London, United Kingdom (England and Wales)
Day 1,500
A few hours before I’m due to meet Libby and her brother, Peter, for “pre-Christmas” drinks, Nadine Johnson’s memo and the surrounding furor hits the internet with a velocity that leaves much of the world reeling. It’s the impossible question the world needs to answer: How will we repopulate? Who gets to have a baby?
I meet Libby and Peter in a bar in the city. I rarely venture here to this land of glass skyscrapers and well-dressed women with smart handbags, heads bowed over their phones. Each time I’m here, though, I’m struck by the vast difference from before. Before it was mainly men with some women. Now the few men stand out, their suits glaring against the dresses and skirts.
Sometimes I wonder how Libby and I are friends. She is hugely, indubitably cooler than me. There’s no way around it. Today she’s wearing a pink jumpsuit that would make me look like a deranged plumber. I turned up at Oxford with a bag full of crocheted cushions and bunting for my room, wearing a cardigan, and she arrived wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt and with a vinyl record player in tow. Despite my shortcomings, she’s a steady, devoted friend and I feel the relief of her presence.
“God it’s good to see you,” I mutter into her hair as I hug her.
“A lot easier to arrange to meet up now that we’re in the same country, huh?”
“Just a bit.”
Libby beams at me, that broad smile that makes me feel like the world is about 20 percent less scary than it was a moment before.
“Have you seen the article?” she asks as she pours me a glass of cider from the bottle on the table.
“Absolutely mad, isn’t it?” I reply.
“Are you going to write a paper on it?” Libby asks, knowing that before the Plague I found the search for research topics painful. “Surely how we’re all having children is pretty high up on the lists of things for anthropologists to study at the moment.”
I nod. “For once there’s too much for me to be studying. I don’t have time to do a paper on this specifically, although I’m teaching a new course, ‘The Ethics of Reproductive Choice in a Post-Plague World,’ in the new year, so I’ll have to write something up on it.”
“That sounds fascinating,” Peter says, his voice practically dripping with longing. “Being an actuary has never seemed like such a bad call.”
“You live in a four-bedroom house in Zone 1, you can walk to work and you have a garden,” Libby says with an eye roll. “Being an actuary pays.”
“What else are you going to include in the course?” Peter asks, and I remember that part of the reason I like him so much is that he’s one of the four people I’ve ever met outside of academic circles who’s seemed genuinely interested in my work.
“In the first lecture I’m covering New Zealand and the ethics of their whole ‘taking children and putting them in isolation’ thing. Some of the parents have posted videos online of the children being released once they’d been vaccinated and you’d have to be heartless not to cry at that.”
“Always good to pluck the heartstrings in the first lecture.” Libby smiles knowingly. “Then you can be a cool lecturer.”
“One lives in hope. Then in the second lecture we’ll dig into the meat of Norway as a case study. They’ve set up the Norwegian Demographic Institute, which researches policies around maintaining population numbers and increasing the speed of a return to equal numbers of men and women.”
“How?” Libby asks with a raised eyebrow. “Encouraging men not to be fuckboys?”
Peter laughs and I try to figure out the best way to answer “Yes” without just saying “Yes.” And wonder if I can include the word “fuckboys” in my lecture notes without getting fired. Somehow, I suspect not.
“They have three public aims. Make sure as many babies are born as possible without affecting the economy, manage fertility treatment so in IVF male embryos are selected, which led to an additional four thousand baby boys last year and, well.”
“Is this the fuckboy bit?”
I reel off the spiel from the Institute’s website. “‘Ensure in the longer term, over the next ten to twenty years, young Norwegians form stable partnerships in which they have children.’”
Libby hoots with laughter. “Oh my God, it literally is.” She pauses. “I could do with that here, to be honest. There’s an epidemic of fuckboys in London.”
“You’ve used that word so many times, it’s stopped having any meaning,” Peter says kindly, topping up her glass.
“I read an article in a Norwegian newspaper that said that children have personal development classes at school to encourage them to ‘prioritize romantic commitment and parenthood.’ They’ve been showing them old Disney movies. Some of the parents are outraged.”
“I’m not surprised,” Libby replies hotly. Even though I understand the logic behind the classes, I can’t muster the will to disagree with her. The idea of Theodore having been sat down by a teacher and taught how he should think about his future and relationships makes me feel a bit nauseous.
“How are they encouraging adults to have children?” Peter asks.
“Oh, the usual. Eighteen months of maternity leave on full pay, eighty percent funded by government. Free full-time childcare after that. And financial bonuses that amount to about ten grand.”
“Is that just for straight couples?”
The intensity in Peter’s gaze reminds me that Peter is in a uniquely difficult position compared to Libby and me. His husband died in January 2026, when they had been planning to fly to the US to give their sperm for a surrogate they had found.
