morning just after seven. I scribbled, ‘Gone 2 work, C U 2night?’ on a Post-It note and stuck it on the forearm that was flung out across the pillow. I used to write messages straight on to his arm with a felt-tip pen until he complained it ruined his street cred to have ‘Buy milk’ stencilled indelibly across his wrist. Nothing if not sensitive to people’s needs, I switched to Post-Its.
Back in my own home, I stood under the shower, taking my first opportunity to consider Alexis’s ballistic missile. I knew that having a baby had climbed to the top of her and Chris’s partnership agenda now that they had put the finishing touches to their house on the edge of the Pennines, but somehow I hadn’t realized parenthood was quite so imminent a project. I’d had this mental picture Of it being something that would rumble on for ages before anything actually happened, given that it’s such a complicated business for lesbian couples to arrange.
First they’ve got to decide whether they want an anonymous donor, in which case their baby could end up having the same father as half the children of lesbians in the Greater Manchester area, with all the potential horrors that lines up for the future.
But if they decide to go for a donor they know, they’ve got to be careful that everyone agrees in advance what his relationship to the child is going to be. Then they’ve got to wait while he has two AIDS tests with a gap of at least six months in between. Finally, they’ve got to juggle things so that sperm and womb are in the same place at the optimum moment. According to Alexis, it’s not like a straight couple where the woman can take her temperature every five minutes till the time is right then seize her bloke by the appropriate body part and demand sex. So I’d been banking on a breathing space to get used to the idea of Chris and Alexis as parents.
I’ve never been smitten with the maternal urge, which means I always feel a bit bemused when my friends get sandbagged by their hormones and turn from perfectly normal women into monomaniacs desperate to pass their genes on to a waiting world. Maybe it’s because my biological clock has still got a way to go before anything in my universe starts turning pumpkin-shaped. Or maybe, as Richard suggests when he’s in sentimental father mode, it’s because I’m a cold-hearted bastard with all the emotional warmth of Robocop. Either way, I didn’t want a child and I never knew if I was saying the right thing to those who did.
Selfishly, my first thought was for the difference it was going to make to my life. Alexis is my best friend. We go shopping for clothes together. We play seriously competitive and acrimonious Scrabble games together. When Chris and Richard aren’t there to complain about the results, we concoct exotic and bizarre snacks (oatcakes with French mayonnaise and strawberry jam; green banana, coconut and chicken curry…) and wash them down with copious amounts of good vodka. We pick each other’s brains and exploit each other’s contacts. Most of all, we’re there for each other when it counts.
As the hot water cascaded over me, I felt like I was already in mourning for the friendship. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. Alexis would have responsibilities. When Chris’s commitments as a partner in a firm of community architects took her out of town, Alexis would be shackled without time off for good behaviour. Instead of hanging out with me after work, she’d be rushing home for bath time and nursery tea. Her conversation would shrink to the latest exploits of the incredible child. And it would be incredible, no two ways about it. They always are. There would be endless photographs to pore over. Instead of calling me to say, ‘Get down here, girl, I’ve just found a fabulous silk shirt in your size in Kendal’s sale,’ Alexis would be putting the child on the phone to say, ‘Wo, gay,’ and claiming it as ‘Hello, Kate’. Worst
Elizabeth Amelia Barrington