You look out through your bedroom window. The sun looks like a rose grapefruit as it rises over the rampant profligacy of vegetables that you insist on calling your little veggie patch, despite it being the size of two tennis courts put together.
You once bowed to the Duchess of Kent from centre court, wanting to throw up all over your tennis togs out of nervousness but somehow managing a smile and then winning a game the Fleet Street rags vote match of the tournament.
Rags they are, that loosely bind the flowering peas, courgettes and vine tomatoes to the timber trellises that stand tall above a perimeter of sunflowers and blackberry thickets. Hidden amongst the brambles and berries is the chicken wire fence buried deep in the crumbly black soil to keep the rabbits from digging their way in. Growing profusely within this protected space are scores of green peppers, eggplant, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, carrots, lettuces, pole beans as well as herbs such as thyme, basil, oregano, rosemary, mint and dill that not only abundantly fulfill the needs of your kitchen but produce a generous excess that gets boxed up and taken to the weekend markets, fair weather or foul.
You throw open the window and, upon hearing the self-satisfied clucking of your chickens, slip your arms into a silk kimono that suggests more than conceals. You walk bare-footed down the wooden floorboards of the hallway and twist open the round crystal knob of the front door where you are greeted by a pair of sheepdogs rising from their dusty doze in the morning sun, shaking themselves with pleasure to see you. You enter the walk-in chicken coop and feel for the smooth shells of newly laid eggs nestling in the straw. Pausing in its strut outside and cocking its head, Kill-Bill the suited-up magpie looks at you with knowing eye.
Arms slip around your body from behind and you just know it’s Ren. Eyes shut, you lean back into his hug. He kisses your neck while your kimono falls open to reveal your breasts which he cups one in each hand. He growls with pleasure but you gently maneuver yourself out of his grasp and slip out of the coop with the basket of eggs safe in your grip.
As of eight weeks ago, new life is budding from two of your own eggs. Neither you, Ren, Mannie nor Sun-Linx know whose sperm it was that reached the prize. Indeed, given the relaxed sharing of your bed with the three men, there is a chance that each of your two ova was fertilized by a different man’s seed. Regardless, you have no doubt your twins will thrive from the security of having a mother and three fathers, considering that single- and two-parent families are a modern madness and multiple family carers the norm in humankind’s rich tribal past.
You see your children growing up with organic fresh food from the rich alluvial soils of your land and drinking pure water from your rainwater tanks, whilst consuming renewable energy through the solar panels and battery banks and recycling any waste produced on the farm. You and their fathers will provide homeschooling to uncover and encourage their unique creative, athletic and intellectual talents, not in an attempt to produce übermensch but rather to shape a pair of environmentally-aware, emotionally secure and loving human beings for planet Earth.
What takes you from being fêted as the toast of Wimbledon to this isolated farmland? What makes you give away all your trophies, abandon your sponsorship deals and seven figure earnings, give up your enviable lifestyle and retreat from sporting fame? Who wakes you?
Greta Thunberg wakes you.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words…Humanity is now standing at a crossroads…We must now decide which path we want to take, how we want the future living conditions for all living species to be like.”
Flying over the Atlantic, cossetted in the smooth opulence of your Dassault Falcon jet, you read Steffan Gossling’s article on how the carbon footprints of celebrities like you is hundreds of times greater than average. You decide – then and there – to leave this ultra-competitive world of strutting yet insecure, talented yet brittle sporting heroes. You step into an unaffected, earthy world of equanimity, environmentalism and universal love. You sell your private jet. You buy a farm in the Nimbin valley.
Sun-Linx, bearded and giggling, is at the front door with a can of milk fresh from the milking shed. Mannie, with biceps like rock melons below the sleeves of his overalls, climbs down from the electric tractor and lowers himself onto the low-slung bench to ease off his boots. Ren is already inside, looping new words of poetry with thoughtful hand.
After scoffing breakfast amidst all the usual jousting and merriment, you’re donning gumboots, getting ready to dive into that tangled jungle of agrarian profundity you insist on calling your little veggie patch. You’re in your Eden, receiving all the love and tenderness you deserve, and now with two new lives growing in your belly.
***
Oh, how you wish it were so. But facing you through your grimy bedroom window, are the endless walls of apartment blocks that sever your gaze, blot out the sky and cast a dank shadow over the cracked paving below.
There is a tennis racquet in the back of your cupboard, but the closest you’ve been to Wimbledon is facing the endless lobs of arthritic Dorothy Wickett in Carlton Gardens, thirteen tram stops away.
Each day that you get closer to forty, you crave a baby more and more – and a father to share in the joy of nurturing it. The sun rises in promise but sets in grief. I mourn for you each blank night.