Dreams Before the Start of Time

by Anne Charnock

  “So we’ll skip this one,” she says, pointing at the first-trimester ward.

  “Are there any adoptions at this stage of gestation?” asks Rudy. In an ideal world, he’d like to start the bonding process earlier. He wants to be sure that his bond with the child will be as strong as Simone’s, and the sooner he starts the better. He suspects that women might be quicker at making the emotional attachment. Though he doesn’t agree that women have more innate caring skills, a notion that seems to persist, annoyingly so.

  “If a foetus were orphaned at this early stage we’d delay offering it for adoption. You see, if there’s going to be an emergency in this clinic, it’s going to be in there. Once the embryonic period is complete, and when most of the foetal body surface responds to touch, we transfer it to the second-trimester ward. We aren’t rigid, though; if development is lagging slightly at twelve weeks, we keep the foetus in the first ward a little longer.” She smiles. “It’s not a production line.”

  After a second’s silence, Dr. Christophe laughs lightly.

  “What’s the . . . failure rate?” asks Rudy. Simone pulls a face at him, but he refuses her rebuke.

  “Well, the rate is coming down. The figures are in the public domain. Close to single figures now—eight per cent, give or take.”

  As if on cue, red lights set into the corridor floor begin to flash. There’s no audible alarm. Two female medics emerge from a side corridor ahead of them. Dr. Christophe, Simone and Rudy stand aside as they rush past. Side by side the two medics shoulder through the double doors of the first-trimester ward.

  “Don’t be alarmed. It’s not necessarily an emergency,” says Dr. Christophe.

  They enter an elevator and Dr. Christophe requests the viewing gallery. The lights dim as they ascend. They step out into an even more dimly lit corridor. Dr. Christophe gestures towards windows that run the entire length. It takes a few seconds for their eyes to adjust.

  “I thought the baby wards would be brightly lit,” says Simone.

  “That’s only in the marketing material. We don’t want the images to look too sombre. In reality, as it’s dark in a mother’s womb, we try to create similar conditions without having a total blackout. We all prefer to see the foetuses—the medical staff and the parents.”

  Rudy and Simone gaze down into the second-trimester ward. Though at first sight the ward appears to be a tangle of tubes and pulsing monitors, it soon becomes clear that the tangles are set out in a repeating pattern along the length of the ward, in three rows. In the midst of each tangle sits a tear-shaped bottle that reflects the green data on its overhead monitor.

  “So much equipment. And it’s so quiet,” says Rudy.

  “Well, it would be,” says Simone.

  Dr. Christophe smiles. “It seems quiet to us, but it’s noisier for the foetuses. We record the mothers’ and fathers’ voices and feed the sound into the foetus flasks during gestation. We follow a natural daily rhythm—no voices during the night, just the sound of a parental heartbeat.”

  “Do you switch off the voices if the baby is orphaned?” asks Simone.

  “We haven’t had many cases—a handful in five years—so there’s no fixed protocol. I try to dissuade the adopting parents from deleting the source-parent voices. We have concerns over continuity.”

  “You mean the foetus might miss the parents?”

  “Not exactly. We feel some aspects of brain development might falter.”

  “Oh dear! We don’t want to risk that,” says Simone.

  “In the case of the foetus you are considering today, the parent is a solo mother. I’d recommend keeping the mother’s voice and adding both of yours.”

  Dr. Christophe walks ahead, and they follow her along the viewing corridor. With his eyes fixed on the glass bottles, Rudy feels he is watching a time-lapse. The sizes of the foetuses increase as Rudy and Simone follow the lineup. They come to a halt near the end of the ward. Directly below them, one male foetus is hugging himself.

  Rudy has been careful not to give Simone the impression that a boy is his preference. He accepts that a girl would bring equal joy, but he suspects he’d prefer messing about with a son. But then, he knows he’s being romantic. There’s no guarantee he’d replicate his friendship with Aiden, his godfather. Not that Aiden was physically affectionate. His visits were sporadic. Rudy’s closeness to him arose through shared pleasures—tough hikes during which they barely spoke. And they both kept goldfish. Rudy knows that even a biological son might be very different from him. With an adopted child, it would definitely be a matter of chance. He tries to push these thoughts aside as he scours the glass bottles, but he can’t. Boy, boy, boy, girl, girl, not clear, boy, girl.

