Pay absolutely no attention to this, I tell Helen as soon as she’s settled in and used to us all. Lily’s just developed a bee in her bonnet about the whole idea of having a dad and maybe even getting to meet him, nothing more. But she’ll pretty soon forget all about it; wait and see. All we need to do is starve the whole thing of oxygen. Simple as that. Not unlike my strategy with her whenever she’s stomping her feet and demanding whole dessert spoonfuls of Nutella on top of her toast for her breakfast on our Sundays together; I just blatantly ignore it, distract her by dangling some kind of toy in her face and in no time, all her little demands disappear as though they never were.
Such are the vagaries of being almost three years old it seems; you’re cursed with the short-term memory of a fruit fly. What was bringing on hysterics two seconds ago is banished instantly at the sight of anything pink and glittery dangled in front of your face. Complete doddle.
I continue to believe that the whole ‘when am I meeting my daddy?’ issue has finally been put to bed right up to the following weekend which, in spite of my best efforts, is the next window of peace I get from work, so I can spend a bit of time at home.
I race home on Friday night so I can give Lily her bath and put her to bed, aching to do some mother/daughter bonding with her, but to my dismay I find out I’m already too late.
Helen’s waiting up for me, watching TV while texting away on her phone downstairs in the family room, wearing an oversized dressing gown and a mansize pair of fleecy socks, sofa-lising. (New buzzword dreamt up by Marc, from Arts and Culture. A bastardisation of words to describe the act of socialising whilst your bum is glued to the sofa. Marc, as you see, is very fond of his word mash-ups.)
She doesn’t hear me slip into the kitchen at the far end of the room and looking at her from this distance all I can think is … so much about Helen has changed over the years and yet so much has stayed exactly the same. She’s gained weight, but she’s lucky, it happens to suit her. Fills her face out and makes her look even younger. She still has the same even temperament and insuppressibly sunny good humour, the exact same general Pollyanna, glass-half-full outlook on life, at all times, always. Just like an air hostess, smiling through her pretty, even white teeth and unfailingly polite, even when living under the same roof as a termagant like me.
She and I don’t look even remotely alike. Helen is bright-eyed and fair-haired, with a sunny, sparkly, outgoing personality to match; not so much a glass-half-full person, as a Waterford crystal, limited edition glass, half full of rare, vintage champagne. Then there’s me; small, dark, unsmiling, with deathly, Morticia Addams-pale skin that’s the bane of my life and a permanently hollow, sunken-eyed look about me, which, in spite of the most expensive face creams money will buy, still seems to be permanently etched in.
Helen’s adopted you see, something which always left me with the lifelong sensation that I somehow wasn’t good enough for my parents, which was why they felt the need to go out shopping for another daughter, as I’d seen it at the time. It had hurt me as a little girl, hurt me far more deeply then I ever let on, and to this day remains a searingly vivid memory, one that still has the power to sting even now, from a safe distance of decades. Coming home from primary school to be told by Dad that there was a ‘surprise’ waiting for me in the good front room. Course I was all excited at first, then bitterly disappointed to discover nothing other than my battered old cot with a new baby sleeping in it. I’d thought at the very least that I was getting a new home computer or a maths set. Something useful.
As time went on though, I realised the truth; that Mum and Dad had just brought home what appeared to the five-year-old me to be an improved version of what a little daughter should be. One who grew up to be pretty and blonde who lisped and giggled and wore pink and got invited everywhere. And although they’d die rather than admit it, one who they both clearly preferred; to this day, I can still hear the three of them happily laughing and messing about while watching some TV programme together night after night, like a proper family. All while I sat all alone upstairs in my room, getting ahead on the next day’s homework and trying to choke back hot, furious tears at being so blatantly excluded. Five years old was a young age to learn all about rejection, and yet that’s exactly what I had to do.
Course years later, after several gin and tonics, my mother has told me that this actually wasn’t the case at all; that she and Dad were if anything just utterly exhausted and worn out by all the various demands involved in rearing a child genius – the special tutorial classes, the constant IQ tests, the violin/cello/clarinet lessons, the way I never seemed to need sleep for more than a few hours, instead reading book after book throughout the long, lonely nights.
According to Mum, they could deal with all that though; what worried them was always hearing that other kids in my class were organising birthday parties for their friends, trips to the movies or else days out to the zoo, none of which I ever seemed to be invited to. But once they adopted little Helen, all that changed for them; because this, thank God, was a more normal child, one who failed maths tests and struggled with her reading, but who was bubbly and friendly and perennially popular; forever getting invited out on play dates and sleepovers with all the other kids in her class. The complete polar opposite to me, in other words.
