It was bad enough that the world was slouching towards Bethlehem without having to make six educational and entertaining programmes about it. Starting a new job in August had not been ideal. Noah had enjoyed a long run of being adored at home, and with his birthday in December was one of the older boys in reception, but Olivia still felt guilty about not having spent the last week of the summer holidays with him. Sitting at her desk in Soho, she was fully aware of the irony that having achieved the independence and intellectual stimulation she had been longing for, she was now giving in to a pre-emptive nostalgia for the last days of his early childhood made even more precious by the trouble she had taken to miss out on them.
At least the strain of these maternal complexities was being alleviated by her growing friendship with Sam, the commissioning editor at Silverline. Sam was a woman who seemed completely relaxed in her hedonism, quietly challenging anyone to find a motivation more fundamental or an aim more worthwhile than pleasure, whether it came from gratified appetites or silent virtue, from self-regard or admiration, from struggle or from its absence. However brief or complicated the journey, she seemed confident that it would somehow become suffused with enjoyment, turning frustrations into a down payment on delight, and transforming guilt from an unwelcome gatecrasher into an honoured guest who could always be consulted about what would be wilder, more excessive or strictly forbidden in a world dimmed by obedience and convention. Sam didn’t make plans to appease her anxiety about boredom and chaos, nor did she avoid making plans to appease her anxiety about entrapment; she just seemed to take the bewildering view that whatever happened, planned or unplanned, it was eventually going to be fun. Olivia had become fascinated by this faith in the guiding power and the guaranteed advent of pleasure. She had to find out whether the whole thing was an act or not. She had only known her new colleague for a few weeks and, despite her intuition that Sam was authentic, perhaps thrillingly authentic, she couldn’t be sure without getting to know her better.
‘Yes, I’d love to have a drink,’ said Olivia. ‘I just have a few emails to send.’
‘In an hour?’ said Sam. ‘Perfect.’
Olivia was feeling browbeaten by the variety of global death threats to which she would have to make some allusion in her series. Extinction felt like a rush-hour train that had finally arrived but was too crowded to fit anyone else on board. The growth in human population seemed to be matched by a surge in the number of Apocalyptic Horsemen. She could imagine David Attenborough saying, with his adorable authority, that it had taken the whole history of the world to produce the Four Horsemen he was told about as a boy, but that over the course of a single lifetime, their number had doubled, and unless something drastic was done, there would be twelve by 2050. Perhaps, in the end, good old Famine, War, Pestilence and Death were always going to cover the case. When it came to extinction events, you couldn’t go wrong with Death on your team. Nevertheless, as she surveyed the field, she couldn’t help feeling that the paths to universal destruction had been modernised and multiplied in some quite fundamental ways. In the quaint world of the original Horsemen, ‘wild beasts’ were supposed to be a big threat; the difficulty now was finding a wild beast to be killed by. War, astride its red steed, used to be armed with a sword rather than the twelve thousand nuclear warheads currently at its disposal. Commenting on Yeats’s epitaph, ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by’, Auden had said something withering along the lines of, ‘It’s more likely to be a motorist these days.’ She couldn’t help feeling the same thing about the Apocalypse. Young motorists with extinction start-ups, hoping to make a killing and retire early without ever having to put on a suit, were clogging the highway to Armageddon. The trouble with the new styles of annihilation, from out-of-control artificial intelligence, or dioxins released into rivers, seas and food chains, or viruses making zoonotic leaps caused by the unprecedented friction between wild and human populations, or butter-fingered bioengineers, grabbing a couple of bats and a racoon dog on the way home for dinner and clumsily dropping the latest gain-of-function smallpox test tube onto some frozen foreign food, was that they made death so complicated. Their juvenile eagerness seemed to conspire against their equestrian role models in confusing ways. Her programme about asteroids, for instance, had made her less rigidly opposed to nuclear weapons. Without nukes there would be no chance of diverting or disintegrating an asteroid that was on a collision course with the Earth; on the other hand, thanks to nukes it might be a matter of total indifference whether an asteroid plunged into the Earth or not. Synthetic carpets, fire retardants and non-stick pans were chock-full of the endocrine-disruptive chemicals that had contributed to a fifty per cent drop, between 1973 and 2011, in the sperm counts of men in Europe, America and New Zealand, as well as damaging female reproductive capacity in less starkly quantifiable ways. With one last plastic-bottled pseudo-oestrogen push, a generous helping of organophosphate pesticides, and enough glycol ethers in our cosmetics, human infertility might yet save the world from ruin.