“No, it applies to everyone. Straight and gay couples, and women who have a baby alone.”
Peter almost groans in envy. “Although, I’d need a husband first,” he says, with a trace of flinty bitterness in his voice that I recognize well from my own tone. “Being a micro-minority is no fun, I can tell you. Everything I used to do to meet men back when I was single is impossible. Gay clubs? Not enough of us. Apps? I swipe fourteen times and then I’m out of men. I’m seriously considering extending my radius to include Birmingham.”
Libby puts a protective hand on his arm.
“I’ve been thinking about applying to have a baby,” I say quietly.
“Do you think it’ll make it better?” Peter asks, and from someone else it might sound like a challenge but from his mouth it’s more like a plea. Do you think a baby will make the pain, finally, lessen?
“I really, really hope so,” I say. “Even thinking about it gives the future focus. It makes me hopeful.”
“You have to try,” Peter says urgently. “If I could get pregnant . . . what I wouldn’t give. You can try, you have to. All I can do is donate sperm.” He looks down at his drink, pain radiating off him in waves. “No one wants to be a surrogate for a single man. Not now. I can’t say I blame them. It’s one thing to carry a baby for someone else when life is normal but when sperm is like gold dust.” He shakes his head. “I’m too worried to agree to have a baby with someone I don’t know well. ‘Co-parenting.’ What if they leave and never actually wanted me to be involved?” He pauses and looks at me carefully. I know what he’s thinking—could we do this together? One man, one woman, making a baby and co-parenting as friends? He won’t ask because he’s too polite, and I can’t offer. I only want a baby on my own. I can’t bear to see a man who isn’t Anthony parent my child. I can’t.
I think about the pictures of women in the Norwegian article. Women who were like me with circumstances so similar—widowed, having lost children—that it felt like I could slip out of my skin, enter the photo and their pregnancies, babies, would be mine. The desire for another baby, which has been humming under my skin on and off ever since Theodore turned one and with ferocity since the Plague hurtled into my life, has gained yet more intensity. If they can do it, why can’t I? It’s so much easier to ignore my desires when I can’t see them coming true. The Norwegian pregnant women are my own version of a Disney ending: no prince, no happy ending, but a recovery. A return to motherhood. A return to part of my old life.
As Libby talks to Peter about their mum’s latest drama, trying to distract him from everything, I think about Phoebe. She was my closest confidant through the tribulations of our conception battles. I know that she’s the person I need to see most but I don’t know if I can do it. I miss her desperately. I miss my friend, but the bitterness at all she has is still just below the surface of my skin. On a near-daily basis I tell myself I should be better than this bitterness. I should be better than jealousy. I should just be better. For a moment, I’m overwhelmed by how tiring the emotional back-and-forth is and by the guilt I feel. I decide to reach out and ask her to meet me before I can talk myself out of it.
Hi,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to do this. Do you want to meet for a chat? I thought we could go for a walk together in Brockwell Park. Let me know if you’d like that. Cat x
And then, in a rush because I worry my message is too cold:
I miss you x
The messages burn in my pocket but after only two minutes, there it is. A reply.
I’d love to. How about Saturday at 11? x
I feel calmer and more centered, knowing I’ve taken the first step toward narrowing this fissure between Phoebe and me. Libby and I head toward the Barbican, where we’re seeing a “multimedia art installation” with pictures by Frederica Valli, the famous war photographer.
We make our way into the gallery and I’m looking in my bag for chewing gum when I hear Libby.
“Oh my God,” she says, her face caving in on itself in pain.
“What? What’s wrong—”
There’s no need for her to answer. I realize now why the room, full of people, is solemnly silent. The first picture is a huge black-and-white photo from the Oxenholme riots. A woman, giving birth on the tarmac of the train platform, surrounded by people and yet looking so alone. Where is her husband? I hope he was trying to find her help. Her expression is one of pure anguish and primal fear. It says both, “Somebody help me,” and “Please, please stay away.”
I had heard about the riots, I watched them on the TV, but this photo conveys more than any grainy helicopter footage ever could. The roiling mass of people in the background yet no one is stepping forward to help. This woman reduced, in the twenty-first century, to giving birth on a cold, dirty floor out of sheer desperation to escape the inescapable.
I’m desperate to know what came of her but there’s a queue to read the card by the photo. Eventually, endless minutes later, we reach it. Woman in pain, by Frederica Valli. January 7, 2026. That’s it. Nothing else. No mention of whether the baby was a boy or a girl, or if her husband survived, or if the mother was okay in the end.
We move along the corridors, awestruck by the photos. There has never been a shortage of images of the Plague and the pain it wrought but I hadn’t realized until now the absence of these kinds of images. Quiet, taken not for a news program but with care, in the moment. Art, in other words.
