Dreams Before the Start of Time

by Anne Charnock

  She glances down. The green light has stopped blinking. She takes the first cup at hand and makes a double espresso. As she takes her first sip, she wonders if pregnant women are supposed to cut down on caffeine. She can’t recall Millie ordering a coffee recently.

  It occurs to Toni that if she keeps the baby, Atticus might want to move in. She doesn’t care for that idea, but then, if she doesn’t let him move in, he might drift away; she’ll be bringing up a baby on her own. In a knee-jerk, she calls the co-parenting agency, which she contacted a month ago when she was feeling particularly broody. She’d had lunch that day with Millie and was almost sick with envy over Millie’s pregnancy. Toni didn’t say anything to her friend, but personally she’d never opt for donor sperm—could be anybody’s! Nice genes, never mind the sociopathic personality.

  The agency receptionist picks up.

  “Hi. My name’s Toni Munroe. I’m considering co-parenting, and I have an appointment on Friday with the clinic’s counsellor—

  “No, I’ve no contract yet. I’m afraid I have to cancel—

  “Yes, I know it’s short notice, but something came up at work—

  “I’m so sorry, I can’t reschedule just yet—

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind. Leave it with me a few days—

  “So sorry. Bye.”

  She hasn’t moved from her bar stool. She slumps forward with her closed fists against her forehead and recalls the co-parenting advertisement, which she saw immediately after her lunch with Millie. It was a large poster that happened to face Toni as she waited on the platform for a Victoria line train. She was still thinking about Millie—her obvious delight at being pregnant—and no doubt that’s why the advert snagged.

  Toni felt embarrassed taking a photo of the contact details. So much so, she held her phone at waist height, angled up towards the advertisement, and took the shot while looking away.

  YES, YOU CAN HAVE A CHILD WITHOUT A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP.

  IF YOU ARE SINGLE, IF YOU ARE GAY, IF YOU ARE GENDER FLUID, SIGN UP FOR OUR CO-PARENTING INTRODUCTION SERVICE!

  CHOOSE YOUR CO-PARENT FROM OUR DATABASE—A SPECIAL FOREVER FRIEND WHO IS EQUALLY KEEN TO BE A LOVING PARENT!

  THOUSANDS OF HAPPY CHILDREN ARE NOW BEING RAISED BY PLATONIC CO-PARENTS WHO DON’T LIVE UNDER THE SAME ROOF!

  SHARE THE JOY, SHARE THE WORK

  A forever friend? At the time, it sounded so much easier to Toni to find a forever friend than a forever boyfriend. Toni has already downloaded the forms—page after page of teasing blank boxes offering the giddying prospect of an ideal co-parent. Education, hobbies, cultural interests, eye colour, hair colour, physique, religion, politics. Oddly, nothing about attitudes to discipline. This particular omission has niggled her; it’s the reason she hasn’t ticked any boxes as yet. Imagine teaming up with a control freak.

  Which prompts her to reassess Atticus. He seems pretty relaxed with life. She can’t imagine him getting uptight. He must be reasonably intelligent too. But he’s a damn football fanatic. She and Atticus have somehow bypassed the usual get-to-know-you stuff, which isn’t surprising. He’s a sex-buddy, basically, and it’s working great; it’s all she’s wanted since her split with Freddie.

  She inhales deeply, puffs out her cheeks and slowly releases her breath. Idiot. It’s too late to ask Atticus the easy stuff—brothers and sisters, does he have any? Where did he study? So she shoots off a message:

  Hi Alice, free to chat?

  Not now, Toni. I’ll call you back on lunch break. About?

  Your friend. Atticus.

  Ah!!!!!!!

  Making his way through Camberwell to the elevated cycle route, Atticus O’Neill is pleased when the traffic lights change to red outside the Hermit’s Cave pub. He can see the far end of the bar, where he stood last night with Toni and her friends—journos and teachers, a couple of city types. He didn’t know them all. For most of the time, he felt on the periphery, whereas Toni, all evening, took centre stage during the best conversations—fast banter, laughter and in-jokes lost on him. He can’t believe he’s dating her. She could be the one. But then, she didn’t stay over last night, mentioned early deadlines. An excuse? Or did he bang on too much about his footy team? Bored her rigid, probably.

