The music was blasting out from the CD player, filling the room with its catchy rhythm. Calli far preferred to listen to her favourite tracks on her old sound system, rather than on her mobile. She cherished her collection of CDs amassed over the years and couldn’t bring herself to throw them out, much to James’s irritation.
‘You’re cluttering up the place with last century’s technology,’ he would complain; James liked to do things his own way, but when it came to music she didn’t care. She had them all categorized and in alphabetical order, allowing her to wallow in nostalgia whenever she had the chance to play them; when they were together it was usually his choice.
That morning she had been sitting in front of her state-of-the-art computer for the past few hours, editing a batch of photographs for her latest commission and singing along to old favourite hits as she worked. Her voice, loud and clear, merged with the girl singer of Ace of Base. She liked their music – it was played often in her parents’ house when she was growing up. This part of her work was very much to her liking: sifting through the images and choosing which ones to use. Writing was a different matter, demanding far more concentration and no distractions. She was a good writer, but she always struggled with her spelling and had to focus all her attention on the storyline and how best to put it across, so her rule was strictly no music during that stage of a project. As a photojournalist she saw everything in images. Taking pictures was instinctive – the words always followed later, after time to reflect.
The story she was working on that day, which had influenced her choice of music, was for a Sunday newspaper supplement. The theme was teen parenthood, focusing on young fathers. She had spent a couple of days interviewing and photographing six lads aged between sixteen and nineteen who had unexpectedly found that their girlfriends were in the family way. With the exception of just one boy, all had embraced fatherhood with relative ease and apparently without regrets. The experience had been a revelation for Calli. She marvelled at these young men and their commitment to parenthood and sense of responsibility. She herself, at a similar age during her first year at university, had feared she might be pregnant and remembered the panic that had set in, followed by relief after the discovery that it was a false alarm for her and her then boyfriend. Under no circumstances would she or the boy have wanted a baby, unlike the song she was now singing along to. In fact, Calli mused, she had spent all her adult life panicking at the thought of pregnancy and the restrictions that it would bring into her busy life. James, her partner and the man she loved and had lived with for the past ten years, felt as she did; a baby had no place in their London metropolitan life.
‘When will you two be getting married?’ one of her Greek aunts had asked them while they were visiting family in Crete one year soon after Calli and James had moved into a flat together. ‘It’s time to start thinking about having some babies soon, no?’ the aunt carried on.
‘We’ve only been together for a few months,’ Calli had protested, horrified at the prospect of children.
‘That’s plenty of time,’ the aunt replied. ‘Besides, you’re twenty-five or six now, no? You’re not so young anymore!’
‘For goodness’ sake, Auntie, you make me sound ancient.’ Calli threw her arms in the air with mock despair. Her own mother never pressurized her, but her Greek aunties were always quizzing her.
‘You might not feel ancient, koritsi mou, my girl,’ the aunt continued, ‘but your eggs soon will be. You are only born with so many of them and if you don’t start using them soon they will go off and be no good anymore!’ All Calli could do was laugh at her aunt’s gloomy prophecy.
‘I’ll take a chance on it,’ she replied, still laughing. But James had considered the aunt’s questioning inappropriate and rude. ‘None of her business,’ he had said grumpily later. Calli, being half Greek herself, knew her aunt’s comments were not unusual. In their community, when people made a commitment to one another, marriage and babies inevitably would soon follow. ‘It’s cultural, you see,’ she told James. ‘She wasn’t trying to cause offence, she was just being her typically blunt