Egg Dancing (2 page)

     It’s as though she’s describing a tankful of exotic fish, with herself as one of the plainer ones. I’ve never seen her so animated, or so happy.

     She glances at me sideways to see how I’ve reacted. She is obviously pleased with the result. I am dry-mouthed, speechless. After all these years, I still don’t know what to say to my mother. The State of Absolute Delusion, Linda and I used to call it. It was a territory which was home to her and us, and yet far away from Gridiron City and all the things we knew in the normal world outside – pop stars, the Dress-for-Less shop, make-up, department stores, Wimpy menus.

     ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here,’ we would laugh, coming home from school and entering Ma’s domain. But it wasn’t in fact that funny.

     ‘I’ve found a new word in the dictionary,’ Ma is saying.

     I’d forgotten: she’s a beachcomber for words, picking over the shoreline of language for lexicographical detritus. She used to be a librarian.

     ‘It’s under K. It means ‘the government of a state by the worst of its citizens’. It’s what we live in. As do the Portuguese, the New Zealanders, the Colombians, the Austrians, and many others. You’ve only to look at the globe. The word – ’ Here she paused for effect, and I find myself stopping, too. ‘The word,’ said Ma, ‘is “kakistocracy”.’

     And she moved off again.

     Now we enter an annexe of Manxheath’s main building and Ma leads me down a draughty corridor that smells of paint. Now and then she still calls me Linda, but I find myself making excuses for her: Linda (being unmarried and self-righteous) comes to see her more often, after all. Always has; ever since way back. I’m shocked by the way Ma shuffles along, dragging her feet behind her as if they’re paralysed – especially when otherwise she seems quite alive. An alarming thought crosses my mind: I’d quite like to poke the back of her calves with a stick to see if they mottle or discolour. I stifle a giggle.

     We reach the Day Room, a desolate, shambolic place in which lumpen chairs and sofas are moored on a disinfected linoleum lake that stretches to the horizon of the far wall. The wallpaper strikes me as inappropriate; it’s a Regency floral pattern, in stripes. I have always thought that vertically striped wallpaper is a mistake. Another oddity: a large chandelier, to which the dust is welded by means of grease. Ma sees me looking at it and says, ‘Quite a bugger to clean,’ as though she’s in charge of it.

     Despite its size, the room smells closet-like from stale cigarettes. Around a formica-topped table there are three men watching a Kung Fu video and an elderly woman playing Scrabble with a fat youth. He has a shaved head and a dangerous, pudgy expression which horrifies me. I see the words ‘colder’, ‘it’, ‘jinx’ and ‘finance’ on the board, and wonder if they might mean something to the psychiatrists.

     ‘That’s Dr Stern,’ whispers my mother, nodding to indicate the man who has just entered. She is glowing with pride, as though he is the president of a very exclusive club she’s joined. I notice that she’s swinging her handbag in what I take to be a flirtatious way. ‘I’ll introduce you. He’s a very brilliant man. He does
The Times
crossword every day and has published all sorts of case studies.’

     She’s wriggling, and her man’s slippers are making squeaking noises on the floor.

     I look at my watch. I’ve been there fifteen minutes, but it feels like hours. Dr Stern, now talking to a nurse, catches my mother’s eye and smiles. He gives her a little friendly wave and she blushes with pride.

     She calls, ‘Dr Stern! Come and meet my other daughter, Linda!’

     The nurse leaves and Dr Stern comes over, hand outstretched, a wide smile. He is small, with dark eyes and a dark moustache. Beneath his white coat there is a green silk tie and a green-and-white-striped shirt. He could be a cardboard cut-out of a man selling something. His smile shows even, cared-for teeth. He seems so normal next to Ma that the frank sanity of his handshake chokes me.

     ‘Pleased to meet you, Linda,’ he says.

     ‘No, Linda’s my sister. I’m Hazel.’

     We are still holding hands. I want to explain that my mother gets us muddled up, but I can’t in front of her. I find suddenly that I have used up the last ration of optimism I’d brought with me for the journey. I’ve been dosing myself frantically, not heeding the limited supply, and now it’s gone. And I want to go too – not formally, but just to fade to blackness in the way some documentaries do. Perhaps it’s the presence of the psychiatrist, and the odd constriction he has caused in my chest, as though Polyfilla has been shoved in there to fill a hole I didn’t know I had, that also gives me an urge to disintegrate into hopeless blubbing. The psychiatrist and I let go of one another’s hands, suddenly conscious that we have held on too long, and that my mother’s bag is swinging violently close to us. I’d thought it was empty, but it’s suddenly rattling with small dry things like a desert snake.

