I’ve got this great idea for a story. Well, OK. It was given to me – well, the bones of it anyway – but that doesn’t matter. It’s a great story. A man, a student, decides to pay his way through college by being a sperm donor. So he gives his sperm and gives his sperm. It’s all good. This bloke – we’ll call him Will – is studying to be a doctor. He’s tall and blond, strong and athletic. The sort of bloke who your mother would want you to marry. This guy offers his sperm and it goes to the top of the sperm charts. He’s the perfect physical speciment.
But he’s got a secret, a secret even he doesn’t know. He’s (and here we’ve got to work on it a bit) got a madness, a psychopathic madness – a congenital psychopathic madness.
Anyway, many years – well, maybe 10 – down the line, Susan is having trouble with her daughter Molly. Molly is very bright but she’s got an evil streak, a mean side to her that’s a little bit disturbed. And Susan doesn’t know what to do. She can’t ask her partner because she doesn’t have a partner. She never has had. A few lost loves, the usual catalogue of losers and chancers, nearlys and almosts. When Susan was 31, she met the man of her life, the Big Love. But – and we don’t need to go into the detail here – he was a twat, a lying, cheating, no-good dirty low-down hound dog. He wrecked her life and she swore – she absolutely swore – never to fall for a man again. She’d have a baby.
Anyway, back to the main story. Susan tries all sorts of things and, in the end, she goes to a parent-child therapy class because – obviously, she thinks that it’s all her fault. While she’s there, she meets another woman, like her the mother of a 10 year old girl. They start talking.
Can you guess where this one’s going? OK, let’s spell it out a bit more.
This other woman, her story is remarkably similar to Susans. She’s a lesbian but, that apart, it’s the same. Lost love, disappointment, betrayal. Refuge sought in a baby.
Now you know what’s going to happen. They start talking, realise that they both got pregnant after going to sperm donor centre in Gradham. Now then – you and I know the next question: how many other babies were born between 1980 and 1985?
So OK. That’s the pitch. It’s like a cross between The Boys From Brazil and maybe The Midwitch Cuckoos.
How many are there? Does something happen to them to ‘kick-start’ the inner madness that propels them? Shall we turn them into an army?
1 comment:
Susan has been doing her research and tracked down Will; she invites him over somewhere around the end of Act One. (She found 18 babies - something about the 9 Circles of Hell and 9 Spheres of Heaven, but she'll explain that later). She welcomes him in with the eponymously warm offering, "Thanks for coming".
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