Knowing that she had Asteroids sewn up and could move on with confidence to Overpopulation had done something to alleviate her extinction fatigue. Overpopulation was a subject she kept being told was ‘taboo’ by the innumerable people who wanted to talk about it on her next programme. She was in touch with several GINKS (Green Inclinations, No Kids), the network of ecologically minded people who took seriously the impact of their reproductive choices on the finite resources of the planet. It was thanks to the political implications of this neo-Malthusian angst that the word ‘taboo’ was so often whispered down the phone. Since the highest birth rates took place in poor countries in Africa and Asia, while many of the strongest proponents of reproductive restraint came from developed countries, any call for lower birth rates could easily be reframed as racist, or as the colonial export of an alien feminism to cultures in which waiting as long as possible to have one child, so as not to interrupt a prolonged education or a promising career, held less appeal. The feminism promoted by the dominant voices at the Cairo conference on population in 1994 emphasised a woman’s sovereignty over her own body. So often used to defend abortion, the same argument could be repurposed to defend reproduction. If the choice was based on bodily sovereignty, rather than a utilitarian accountancy of prosperity and suffering, it became incoherent to apply it exclusively to abortion. The justified accusation that the carbon footprint of a child from a rich nation was gigantic compared to that of a child from a poorer nation (except those from elite families) thickening the political smog obscuring the raw ecological toll of adding eighty million a year to the human population. The need for food, clean water and living space was unsustainable, even if most of the people trying to secure them lived in misery.
Olivia’s barely acknowledged sense that she might have been better off not having a child at all gave her some sympathy for the GINKS, but the idea of subtracting her adorable son from the world was of course an unthinkable thought, a quasi-homicidal taboo much more savage than the ‘taboo’ of revisiting a once prevalent pessimism about the population bomb and the limits of growth. She had been brought up by her psychoanalytic parents to believe that some of our most powerful feelings were hidden in the reservoirs of the unconscious behind a cracked dam that was sometimes swept away by real madness, but in the case of an ordinary neurotic like her just leaked rejected memories and chimerical combinations into her dreams and daydreams, into her decisions and her indecision. Her fleeting, non-lethal fantasies, imagining that her family had never come into existence, rather than imagining its destruction, often took hold of her when she had spent almost the entire day behind the wheel of her car. As a Londoner, a naïve part of her had thought that at least some of life at Howorth would feel like stepping into a Monet, with startling poppies dotting the thick fields, and perhaps some Pissarro poplars shimmering in the distance, and the glowing flanks of a Stubbs horse occasionally trotting into view. Her gallery of expectations was soon replaced by speed cameras and weather apps. She knew now that country life was really all about being on the road, with only a slim chance of fitting in a walk after dealing with the logistics of survival. She drove and drove and drove, to shops and to school and to visit neighbours she didn’t especially like (that was also part of the country code) but who lived, after all, within a forty-minute range. She drove everywhere, except to London, where there was no need for a car and therefore nowhere to park. In the country there was no shortage of parking spaces but hardly any opportunity to use them, as everyone was at the wheel, slowing down to pass through yet another village, waiting at a junction for the chance to join an alarmingly busy road, or reversing virtuously up a single-track lane to the nearest passing place.
‘Country roads, take me home,’ Olivia started to sing in an ecstatic whisper, ‘To the place I belong,/ Streets of London, Hampstead hills,/ Take me home, country roads.’
Last weekend, on her way to collect Lucy, Francis had called to say they were a bit low on olive oil, so she made a detour to a petrol station, with a shop attached, where she refuelled and picked up a bottle – wondering, as she always did, why olive oil was alone in having extra virginity.
On the drive home, she told Lucy that Francis would be making his ‘famous’ paella for them.
‘Oh, great,’ said Lucy. ‘When I tear the head off the shrimp these days, I sometimes can’t help wishing someone would tear my head off. Sorry, that was a bit dark.’
‘It was pretty dark,’ said Olivia, ‘but you can be as dark as you like with me.’
‘But I don’t want to be dark,’ said Lucy, ‘especially with you. Or perhaps I do; perhaps I just don’t want to have a reason to be dark – which is simply childish. Sorry. Sorry to keep saying sorry. Hunter is away on another trip. It’s not that I think he’s having an affair. It’s more like my absence is his mistress. It’s a holiday from my darkness that I can’t join him on.’
Olivia didn’t know what to say, while knowing that she didn’t have to say anything. She also knew that it was Hunter, with his surcharge of executive energy, who was finding it hard to live with Lucy’s diagnosis. He expected to fix problems, find loopholes, and buy solutions. He did not expect to absorb powerful destructive emotions, without action or judgement, without contagion or despair. He had taken to disappearing for a while, to acquire a company or crush an opponent, to crush, in effect, his own frustration.