  In their marriage classes, Simone had opened up more than he’d expected. She said that if they were going to have a family, she didn’t want a son who was biologically related to her. More than one child was also a no-go. Rudy accepted her conditions. It was a compromise he made willingly because he felt sure Simone offered him a true lifelong marriage. He saw himself as a devoted one-woman man; he didn’t wish a repeat of his own upbringing with his mother and his Aunt Robyn, or Uncle Robyn depending on daily, it seemed, shifts in the zeitgeist. Rudy gave up keeping track of the men and women transiting through Robyn’s chaotic love life. And his mother, Millie—well, she eventually gave up on finding a fella, only to embark on an erratic succession of girl crushes, which in the main were crushingly unrequited. For both the women in his childhood, their love interests were, ultimately, disposable. Drove him to fucking distraction.

  So he’s going along with Simone’s wishes: a non-bio, one-child agreement, which negates her anxieties over sibling rivalry.

  Sibling rivalry—that’s how he and Simone refer to it, though they don’t talk about it so often. She was bullied at home. It might have seemed like low-grade stuff—pushing and shoving. Hair tousling that was deliberately heavy-handed—fingertips squeezing her skull. So painful. And relentless teasing. In any case, her parents didn’t protect her. Just the once, when her mother walked into Simone’s bedroom and found her daughter pinned to the floor by her oldest brother, his hands around her neck. Her mother dragged him off and pulled him down the stairs. But he wasn’t grounded. Simone, at heart, felt let down by her mother. Why hadn’t she been more protective?

  So Rudy and Simone agreed on adoption. Rudy finds it odd that as adopting parents, they can in theory choose the sex of their child. Yet if he and Simone wanted a biological child, he’d be viewed as insensitive should he admit he’d rather have a boy.

  “And next,” says the doctor, “the control room, which monitors each artificial womb, around the clock, checking nutrient levels, oxygen feed, waste removal and so on. It’s safer than a natural pregnancy once the fertilized egg has bonded with the womb lining.”

  The control room, in its essentials, looks no different to the monitoring and diagnostic centre for any production process. Dr. Christophe waves down to her colleague, and she in turn acknowledges the visitors.

  “I’d love to meet the technicians down there, Dr. Christophe,” says Simone.

  “I remember now. You’re both engineers. I’m sure we could arrange a technical tour if you go ahead with the adoption.”

  “I reckon my current job is pretty similar to your control room operation,” says Simone. “I’m in remote problem-solving, diagnostics—for engines, not babies, of course. But mistakes can be equally catastrophic. What about you, Rudy? Would you like a tour?”

  “I’m more interested in the first-trimester operation.” He turns to Dr. Christophe. “I’d like to see the wombs as they arrive from the manufacturer, and see how you connect them into your bio-support system. And I’d like to see how you introduce a fertilized embryo. If I ever switched from aeronautics to biomechanics, I’d be the guy at the end of the manufacturing line checking each baby . . . sorry, each foetus flask. Or I’d be part of the setting-up operation in the first-trimester ward.”

 
“Takes a calm person for that kind of work, doesn’t it, Rudy?” says Simone. She places her hand on his back.

  He and Simone met at work, and he often muses that the odds were stacked against them as a couple, work-wise: he performs the final quality checks, while she diagnoses faults in operation. Fertile ground for sideswipes. It seems to Rudy that Simone was attracted to his calm, steady nature. No sharp edges; that’s how she sums him up. Totally laid-back.

  In the third-trimester ward, the foetuses look robust. It’s now evident to Rudy that the younger foetuses in the previous ward have more wriggle room.

  “I don’t know why people call them bottle babies. The vessels are not solid,” says Dr. Christophe. “They distort if the foetus is moving. Parents are so thrilled if they visit during their baby’s active time. They can place their palms on the vessel. They can see and feel the baby moving.”