  He knows part of the reason he’s attracted to her is that she owns her own flat. She’s solvent. And he knows this reflects badly on him, but he’s done his share of supporting other people, his parents. She might have a private income.

  When they all left the pub last night, he felt a knot in his stomach. He wanted her to stay over. He wonders if she’s backing off. And why hasn’t she ever asked him over to her place?

  A car honks. He looks up and sees the traffic lights changing from amber to red, again. “Shit,” he says. He needs to snap out of it. He doesn’t do daydreams.

  Finally, Toni faces a mirror, swipes away the puffiness under her eyes with her forefingers. The effect is short-lived. She feels guilty about last night’s boozing. She recalls that as she approached the Hermit’s Cave, she promised herself she’d drink water from ten o’clock onwards, but she soon lost track of time. When the bell rang for last orders at eleven—she groans at the memory—she egged on her friends to have another round: “Well, I’m having a whisky for the road, so who’s joining me?” If she tells her friends she’s pregnant, they’ll all remember that heavy midweek session.

  Atticus is a nice name. She scratches her head. What on earth does it mean?

  She sits at her admin desk, which is the messier of two desks that stand at right angles in her supposed living room-come-kitchen. The second desk, a Danish rosewood antique, is where she writes. And her designated relaxation space is a single armchair that’s angled slightly away from her work area. Toni opens the forms from the co-parenting agency, but before inspecting them, she searches for boys’ names.

  Atticus: inhabitant of Attica. Um, boring. And more: Atticus was a Roman man of letters who is reputed to be the first publisher because he directed his freed slave, Tiro, to copy Cicero’s letters. Still boring.

  Back to the co-parenting forms. If she terminates her pregnancy, she could start afresh with someone on the database, start artificial insemination at the clinic with Mr. Right’s cleaned-up sperm. If that doesn’t work, she could begin IVF with Mr. Right’s cleaned-up sperm. And if she’s going to take that path, she wants the full monty—what the agency calls a fully refined search and matching service. What if there’s no match for all her box ticks? It could be a con. She reckons the agency can offer only an approximate match. Whoever she settles on, she needs to be best buddies with him, because she could be meeting him every week for at least eighteen years—that is, if she goes ahead with this. There’s a suspicion—it’s stalking her—that if she’s right-on politically correct when she ticks the boxes, she’ll be matched to someone she can’t abide.

  She isn’t bothered about sexual preference or religion, but she is concerned about his outlook on life, which might conceivably be genetic, at least in part. It’s a pet theory for Toni: people might be conservative rather than outgoing by nature. A case of hardwiring. A yen for familiarity and comfort—two roast ducks on New Year’s Day, battered cod every Friday and cheese from only Mrs. Finnigan’s farm shop. Toni doesn’t relish being incompatible with her own child; it’s surely to be avoided, at all costs.

  What would she do if this best-match guy suddenly wanted to up sticks, emigrate to Australia, like Freddie did? Flamin’ Nora! Co-parenting with someone new could be a total disaster. At least Atticus seems steady. Pretty sweet, to be fair. Maybe she could persuade him to co-parent with her. And, more to the point, he doesn’t travel too much. He did mention a trip to China when she last slept over, and she feels bad she didn’t ask him more.

  Her muzziness persists. She drops into her armchair. In a split second, she feels herself ignite. She lifts her right foot; she’s tempted to kick over the coffee table. So tempted. But no. She lowers her foot. Six fertile years wasted
on that tosser Freddie. Why didn’t he clear off three years earlier, give her a chance to start over? She curls up, knees to chin, and hugs her legs tight.

  Toni admits to herself now—twelve months since the final split—that it wasn’t six years she spent with Freddie. Probably four and a half years, if she subtracts their spats and periodic break-ups. They never moved in together.

