It Was Never My Idea To Go To That Party

It was never my idea to go that party, let me make that clear from the start. It was never my idea to attend the National Society of of Turkey Basting Swingers Competition Party, but Donna was a strong woman and she could always make me think of things as ‘a good idea’ and somehow she did it with this. Even with a party of that title I can honestly say that it seemed like a good idea, at the time.

It was after six glorious years together that we had decided to have a baby. We were certain that we didn’t want to adopt, Donna spoke with a desperate clinging of her longing to be pregnant, and I, with my fear of all things sickly and my recurring back problem was more than happy to go without the whole ‘miracle’. We lived in my house in the surburbs of a small city and had a decent income, many good friends and it just seemed like the logical next step.

Donna. Oh, Donna! That beautiful, sexy witch! Why did I let her rule me so? I had always been at her absolute mercy without either of us really knowing it. I wonder now, if I had ever even been myself the whole time we were together, but more just the person I wanted to be for Donna without a single regard for myself. I had no soul to feed or life to lead, I had only Donna.

Donna was freelance journalist and a very good one at that, she was always being invited to press launch parties and this is how I would meet most of our friends too. I was just serious old scientist Maggie; but she would dress me up, show me off, introduce me to the people who were actually interested in the kind of science I was working in, and I would watch her dazzle them with her headlines.

One morning I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking my tea, eating my toast, listening to the breakfast show radio as I always did before leaving for the lab. It must have been the heart of winter for I had the gas fire on all bars and it was still dark outside. I remember this morning clearly, for this was the morning that Donna put to me the idea. She appeared at the foot of the stairs; bed-hair, silk robe barely covering her perfect, naked skin and she had that look on her face. The one that made her special and that also made her dangerous.
“Maggie. Darling Maggie!” she was excited and she came pawing at me, kneeling by my side. “After the opening party at Trams last night, I went on to Hippos” she was now stroking my hair, curling it around her fingers, “and sweetie. I got talking to these people who told me about this sort of party that, well...”

And so there it was. There was the moment when Donna told me about the party and talked me into thinking it was good idea. The party I’m talking about is of course the National Society of of Turkey Basting Swingers Competition Party. It works basically like this:

There are twenty parties that happen on the same night nationwide. In each party there are five lesbian couples who are all wanting to have a baby through artificial insemination and there are five men who are willing to donate their sperm. There are five turkey basters that the men fill up while watching the couples have sex and then all the turkey basters are put into a large dish, much like car keys at a swingers’ party, and they are shaken around, mixed up by an officiator of the NSTBSCP.
Each couple takes away one of the basters and inserts it into the woman who is going to get pregnant. Nobody knows who the father is, and then when the babies are born each party has to come to a decision by committee as to who they think each father of each baby is, fill it in like an orienteering card, and send the completed card back to the HQ of NSTBSCP. The NSTBSCP run DNA tests and then the first party who has sent back their card and correctly identified each baby with each father wins the money.
Did I forget to mention it costs each couple and each man £2000 to enter so with five couples, five men in each party and twenty parties the prize money is a delicious £400,000 which means a nice £40,000 for each couple and man of the winning party.


Were we poor? I didn’t think so, but then I didn’t know about the debts. From what I saw, we didn’t even particularly need £40,000 but I allowed that seed of greed to settle within me, planted by the evil goddess, Donna and nurtured by me and my fancy.
“At the end of the day, Donna” I said “I suppose we can just look at it as a fun way of getting pregnant. I mean, we get to go to a sex party AND get pregnant. The chance of winning £40,000 is slim, but a possibility. But, darling, we have to just see that as a bonus in the unlikely event that it happens.”
She smiled a wicked smile.
“Oh dear, sweet Maggie. Why don’t you ever realise who you are?” she kissed me all over as she told me of the dangerous part of the plan.

The science I worked in, was with DNA. I was working on a project at that time that examined the DNA of living things that had now died. But that’s not to say that the specifics of my work were not mutually exclusive to all other parts of DNA, or that I did not have access to the sorts of things you would need to perform a DNA paternity test, for instance.

Oh, Donna! Ghastly, dazzling Donna! With her ways and her wiles! Her soft lips that I so lusted for and licked up the very poison which oozed from them. I agreed to it; to the party, to the plan, to the whole wretched affair. She signed us up, we had to be interviewed and approved and we were charming and sparkling, and naturally, we passed. We maintained this delightful atmosphere about us as we pulled up into the driveway of the private country estate house that the party was being held in. Donna held my hand as we walked through the rose garden around to the front of the house. From inside, I could faintly hear the sound of a violin. I remember looking at Donna in the moonlight and being quite unable to speak for her beauty had me so spellbound. Stars flickered in the clear, country sky. It had been so long since I had seen these stars. I was back at college all over again; breaking into the observatory at night with my friends, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes under the willow tree and Faye Coulson asking me to come and look at the moon with her.