  “Is the orphan baby here? Can we see it?” says Simone.

  “Yes.” She lifts her index finger, waves it back and forth, and stabs. “There he is—middle row, fifth from the left.”

  “What do you think, Simone?” says Rudy. “Can you imagine taking him home?”

  The French windows of the visitor restaurant are folded open to welcome the first warm day of spring, and Rudy and Simone sit overlooking the clinic gardens. There’s a skittering noise outside. They catch sight of two squirrels making a helter-skelter descent of a thick-trunked and peeling eucalyptus tree. Simone laughs and says, “It would be lovely to have a big garden like this.”

  “So? You’ve not answered my question.”

  “Yes. I can imagine taking him home. I can imagine playing with him in a garden like this. I mean, what’s the point in having a garden if you don’t have children? And we’ve no other children in our lives.”

  Rudy has long accepted this thick gloss over the truth. Simone has three nephews and two nieces—the children of her three brothers—but she chooses to have no contact. “There’s no halfway house,” she told Rudy early in their relationship. She explained that all those years—the constant jibes, the physical bullying—left her nothing to build on. She told him more than once that she had never understood if they hated her because she was a girl or if they hated having a young kid around.

  Rudy always tells her, “Everyone deserves a fresh start.” He knows she takes consolation from the remark; she responds by hugging him.

  “We’re agreed, are we?” says Rudy.

  “We’ll tell Dr. Christophe we’re good to go.”

  After lunch, they meet Dr. Christophe in her consulting room, which has one window overlooking the second-trimester ward. There’s a blind, fully open. Rudy wonders what might prompt Dr. Christophe to close it. Etched plaques are arranged on the wall behind her as though crowning her head: a General Medical Council certificate, plus a certificate for a doctorate in biomechanics from the University of Tokyo, and a photograph of Dr. Christophe holding a baby. Two grinning women stand on either side of her.

  “Who’s in the photograph, Dr. Christophe?” asks Rudy.

  “Ah yes. My first delivery of a child with no biological father. They were set on having a daughter, so the baby was conceived by parthenogenesis—using two eggs; one, less mature than the other, acts as a pseudo sperm. It’s interesting you should notice the photo, because we’re dealing with a similar case with this orphan, insofar as there’s no father. There never was a father, I mean. The mother was a solo parent who conceived with synthetic Y chromosome—my third such patient—and she didn’t mind if the baby was a boy or a girl.”

  “Does solo conception make any difference to the adoption?” he asks.

  “In one aspect. Before we accept a solo parent for remote gestation, we require the name of a next of kin; someone who is willing to sign a legal document which states that he, or she, has the financial resources to take responsibility for the baby if the parent dies during the gestation process. We need to ensure that if the solo parent dies, either accidentally or through illness, we’re not faced with a legal issue at the time of delivery. Of course, the risk of maternal death is higher when the mother opts for remote gestation. They live a little more recklessly, go skiing and so on.”

  Simone jumps in: “How did this particular mother die?”

  “I can’t tell you specifics at this stage, but if it puts your mind at ease, it was an accident. In fact, a bicycle accident.”

  “So who is the next of kin?” she asks.

  “I’m coming to that. It’s her brother, her only sibling. But he has fallen ill and can’t fulfil the contract. Our lawyers decided to release him from responsibility. And as a consequence, we have this unusual situation. It’s fortunate we still have people like you who are willing to adopt.”

  Rudy shuffles in his chair. “Will the brother want access to the baby?”

  “I definitely recommend that you offer plenty of access. You can offer access in a variety of forms. Face-to-face contact can be negotiated down to one visit per year near the child’s birthday. But this brother is very ill, so I’d encourage you to be generous in this regard. He has lost his sister and now he’s alone. They’d planned to raise the baby together.”

  “How sad.” Rudy turns to his wife. “What do you think, Simone?”

  “It seems so tragic and . . .”

  “Yes?” says Dr. Christophe.

