Egg Dancing (17 page)

     ‘And that’s perfection? I’d never thought of it like that.’

     There was a certain Gregory-type logic to it which might make sense on graph paper.

     ‘It’s part of it,’ he answered. ‘But only a very
small
part. There’s lot’s more. Other things. It’s a fascinating
dynamic,
Hazel. Completely fascinating.’ He stroked my arm gently. There was a pause, and then he said, ‘You know, Hazel, in a funny sort of way, I’m jealous of your husband.’

     Which was absurd. Gregory was at a gene conference with Ruby in Miami. He was probably probing her ‘birth canal’ even as we spoke.

     Dr Stern dropped me off at reception, saying he ‘had to get back’. In the car, he kissed me on the cheek. I could feel the imprint of his lips for a long time afterwards. I knew he had wanted me.

     I had a dream that night. He pinned me down on the floor of his office. Its surface was mushy, and soon began to deliquesce to a soup-like liquid. Ishmael’s chest was bare, I remember, and matted with dark hair. We were having sex, in a motion that was tortuously slow and swimming-poolish. We were weightless, and octopus-like, and I have a memory of my legs round his neck and he had one hand on each breast while, miraculously, a third slowly, slowly massaged what Ma always referred to as one’s ‘front bottom’, and then suddenly the pace changed and he was thrusting inside me like a madman with a vision, and I was being food-mixed, my soul and my bum aflame. It was exquisite, but also excruciating, because Gregory was watching us from a corner of the room. He was laughing at me and calling out various taunts, but Ishmael, who couldn’t see or hear him, just kept shrieking in my ear, ‘Hazel, are you safe?’ and I couldn’t remember, because I couldn’t see the chart and had forgotten the dates, and didn’t care, and then I burst and became ectoplasm, and floated out of the room.

EIGHT

Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability

Dear Late Husband,

     Something I forgot to ask about your current ‘lifestyle’: is it a question of fluffy clouds, cherubs wielding cornucopias, and Earl Grey tea with a thousand vicars? Or is it more a question of keeping your end up in a sea of faeces? I am curious. One of these days, I shall come and check. Here, apart from some ‘special sessions’ with our grandson, it’s purgatory as usual. Can you see us down here, from your celestial vantage-point? See the bitter-looking female who moves like an eel? She’s Dr ‘Sarah’ McAuley, mine hostess. In charge.

     Once a day we sit in a semi-circle, with our ashtrays, our balls of wool and our psychoses, and mouth off about what beached us here, far from our beloved suburbia, with its mortgage and two veg.

     Here we are: the Group. Take Max. Look at him with his cunning badger’s face, and then tell me there is no justice in the world, and no God. He’s tall because he was a brigadier. He served in the Falklands and performed secret missions in Beijing, though a blond man of that height in a Chinese community is hard to keep a secret. Lay him end to end and he’d be six foot four, but see the giveaway stoop? That’s guilt at work. They say that if he hadn’t been caught in a series of peccadilloes – whippings, acts of violent buggery with junior officers, obscene phone calls to the high and mighty (that’s what did it) – he’d have been in for a generalship. I don’t know. ‘They’ is only his roommate, David, who believes everything he’s told.

     David’s the one next to Max. He of the horn-rimmed glasses, the seventies sideburns and the eternal Silk Cut. He’s talking now, about leather. You are looking, incidentally, at a man broken by circumstances. As evidenced by his bitten fingernails. Nail-biters are to be pitied; they are like Jesus, suffering on the cross that we may be spared. Anyway, when David’s marriage fell apart, so did he. The day his wife walked out, his sanity upped and left with her. He’s obsessed with the legal side of it. The Bar Association conspired to wreck his life, forcing his innocent wife to run off with his company’s accountant. The couple ran a business together, manufacturing inner soles for shoes. They dominated the market in the Midlands, and had trade links with Portugal, fending off the Taiwanese threat when lesser operations went under. Anyway, Wifey and the accountant are running the shoe business now, and there are letters flying about between their lawyers and Dr Stern on the question of ‘incompetence due to insanity’. Wifey visits sometimes, small, tarty, pert, like a wee sweetie in a fancy wrapper, different shoes on each occasion, and calling him ‘darling’, while he looks up at her doggily from his armchair, waiting for her to throw a poisoned bone. I presume the accountant and the legal team wait in the car-park. When the staff aren’t looking, Sweetie pushes papers under his nose, and hands him a pen. He reads them and writes mechanically – but it’s not a signature; it’s a message to the lawyers. ‘Fuck You’ on every document. Wifey reads it and smiles in a pained way.