  When he announced his emigration plans, Toni scoured her entire flat for anything he had ever given to her: a designer corkscrew, a travel manicure set—what was he thinking?—all the film books. And a scarf, which she loved. She stripped photographs from their frames—even a group photo taken at Danny’s wedding in which she could see only the top of Freddie’s head. In her utility room, she found an old gym bag, and she carefully packed all the Freddie-reminders inside as though laying things to rest. It all went up into the small loft. Then she remembered her short stack of theatre programmes; Freddie had snaffled most of them. Sifting through, she weeded out three programmes for productions they’d seen together. Up to the loft, into the gym bag. Finally, she decided the empty picture frames were useless because they carried a memory of the Freddie photos. So they went up to the loft too. There was nothing left. Nothing. And she found the purge surprisingly cathartic. But that feeling didn’t last. On the morning Freddie boarded his flight, she experienced a throwback to an old, too-familiar feeling of abandonment. She didn’t get out of bed that day. It seemed she couldn’t differentiate between a split with a below-par boyfriend and the accidental, life-shattering loss of her mother.

  Atticus shows his pass at the gate. The security guard hands over a hard hat and reflective jacket, and Atticus strides out onto the site—levelled, apart from one mesa-like mound, some three metres high, at the site’s northern end. The mound’s slightly angled flat top reminds him of a particular mesa, the Cerro Negro in Argentina—a world away from the dereliction of Dagenham. Until twelve months ago, this site housed a dilapidated and abandoned transport depot, and since then Atticus has supervised the painstaking process of stripping oil and fuel spillages from the soil.

  A tracked excavator stutters forward with its bucket raised. The operator stabs the bucket into the remaining mound, scoops and tips soil into the waiting dump truck. Atticus estimates the bucket’s volume and quantifies how long it will take to treat this remaining mound of soil. On days such as these, he knows he has the perfect job. As he rocks on his heels, watching the synchronized performance—it’s so satisfying to hand over a clean blank canvas—a message pings on his phone. It’s from Toni: Hey, weather forecast good for weekend. Fancy a picnic Sunday?

  Promised to spend the day with Max, my kid brother.

  Bring him along?

  OK!

  Toni opens her calendar and makes a new overlay, which she titles “Atticus.” A single red dot for each time they dated over the past six weeks, and an extra red dot for the times she stayed over at his place. It takes a few minutes of cross-referencing with messages to pinpoint the sleepovers. She screws up her eyes and sighs. Atticus hasn’t met her dad or stepmother, he hasn’t seen her flat—no one has stayed over with Toni since Freddie left—yet she’s carrying his baby. She opens her eyes and assesses the double red dots—three sets in one particular week, nearly six weeks ago. No problems though. The one time, ages ago, that the condom slipped, she took a morning-after pill.

  At midday, Alice’s video-call whoops from Toni’s screen. Alice is brushing crumbs from around her mouth with her fingertips.

  Toni says, “Hey! Alice. Thanks for getting back.”

  “You’re still in pyjamas, Toni. What a life!”

  “Yeah. I’m not leaving the flat today.”

  “Not hung over, then? You looked a bit wobbly after the pub.”

  Toni rebuffs the comment with an innocent look. “I was tired after a busy day. In fact, I didn’t have much to drink.”

  “Fun night, wasn’t it? Look, I’ve got a student coming in, so I might have to break off.”

  “I won’t keep you. It’s not pressing but, um, I’ve been seeing Atticus for three months or so, and I know he’s knocked around in your circle for much longer.”

  “Danny knows him better but, yeah, I’ve known him a couple of years.” Alice is distracted. Toni assumes she’s multitasking.

  “It’s just, he’s kind of quiet, and I haven’t made much effort to . . . well, we haven’t talked much. Just having fun.”

  “You want the back story?” says Alice. She makes full eye contact.

  “Yep.”

  “That’s only fair. He’s been asking around about you.”

  “Asking who? You?”

  “I know he’s been asking Danny. He wanted to know how long you’d been single.”

  “So, what do you think of him?” asks Toni.

  “He’s really nice, actually.”

  “Nice?”

  “Yes. He’s really nice.”

  Toni leans into the screen. “Is that it? What about previous girlfriends?”

  “I know he had a thing with Bethany whatsit, and that was going well, or so we all thought, but then she broke it off.”