  “Well, you know. We’ll be drawn into all that sadness. I didn’t expect this complication. I assumed the baby had two parents and they’d both died and there were no relatives. Rudy?”

  “We should perhaps meet the brother before we decide. Can we do that, Dr. Christophe?”

  “You would have to meet him before we progressed. He has the power of veto. He might decide to give up the baby for enhanced state adoption, with all the educational privileges afforded to clinic orphans—our insurance policies are comprehensive.”

  “It’s less than straightforward, then? We thought we’d crossed the main hurdle with our own profiling,” says Rudy.

  “You’re right. That was the major hurdle. It allowed us to recommend you as suitable adoptive parents.” Dr. Christophe pauses before pressing on, since Rudy and Simone have run out of questions. “You should have a quiet chat together. Why don’t you take another look at the gestation wards? Come back here in, say, twenty minutes.”

  They leave Dr. Christophe’s consulting room and head back to the viewing gallery. They hold hands as they look down into the third-trimester ward at the orphan boy. He appears to be frozen.

  “It’s a pity he’s so still.” Simone pouts her disappointment.

  Rudy and Simone take their usual weekend constitutional to Holland Park, which they prefer to Hyde Park and Kensington Palace Gardens because it’s off the tourist trail. Over recent weeks, they’ve nudged the baby into a routine, bringing an order of sorts to their own lives. Routine and cosiness go hand in hand. They pick up their usual croissants and coffees from the deli on Holland Park Avenue and push their pram—the latest model—up the sweeping road to the park entrance. There’s a steep path through woodland. Rudy sees a magpie and a squirrel fighting, or playing—he can’t tell which—then they emerge onto a vast lawn that slopes down to the West London Opera House. Rudy has already recognized two families from their previous weekday visits.

  “Here, or the Kyoto Garden?” says Rudy.

  “Here, I think. We can stretch out for ten minutes before feed time.”

  They set up camp, spread out their tartan picnic rug and lie on their backs, their faces to the sun.

  “When Julia starts kindergarten, Rudy, we’ll get to know a lot of local families. We’ll be able to meet them here and let the kids play together.”

  “By then we won’t be so bleary-eyed.”

  She rolls over and inspects his face. “Hmm, you do look a bit tired.”

  “You slept through it all last night.”

  “You’ll be glad to get back to work, won’t you?” she says.

  “Not really.
If anything, I’m worried I’ll be less focused on the job. You know, thinking about Julia.” He turns onto his side to face Simone. “I sometimes wonder if I’d feel the same way with an adopted baby. I’m sure—”

  “Oh, Rudy, I kick myself now. We should never have started that process. They didn’t make it easy, did they? Obligations to the brother . . . Aren’t you relieved?”

  “What do you think?” He kisses Simone on her forehead.

  “We couldn’t possibly be any happier. That’s what I think,” she says.

  Rudy rolls onto his back and smooths his palm across the picnic rug. He recalls how he and Simone explained their change of heart to Dr. Christophe. They returned to her office from the viewing gallery and told her the arrangements were too complicated. They didn’t want to meet the brother. Dr. Christophe sighed, but recomposed herself. She fixed a smile on her face and said she understood their misgivings.

  He’d looked up at Dr. Christophe’s photograph on the wall. How many years would it be, he asked, before men in this country could become solo fathers?

  “I’ve just received approval to do my first. The first in the UK as a matter of fact. The clinic has recently gained accreditation for the procedure. We’ll create an egg from the father’s stem cells. But, I thought you wanted to adopt?”

  Simone spilled the beans about her childhood; she admitted she wanted to have a child who was biologically unrelated to herself—or, more to the point, unrelated to her brothers. She said, “Rudy, I’d rather have a baby that’s genetically all yours than have a baby that’s genetically unrelated to either of us. I’m sure you’d prefer that too.”

  Dr. Christophe agreed to start the paperwork for solo parentage and made a provisional booking in the gestation suite.

  As they stood to leave, Dr. Christophe said, “The adoption idea wasn’t motivated by altruism, was it? If you’d explained your family background, Simone, I might have suggested this course of action in the first place.”