Love Is a Thief (24 page)

the office of dr patel | harley street

I’d made an appointment with a world-renowned fertility and embryology specialist called Dr Patel. On meeting him I realised Dr Patel had exchanged his sense of humour and dress sense for intelligence. Brilliantly bright, to the point of communicating like an android, he dressed in a variety of different shades of brown, as if colour or pattern may somehow distract his patients from his mind.

‘The process is long, Miss Winters,’ he said after welcoming me into his office. ‘The process is expensive.’ He signalled for me to sit in a brown plastic chair. ‘There is preparation. There is harvesting. There is storage. There is thawing.’ He listed them on his fingers. I did the same. ‘And there are no guarantees of success.’ I looked around the room at all his certificates. It looked to me as if he’d been very successful indeed. ‘First we would need to take some blood to assess your current fertility levels. The higher the result, the more eggs you have left.’ I winced at the thought that my egg supply was running dry and there was no supermarket on earth that could supply me with more. I was like a drought-affected river in Africa, the animals wanting to drink from me and there being nothing bloody left. I clutched the edge of Mr Patel’s desk for support. I felt the imprint of a thousand different women’s hands placed there before me. Dr Patel poured me a glass of water and told me
to relax. Dr Patel had lots of water. He was like a fountain of hope but in brown.

‘Subject to you being a suitable candidate,’ he continued, ‘there would then be various different stages culminating in collection of your eggs, which is called harvesting.’

‘Mr Patel,’ I whispered, ‘I’ve never had any kind of surgery in my life. And I’ve certainly never been harvested, to my knowledge.’

‘Oh, you do not need a surgery for the harvesting. You will be lightly sedated while a fine needle is inserted into your vagina and up into your ovaries.’

‘Oh, God.’ I felt as if I was slipping closer to the floor. A needle up my vagina! I’d need more than sedation. They’d need to chain me down and lobotomise me, if that’s even a word.

‘The successfully harvested eggs would then be stored for up to ten years in liquid nitrogen.’

‘Like
Han Solo
in
Star Wars?’

‘Is she a patient at this clinic?’ he asked, typing her name into his computer until he saw me gently shaking my head. ‘The eggs would then be thawed when you decide you want a baby. We inject them with sperm, insert them into your uterus and then, if successful, you’d be pregnant.’

‘Wow. I’d be pregnant.’

‘If successful.’

‘Well, how successful is it? How many women have had babies this way?’

‘200. Worldwide.’

‘200? Worldwide? Only 200 babies worldwide! It doesn’t seem like an awful lot, Mr Patel.’

‘It’s Dr Patel, Miss Winters, Dr Patel, and 200 is more than zero, is it not?’

‘And presumably the younger I am when I freeze my eggs—’

‘Time is not your friend, Miss Winters. Time is not your friend.’ Bastard.

‘Well, is there another way?’

‘No.’ Great. ‘But a more successful process is freezing an embryo. Embryos can better withstand the thawing process and there have been huge successes with babies going full term.’

‘You mean extract my eggs and fertilize them with someone’s sperm. Make an actual embryo and freeze that? And who would I make an embryo with? Because I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, Mr Patel, but if I already had someone to make a baby with I don’t think we’d be having this chat.’

‘Is there someone platonic in your life that you would be happy to create a child with? Healthy family tree, good level of intelligence, good skin, teeth and so on; someone unlikely to marry and have children of their own. If not we can recommend a donor but the laws are changing regarding anonymity and children are seeking out their donor parents. It can be distressing for them later on. Have a think, Miss Winters. You don’t have to be romantically involved with this person. Just someone who you have a good stable relationship with, perhaps someone who doesn’t want a child per se but would support you wanting one.’ He looked at the brown wooden clock on the brown wooden wall in the brown-coloured room. His office was in the autumn of
its life, like my ovaries. ‘I think we have gone as far as we can today. So please, read all the literature, take your time and if you have any questions call the clinic.’ He handed me a pink leaflet with the words ‘IVF is for us!’ blazoned across the front and a really happy couple high-fiving. ‘Let me show you to the door, Miss Winters,’ he said, standing up from his brown chair and walking out through brown corridors to the brown front door. He opened it onto a noisy, rainy Harley Street, a stark contrast to my thoughts of eggs, sperm, fertilization and lone parenting.

