Egg Dancing (16 page)

‘Do you resent that?’ Stern asked when I crashed into his office and poured all this out.

     ‘Yes. I can’t see how Billy can like her.’

     ‘Well, there’s no accounting for children’s taste. They don’t have the
same prejudices
we do.’ He stopped and smiled. ‘Take
advantage
of it. Get her to babysit. You need a bit of time to
be yourself
.’

     Be myself? I didn’t quite understand what this meant, but he said it with his usual gentle tact and sympathy. There was a generosity about him that was almost spiritual. It was in that moment that I realised something: Dr Ishmael Stern actually cared for me. When I looked back into his dark eyes I felt the vertigo of a weird epiphany.

     ‘I don’t have plans to go out,’ I said.

     ‘Well, maybe you should.’

     There was a pause.

     ‘Who with?’ I finally asked.

     An unfamiliar flush swamped my thighs, and a voice sang high in my head. The psychiatrist smiled.

     ‘Me.’

     I smiled back, aware of my teeth.

     There was a huge gaping silence, and then he said, ‘Hazel, can I tempt you?’

     Doctor Ishmael Stern. I noticed he always wore Italian suits, good shoes, a tie that complemented his shirt – a rare thing in a British man. At the Institute he was the calm heart of a perpetually busy machine, in which phones rang, secretaries rushed in and out, and nurses hovered. And there is always something about dark men that makes them seem extraordinary powerful, like they stalk the earth outlined in black felt-tipped pen. You could say I was in love with him. Or you could say I’d been reading too many women’s magazines. Or you could say this always happens: women and shrinks, sex and God.

     ‘I want to take you out to dinner,’ he was saying. He had his hand on my arm now, and his grip was firm. ‘We both need to get out of here. It’s been too intensive. And I need to talk to you about a few things.’

     Funny, that word ‘need’. Its power; its mesmeric insistence. I need you.

     ‘About Billy? Is he going to be all right? And the cutting? Did you get it?’

     I found myself speaking fast, but in a way that passed for normal. Couldn’t the man see that he had fried my heart?

     ‘Wednesday evening OK?’ he asked, as though I hadn’t said anything.

     ‘I’ll pick you up at eight.’

     ‘Yes,’ I said.

     Yes, Ishmael. Yes, yes, yes.

The light is on in the window of Flat 17, Bollingate View Terrace, and through it a spiky form can be seen darting to and fro, wielding cutlery and an ashtray. In her small kitchen with its artificial oak units, Linda Sugden is microwaving her TV dinner. When the machine pings, she slides the meal on to a plate, moves into the lounge and settles in a red velveteen chair to watch the news. A mug of Nescafé sits before her, planted on a cork-and-melamine place-mat depicting a Thai flower-market scene. She lifts the cardboard lid from the aluminium meal tray and the exotic vapours of Ham, Aubergine and Coriander Bake burst forth.

     ‘Comfort and joy,’ murmurs Linda to herself, releasing a pneumatic fart and lighting a cigarette.

     Comfort and joy, and a packet of Love Hearts for afters. The Rancidity Forum has come to a close, and Linda feels exhausted but fulfilled. This week has proved to be something of a watershed in Storage Policy. Her eyes glaze over as the latest figures from the Fish Wars appear in a complex graphic, and the Energy Minister launches a nationwide compost appeal.

     ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die,’ she sighs five minutes later, stubs out her cigarette, and farts again.

     She’s halfway through the Bake when suddenly a familiar figure pops up on the screen, clad in a yellow anorak with a red crucifix logo, and wielding a banner declaring ‘we are all perfect babies’. A group of a thousand demonstrators, the reporter is saying, many of them physically challenged. There are shots of the guide dogs, hearing-aids, and wheelchairs of the halt and the lame. The controversial trial drug GR218; controversial merger plans of the Fertility Management Centre and Hooper plc, headquartered in London; the charismatic and controversial babywear, stationery and frozen-food magnate Root Hooper (shot of Root Hooper banging his fist on a table); controversy; heated argument; debate; moral dilemma; outrage; crusade; practicalities; uncertainty.

     Now the Reverend Carmichael is addressing the throng through a green megaphone: ‘Big business has put itself behind Frankenstein. Together they will create monsters. The wages of sin is death, saith the Lord! Boycott Hooper products, folks, and show the Big One you’re on the side of righteousness!’

     And replacing the megaphone with a pair of giant garden shears, he begins to cut to pieces a miniature towelling Babygro to the sound of frenzied cheering.

     ‘Whatever the outcome of this dispute,’ the po-faced reporter concludes, ‘one thing’s for certain: the Perfect Baby issue will be on the social agenda for some time to come.’

     ‘Good on you, Reverend,’ murmurs Linda. ‘As ye sow, Gregory Stevenson, so shall ye fucking reap.’

     And opening the packet of Love Hearts, she reads the inscription on the first. It is pink, on a lemon background.

     It says: ‘My One True Love’.

You don’t feel like a woman any more after you’ve had a baby. Not a real woman, a sexy one. What mother has time to wax her legs properly and stay awake long enough to get aroused by something which is after all old hat – her husband? What mother of a young child feels an overwhelming sexual desire for the father of her infant, after that infant has vomited milk on her shoulder all day? Give me her name and address. I will write to her and tell her she’s a liar.

     I saw the loss of my libido as part of being invisible. Men don’t look at women who push buggies, except in Italy, where as an ensemble you become, momentarily, the manifestation of the Madonna and child, a sort of street icon. (On a trip to Padua, I was a goddess.) But Gridiron isn’t Italy, and no one looked at me, and I became part of that sub-species of womanhood known as the mum, an underclass that forms the great marshmallow cushion on which other lives, more interesting and worthy than ours, are sustained and serviced.