And now here we are, living under the same roof together, for the first time since we were teenagers. Except now, instead of feeling old pangs of childhood jealousy towards her, all I can think is, this girl really must be some kind of walking saint. I can’t describe just how hugely grateful I am to her for doing this and for putting up with me, when not many would. Grateful to her for dropping everything to help me out in my hour of need, though I did insist on paying her far more than I ever paid Elka, stressing that this was just a temporary measure till I found someone more permanent. (Not an easy task, given that I’ve been blacklisted by just about every nanny agency in town.)
‘Hi, I’m home. So where’s Lily?’ I ask, still breathless from the mad dash to get back to see her and knowing full well what the answer will be. The house is way too quiet, for starters; course she’s already in bed.
‘Asleep hours ago,’ Helen smiles sweetly up at me from where she’s sprawled out in front of the TV, eating Haagen-Dazs straight from the tub. ‘Oh you should have seen her in the bath! She was so adorable! We had the BEST fun. Then she got into her little pink sleeper suit and insisted on me reading Sleeping Beauty to her … You know that’s her number one story now? And her new thing is that as soon as I’ve told it to her, she has to tell it back to me. She’s completely word perfect, her memory is just incredible you know, almost photographic, just like yours …’
Helen happily chatters on while I stand rooted to the spot, fixing her with a borehole stare. No, I did not know Sleeping Beauty was now Lily’s favourite story. Or that she likes to tell it back to you as soon as you’re finished. I knew none of this; how could I? The one night I can get away from work relatively early to see her, I’m already too late.
‘I really wanted to do all that with her,’ I tell Helen, as a flood of disappointment suddenly makes me irrationally snappy. ‘Just once, just for tonight. I nearly crashed the car I rushed home that fast, I had to spin a pile of stories even just to get away this early …’
‘But it’s half eight at night!’ Helen insists. ‘The poor little thing was exhausted. We’d been to the park earlier today you see, to feed the ducks and the weather was so fine, we stayed there much longer than I’d planned. Then we came back here and had dinner, and of course by then, she was practically falling asleep into her spaghetti hoops. So what else was I to do?’
I give a long, defeated sigh and tell her it’s okay, it’s not her fault. I was just looking forward to seeing my little girl, that’s all. But she knows me of old and knows only too well when to pay no attention to me when I’m ratty from sleep deprivation, so she quickly goes back to her TV show.
‘By the way, Sean called for you today,’ she calls over to me cheerily from the sofa as I tear open the post from the island in the centre of the kitchen.
‘Who the hell is Sean?’
‘Oh you know Sean, he’s the FedEx guy. Left a package on the hall table for you. He says he’s been delivering to you for years. Such a sweet guy; do you know he has a daughter exactly Lily’s age with another one on the way?’
Vintage Helen, getting pally with all around her, entrancing everyone she meets with her natural charm and old-fashioned niceness. In the space of a few days, she’s also befriended the cleaning lady over big, bonding mugs of tea and whinges about the respective men in their lives, not to mention the gardener, who she’s now on first name terms with as well. Whereas the sum total of my knowledge about the cleaner is that her first name is Mary and that she has the permanently disappointed look about her of a woman whose husband left her for someone younger, but not before transferring all his assets into an offshore account. Wait and see though, I bet before the month is out Helen will end up going out on a drunken girlie night in Temple Bar with the cleaner and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she ended getting invited to the gardener’s house for a Sunday roast.
Not that I’m holding any of this against her, it’s just a constant daily reminder of our sibling relationship; I’m permanently cast in the role of bad cop against her perennially popular good cop. I’m the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West to her Glinda, the Good Witch in the meringue dress that everyone loves and gravitates towards and wants to hang around with. This was our central casting as kids and this, it would seem, is how we still are.
Then there’s the fact that she seems to be in constant and daily contact with our mother and feels the need to tell me this all the time. Now every family has someone like Helen; the glue person. The one who tries their level best to keep each one in check and fully informed about everyone else, no matter how much indifference and how many shrugged shoulders they come across. Since she moved in, Helen’s forever passing on little titbits of news, like, ‘Guess what? Mum’s just gone and bought a lovely new patio set for her back garden. The wooden one she had just fell apart after all that rain they had recently in Marbella, and you know how she’s had her eye on a cast iron one for ages now …’
Have I ever had a conversation with my mother regarding patio sets? Didn’t even know she had a back garden. Last time I had a decent conversation with her was over a week ago and even then, she was only ringing up to talk to Lily.