‘Thank you, Mr Patel,’ I said, shaking his hand and stepping out into the rain. I was about to walk off when I remembered something. I turned and stopped him from closing the door.

‘Is there something else I can help you with, Miss Winters?’

‘It’s a bit awkward, Mr Patel, but would you mind if I just gave you a quick kiss, on the lips? I can’t leave until I do. It’s for my grandma.’

‘Very well, Miss Winters, but please remember, it’s Dr Patel, not Mr.’

I leant in and gave him the briefest, quickest, barely lip-touching kiss on the lips.

‘Are we done now, Miss Winters?’

‘Yes, I believe we are. Thank you.’

Mr Patel closed the door and I stood on the steps rummaging in my handbag for my umbrella. On opening it I remembered why the last time I’d used it I’d made a diary note to buy a new one. Only two of the prongs still extended out fully with less than 50% of the umbrella’s rain-resistant
material still attached. It left one strip of possible rain protection that would have been insufficient for a single piece of pre-cooked spaghetti. Resigned to the fact that I would be soaking by the time I got home, I turned to walk to the tube only to find Peter Parker standing on the other side of the road. Force of habit led me to wave enthusiastically until I noticed he was glaring at me and looked for a moment as if he was going to walk off. Instead he sighed heavily, checked for traffic, then strode across the street towards me, towering above me with an enormous and structurally sound umbrella. He exchanged his umbrella for my umbrella equivalent of a shanty town. A large drop of rain immediately plonked on his nose. He didn’t flinch.

‘So,’ he said in what was his most flat and irritated voice yet. ‘Your grandma tells me that not only do you battle the evil and conspiratorial forces of love, but now you kiss everyone who stands in your way. I assume I just witnessed another example of your kissing crusade, or have I just interrupted you on a date?’

‘No, it wasn’t a date, Peter, it was a … You know what, it doesn’t matter what it was. And Grandma wanted me to kiss people because she thought it might help me move on from Gabriel, something to do with frogs and beating the odds and making him one of a number. And it makes her and the girls at Pepperpots happy so it’s the least I can do really, bring a little joy.’

‘Ah, yes, I’ve seen photos of the joy you brought in France.’

How was it possible he already knew about Julien the heterosexual love God?

‘What is your problem, Peter? I didn’t particularly want to kiss most of these people.’

‘Most of them?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘And yet you do it anyway. You do as you please without concern for the consequences.’

‘I am constantly concerned about the consequences of my life choices actually, and the kissing seemed to be in the spirit of things, me doing things I wouldn’t normally do, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, seeing as I’m asking everyone else to do the same.’

‘Maybe things worked better when they were left alone. Did you ever think of that? Maybe things were just fine and functional and made sense before this stupid idea and all the ridiculous and irrational decisions people made as a result of it!

‘What?’

‘I read your article, in
True Love
, about you and Gabriel.’

‘Oh.’ I’d totally forgotten about that.

‘About how you compromised yourself and—’

‘Peter, that was a
massively
exaggerated version of the truth—’ by about 1% ‘—and actually I didn’t even write it, Chad’s assistant did, Loosie. I know it’s a bit confusing how we all seem to write under each other’s names but Chad always seems to come up with some compelling reason why it makes sense. In fact the only person who writes under her own name is Jenny Sullivan, although she seems to put her name on an awful lot of my work these days, like the Delaware interview, for starters, and—’

‘Kate, I can’t believe you had all these people in your
life, all working hard to make sure you remained happy and safe, and you just threw it all away with Gabriel, losing yourself in some relationship. And you go from one extreme to the other. First you throw everything away, now you’re reclaiming everything; flipping between two extremes isn’t progressive, Kate; kissing bloody ski instructors isn’t progressive.’

‘So what if I kissed Julien?’

‘I don’t like it, Kate!’ he shouted, before looking a little startled. Then he turned on his heel and marched off down the street, chucking my shanty umbrella in the first bin he passed.

‘What is your problem, Peter?’ I screamed down the street after him. I’ll be honest with you, it was a bit like a scene from a trashy soap opera, and strangely liberating, until I noticed Mr Patel staring angrily out of his office window. He was jabbering into his phone, probably calling the cops, reporting me for disturbing the peace.

