Halfway to Free (Out of Line collection) Read online

  “But the paid work you mentioned—how can that be enough to support you all?” Ned wanted to know.

  “Well, those of us who stayed child-free still get the Dividends, remember. And so do each of the kids once they reach sixteen. Most of them have stayed in the community, interestingly,” Lucille added. “And they bring in a lot of our income through modeling, that kind of thing.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the window. I’d spotted another little one out there, a creature in stripes, jumping on the spot. And two more, clambering up some kind of makeshift climbing structure. “I have to ask—you came here, Lucille, but you never had any kids yourself . . .”

  “Is there a sob story?” She grinned. “Nope. Never wanted a baby of my own. But once the initial frenzy of taking the Pledge wore off, I realized the whole Phri lifestyle smelled like social engineering. I just didn’t want to be told what to do, nudged into a corner, then walled up in it. And the thing about me is, I just prefer to be around the whole human span. I fix everyone’s teeth here,” Lucille told me, “one-year-olds to hundred-year-olds.”

  “Can I ask, is that one laughing or crying?” I pointed out the window at a child I’d have put at about three or four.

  She looked out. “Hm. Hard to tell. Or it could be a mixture.”

  I strained to remember being like that: irrational, unstable, unpredictable. How could any adult learn how to take care of a kid if they’d never seen it done? It would be funny if I transformed my life to do this, then turned out to suck at it.

  Just then a woman walked across the grass and scooped the child up in her arms, held it upside down. Yeah, I thought it was definitely laughing now.

  “I came in 2035,” said Lucille. She gestured south, where we’d come from. “It was already eerie out there, the way you’d never see babies or toddlers anymore, as if they’d been wiped out by an asteroid. And by the time you two are my age, the whole species will be wrinkled.”

  “But the world’s cleaner and so much more equal than it was in the consumerist era,” I found myself saying in a weirdly preachy tone.

  “Yeah, I like the birdsong. There are always trade-offs,” said Lucille with another shrug. “Freedom from versus freedom to. No, we voted for what seemed like sensible changes, and they were certainly urgent, but the consequence is that we’re dying out, so . . . joke’s on us.”

  “Six billion, that’s hardly dying out,” Ned objected. “Not even endangered yet. We can reverse course as soon as we hit Optimum.”

  “Sure we can, but will we?” Lucille looked at him levelly. “You believe that pipe dream, that somehow governments all over the world will persuade their citizens to start reproducing again, at a point when the median age will be about ninety? Face it, we’ve lost the habit already. We’re strolling gently downhill to extinction.”

  “I can’t worry about the fate of the human race right now,” I said hoarsely. “I just . . . I want this.”

  Ned took hold of my hand, nodding; his grip was hard. “But pregnancy sounds so dangerous.”

  Lucille puffed out her breath. “Every female ancestor of ours got through it all right, didn’t they?”

  I looked around the kitchen. This wasn’t a nightmare of poverty and isolation; it was a sort of home—I saw that. Just not the kind I was used to. “Realistically, having a kid—” I broke off. “The costs . . .”

  “I’ve seen those lists,” said Lucille. “Half the items are made up to scare off everyone but bazillionaires. High-performance infant formula? The perfect food would leak right out of you.” And she reached over and tapped me on the sternum.

  “I don’t know why I need this so badly,” I said. “I just know I do.”

  “That’s all you need to know.” She was looking down at my belly. “You have this power, Miriam—and you too, Ned—so don’t let anybody tell the pair of you what to do with it.”

  After that, Ned and I seemed to be talking in the future rather than the conditional. I didn’t know exactly when we’d stepped over that line.

  We never even took our clothes off, not yet. Whenever we got time together, we sat pressed against each other, whispering. “I just want to hold it,” he’d tell me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Them, I mean. Him or her. Whoever we get.”

  “Let them fall asleep on me,” I said. “The weight of them.”

  “Read them stories,” he said with longing.

  “Yeah!”

  “Everything.”

  We didn’t know what we were talking about; we knew that much. But it didn’t stop us.

  These days I felt more rage than anything else. Now I registered the propaganda, actually felt the brainwashing, a hundred times a day—all the little signals that told me not to do what every other mammal did. But some days I was angry with myself for not being more like everyone else, not managing to be fond enough of my perfectly good life in the core, the way it was.

