The last meeting of Olivia and all of her daughters had been more than fifteen years ago. Megan was a bright-eyed, still boyish twelve-year-old, Jessica a shy, pretty sixteen, pale and quiet after getting mangled on some school skiing trip - at least, that's what they told Megan - and Cat at twenty was clearly a young woman, emboldened by two years at university, openly bitter and keen to confront their mother over the designer pizzas.
When their mother casually informed them that she would not be attending the prize-giving day at Megan's school -Megan was always the most academically gifted - because she had an audition to play a housewife in a gravy commercial ('Too old,' they said when she had left, 'too posh.'), Cat exploded.
'Why can't you belike everybody else's mother? Why can't you be normal?' 'If I was normal, then you three would be normal too.'
Megan didn't like the sound of that. Her mother made normality sound scary. Maybe if she was normal then school-work wouldn't come so easily to her. Maybe she wouldn't be collecting a prize from the headmaster. Maybe she would be as slow and stupid as all the other children.
'But I want us to be normal,' Jessica sobbed, and their mother laughed as though that was the funniest thing in the world. 'How is my little Jessica?' said Olivia.
'This is a tough time for her,' Megan said. 'She's been trying for a baby for so long. She would feel terrible about - you know.' 'Your abortion, yes.' 'My procedure.' Olivia never asked about Cat, although she sometimes
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offered an unsolicited, and unflattering, opinion on her eldest child.
'I tried to speak to Jessica on the phone recently. Pablo said she was sleeping. Bit of tummy trouble, apparently.' 'Paulo. His name is Paulo.'
'Of course. Lovely Paulo with those gorgeous eyelashes. Like a girl, almost. I heard they were taking away her womb or something.'
'That's not it. She just needs some tests. She gets these excruciating periods. God, Mother, don't you know that?'
Olivia looked vague. 'I never really had much to do with Jessica's cycle, dear. But you're right, of course - you can't talk to her about your, you know, condition.'
Megan stared out over the lake. 'This should be happening to Jessica. This should be happening to her. She'll be a terrific mum.' 'Who's the father?' said Olivia, lighting a cigarette. 'Nobody you know.'
And Megan thought - nobody I know, come to that. How could I have been so stupid?
'My baby,' Olivia said, and she touched her daughter's face. Unlike her sisters, Megan had never doubted that her mother loved her. In her special way. 'Get shot of the bloody thing, okay? You're not like Jessica. The little woman who can't be fulfilled until she has a couple of screaming brats sucking her tits to the floor. You're not like that. And you're not like Cat - determined to be a spinster wasting herself on some inappropriate man.' Her mother smiled triumphantly. 'You're more like me.' And Megan thought, is that really what I am? Paulo hadn't been expecting the magazines. They were a surprise. Who would have thought the NHS would provide you with a bit of porn to help you fill your little plastic jug? Their attempt for a baby had been so overwhelmingly unsexy, so stripped of anything resembling passion or lust - saving up your sperm as though they were points in Salisbury's, only doing it when the ovulation test decreed, his wife's tears when it turned out that the act had all been in vain - that Paulo was stunned by the sight of what he thought of as dirty magazines.
Blushing like a teenager, he grabbed one called Fifty Plus and headed for his cubicle, wondering if that was their chest size, their age or their IQ. The doctor had assured Paulo that his sperm test wasn't really a test at all.
'I don't want you to feel under any pressure. Nobody expects you to actually fill the little plastic jug.'
But just like any other exam, a sperm test came with the promise of either success or failure. Or it wouldn't be a test, would it?
So Paulo prepared. But instead of practising three-point turns or studying the Highway Code, he did everything to increase the number of potential lives swimming about inside him, and everything he could to ensure that they would be heading in vaguely the right direction.
Loose pants. Cold baths. Zinc, vitamin E and selenium, all purchased in health shops where both the staff and the clientele looked uniformly and spectacularly unhealthy.
He read all the literature. And there was an amazing amount of it. The human race was forgetting how to reproduce itself. Tap in 'sperm' on the search engine, and you almost drowned in the stuff.
The vitamin pills, the roomy pants, the nut-shrinking cold baths - apparently all these were good for the number of sperm, and their motility - their ability to wiggle around in the required fashion. But what was the pass mark? How many million did you need to get the nod?
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Surely, Paulo thought, when the sperm hits the egg, all you really need is one? The examination room was the toilet in an NHS hospital. Paulo had heard rumours that if you had your sperm test done in Harley Street, your wife was allowed to go in there with you and give you a hand.
But in this sprawling NHS hospital, which felt more like some untamed frontier town than a place of healing, where cancer patients in their dressing gowns hungrily sucked cigarettes outside the main reception, and tattooed men with head wounds regularly attacked the young nurses who were caring for them for not caring quite quickly enough, you just went in the toilets and made sad love to your little plastic jug.
And yet the event seemed momentous to Paulo. This was something new. This was masturbation for some greater good. After years of doing it behind locked doors - and how he recalled the shame and the fear that his parents would catch him red-handed emerging from the bathroom with a copy of a Sunday paper stuffed down his shirt - he was actually being encouraged to strangle the one-eyed trouser snake, choke the monkey and beat the meat. The world was saying, go ahead, Paulo. Wank yourself stupid.
There was a list of instructions - as if any man needed advice on how to fiddle about with himself - but basically it was just you, your jug, and some pornography, provided by the state.
So much was riding on this ridiculous act. It didn't feel like his sperm they were testing. It felt like his future, and the future he might have with Jessica. He unzipped his trousers, then immediately zipped them up again, taking deep breaths.
He had it easy. He knew that. He had to ejaculate into a little plastic jug, and he was allowed to do it in the privacy of an NHS toilet. Jessica had had so many examinations that she said she felt like her private parts were now in the public domain.
All these tests, all these judgements - as if it wasn't up to them if they loved each other, but to some much higher power, ancient and cruel.
Paulo flicked through the pages of Fifty Plus. He hadn't seen any of this stuff for years. At school, there was a boy known as Spud Face, a cackling, habitual masturbator -thick specs, red cheeks, always giggling inanely by the corner flag during games - who had regularly brought to class what he pronounced 'good wank fodder'.
Paulo, a shy, thoughtful boy who preferred magazines featuring motors, had always stayed at his desk, reading the latest edition of Car. But one day Spud Face had called Paulo across to the leering, cheering mob that always surrounded his dirty magazines during break.
'Oy, Baresi, come and look at this, you big poof. Here's something you can't get from cars.'
Paulo had caught a glimpse of the magazine and almost fainted - a bearded Asian man with no clothes on was doing something unbelievable to a goat who clearly couldn't believe his luck. While all the other goats in the neighbourhood were no doubt being beaten and mistreated, this goat was getting a blow job. That goat must have felt like he had won the goat lottery.