‘What are you looking at?’ I yelled up at him, like a thug, totally forgetting myself and my social graces. ‘Sorry, Mr Patel,’ I wailed up. ‘I’m so sorry!’ My voice was wobbly, my personality shifts like watching the therapy tapes of a schizophrenic. Peter was right: I catapulted between extremes. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me, Mr Patel.’

‘It’s Dr Patel!’ he yelled back down.
‘Dr
Patel!’

‘It’s my hormones, Mr Patel. I think it’s my hormones.’ People on the street started stopping to watch. Mr Patel snapped his office blinds shut.

‘Damn!’ I yelled, dramatically lightly kicking the iron
railings, punching the air, knowing that’s what Tom Cruise
¹¹
would have done. ‘DAMN!!’ I yelled again, picking up my bags and my structurally sound umbrella and making my way back to the tube. ‘Show’s over, people,’ I said to bystanders as I passed them. ‘There’s nothing to see, folks. There’s nothing to see.’

And there really wasn’t anything to see, except a slightly deranged woman arguing with a so-called friend while dealing with imminent infertility. I swore that day that if Peter Parker had just ruined my only chance of getting Mr Patel to harvest me he would bloody well have to impregnate me himself.

¹¹
I have an obsession with
Tom Cruise
and his attitude to life. He is passionate about everything he does, enthusiastic, dedicated, committed. If you asked Tom Cruise to wash up dirty dishes, he’d wash them up so hard those plates would gleam. If he gets angry, he’s like a raging bull. Tom Cruise commits to everything 110% and I aspire to be more like that. So when questioning my own attitude to life or when facing its hurdles, obstacles, the odd broken heart, I ask myself the following: ‘What would Tom Cruise do?’ then I try to embody the spirit of Tom. More often than not life starts to feel pretty damn good. Try it. Say it. ‘What would Tom do?’ Feels good, doesn’t it? I love you, Tom! I actually love you!

‘we forge the chains we wear in life’ (charles dickens)

F
inally it was time for Beatrice’s Love-Stolen Dream. A trip to New York had been arranged by
True Love
and Loosie had been responsible for organising every detail. She had liaised with the Head of Student Care (Huck Snuffleupagus) and the Principal of Juilliard (Herbert Birdsfoot) both of whom were delighted to welcome Beatrice to the school, neither of whom were offspring of
Sesame Street
characters.

Beatrice had been invited to stay for three days and had been given carte blanche to attend any lectures and classes she wanted. So we flew out on the last New-York-bound flight from Heathrow late one Sunday night, Beatrice quickly falling asleep after take-off. As I watched her sleep, in a way that does not resemble a stalker, I wondered what her life would have been like if she had made this flight all those years ago. Then I wondered if she would have flown or taken a boat. Which made me wonder about the history of the commercial jet plane, which consumed my thoughts for the next five and a half hours. Before I’d even managed
to watch the new
James Bond
or
Twilight: Breaking Dawn—Part 2
we had landed at JKF and a car had whisked us across town to the Juilliard School of Music.

‘Super great to meet you both,’ said Head of Student Care Huck. ‘We are honoured to welcome international guests to our school, especially fellow musicians. Beatrice, we have a great programme lined up for you this week. We even managed to get our hands on your original application to the school. Super great choices of music. And some tough ones! I hope we get to hear those magic fingers play this week! Kate, do you play?’ He pursed his lips so tight they went white.

‘An instrument? No, no, not really. I used to play the recorder at junior school although I never passed any proper exams, and Peter Parker to this day says that I gave him tinnitus, which I don’t think you can actually catch or be given by an untalented recorder-playing friend. He has a dry sense of humour.’ I chuckled, to myself. ‘Well, he did have—he seems to be harbouring a lot of repressed anger of recent weeks, and hidden homosexuality, but I’m pretty nifty on a set of bongos. I’ve been told that
a lot;
bongos or a tambourine, any kind of percussion instrument actually, but that is normally when I’ve had Red Bull and, er, well, something else that goes with Red Bull that is associated with fun and parties. Alcohol. When I am a bit pissed I have rhythm … apparently …’ At this point I knew I should
never
have started talking and Huck’s right eyebrow was raised so far up his forehead I was concerned it would ping off and attach itself to Beatrice’s face, forming a small Hitler moustache. ‘That’s probably not what you meant when you
asked if I play an instrument. No, I do not play any instruments, at all. I am not musical. I am
not
a musician.’ Phew.