     ‘You should watch out, David,’ I warned him once. ‘Those lawyers will change your name to Fuck You by deed poll, and you’ll have signed away your life.’

     So he agreed to alternate it with ‘Bollocks’.

     Dr McAuley thinks the lawyers are a fantasy, but she’s never seen Sweetie’s antics. The way these doctors put so much faith in people who are supposedly sane, and turn a blind eye to the fact that they’re cunning cut-throats who’d sell their children’s kidneys for a go on a one-armed bandit. No case notes, no case to answer. That’s doctors for you: pedantic. Look at our son-in-law, Greg Stevenson. Carries a tape measure everywhere, in case someone says ‘How long is a piece of string?’ Hazel always lacked imagination herself. She just wanted a nice life, I suppose – and she has one, if hideous curtains from John Lewis, a designer-splotched thing in pastel, at £21.75 a metre are proof of it.

     Can you see how we’re sitting? How the semi-circle is arranged around Dr McAuley to make her feel useful and in control? We are encouraged not to sit in the same place each time, so we do. I’m there in the middle, with Keith to my left and Isabella to my right. Next to Isabella, an emaciated, desperate wee figure, with bulging eyes. Is it a dragonfly? Is it a cricket? No, it’s an anorexic, a creature defined by the medical dictionary as an ‘ossature’ – that’s Latinate for bag of bones – who squeezes in where she can. And there’s Monica Fletcher. Over there, in the navy Popsox, all scrunched up in a ball. She crouches on the floor when she’s feeling low. She’s very geographical; the day we find her perched on a high shelf, we’ll know they’ve found the right drug combination – but no chance of that, I fear. You’d be surprised at the sheer volume of water that comes out of her. She takes the world very personally. Every starving baby is one she has given birth to, every torture victim and every murderer on Death Row is her husband or son, every rape victim is her sister or best friend, every hunted fox, drowned dog, or sexually abused tortoise, her pet. Frankly, her selflessness ends up being rather invasive, bless her.

     The doctors have been experimenting with hormone therapy, the theory being that she’s too feminine, too inclined to self-sacrifice and frailty. They assume this is a purely physical phenomenon – a question of oestrogen balance. So they give her doses of testosterone, and she grows a fetching crop of facial hair, and she carries on, all lace and dimples and wee seed-pearls of tears trickling forever down her pink-and-white face, forever writing billets-doux to her husband saying sorry, sorry, sorry. I found one and read it: darling this and darling that, sorry, sorry, are you OK, my love, oh I’m so looking forward to another honeymoon in Clermont-Ferrand, sorry, sorry, I love you etc, your loving wife Monica. Clermont-Ferrand!!?? That made me laugh. An industrial metropolis of rusting iron and belching smoke, if I remember rightly. He should be the one apologising.

     Keith is playing chess in his head again. You can tell from the way his eyes flicker. He doesn’t participate in the Group, being indifferent to humans on the whole, and not speaking. Right from the start, I took a liking to him. He makes me think of how our son might have turned out, if I hadn’t sat on him. I remember, years ago, Hazel came home from school one day with a whole load of jokes about dead babies. I made her tell me each of them at least three times, standing on the kitchen table. I laughed till the tears ran down my face.

     Look, Brendan: Isabella’s talking now, about her cervix dilation, waving her arms in that operatic Latin way, fecundity and motherhood written all over her. Born to breed. She’s had so many, she tells me, whole litters of them, she’s lost count. All given up joyously for adoption, in that spirit of altruism I so much admire in her. Breastfed and vaccinated, and then off into the wide world. But this latest offspring – how long has she been carrying this creature? Eighteen months? Two years? (Dr McAuley, who is childless herself, said once she reckoned the swelling was wind. If that’s the case, I told her, may you be the first to be blown to kingdom come when Signora P. lets loose
that
fart.)