Ahh, Lily. It seems that even a small child isn’t immune to Helen and her Miss Congeniality charm offensive. I’ve never seen anything like it; Lily took one look at this shadowy figure who she vaguely remembered from Christmas dinners, not to mention all the birthday cards and gifts that had been posted up from Cork over the years, and instantly idolised her Auntie Helen, practically from the moment she walked through the front door. Turns out Helen is a born natural with kids, the way she’s a born natural with everyone, and now on the rare occasions when I’m home, all I’ll get from Lily is a rough shove followed by, ‘NO! Not YOU, I want Auntie Helen to read me my storwy. Then Auntie Helen can gimme my bath and put me to bed.’
Don’t get me wrong, of course I could kiss Helen’s feet, I’m that grateful to her, but that doesn’t mean it’s not killing me inside.
No words to describe it, when you suddenly feel unwanted at home. When you’re superfluous under your own roof.
‘No, please don’t worry about rushing home, Eloise,’ Helen’s said to me time and again this week, ‘you don’t have to cancel your meeting and leave the office yet. Lily and I are having such a ball here! We’ve made cupcakes and I’m just teaching her how to ice them now. Stay in work, I know how important that is to you. And don’t worry, we’re all fine here, we’re having great fun!’
So far, the pair of them have been to the park together, the movies, the Build-A-Bear factory at the Dundrum Town Centre; they’ve even had tea parties for all of Lily’s dolls in the back garden and picnics at Sandymount Strand. Everything that I want to do with Lily but can’t.
So if I’m being brutally honest … I’m in equal parts grateful to her, but not a little jealous of her too. Burning childhood memories resurface; the way everyone, absolutely everyone just prefers her to me, she’s a bright light that people can’t help be drawn towards, moth-like. My own daughter, it would seem, included.
‘You know Eloise, I’ve been thinking,’ Helen beams over the top of the sofa at me, turning down the volume of the TV.
‘Umm?’ I mutter distractedly, my head buried deep in the pile of post that I’m still wading through.
‘Lily still hasn’t stopped talking about her dad you know, it’s become almost like an obsession with her.’
This, by the way, is delivered with a look that might as well say, ‘if you were around more often, you’d know.’
‘Oh come on, not this again …’
‘Yes, this again. You have to listen to me, Eloise. It’s the first thing she talks about when she wakes up every morning, last thing she asks me about before I put her to bed. When am I meeting him, where is he, have you found him yet, where are you looking … the poor little thing’s not letting it drop. And to be honest, I don’t think this is something that’s just going to go quietly away all by itself, like you’d thought.’
Okay, so now she has my attention.
‘So if you think about it,’ Helen goes on, pausing to dump the now empty tub of ice cream on the coffee table in front of her, then licking every single last dribble of chocolate sauce off the back of the spoon. ‘Would it be such a terrible thing if we did a bit of detective work and tracked him down? I mean, I’d be more than happy to make all the phone calls and do all the work for you. I know how busy you are, but trust me, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I’d report back to you at every stage and I wouldn’t do a thing without your say-so …’
I stand stone still and throw her a look so icy that it could freeze mercury. At least, that’s what I hope it conveys. Lately Seth Coleman has been saying behind my back that my glacial stares, once so terrifying, are now starting to make me look a bit constipated.
‘I mean … it absolutely goes without saying …’ she hastily backpedals, realising how unimpressed I am by all of this shitetalk. ‘Not that we’d want him to be a part of her life in any way at all. This is just so Lily can put a face to his name. That’s all. To help her get closure on this and you know … put it all to bed. She’s become unhealthily obsessed and I really think this is the best way to deal with the whole issue.’
Helen trails off, waiting on my response. Then for good measure tacks on,
‘So, emm … What do you think then?’
‘Helen,’ I begin, arms folded, nearly swaying with tiredness by now, ‘Are you completely insane? Why are you even raising this subject? Lily isn’t quite three years old yet, she’ll have forgotten all about it in a few days.’
‘But she hasn’t forgotten, that’s the whole point that you’re missing!’ Helen insists, forcefully coming right back at me. ‘You work twenty-four-seven; you haven’t heard her asking about him morning, noon and night …’
‘Oh here we go,’ I sigh deeply, sinking exhaustedly down into the armchair opposite her and kicking off unforgiving high shoes which have been pinching me since I first put them on … at five this morning. ‘Throw in the absentee mother jibe, why don’t you. Go for it, play the low card.’
