Page 36 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

“Yes. Humanising myself,” said the woman. “Too much?”

“Yes,” said the Boy.

“Everything’s too much right now,” said the Girl. “And we’re out of coffee.”

“You know there’s only a very finite number of coffee harvests in the future,” said the woman. “Before the farmers decide it’s pointless. Before they get too old. With no next generation to take over, to do the backbreaking work of cultivation. Before the supply lines linking them and the markets become even more unreliable and then stop. There’s lots of things I hate about what’s going to happen to the poor old world, but most of all the thing that gives me nightmares is facing the exhausting shit-storm that’s incoming without a cup of coffee in my hand.”

“Is that your pitch?” said the Girl. “Do it for the coffee?”

“It is if it makes you say yes,” said the woman. “But no. I’m just bitching because I’m tired and I’ve screwed this up and it’s important and I literally get paid not to screw up. Trained not to. Though actually, it’s more than that. It’s that I think what I’m asking is beyond important and I’ve come to ask it too soon because we’re desperate and you are both still grieving.”

The Girl turned and gazed out of the window again. The woman stared at the back of her head for a beat, then looked at the Boy, her voice falling somewhere between an apology and a plea.

“The reason we’re desperate is because we have no idea how to solve this,” she said. “We’re more than a decade into the finest minds working the problem, and that’s just the AI minds. Real scientists have been thinking outside the box, and outside the outside of the box too and nothing’s sticking. We don’t know if it’s the genome or the biome, or both, or neither or even some other -ome we haven’t noticed yet, the way we missed the whole biome thing for centuries.”

“Your point is?” said the Boy, his eyes giving her nothing. She took a deep breath and turned back to the Girl.

“My point is this,” she said. “We don’t know why you got pregnant, if it’s a male thing or a female thing or if it’s only when two black swans find each other that the old magic still happens, or if it’s just a random stuttering along a dying curve that’s inevitably heading downhill into the ground. We just don’t know. And yes, studying you both might help, but it also might not. At best we’re asking you to be just another in a series of increasingly rare data points; at worst, well, at worst we waste your time. And yes, nowadays, since that’s all we really have – our time and not that of our children – well, that’s a hell of a lot to ask, I know. Nobody wants to be a lab rat.”

“Lab rat?” said the Girl, still looking out of the window. She shook her head in wonderment. “Wow. That’s you not being clumsy? That’s your try for sensitive and graceful and elegant?”

“No,” said the woman. “That’s just me, insufficiently caffeinated and trying to be as straight as I can be about the ask.”

“Maybe they should have sent one of the men,” said the Girl. “Jesus. Lab rat? I don’t think soft skills are your thing. If I can be frank.”

“Then can I ask you an unforgivable question?” said the woman, standing and putting her hands on the breakfast table between them. “If you’d had the child. If you hadn’t had the car accident, if the tyre had held and your vehicle had stayed on the road, do you think your answer would have been the—”

“Yes,” said the Girl. “It would have been the same.”

“Seriously?” said the woman. Her eyes stuttered, like she was glitching in reaction to contact with this unexpected reality. “Seriously?”

“You said nobody would think any the less of her,” said the Boy, unconsciously rising to his feet and standing between them.

“It’s OK,” said the Girl. “I don’t care what people think.”

The woman shuffled her papers back into her brief-bag and shook her head at herself.

“Well, I called that wrong.” She half-laughed. “Shit. You both work for charities. I thought charity begins—”

“What?” said the Boy, and then, aware he’d raised his voice, stepping back to give the woman some space.

“Where?” said the Girl, putting her hand on his shoulder. Grounding him and herself in the one simple moment of contact. “She was going to tell us where charity begins, right? At home.”

“Yes,” said the woman, picking up her bag, and putting on a battered version of the once shiny smile she’d arrived with. “Yes, cheesy as it is, that was going to be my last pitch.”

“Not a very good one,” said the Girl.

“No,” said the woman. “I’m sorry. Thank you for hearing me out. And for the coffee.” She slid a business card out of her pocket and laid it on the table in front of her.

“In case you change your mind.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” said the Girl.

They watched her walk away to her car, noted the two suited men sitting in it waiting for her, and only relaxed as they all disappeared between the high hedges of the lane that was their only connection to an outside world each now felt even less ready to face than when they’d woken.

“She can’t have been listening,” said the Boy. “I don’t know why she bothered leaving her card.”

“Yeah you do,” said the Girl, pushing away from him and looking into his face with a directness that wrong-footed him and made his whole being jolt.