     ‘It’s usually nine months with me,’ Isabella told me yesterday. ‘Sometimes ten. Eleven maximum. But never this long before. I try not to worry.’

     Best friends we may be, but she won’t tell me who the father is.

     Now Dr McAuley’s turning to David: ‘Shall we carry on with your story, now? We’d just got to your marriage, I think.’

     Watch. Max puts his head in his hands, and Monica has her just-finished-crying-but-just-about-to-cry-again look. David is a very precise man.

     ‘10 June 1976. The happiest day of my life. We spent our honeymoon on the Greek islands of Paros and Antiparos. It was  – ’ but he’s started to make strangled noises, which is his way of crying, and fumbles for a cigarette.

     ‘Blissful?’ asks Isabella Pimento, helpfully.

     My turn to pipe up: ‘Nice weather?’

     ‘Romantic!’ That comes from Monica Fletcher. Look at her, Kleenexing for all she’s worth.

     Max lifts his badger’s face out of his hands, and looks up, as if dazzled by the light. He barks, ‘All a horrendous farce?’

     Silence. Keith will come up with something. Yes, look, he’s gesturing with his hands. I translate for him.

     ‘The beginning of the end.’ David nods, takes a shaky drag of his fag, and wipes his nose on his sleeve, Monica being too self-obsessed to think of sharing her paper hanky.

     ‘Yes, it was the beginning of the end, I suppose. Though I didn’t know it then. You see, I’m not very – empowered’ – see us all smile; this is an Institute sort of word – ‘I’m not very empowered sexually.’

     ‘You mean you’re impotent!’ crows Max.

     David shudders and recoils into his cloud of smoke. Dr McAuley’s role is to make sure the big ones don’t throw sand in the little ones’ eyes, to punish and reward, to stir up wee McNuggets of insight in our dumbfounded minds.

     ‘It sounds like
you
might have something to share there, Max,’ she suggests helpfully. ‘This is an issue I think we might find ourselves talking around later, but I’d like David to complete first.’

     That’s the trouble with communicating with psychiatrists. You have to learn their language.

     ‘Now, David, you were sharing with us around your feelings of disempowerment.’

     ‘No,’ says David. He’s addressing himself to Max, like the fool he is. ‘I don’t mean impotent. I mean I was overwhelmed by the way she seemed so experienced for a virgin.’

     What’s the betting Max is going to say something about ‘virgin on the ridiculous’?

     ‘Virgin on the ridiculous, was it, the idea that she was a virgin?’ he guffaws on cue.

     ‘You could say that,’ replies David. ‘In any case, it made me wonder if I really knew her after all. And it made me have – problems of a sexual nature.’

     Now they’re discussing premature ejaculation and expectations of sex. Time for Isabella and me to get out our knitting: no point getting involved in
that
kind of discussion, though Isabella murmurs that she’s never had any sexual problems with
her
men. See Keith, off in another world, and the Ossature, in her yogi’s starvation trance, her bony knees clamped together. And look how Monica Fletcher is blushing and looking uncomfortable, and whimpering a little when the language gets explicit. Whoops! She’s in tears and crying out in her poor quavery voice, ‘Are you all mad? I don’t understand how you can talk like this! No one’s saying anything about
love
!’

     Watch us all look up sharply. It’s not like her to be so vehement, even with the beard.

     ‘Surely if a woman
loves
a man,’ she’s saying, ‘she’s not going to start criticising how he makes love to her, is she? She’s just going to
take
everything he wants to give her, and be
joyful
about it. Love should be uncon
di
tional. There you are, talking about  – ’ but here she stops for the ugly word will not pass her pretty moustached lips.

     ‘Orgasms.’ That’s Dr McAuley. Matter-of-fact as a toilet brush, when it comes down to it.

     ‘Yes, well, there’s no need to, is there. They’re not – they’re not – they’re not –
everything
!’ and she’s in fresh tears, shocked at her own ferocity, and scrabbling for a fresh Man-Size pack of Kleenex in her bag.

     ‘Get out your mops, Group,’ says Max gaily. ‘We’re in for a flood, and it’s looking Bangladeshi.’