Then I remember my manners, remember just how much I owe her for being here when I’d no one else to turn to.
‘Sorry, I really didn’t mean to sound so grouchy,’ I compose myself and apologise.
‘That’s okay. I think that after almost twenty-eight years, I’m well used to you by now,’ she smiles benignly, then looks back at me expectantly, clearly waiting on a fuller discussion to follow.
‘Thing is, I’m very, very tired, Helen. I’ve had the longest day in the longest week you can possibly imagine. Tracing Lily’s father is completely out of the question and to be perfectly honest, I’m not a hundred percent certain that I appreciate you even bringing it up.’
‘But I’m only doing it for Lily,’ she says sweetly, refusing to get riled.
Which of course only riles me up even more.
‘Because you know, this isn’t a bullet that you can dodge that easily,’ she chatters on easily, ignoring the waves of boxed fury emanating from my corner of the room. ‘Sooner or later, the day will come when she’s going to track him down for herself, you know.’
‘Yeah, fine, maybe when she’s eighteen, so why don’t I just cross that bridge when I come to it? I’ve told you Helen, it’s completely out of the question. I won’t have some total stranger barging his way into my baby’s life and maybe even letting her down and wanting nothing to do with her. Which he’d be perfectly entitled to do, you know. I’m only trying to protect her, that’s all’.
‘But you’re completely missing the point,’ says Helen calmly, reasonably. ‘She’s not a baby any more, she’s a little girl. And all kids want is to be normal, to be the same as the others. If you won’t do this for your own reasons, then at least do it for Lily. Let her just put a face to the word daddy, then let it go. She’s already well able to understand that you’re not with her dad, but just let her get this out of her little system. Then next time other kids in a playground ask her about her father, she can be one of them and answer truthfully about where he is and what he’s like, instead of having to tell the world that she doesn’t even know where he is or what his name is. It’s this whole mystery surrounding him that’s making her so obsessed.’
‘You’re completely exaggerating, she is not obsessed …’
‘Oh no? Do you realise that every picture she’s drawn with her new colouring set is of her dad? Then today we got the bus to the park and she waddled up and asked the driver was he her dad. Same thing to a guy serving on the till in Tesco. Then later on she was watching a DVD of Shrek while I was getting dinner and now she’s got it into her head that her father is king of some faraway kingdom.’
‘Well … This is just a phase and she’ll soon grow out of it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because kids do.’
‘I didn’t.’
Which of course, suddenly stops me dead in my tracks.
‘I’m sorry … What did you just say?’
‘Eloise, do you honestly think that I spent my whole childhood and adulthood not wondering about my own natural parents? Who they were and where they were from? And what were the reasons why they’d given me up for adoption? Do you really think that’s not something that obsessed me for just about as long as I can remember?’
‘But, you never mentioned anything before …’
My voice gets increasingly smaller and smaller then trails off into nothing. Because the thought is unspoken between us. Why would Helen tell me, of all people? Why would anyone bother to tell me anything about their private life? Even if she had phoned me to talk, chances are all she would have got would have been my voicemail, or else a promise from my assistant to get the message to me. Which, I shamefacedly have to admit, the chances of my returning would have been slim to none.
Have to say I’m feeling very, very small right now. Something that’s happening far too often lately.
Thankfully Helen is too humane to really hammer the point home though and I feel an even deeper surge of gratitude towards her for this small mercy.
‘You see,’ she goes on to explain, distractedly picking up one of Lily’s stuffed cats from the floor in front of her and thoughtfully playing with it, ‘because our parents were fantastic to me and I loved them both so much, it seemed almost like ingratitude to want to know who my real family were. But that didn’t stop me from always wondering, and in later life, becoming absolutely determined to find out the truth about my birth family. Who were they, why they gave me up, all of that.’
‘But Helen,’ I say, a bit softer now, ‘Mum and Dad adored you, idolised you.’ You were like their little treasure. I want to tack on, and we both know that I was the also-ran daughter, the difficult one, the one they always had to worry about, but somehow there’s no need to. It’s unspoken between us. She already knows.
