‘That’s me.’ I guess it took Ted and Alice a while, but they finally got there in the end and found me.
‘Did you make an emergency call from this address about an intruder earlier in the evening?’
‘Whuh?’
‘You called to say there was someone in the house who shouldn’t be here.’
My brain falls on to the explanation easily.
‘No, that was probably my mother, I should think,’ I reply.
One of them peers past the door beyond me, his fingers grazing his notebook. ‘Is your mother available to come to the door and talk with us about this?’
‘Well, no,’ I tell them. ‘She has dementia, and is living in the Brideswell nursing home, just down the road.’
This seems to stump them, so I press on.
‘I think what’s happened here is while she technically made the phone call to tell you about an intruder in this house, which was once her home, she will have absolutely no memory of making the call if you ask her about it.’
She’ll be about as useful to you as a handbrake on a canoe, I want to add. I breathe out, relieved.
‘I’m sorry, but Mrs…’ The garda refers back to his notebook. The ‘Mrs’ bit still chafes a little, now that I am no longer one.
‘It’s Miss Loftus,’ I say. ‘My mother is Mrs Loftus. My guess is she was probably trying to turn the volume up on the TV remote control over in Brideswell. She now mixes the handsets up all the time.’
They are unmoved at this explanation. This isn’t something I feel I even need to apologize for, but I say it anyway. ‘Look, I’m really sorry for wasting your time.’ Apologizing on behalf of my mother feels like the least I can do.
These days, I am the only person living in Hiroshima. Occasionally, I bring my mother back from the care home for the afternoon, and she compliments me on the new curtains, rugs and cerulean glasses as though I am a salesperson in Arnotts, not knowing or maybe not caring where her swan ornaments, Ibiza tea towels and duck-covered tea cosies ever went to.
‘Oh, you’re like your lovely dad, you are,’ she tells me one Monday afternoon, her eyes twinkling with genuineaffection, as I drive her back to the Brideswell before my 2p.m. appointment at the fertility clinic.
I never thought I would, but I miss her attempting to massage some order into my life. ‘You should be in Dubai. Big, big money to be made out there.’ ‘You’re forty-two! You can’t afford to be picky about boys. A pulse should be optional at this stage.’ My admin job in a small theatre company in Wicklow isn’t big, big money, but it suits me just fine.
‘Aksel’ is twenty-four, and studying law in Copenhagen. He has sandy hair and nondescript features, but volunteers in a child literacy agency on the weekends. ‘Lucas’, twenty-five, has qualified in shot-putting for the Olympics and is six foot three. ‘Emil’, twenty-three, is pre-med. I don’t know how I feel about a 23-year-old’s sperm making its way inside my body, even if he is on course to save many lives in the future, but I press on regardless.
‘Jon’ is twenty-one and, frankly, this is starting to feel a little bit creepy. I keep flipping through the catalogue, hoping for a thunderbolt but secretly willing myself not to pick the wrong person.
This is like Tinder, but they’re headed for my cervix, and without so much as a drink bought. Most unsettling.
It’s the eyelashes that I see first on ‘Elias’. Full-fat and fluttery, shading huge milk-chocolate eyes. The hint of a receding hairline. For a moment I feel a slight stir from the past.
The nurse at the fertility clinic in Blackrock creeps up behind me, and watches me flick through the profiles at high speed, as if I’m going throughCosmomagazine and hurrying towards the ‘drive him wild in bed’ content.
‘It’s a strange one, isn’t it?’ She laughs, her earthy Northside Dublin accent making her immediately feel like a friend.
‘Really weird,’ I affirm.
‘The cream of the crop,’ she says.
And they really are. Perfect male human specimens. If you’re going to be making babies with anyone, it is this lot.
I puff and blow air out of my cheeks as I flick through the catalogue of donors. I am becoming paralysed by choice. In this specific instance, I envisage myself telling my mum, I am paying precisely so that I can be picky.
‘It’s a big decision, so take your time. If you want to come back and look again…’ the nurse begins.
But I’ve decided. Full-fat eyelashes are overrated. ‘I think it will have to be Aksel,’ I tell her. ‘He looks kind.’ If anyone’s getting their junk up in there, they’re going to have to be a kind person, I want to tell her, but don’t.
I make an appointment to get hopefully knocked up by Aksel on the twentieth. It’s a weird feeling. I’m coming out of the clinic contemplating what my womb might say about all of this if it spoke English when Johnny calls.