I can barely think about those times now, it makes me so sad because I can truly say that that was me back then, that was who I was. And yet the years that followed after college, when I met Donna, I simply lost that. Donna was the interesting one, she was the one who did the things worth future reverie, I just watched her. I complemented her but she was magic on her own. She was a willow tree in the good times all the time. She was remarkable and thoroughly overwhelming and there just wasn’t room for the both of us.
“Look a shooting star!” Donna, smiling, pointing upwards, "Make a wish!" But I just carried on looking at her thinking how I had nothing I would wish for.
Oh, shooting star! If only I could see you now. I would take that wish. I would take it now and wish myself never to have met Donna Craven!

Everyone in our party got pregnant, everyone in our party took very little pursuading to agree to the plan to win the money. All the babies were born, I performed the swabs on the men and the babies. Our baby, a beautiful girl we called Sadie, was the daughter of Benny, a man who left watching us to go and watch a foursome down the corridor. Rubia and Liz had a baby boy they called Zeek, he was the son of Marlon, a maths lecturer who had watched us and who had been my favourite of all the potential fathers. We filled in our card and sent it off to HQ and won the money. It was about eight months after that that it all started to unravel.

Liz came home from work early one day after her office was closed due to a fire in the neighbouring cafe at lunchtime and she found Rubia and Donna naked on the living room floor. I got the phonecall from Liz while I was in the park with Sadie, feeding the ducks. I sat there with my mobile against my ear, looking at Sadie and listening to the ducks mocking me. Rubia and Donna had been having an affair ever since the night they met in Hippos. Donna was in debt of more than £50,000 and Rubia was more than willing to pool her money with Donna to pay of the debts and then she and Donna and the two babies could run away together to Brazil where Rubia was from and desperately homesick for but Liz had always thrown out the idea of moving to San Paulo where as Donna was up for getting as far away from her past life ie. before me, as possible. What she did to gain those debts and to need to run away from her former life I do not even want to know, but I bet it is even worse than my darkest imaginings.

When I heard all the sorry details of their plan, I came back to myself. I found the person I truly was before I turned into the pleasure of Donna and I made plans for custody of Sadie.
“What are you going to do?” Donna snarled “how can you tell them we had a plan involving the money when the only sure way to get that money was to use you? You’d get years for that sort of fraud, and you’d lose your whole career!”

I took no notice of her and filed ahead. Sadie was the most important thing to me now, much more important than Donna or the lab. But oh! Donna! That evil wench! She had been right! Rubia had a cousin who was an excellent barrister who specialised in fraud cases. In the custody battle that I waged, Donna of course, hired Luis and I lost my baby. Donna was the biological mother of Sadie, she had carried her for nine months, and though we had lived together, we were not married and there was nothing the court could do to give me- a fraudster, the custody of a baby who technically I had nothing to do with. Donna was her mother, and Donna denied all knowledge of the paternity testing I had performed on all the babies. Everybody else in our party denied that they knew anything about the paternity tests too, as they wanted to keep the money they had mostly already spent.

“She must have pulled hair out of our babies when we weren’t looking!” Candice shrieked in the witness box. How she had the brass to look me in the eye as she said these things I can never comprehend.

“Is it possible she took DNA from our babies through collecting old soiled nappies from the bin outside our houses? The woman is SICK!” was the contribution from Jade.

“She tried to kiss me once, but I realise now that she was actually taking a mouth swab from me!” -Marlon, who I had always liked the best from our party.

And Donna, in that witness box, Donna put on quite a show. She sobbed quietly, saying through the gulps and the tears how she was unable to understand how she thought she had known me so well when really I was just a liar and had she ever really known me at all?

Devil take that woman! For here I am, in prison! Nine years before I will even be able to begin my search for Donna and more importantly for my Sadie. Every hour of every day I weep. I weep more than that willow tree which, if I stretch on the very tips of my toes, I can see through the bars of my window. In a final sick twist of fate it is such that my prison cell happens to ever so cruelly overlook my old college and, in the far distance, the observatory holding within it the brutal memories of when I was last truly myself . I sit here and watch it like a distant star; the light from which it burns is from so very long ago and has taken so long to reach me. The star; from which the light has traveled all these years to me is, quite possibly, already dead.