‘I know all that and believe me, I couldn’t have been more grateful to either of them. Or, God knows, have had a happier childhood. But you’re missing the point. Because no matter how loving a family you grow up in, knowing you’re adopted still leaves a scar. You spend so much time wondering. Think about it. Your mother, the person who’s supposed to love you and protect you more than anyone else in the world, gives you away. The first thing that happens to you in the first few days of life is that you’re rejected. And I just had to find out why. And also to let her know that I was okay and thank God, that things had worked out well for me. So, it took me years to pluck up the courage, but eventually I decided to do a bit of detective work. I told our mum of course; I’d die if she thought I was doing anything behind her back. But she understood that this was something I absolutely needed to do and she was incredibly supportive. Came with me to the adoption agency and everything.’
‘And …?’ I manage to get out, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of guilt at not being there for her. At not even knowing about this before now.
‘I was too late. My birth mother had passed away about two years previously. She’d had breast cancer and apparently died very young, in her early fifties. She was only sixteen when she had me and it turned out my biological father, her boyfriend, had been killed by a drunk driver in a car crash shortly before I was born, which was why I was put up for adoption in the first place. She was grieving, I imagine, and felt she couldn’t cope with a new baby on top of everything else she was going through. I don’t even blame her either – chances are I’d have done exactly the same thing in her shoes. She was only sixteen for God’s sake, she was still a kid herself.
‘But please listen to me on this Eloise,’ Helen says gently, leaning forward and looking at me intently, ‘I now have to spend the rest of my life living with the fact that I was too late. That if I’d gone about tracking down my birth mother years ago, I may have been able to meet her, might even struck up some kind of a relationship with her. Maybe I could even have seen her before she passed away. But I kept putting it off and now I have to live with the what-ifs. All I’m saying is, don’t put Lily through what I’ve been through. She’s obsessed about finding her real dad just like I was and it’s not going to go away. So please, for her sake, deal with this now, while there’s still time. She has a right to know, just like I did. And our mum supported me when I went digging for the truth, so why not do the same for Lily?’
Oh God, I think, looking sympathetically across at her. I feel so awful for Helen, for what the poor girl had to go through. And could she have a point? Is this whole thing turning into an obsession for Lily that won’t go away until she finally finds out who her father is? Then one awful mental image after another starts to crowd in on me; of the child sitting on a bus today and asking the driver if he is her dad. Of her not even being able to enjoy a harmless TV movie without fantasising about who her real dad is … Drawing pictures of him …
Who knows what’s going through her little mind?
Helen knows me well and must sense that I’m wavering, because next thing she’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the Lotus position, looking serenely calm, fair hair neatly flicked over her shoulder.
‘Aren’t you in the least bit curious yourself,’ she puts it to me, ‘to know anything at all about him? I mean, he must come from good stock, he’s got to be intelligent, because Lily couldn’t just get it from you and you alone. Sure, just look at her. She’s so alert and advanced for her age, don’t you think so?’
I nod, tears of pride surprising me by stinging my eyes. Lily is incredibly bright; I’ve no doubt about that. She never even had baby-talk, she started speaking words clearly and distinctly at eighteen months and by aged two, she was talking in whole sentences, like a proper little lady. Already she’s learning to read and can assemble all her own toys and even more impressive, can amuse and entertain herself for hours without getting bored. She even surprised me by being musical at a very young age and when I bought her a piano, she took to it like a duck to water. She’s too young for proper lessons yet, but the second she is old enough, I’ve been intending to hire private tuition. To be perfectly honest, I’m only itching for her to turn three so I can get a proper IQ test done on her. Because I know she’ll score high, just know it.
‘I’ll bet her father turns out to be … A senior consultant cardiologist in the Blackrock Clinic,’ Helen chips in dreamily. ‘Or because she’s so musical, maybe a conductor. With the Philharmonic at the New York Met. Or maybe he’s a physicist well on his way to winning the Nobel Prize by now. One thing’s for certain though, he must be really good looking, because she’s such a gorgeous little fairy.’
‘Hmmm,’ is all I can say, getting intrigued now in spite of myself.
‘Either way,’ she goes on, still in her fantasy world and I think barely even registering me now, ‘if you were him, and if you had a little girl this special, wouldn’t you want to know about it?’
The funny thing is that when it boils down to it, I actually know so little about Lily’s father myself, it’s ridiculous. And I’m surprising myself by wondering about it now, as it’s something I rarely do. Once I had Lily, I banished all thoughts about whoever he might be completely out of my mind. She’s mine, I thought. Mine and no one else’s. One thing is for certain though, whoever he is and wherever he is, he’s got to be someone very special – because isn’t Lily the living walking proof of that?
Oh, sod this anyway. You know something? It’s curiosity that’ll be the death of mankind. Not all this crap about climate change.
