Saving the Human Race

Troy and Beth were umm-ing and ahh-ing about having a baby. They were rattling around in that old cage, made of poorly paid jobs and ideas that, in another time, it would be considered gentlemanly to call ‘above their station.’ There was also their age: both must have been late thirties by now and much publicity about Down’s syndrome wriggled into their self-perception, giving them a kind of pre-parenthood guilt. However, the greatest cause of their inertia was Troy’s illness. He had a diagnosis of mesothelioma but no prognosis. His doctors muttered confusedly about unclear MRIs; it seems Troy’s scans were muddy, and thus, so was his future. The cause of his cancer was supremely obvious, on the other hand. Troy had been on a team stripping an old warehouse who realized a little late that they were tearing asbestos from the ceiling, letting the lethal insulation rain down on them. The construction firm was arguing in circles about the payments; Troy and Beth were in perpetual hope of a windfall, but the apples were held fast to that tree, at least for now. In sum, the loving pair didn’t know what to do. When they had sex, Beth’s injections made the decision for them. While at home together, they’d all but given up discussing babies. When they went to work, it seemed that their colleagues were in a malicious league against their procreating.

Troy’s boss seemed to spend all weekend reading broadsheets and came in on Mondays, eager to impart the lessons learned to Troy, since he was polite enough to listen. One lecture resounded in Troy’s mind, and as an overweight man, it was hard not to take it personally.

‘I read this really good article about epigenetics,’ Troy’s robust, balding boss with a tattooed neck expounded. Troy looked at him blankly. The boss continued: ‘You don’t just pass on your DNA to your kids you know. It turns out that when you have children, you can sometimes pass on your bad health as well as your DNA. So if you are unhealthy, your kids are more likely to be too. Say for example, you are obese, this fucks with your sperm and your kids are more likely to be obese too. Makes you think.’

Troy’s boss always ended his accounts with ‘makes you think.’ Often, Troy wasn’t sure what the homily to Sunday papers was supposed to make him think, but this time it was quite plain. For Troy, this was yet another way in which the errors of generations gone were delivered, unmarked but with their targets profoundly clear, onto the next. He thought that his boss’ story just went to show that ruination of your offspring was inevitable, and yet he couldn’t avoid that tenacious feeling, which has saved the human race really, that somehow he would do it better, if only he had the chance.

Beth, for her part, worked in a school office, where no one liked children. She guarded the confiscated phones, sold the uniforms, sent the letters to the parents. Beth also minded the counter where students came with their endless pathetic problems. It gave her pause, dealing with teenagers and their vacant personalities. However, in another twist of human psychology that has saved us from extinction, the teenage years just felt so different from her pre-pregnancy position that they couldn’t seem to relate to her unresolved desire for a little tot.

The couple received much more badgering about breeding from Troy’s family than Beth’s. Troy’s Jamaican mother would sit in her floral armchair and shout over the radio, which was constantly tuned to live healings and righteous condemnation of all the sinners, pointing conspicuously at Troy’s crotch, ‘Why haven’t I got any grandchildren yet?’ Troy’s father would sit in his mismatched tartan chair and just look quizzically from Troy to Beth and back again, the epitome of nonplussed husband. This usually happened on Sunday afternoons, after Troy’s parents had been to their histrionic church. The ministering, of the same flavour as her preferred radio stations, tended to put Troy’s mother into something of a fervour, and she would clutch Beth’s arm and say, ‘I can get the Reverend to bless you, just say the word. He can mend a rotten womb you know.’

Beth would regard the cats, perched all over the little sitting room, and say, ‘Thank you, Sandra, but there’s no need. We need to know about Troy’s prognosis before we think about that.’

When the conversation took this turn, Troy would usually stand up and shake off his long loose limbs, grab a biscuit for the road and announce their departure. Like his dad, Troy was what a women’s magazine would call an ‘issue avoider’. (The pun apparently lost on the editing team.) His father always said the same thing at this point: ‘Already, son? Well, you two go easy out there.’ As though ‘out there’ was a place, or state of mind, foreign to him.

Beth’s obfuscation around Troy’s parents masked her genuine mounting broodiness. It went from vague feeling to concrete decision one evening at her best friend Mary-Beth’s house. Yes, they were Beth and Mary-Beth, two peas in a name pod, as their teachers had once moronically said. Mary-Beth called up Beth and asked if she and Troy wanted to come for dinner.