The next picture needs no explanation of the identity of the subject. Marcus Wilkes, author of Good-bye darling: A Memoir of Fear and Acceptance. Marcus was a popular journalist who recounted his life in journals from the day he first heard about the Plague in November 2025 to the day before he died, delirious and able to only write the words “Good-bye darling” to his wife of thirty-four years. It only spans six months but it’s a beautiful book. This is Marcus in three stages, all lined up. The first with his wife in November 2025, fearful but pasting on familiar smiles. They are the smiles of careful optimism; two people who can’t hope too much to be spared because it will be too painful when the disaster comes to pass. The second is in March 2026 after the death of their son. Their faces are old, weary, desperate. The third is in April 2026. Marcus is clearly dying. The picture is in black and white but a thick layer of sweat is visible on his forehead, his face a mask of pain. But it is not this illness that pierces me and makes me weep. It is the sight of his hand tightly held by his wife, who is looking at him with hunger. I recognize that look. It is the look that says, “Please don’t leave. Please don’t leave me all alone. I can’t bear it, so I really need you to try and stay.” It is unavoidable, the tears that tip themselves freely down my cheeks as I think back to the awful night when my kind, strong, calm husband had to leave me. To walk upstairs in our happy, love-filled house knowing we would never see each other again unless, by some miracle, he recovered. A tiny hope so small we never articulated it.
I wish I could have held his hand. If I could have anything in the world in this moment, go back to any point in my life, I would go back and hold his hand at the end. I would do what Marcus’s wife did, and hold his hand so he knew he wasn’t alone. Anthony died all alone, with no one to comfort him, hold him, reassure him, tell him that at the very least he was loved. He died alone and I can never go back to that moment.
I feel Libby’s hand slip into mine and with her other hand she cups my head and pulls it onto her shoulder where, in the middle of an art gallery full of women, some of whom are crying as openly as I am, I fall apart at the seams.
We leave a few minutes later, unable to cope with the images of grief so close to us. It is unbearable, like looking into the sun. We walk to the station, me still crying silently, Libby looking at me with the desperate need to make it better, but she can’t. I wave away her offer to take me home and insist I am fine. I’m alone now and I have to get used to it. I get onto my train and she follows me. She sits on the other side of the carriage, takes a book out of her bag and reads it for the entire thirty-minute journey. We get off the train at Crystal Palace and she walks the fifteen minutes back to my house, always a few steps behind me. I walk down the path to my house, put the key into the cheerful, red door of my home and turn around. Libby is standing, smiling at me. “You’re not alone. I love you,” she says, and turns around to make the hour-and-a-half journey back to her own home.
Perhaps it is the images of Marcus and his wife at the gallery, or Libby’s kindness or the heavy silence of my house, but I lie down on the sofa in the living room and keep weeping as though I hadn’t ever stopped. It’s a faucet of grief that has released itself and as I listen to the thoughts racing I realize that I have to forgive myself. I did the best I could. I couldn’t hold his hand; I was protecting Theodore. I couldn’t tell him I loved him as he took his last breath; I was protecting Theodore. Anthony wanted me to keep Theodore safe with every fiber of his being. He didn’t blame me for leaving him alone at his time of greatest need, but I have blamed myself. I’ve blamed myself for the deaths of my husband and son, for my failure to protect them, and my failure to save them. That belief—that I had wronged my family and brought doom upon myself—is preventing me from acting upon the need I desperately feel to have another baby. I want another baby. I want to be a mother again, I want to have a child and to have a family. I want to gain someone into my life rather than merely cope with the aftershocks of loss. Surviving and living a life I want are very different things.
I go to the tab I have saved on my computer. My local authority has opened, as of today, an application process for fertility treatment using donor sperm for women who no longer have any living children. It’s time to move forward. I complete the application form, which is surprisingly simple. I confirm I have had a child before and list my health history. I expect it to ask me to list any miscarriages, fertility drugs taken and any other details but it doesn’t. Perhaps they will take this straight from my medical records.
I send the form and text a photo of the sent e-mail to Libby.
Thank you. I love you too.
Now, I need to try desperately to forget about it. I don’t know the odds of being accepted and even if I managed to get treatment, I have struggled to conceive in the past. But it is a chance, and that’s more than I’ve had in years. For the first time since they were put up there, years ago, in another lifetime, I go upstairs to the loft, where all of Theodore’s baby clothes, crib, pram and baby toys are stored. I haven’t touched them. I thought it was because it would be too painful, but now I think it’s that I always hoped. I allowed myself to have moments of hope but the pain of acting on it was too great. And so the relics of my former life sit here, untouched and precious. I so desperately want for them to become part of my future.