The End of Men. Christina Sweeney-Baird
I first heard about coronavirus as most people likely did, through snippets of news and emails from friends saying, ‘Have you seen this? So weird!’ For a number of weeks, it felt distant in that way so many foreign news stories do. Something awful and scary but ultimately a disease I would remain personally unaffected by.
Only a few months on from those emails and news reports, I’m sitting in my flat in central London in lockdown. I leave the house once a day for exercise, and shop for food and other essentials once a week. I don’t know when I’ll next see my family, my friends or my colleagues. Billions of people around the world are in the same position. I feel immeasurably fortunate to still be employed and to have recovered from suspected coronavirus (I have not been tested but experienced the virus’s tell-tale cough, breathlessness and extreme fatigue after returning to London from a trip to Northern Italy). I know you’re meant to ‘live your truth’ through art and everything, but contracting coronavirus was a step towards authenticity I could have done without.
It’s an understatement to say it feels surreal that I wrote a book about a viral pandemic just as a viral pandemic swept the world. More than one person has half-jokingly called me Cassandra. When I started writing The End of Men in September 2018 it felt like the ultimate thought experiment. How far could I take my imagination? How would a global pandemic with an enormous death rate change the world? What would the world look like without men, or the majority of them? I wrote the first draft of the book in nine months, finishing with a burst of intense writing in June 2019. Now, as I edit the book for my publishers, I find myself testing my imaginary world against the real one. I gauge the distance between what I have written and what is happening. As a writer of speculative fiction, this is not something I ever expected.
Coronavirus doesn’t have a death rate as high as the virus I have imagined in my novel. Nonetheless, we are experiencing in real life the greatest pandemic of our lifetimes, which is more than I ever could have imagined in my wildest nightmares. The world I wrote about was meant to stay safely within the pages of my novel; it is now far more closely reflected by the world than I ever could have expected. I hope that by the time you’re reading this, there is a vaccine. I hope our healthcare systems survive and economies recover. I hope your loved ones are safe and that the world has returned to that wonderful, boring, nostalgic state I now crave: normality.
Christina Sweeney-Baird
12 April 2020
London, United Kingdom Five Days Before
Do you need to dress up for Halloween if you’re a parent? This has never been an issue before. Theodore turned three a few months ago so until now I’ve just dressed him up as something cute (a carrot, then a lion and then an adorable fireman with a fuzzy helmet) and taken photos of him in the house. I don’t want to be a boring parent who everyone thinks is snooty and above the joy of dressing up. I also don’t want to be embarrassingly keen. Do all the other parents make an effort? Do any of them? Why does no one ever explain this stuff to you in advance?
Beatrice, my only real friend at Theodore’s nursery, said she would rather die than dress up in something flammable but she works in investment banking and buys £2,000 handbags ‘when she’s had a bad day’ so I don’t think she’s necessarily a good indication of what the other mothers in this quiet part of South London will do.
I’m eyeing up the costumes uneasily. ‘Sexy witch’. No. ‘Sexy Handmaid’s Tale Handmaid’. Will get me banned from the St Joseph’s Parent Teacher Association for life. ‘Sexy pumpkin’. Nonsense. What would Phoebe do? She’s the most sensible and pragmatic of my friends, with an uncanny ability to conjure up an easy answer to a problem as if it had been there, waiting for you all along. Phoebe would say to just wear black and throw on a witch hat, so that’s what I decide to do. I suspect the results of Phoebe’s daughters’ trick-or-treating will be slightly more upmarket than the sweets we’ll be collecting tonight. She lives in a terrifyingly expensive area of Battersea thanks to a huge inheritance from her father last year. He left her his five-bedroom house with a massive garden but, as she likes to joke, her Roman nose was a steep price to pay.
Looking down at my watch I realise I’m running late for pick-up again. I take the hat and leg it to the nursery. I’m charged £20 per five minutes that I’m late, a rate so extortionate I’m tempted to set up my own nursery because it must be the highest legal interest rate in the country.
I do the rushed Hi, hi, hello, yes, I know, late again, despite working from home a lot! Ha! Yes, I am disorganised, funny, hilarious, such humour interaction with the other mothers as I throw myself through the door and pick up a forlorn Theodore.
‘Mummy was late again,’ he sighs.
‘Sorry darling, I was buying a witch hat for tomorrow.’
His face lights up. The power of distraction. Halloween has suddenly flipped from being a thing he had a remote understanding of last year to being the most exciting event imaginable. At least until Christmas. This is what I always imagined being a parent would be like. My parents died when I was ten and I don’t have any siblings so babyhood was an unpleasant series of surprises. I’m how tired? He’s getting sick how often? I feel this lonely? Halloween, Christmas and birthdays are safe spaces in which my dreams of being a perfect, Pinterest mother can be briefly indulged.
We bundle in the door from the cold, and I dive straight into cooking. I’ve been trying to feed him before Anthony gets home and the chaos of seeing his father leaves vegetables and the appeal of eating forgotten on a sad-looking plate. The negotiations required to ensure a three-year-old eats a reasonably balanced diet know no bounds and tonight’s are particularly excruciating. One more pea, and then you can have two more pieces of pasta. Five peas and then you can watch a movie on Saturday.
Anthony arrives home just as Theodore has trudged up the stairs, weary of the requirement to bathe before bed, yet again. He’s still on the phone finishing up a work call as he walks in the door. He looks tired and worn. We need a holiday. Now that we’re in our mid-thirties I seem to say that every fortnight, even when we’ve just had a holiday.
Anthony is finally off the call. Something to do with blockchains and other indecipherable words that mean nothing to me. After a decade of marriage, I’ve happily moved from feeling guilty about my lack of understanding about my husband’s work to being merrily ignorant. If an in-depth understanding of your spouse’s job was a requirement for a long-lasting and happy marriage, no one would stay married. Besides, Anthony could no more name one of my most recent published papers than I could write a script in Java, a word which never fails to make me think of body lotion before it leads my mind to programming.
I get a hello, kiss on the cheek and a quick hug before Anthony makes his way upstairs. Bath and bedtime are his. School pick-up and dinner are mine. It’s a rare and wonderful night when they’re shared. As I pour out a glass of red wine – stacking the dishwasher can wait, although answering emails can’t – the thought pops into my head that I couldn’t do this if we had another baby. No quiet, tidy-ish kitchen with a glass of wine in hand. No evening stretching ahead of me for conversation with my husband, watching TV undisturbed and a long night of brain-enhancing, relationship-maintaining sleep.
‘How was your day?’ Anthony is back downstairs. No wine for him tonight, I notice, as he throws some of the pasta I left for him into a bowl.
‘Editing, editing, editing. My favourite bit of writing a paper,’ I say, my sarcasm heavy. One of my tutors at Oxford once told me that becoming an academic meant a lifetime of homework and I didn’t believe her at