  Toni screws up her face. “Oh dear. How long ago?”

  “A year and a half?” Alice asks herself, looking upwards. “Two years?”

  “Was he devastated?”

  “He wasn’t suicidal, if that’s what you mean. Anyway, he seems a steady type. Doesn’t talk a lot, but he’s not introverted. I guess you know that already. He has a younger brother, lives near his parents. I think he does athletics coaching at his old school.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Toni feels deflated—talk about a one-dimensional relationship. “Anyway, he seems to have a good job, construction work.”

  Alice snorts. “Not actual construction work, Toni. He specializes in land clean-ups. Studied geology—you know, stalactites and stalagmites? He’s involved in that new retail project the Chinese are funding out at Dagenham Docks. He’s doing the site preparation.”

  “Oh! I think I knew that,” says Toni.

  “And lovely manners, in case you hadn’t noticed.” There’s a knock at her door. “Hold on. My student’s early.”

  Alice disappears from view. Toni hears her asking the student to wait two minutes. She returns and speaks in a lower voice. “Toni, look, as far as I know, he’s uncomplicated. Steady. Better than your last one.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  “What’s going on? Are things getting . . . ?”

  “Not sure. Can’t decide if he’s my type.”

  How is she supposed to concentrate on work? Toni sits at her writing desk and reads the feature she drafted yesterday for The London Sentinel. It needs polishing, but Toni closes the document. In her current state of mind, she’ll undoubtedly fuck it up, and she can’t afford another fail. They spiked her last piece, and she didn’t get an apology. It’s already a worry for Toni because on the back of being a Sentinel correspondent, she wins lucrative public relations work. Toni opens her Costa Rica file. It’s all she’s fit for: three hundred words on each of fifteen places of interest to visit from Hotel M——, one of twenty-three hotels in the global chain. She’s churning out similar crap—well-written crap, of course—for each hotel. It’s the kind of commission she doesn’t mention to her friends. Her name doesn’t appear on the stuff; she insisted on that. In her line of work, reputation is all.

  A picnic without a picnic rug looks shambolic to Toni. Her own tartan rug is rolled and tied with leather straps, and it’s slung across her shoulders. She pulls her wheelie cool box through Hyde Park along the path by Lansbury’s Lido towards the widest part of the lake. Her pace is unhurried, for she’s half an hour early for her rendezvous with Atticus. She rolls her eyes as she surveys a vista of half-arsed picnics, the mess of packaging from carry-out cakes and sandwiches. A crumpled paper tissue blows across her path. Toni believes in cloth napkins.

  During the morning, as she prepared the picnic—homemade san
dwiches, a lemon cake, real lemonade—she flitted through the videos and podcasts she’d tagged over the past two days. She listened to a roundtable discussion about co-parenting and the threat to the nuclear family, including an interview with Anthony, a music producer, about how co-parenting allowed him to have a child as well as an all-hours career—“I’ve had zero success in sustaining relationships with women, but I know I’ll be a good dad.” Plus an interview with Frances, a sustainability consultant—“I don’t need a needy male in my life.” And a late-night politics show about the possibility, one day, of gestating babies in artificial wombs so that women won’t be burdened with pregnancy. Could an aborted foetus be revived and transferred to an artificial womb, asks the interviewer? Would the medical staff be obliged to do so? At this, Toni stopped in the midst of buttering bread. An artificial womb? No need to carry a baby? Fancy that! She imagined a conversation with her theoretical Mr. Right co-parent: So, Mr. Right, how would you feel about industrial gestation? Any guy would go for it, she reckons, because he’d be an equal partner, an equal parent, from the start.

  As she approaches their rendezvous by the ice-cream stall, she spots Atticus playing Frisbee with Max, his brother. She falters in her stride, thwarted; she’d planned to set up the picnic before they arrived. Atticus sees her, throws the Frisbee in her direction. It arcs away, then swerves towards her, seems to stall. She abandons the cool box, lurches forward, but she’s not fast enough. The Frisbee drops and veers again. A final lunge and she’s down, flat on the hard ground.

  Atticus sprints towards her. He shouts, “You took your eye off it.”