  Was I in love with Ned? Did I want him for himself? Would I want him without this mad ambition of ours?

  I couldn’t answer that. We were conspirators; that was all I knew. I longed for him and at the same time for the imaginary baby we might make, and the longing felt a lot like fury. A chained-up dragon that circled away, then flew back, breathing out more fire. Was I going to shackle it in perpetuity or let it fly?

  I had to try the idea out on somebody, so I picked Cerise because of her fangirling over the royal feeds.

  “Hey,” I asked, next time she showed me the cutest 3D, “do you ever . . . have you ever thought of having one yourself?”

  “One what?”

  “Baby,” I said under my breath.

  Cerise stared at me. “You mean like if I somehow married a celeb or went viral or won the lottery, so I could afford an entourage? Well in that case, sure. So long as we had all the nurses and nannies and schools and stuff. As well as plastic surgeons and trainers to make me pretty again!”

  I joined in with her laugh, but only briefly. “And what if you couldn’t afford it?”

  “Oh, Miriam.” She’d read my face; she was more perceptive than I’d given her credit for. “Is that how it is?”

  All I could manage was a shrug; I was afraid I might cry.

  “Look, this girl I knew in high school, her broodiness got so bad, she went to work as a surrogate,” said Cerise, “and she’s gestated three times for really big names. The pay is excellent.”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t be able to . . . hand over my baby to someone else.”

  “Well, rather you than me,” she said, incredulous. “But if it’s actual childminding you’re interested in, why don’t you retrain as a royal nanny?”

  My voice came out almost in a snarl: “I want to mind my own.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “You’re talking about total self-sabotage. Miriam, if you’re bored, there are so many other ways to shake it off. You’ve got an interesting job, friends, an apartment in a great building, so much to lose . . .”

  “I know.”

  “You’re a free individual, not some downtrodden breeding female from the bad old days!”

  I said nothing.

  “This is so reckless—a mindless, selfish impulse—you must know you’d regret it, right?”

  But her words were like rain on a glass roof; none of them reached me.

  Ned and I were hand in hand, climbing the stairs to his apartment. (I thought it might be easier to behave out of character if I wasn’t at home.) Somehow our conversation had reached the point of when would be the best time. But it would never be a good time. So we were going to do it now, tonight, before one or both of us lost our nerve.

  He turned on the top stair and asked, “Should we think some more?”

  “I think I’m done thinking.”

  “Me too. OK.”

  Such little, casual syllables. I echoed them back at Ned: “OK.”

  In the bathroom I took out my Phri. It felt like nothing at all.

  A single beep,
from the little black pearl itself.

  “Warning,” said my Headpiece, “your Phri is not correctly installed.”

  I could claim I’d been cleaning it. I could always put the thing back in.

  Instead I flicked my head to the right, for silence. Then took off my Headpiece.

  We went into the bedroom and shut the bathroom door so the beeping wouldn’t put us off.

  I wondered if it was like this to climb out onto a windowsill. To creep along a ledge. You could still go back, but would you?

  Tomorrow I could wear my hair down so nobody saw my naked earlobe. No, Cerise would notice that, or Diwanna or Jane. What was the point of buying a day’s grace? People would start talking. So let them talk.

  “Nothing will actually have changed yet,” I pointed out. “I mean, inside me. It’ll take weeks, at least.”

  Ned nodded. “Still.”

  “Yeah.”

  It felt like being more than bare, even before we started taking each other’s clothes off.

  My hand went up to my right ear once or twice, to check what wasn’t there. All my nerve endings were raw, as if I were a teenager again.

  This was the strangest sex I’d ever had. Forbidden, ceremonial: as if the whole world were watching us, and past generations, and future ones. The dread, the longing, the guilt, the terror, the relief.

  “Are you awake?” I asked Ned, much later.

  “Yeah. Exhausted, but I can’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.”

  We lay there keeping a hard grip on each other, awkward, enthralled. We waited for the morning.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2013 Punch Photographic

  Emma Donoghue is a playwright, literary historian, screenwriter, and international bestselling novelist. She is the author of Akin, and the New York Times bestseller, Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, which she adapted into the Academy Award–winning film of the same name.