No, it’s curiosity, plain and simple.
The fertility clinic I attended went by the unlikely name of the Reilly Institute, which at the time, appealed. It sounded like a place where you do night classes, I remember thinking at the time, not somewhere you’ve to reveal all about your private life and your full medical history, get totally undressed, then undergo possibly the most mortifying medical procedure ever devised by man. I’ll spare the details, but all I’ll say is that it involves lying on a sheet of freezing metal naked from the waist down, while being prodded with a load of ice-cold spatulas, and I’ll leave the rest to the imagination. Trust me though, no torture meted out to witches in medieval times could have been more excruciatingly painful or mortifying.
You know me by now; I did my homework and did it thoroughly. Firstly I found out from the concerned, mercifully sensitive nurse who was looking after me, whether or not the bank recruited, let’s just say, a certain type of donor? Because I was fussy; I wanted someone intelligent, talented, from ‘good stock’, as Helen put it. I bombarded this poor, patient nurse with a thousand questions – on average how old were the donors? (Under age forty apparently is preferable, I knew from my own exhaustive research on the subject. Higher sperm motility.) How and when did donors sign away legal rights to any child conceived using their sperm? And most importantly of all, how exactly was confidentiality maintained?
I must have driven her nearly insane with my inquisition; I requested a full list of donor profiles, then asked for information about each donor’s physical characteristics; ethnic background, educational background, occupation, general health, and hobbies and interests. Some banks will even provide photos, which I took a lightning-quick scan though, then dismissed. Somehow it made the whole mortifying process far simpler not to attach a face to a number on a donor profile.
Made me feel a bit more in control, if that makes any sense.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that the whole process took weeks. I trawled through each and every profile on offer, knowing that this was probably the single biggest decision I was ever likely to make in my life. And finally, finally finally, I found The One. No name, just a number, but this one seemed to tick all the right boxes. Blue eyes, fair hair and fair skin, just how I imagined my little baby would look. Supermarket genetics come to life.
The Chosen One seemed sporty and athletic too: he’d won gold medals for the two hundred metres and was a member of the Trinity College rowing team. This appealed; if I had a boy, I reasoned, he’d have great biceps and would look like he rowed everywhere. And he’d grow up with shiny skin and cheekbones you could grate cheese on, like all athletes seem to have. His profile also claimed that he’d written a thesis on Ireland’s economic meltdown and the subsequent road to recovery, which immediately gave me a mental picture that maybe he worked as a high-earning TV economist, one of those young preppy guys who look straight to camera and gravely tell us we’re all doomed, but do it with such persuasive charm that you end up not really minding that much at all.
What swung it for me though, was that his profile claimed he was musical as well as everything else and played classical piano right up to concert grade. That alone made me almost able to picture him; tall, gifted, clean shaven, articulate and an all-rounder. A real renaissance man. The type that if I ever happened to meet him in a bar in real life, most likely wouldn’t give someone like me a second glance, but would be surrounded by tall blonde modelly women with caramel skin and perfect Hollywood smiles.
But not here. Because in the Reilly Institute, it was me that was calling the shots. And I’d decided on him and that was all there was to it. He was good at sport, academically sound and cultured too – barring him having become a self-made billionaire by the age of twenty five, what more could I possibly ask for?
Then came the science bit. A Dr. Casement, with the cold clinical dispassion of someone who spends half their day looking down a microscope, advised that we needed to find out how many pregnancies this donor’s sperm had previously produced. Ten is the recommended limit apparently, to lessen the chances of a single donor’s offspring ever meeting and producing children of their own, instantly making me think of just about every Greek tragedy I’d ever yawned my way through. But my luck was in; astonishingly, I was the first woman through there to have chosen this grade A specimen. Massive sigh of relief.
Then as soon as the sample was fully medically assessed for family history, heritable conditions, any diseases that could be passed down – not to mention infectious diseases like chlamydia, HIV, hepatitis, syphilis and let’s not forget the delightful gonorrhoea – the rest was plain sailing.
I was told it would take a few rounds of treatment before we’d have a successful outcome, so not to be too disappointed if it didn’t take on my first go. But I was having absolutely none of it. Because under no circumstances was I going through all of this malarkey all over again, so I willed my uterus lining to thicken up and do what it was told and miraculously, astonished everyone at the clinic by getting lucky first time round.
Out came Lily, punctual to the dot nine months later and thus ended my involvement with the Reilly Institute.
Until now, that is.