     So when, over dinner with Dr Stern, I felt the unmistakable urge for sex, I was as sweatily pole-axed as an adolescent. It all started with a sugarlump. We had driven out to an Italian restaurant in Mutton Acre, the sort of charm-packed village that advertises itself on brochures as a ‘hidey-hole’. I liked being someone who went to dinner there. All the clients of its chic restaurants were professional couples, who either had no children (they drank more, had more fun) or had left their offspring with baby-sitters who lived where I once did, in the Cheeseways near the Works. Baby-sitters whose ambition it was, as mine had been when I baby-sat, making use of their telephones and investigating their larders and their loft conversions, to marry one day and have dinner in Mutton Acre. (‘You’re so conventional,’ Ma always told me. ‘Even the dipsomania.’)

     When we had sat down at our table, and the waiter had fussed over us and taken our order and planted a giant pepperpot on the table between us, we clinked glasses and then Ishmael did something strange: he told me to close my eyes and open my mouth. I did what he said, and was shocked to feel a violent sweetness on my tongue. I opened my eyes, crunched and swallowed. The psychiatrist had fed me a sugarlump, like I was a horse. He offered no explanation, and carried on talking about his autism research as though nothing had happened. I was too dumbfounded to mention it. We drank. The salt of the margarita tasted painful and exquisite after the sugar.

     And then I felt it, a tingling flush that crept all over my body. Desire. I was surely leaking hormones on the tablecloth, and I wondered whether Ishmael had noticed.

     He was looking elegant, as usual. He wore a pink shirt and I felt his eyes flit over me, stirring up rogue elements in groiny places. Suddenly he smiled and put down his knife and fork carefully and touched my hand. His voice was slow and reasonable.

     ‘I expect you’re wondering where things
stand
, Hazel,’ he said. ‘Where
you
stand.’

     I was expecting him to say something about the attraction between us, so I was almost disappointed when he began to talk about Gregory’s file.

     ‘My diagnosis is that although you’re upset – disturbed even – by all this, you’re coping very well. I’ve got some one-a-day
vitamins
for you, by the way, because we need to keep you as well and alert as possible while this is going on.’

     He reached in his pocket and slipped out a plastic bottle of pills.

     ‘You can start them now,’ he murmured.

     He opened the child-proof top for me, took one out, and popped it in my mouth.

     I swallowed in a reflex.

     ‘Here,’ he said gently. ‘Wash it down, love. Now, one a day. Don’t forget.’ He screwed back the top and handed me the bottle.

     He had called me ‘love’.

     ‘Your chose to do the
right thing
about this information,’ he went on. ‘It’s a hot potato, and you picked the right person to handle it for you. I’m
aware
of the Hooper merger but I still need more time on it. A week should do it. I’ve gone through the file. It’s not really my field but I know enough. Now it’s just a question of completing those
tests
on your
son
–’

     ‘And?’

     ‘There are some exciting things going on, Hazel,’ he said. ‘Things your husband didn’t think about, because he’s not a
psychologist
. He should really have  – ’ and then he stopped abruptly.

     A shadow passed over me, but I shooed it off. He was grasping my hand tightly now.

     ‘What I’m saying is that he’s on to something very
exciting
, but he has no idea how to
harness
it. I need to know more. And I’ll find out,’ he said.

     He forked a morsel and posted it in his mouth. For some reason I couldn’t eat. He smiled at me while chewing, and I played with the giant pepperpot.

     Swallowing, he sipped at his water and pronounced, ‘Your husband is a good scientist. His records are methodical and his study is elegant  – ’ but here he broke off again, and stopped smiling. He took a little stick of bread and dipped it in his seafood sauce. His face was serious now.

     ‘Elegant,’ he said in a different, censorious tone, ‘but totally unethical. Quite against the
code of conduct.
’

     ‘Immoral,’ I said, gulping air.

     The vitamins had done something to my system. I felt strange.

     ‘Yes, if you want to use that word,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, Gregory’s personality is one I’d be interested in exploring out of professional interest one day.’

     ‘Do you think he could be unbalanced?’ I asked. ‘Clinically speaking, I mean?’

     ‘Unbalanced – no. It’s just that the scientific spirit got out of hand, and triumphed over the checks and balances. In any case, as I see it, it’s actually a delicate ethical issue. One which you
could
argue a case for. I’m not saying I think he’s
right.
I’m just saying that the scientist in me can understand while the man of ethics – the
moralist
, if you like – disapproves almost entirely of the principle.’

     ‘And of the result? If everyone were born perfect,’ I said, ‘it would put you out of a job.’

     ‘That’s right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘An end to mental suffering. That would be quite an
achievement
.’

     ‘And Billy? Is he OK?’

     ‘Fundamentally, yes. Some interesting
results
have emerged, though. He does seem to be capable of telepathic communication of a
limited nature
with your
mother
’ – he raised his palm to stop me – ‘but, as your husband
suspected
, it’s only a one-way thing. He can communicate with her, but she’s only a
receptor
.’

     ‘Thank God for that. She won’t be filling his head with junk, at least.’

     ‘No. He seems to have been busy filling hers with his own little concerns, though. You do have to realise, Hazel, that they
are very close.
’

     ‘I suppose they are,’ I said, realising suddenly the significance of the constipation, the McDonalds, the remotely-controlled aeroplane, and the Magic Train, and feeling like an idiot not to have spotted it before.

     ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘the success of the Baby B experiment was limited to this example of telepathy, with the wrong generation and in the wrong direction.’

     ‘How do you mean?’

     ‘Well, according to the
file
,’ Dr Stern said, ‘one of the aims of Genetic Choice is for the baby to intercept the wishes of parents and act
accordingly
.’