Over the weekend, Lucy regained her poise, as she always did, but she was clearly in a more fragile state than usual. Although it had proved useful in the past, Olivia decided to keep away from discussing what she was working on. Forced to pay close attention to her own mortality, Lucy didn’t always find it a relief to hear about the more inclusive ways that life on Earth might come to an end. She retreated instead into her role as godmother, helping Noah build his boat in the woods, admiring his dinosaur models, watching Jurassic Park, while her godson alternated between frenzied excitement at the next familiar disaster and moments of dread in which he had to plunge his head into Lucy’s sweater to hide from the gruesome action. Francis and Olivia had been alarmed when Noah told them he had seen the film at a friend’s house, but the big blonde school mother who presided over the viewing said that their qualms belonged ‘in the Stone Age’. If the film did have any traumatic impact on Noah, it was passed on efficiently to his parents, who found themselves attacked several times a day from behind a sofa or a door by a tiptoeing Noah, with his arms held close to his chest, emitting weird noises, somewhere between a squeak and a roar, before he headbutted them and pretended to devour their arms and legs.
‘What is it about dinosaurs?’ Lucy asked, collapsing in an armchair after a tour of Noah’s extensive collection. ‘When we were young, boys might have a brontosaurus and a T-rex on the shelf and an incomplete set of cards from some cereal packets, but now . . .’
‘I know; he has a hundred and twelve,’ said Olivia.
‘And he’s so knowledgeable. He keeps saying things like “late Cretaceous carnivore”.’
‘I think it’s the luxurious terror of knowing they’re extinct,’ said Olivia. ‘Not just extinct, but part of an extinct mass extinction rather than the imminent variety that we’re all obsessed with.’
‘Well, some of us more than others,’ said Lucy, smiling.
‘Guilty as charged,’ said Olivia. ‘But I do think there is something reassuring about dead civilisations and extinct kingdoms of life: Aztecs, dinosaurs, Ancient Egyptians. They’re over and we get to curate their afterlives – in the case of dinosaurs, a paradise of plastic toys ruled over by four-year-old boys.’
‘And palaeontologists,’ said Lucy. ‘Oh, and Steven Spielberg.’ ‘Yes! He’s got dinosaurs and Egyptian tombs and cuddly
aliens. I’m seeing a pattern: luxury terror.’
‘Beats the real thing,’ said Lucy, ‘the unfinished extinctions . . .’
Olivia glanced up from her computer and saw that Sam was still busy. Although she had one more email to send, she would have postponed it if her new friend had been ready to go out. She didn’t dwell on this faintly compromising eagerness but moved on rapidly to her final effort, thanking the doctor who had agreed to be interviewed about endocrine-disrupting chemicals. As Olivia wrote a sentence about the tug-of-war between infertility and overpopulation, wondering whether to use a more original phrase than tug-of-war, but leaving it in place, she felt a flush of shame at having imagined not being a mother. Sperm counts were plummeting around the world, at least in countries rich enough to afford the little curlicues of convenience provided by the endocrine disruptors, and there she had been, idly imagining a life without the child she was blessed with. If she had been at Willow Cottage, she would have been giving him something to eat, and then kneeling by the bath as he sat among the crackling bubbles, narrating the improbable circumstances that had led to a pterodactyl making a screeching attack on a diving submarine. She would have read him stories as he lay in his dinosaur pyjamas, in a heap of soft toys and blankets beneath the smiling faces of the solar system glued educationally to the ceiling above his bed. She would have been a little bored, but now she could afford to feel enormously moved, knowing that Francis would be taking care of the whole thing.
As she sent her best wishes and signed off the email, Olivia imagined a future in which humans had become the dinosaurs for a new dominant species – a superorganism of giant-brained cockroaches, for example, whose hard-shelled ancestors had survived one of the mass extinctions anticipated in her forthcoming programmes.
‘Look, she’s getting into her car to drive to the local supermarket!’ a young Roach Sapiens might well be telling his mother sixty-six million years from now as he played with his keratin-based human dolls.
‘Really, darling? What kind is she?’
‘Late Anthropocene omnivore,’ the erudite little monster would explain to his hard-working cockroach mother.
‘Are you ready?’
Olivia looked up, shaken out of her daydream, and saw Sam standing at the edge of her desk.
‘Yes, yes, I’ve just finished. Perfect timing.’
Sam smiled as if to warn her that perfect timing was something Olivia would have to get used to if they were going to hang out together.
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From Parallel Lines by Edward St. Aubyn. Copyright © 2025 by Edward St. Aubyn. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