‘We want to tell you something,’ Mary-Beth said elusively.

Mary-Beth’s husband was called Floris, a slightly simpering man whose most striking physical features were his skinny wrists leading to huge hands. They were all out of proportion, so he looked like Michelangelo’s David if David was pigeon-chested and had wrinkled eyelids. Floris welcomed Troy and Beth and pressed cold bottles of beer into their hands.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said, bowing slightly in pretend deference, and shook Troy’s hand. Troy had an urge to wrap his thumb and forefinger around that wrist, but he resisted. Mary-Beth bustled in from the kitchen; she looked like first prize at the fair. She smiled hugely and kissed both the guests.

Mary-Beth sipped wine along with the others, confusing Beth slightly. Beth glared at her, wiling her to break the news they obviously had. They waited until after dessert and after Floris’ overlong story about a guy he worked with who received half a million pounds in his medical settlement. There was silence a moment then Mary-Beth nudged Floris and stage-whispered, ‘Let’s tell them now.’

Floris breathed in arrogantly through his nostrils. ‘As our best friends,’ he began, looking at Troy carefully, who didn’t flinch. ‘We wanted to tell you first that we have decided never to have children. It just isn’t for us. I had ‘the snip’ last week.’ He said ‘the snip’ like that, bending his fingers in the air ridiculously.

Troy had no idea what to say. He didn’t know if this was meant to be some kind of consolation for his troubles, or an act of tremendous solidarity.

Troy was a competitive man, one of those bum-grabbers and ball-clutchers in Sunday league football. He looked casually at Floris, wondering selfishly whether this was some sort of challenge, a little game of one-upmanship, since Floris made so sure to tell them that it was the snip. So they’d never suspect fertility problems when children failed to be born to them. Floris just smiled sentimentally at his wife. Beth thought she detected a feather of falseness in the smile that Mary-Beth gave back to him.

Later that night Beth and Troy near broke the bed. Afterwards, she said to him, sounding like an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine, ‘Damn it all Troy, let’s risk it. I know you’re going to be fine, and we’ll get the pay-out.’ For Beth, a child would bring meaning to their chill pain. Or maybe she wanted one for Mary-Beth, on her behalf, as it were. Either way, no one deserved a child more than them, because for no one else was it such a hard choice.

Beth said, ‘If you agree, I won’t go for my next injection.’ He rolled over, looked away, but he said ok.

However, they were to be foiled by the tumours in Troy’s lungs. Suddenly, his cancer got worse, with timing that made Beth unavoidably think something appalling: that this was a kind of perverse evasion. It archly stopped responding to treatment. The doctors were as bemused as ever.

Within three months Troy was bedridden. Treatment stopped as the options were exhausted. Beth was on leave to care for him. To this day, however, Beth has never told how her husband managed to get her pregnant in his pathetic state, especially since it may have been what finished him off.

They had tried for as long as Troy was able, but, cruelly, Beth’s hormone injections were still wearing off. Eventually, Troy didn’t have the energy. ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ he said mournfully. ‘You’d be a single mum.’ Yet Beth was a strong-minded woman. With Troy on a dearth of time, Beth bought a huge naked shot of his preferred porn star, a choice pitifully apparent from opening the search history on the laptop. She stuck the four-foot poster on the inside of the bedroom door and woke her husband. She put her hand under the covers and whispered, ‘Look at that.’

Troy stared through half-lidded eyes and his wife felt some interest under the sheets. After a minute, she could move her hand rhythmically. As Troy began to sigh, Beth grabbed the jam jar she had assiduously sterilized and used it to gather her husband’s final contribution to this world. She immediately capped it and placed the jar in the freezer. By the time she returned to the bedroom, Troy was at peace, a serene smile on his lips.

And in the end? The construction company gave the pay-out the following week – Troy’s death finally snagging their guilt. Beth could pay for the IVF and she bore Troy’s daughter, who became a happy, if sometimes listless, child with clear eyes and chapped lips. As foretold by Troy’s tattooed boss, she grew to an enormous circumference by thirty, but it seems spiteful to blame a father who absurdly inverted an ancient trend to become a man who died during conception, or at least his part in it, rather than a mother dying in childbirth.