Our sex-crazed scribbler recalls how maniacal hillbilly pig hunters cause him to actually refuse sex
Hanging above the desk where I am writing this confession is a large picture of my great-grandfather and his children. It’s not an oil painting – he wasn’t quite rich enough to spring for a proper artist – but the black and white photograph shows the Smith family to have been the model of Edwardian respectability. He’s wearing a handsome tweed suit and has a cigar in his hand. Above his lip perches a luxuriant moustache. Seated around him are his four sons. Two of them died on the Western Front in their teens, one emigrated to Canada, and the other, still in toddler’s clothes, was my grandfather. Their faces, caught on that day in the year 1903, are gazing directly into the lens.
I hate this picture. Why? Well, imagine what it’s like to be in your 40s, to be single, to have no proper career, and to see it every day. Tourists at the Louvre often comment that the eyes of the Mona Lisa seem to follow them coquettishly around the room, but the eyes of my ancestors are far more malign. They glower at me, burning with disapproval. “Get the fuck on with it!” they urge. “You’re all we have left! You have to keep the bloodline going!”
I flinch. I avert my gaze and skulk behind my computer screen. But I can never escape them. That old genetic duty… it gets to me every time. Just looking at the maths is horrible. Here goes: unlike me, my father was man enough to settle down and have kids. As was his father. And his. And so on. There’s an unbroken line of men who didn’t quiver at the idea of ‘commitment’, or worry about the expense of raising kids, or baulk at giving up their freedom. And it doesn’t just go back for a few centuries, remember, it goes back through every single generation since we crawled from the oceans. The family tree of my DNA can be traced directly, from son to father, back to an apeman in Africa, and before him to a small furry mammal on the forest floor, and further still to a primitive reptile in the Permian period over 300 million years ago. A billion Smith fathers, each linked to me by a perfectly straight line of inheritance, have done what nature demanded. They introduced their sperm to an egg. And they did it despite the danger of being eaten alive by dinosaurs, frozen by ice ages, or devastated by giant meteor strikes. I can’t help but feel the weight of their disappointment bearing down on me, especially when I split up with a perfectly nice girl just because I don’t like her new hairstyle, say, or the fact that she likes Coldplay. They must look at me, shake their heads, and think, “All that work we put in… and now this idiot…”