this. Everybody was shuffling their feet a bit and looking at their watches. Eventually, of course, he emerged, and nearly ran past us to get out of the place, and so the long day wore on. There was a coffee machine available. I say coffee but what I mean is hot water with little brown islands floating in it. Worse than useless, really. Strange, I mean we all knew the machine served liquid shit but because it
said
it served coffee we drank the stuff. If it had said ‘Liquid Shit’ machine I suppose we would have left it alone. Instructions, you see, we’re all caught in the headlights.

Finally at gone quarter to ten, my number came up. ‘Mr Bell,’ the lady said. It had to be a woman, of course. Like when you’re a kid buying condoms at Boots, you could wait for hours for a lad to take over the till but he never did and you had to buy them off a teenage girl your own age. Anyway, the nurse gave me my pot and the plastic-coated instructions, and when I say plastic- coated, I don’t mean neatly laminated, no, I mean a twenty-year- old form in an old plastic bag. That form has seen some sights, I bet.

‘Last room on the left,’ said the nurse. ‘When you’ve finished leave your pot at the lab hatch and return the form to me.’

Well, I must say I’ve masturbated in more pleasant environments. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think that the NHS should be consuming its precious resources providing sensually lit boudoirs draped in red velvet and reeking of sultry scents for sad acts like me to wank in. I’m just saying it was all a bit depressing.

There was a chair, a magazine rack, a handbasin and a waste- paper basket in the room. That was it. Apart from that it was completely bare. The plastic-coated instructions informed me that I should carefully wash my hands and knob before getting down to the business of the morning. Already in the wastebasket were the crumpled paper handtowels of the previous tossers on which they had no doubt dried not only their hands but also their knobs. Strange to think that only moments before I had entered the room another man had been…I decided not to think about it.

So I scrubbed up and viewed the chair. It was a municipal easy- chair consisting of an upright and a horizontal cushion. The sort of chair you would have found in the teachers’ common room of a secondary modern school in about 1970. I regret to have to report that it was stained, not in a truly horrid way, but just with age. There was a dark triangle on the front of the seat, left where a million men’s legs had worn the material around it. In the magazine rack were some old dirty mags. It’s a long time since I’ve seen the inside of a dirty mag and for a moment I thought, ‘Hello, bonus,’ but really, you just couldn’t get into them at all, they were so
old
. I don’t mean interestingly old, like 1960 or something. Just old; about three years or so. On the wall there was a sign saying, and I kid you not, that any donations of spare ‘reading material’ would be welcomed. Reading! We live in a world where five-year-olds can dial up snuff movies on the Internet and yet a hospital calls wank mags ‘reading material’.

I don’t know why they don’t just write to
Penthouse
. I’m sure the publishers would be delighted to make a donation to assist all those men in making their donations.

Then suddenly I became aware of the time!

Oh my God, I must have been in that room for two or three minutes already! Instantly I had a vision of all the men outside, shuffling their feet, looking at their watches, thinking to themselves, ‘How long does it take to toss yourself off, for fuck’s sake!’ Just as I had been cruelly thinking myself only moments before. Suddenly I was convinced that they were all out there gnashing their teeth and muttering, ‘He’s reading the articles in the magazines, I’m sure of it.’

Must get down to it! Must get down to it! Don’t want to hold up the queue. But how
do
you get down to it under that kind of pressure? It’s impossible. I sat on the chair, I stood up, I glanced at a magazine. Panic rose within me and panic was the
only
thing that was rising!

In the end, by a supreme effort I managed to calm myself down a little. I did it by telling myself that the door was locked, that I would never have to see any of those men outside again and that I would take as long as I damn well liked.

So I sat down on the horrible, worn-out old chair and resolutely concentrated on the job. With, I might add, the added pressure of knowing that I
must get the first bit in
! They make this clear in all the literature, and the plastic-coated instructions were also very very firm on the subject. The first bit is the best bit, of that there seems to be no doubt. All the rest is rubbish, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Well, I did it. Sort of. I think there was enough. I hope so, anyway. Only time will tell. Looking at my watch I realized that I had been in there for over twenty minutes. I could feel the wave of resentment greet me as I emerged and walked past them all to hand in my pot. I was so embarrassed and flustered that I tried to walk out of the building still holding the plastic-coated form and had to be called back, which was humiliating.

Like I say, I’ve had better mornings.

Personally, I think it’s possible that I’d rather have dye inserted into my cervix, but I’m not going to say that to Lucy, of course.