     ‘Your sister!’ sighs Ma theatrically, rolling her eyes. ‘You wouldn’t believe the worry I had with both of them, Dr Stern. And
God
, the relief of being away from them. Cats. Bitches. Words cannot describe. The whole family, in fact. They were wreckers, I’m afraid. Some people are born wreckers. And I gave birth to two. If that isn’t statistically significant I don’t know what is. Look at the way I am. I have a degree, you know. I was just telling  – ’

     And there she breaks off, because there is a huge bellow and a thud as the table in the corner crashes to the floor, and Scrabble letters skid across the lino. The fat youth has fallen to the ground screaming, with his hands over his eyes. Two nurses grab the old woman and rush her away to wash the blood off her hands. She doesn’t resist. She seems to have gone limp and floppy, but she is smiling. In ten seconds she and the nurses are gone, and Dr Stern is seeing to the boy. He won’t stop screaming. It is a thin, high-pitched scream like a pressure-cooker makes. His face is badly scratched, but his eyes are safe. My mother is excited, and the waxy yellow of her skin has flushed to pink.

     ‘Never a dull moment,’ she says proudly, and begins picking up Scrabble letters from the floor, leaning over so that her grey petticoat lifts high. The backs of her knees look like pinched buttocks.

     She picks up the Scrabble pieces one by one. ‘F for Freddie,’ she says. ‘J for Jug.’

     I remember ‘J for Jug’ from my alphabet book when I was little. In some books it’s ‘Jam’.

     ‘C for Chlorpromazine . . . A for Afterwards . . . D for Dog . . .’ Then she finds an X and gets stuck. Suddenly, her mood changes and she snaps, ‘Well, help me with these letters, will you, I spend my whole life clearing up after you. This isn’t a hotel, you know.’

     Dutifully, I help Ma gather up the rest of the letters and we put them in the Scrabble box, while the fat boy continues his whistling scream without ever seeming to stop for breath.

     ‘Monopoly’s worse,’ says my mother. I can feel her getting rapidly more tense.

     I say, ‘I have to go.’

     It’s as though I’ve flicked a decompression switch: her face instantly radiates profound relief.

     ‘Well, I said you shouldn’t feel you have to stay too long. And of course you’ve left your car in the Pay and Display. You don’t want to run over the limit. They can hit you with a hefty fine. You can meet Dr Stern properly another time, if he’s not too busy.’

     We leave Dr Stern crouched over the boy, who has rolled himself into a ball on the floor. Dr Stern begins murmuring to him soothingly, like a father, and rubbing his back. There is a ghastly intimacy about it. I follow my mother’s slow shuffle along the corridor.

     ‘The drugs have all sorts of side-effects,’ she is saying. ‘I’m on seventy-five milligrams a day now. That’s why I’m dry all the time. Parched. Absolutely
parched
.’

     We said goodbye, fumbling again to avoid flesh meeting flesh, and I left her. Halfway down the drive I turned back to see if she’d gone in, but she was still standing in the porch, with her handbag lifted in a sort of salute.

     As I walked away I felt something envelop me like a bubble or a shroud. It was a feeling of invisibility. And sure enough, although there were many people in the Pay and Display car-park, all loading their shopping and messing with children and keys, nobody glanced at me even once.

I grew up near the Works, on the Cheeseway Estate, known in Gridiron as ‘the Cheeseways’. The Works manufactures moulded plastic kitchenware, mainly pedal-bins, and its burnt acrylic smell was part of childhood. We were never away from it. So naturally, in later life, I’d wanted to be rid of it. Linda and I grew up believing that, as daughters of a librarian, we were posh intellectuals. Our mother, who raised us in the Cheeseways in her State of Absolute Delusion, told us we were. Ma drew us a map of the class system once, in green felt pen, so we could place ourselves. Aristocrats/the upper class were at the top, and upper middles (e.g. Mr and Mrs Roberts) on the next level down, because they had a dishwasher and he was a dentist. Below that came the lower middle (e.g. us, Mr Staples, Mrs Carnie), followed by upper lowers/the working class (e.g. Dad, the fallen woman from over the road, my schoolfriend Nicky), and finally, at the bottom, lower lower. There was only one example in this category: Aunt Marjorie, Dad’s sister, whom we didn’t officially know.

     Some things stick. Oakshott Road, where I live now, is leafy. Everyone has a quality paper delivered, and knows how to ski. It’s at the smart end of Gridiron, as far from the Cheeseways as you can get, I reckon, short of going to live on the moon.

     I chose the road and I chose the house.

     My next-door neighbour Jane was at home, baby-sitting Billy. Looking back, I realise now that Jane and I had a strange relationship built around mistaken pity. I pitied her her childlessness, and she pitied me my ball-and-chain of a son. When she baby-sat, each of us thought we were doing the other one a favour. We drank tea and I told her about the Scrabble. I cried slightly, without really knowing why. Jane was kind, in her suffering divorcée’s way, but I think she was afraid she might be exposing herself to contamination from the hospital. I can understand that, because I felt it, too.

     ‘Don’t dwell on it, love,’ she said as she put on her coat and turned to me. ‘And just remember,’ she added with glassy eyes, stabbing her forefinger between my breasts to emphasise her point, ‘the only person who counts in this world, at the end of the day, is you.’

     I think this was an idea she’d picked up on one of her Weekends.

     Billy doesn’t like to see me cry. He looked at me distantly, like his father would, then tottered off to the other side of the room to play with his toy ambulance. He doesn’t say much, but he’s good at noises: ambulances, cars, aeroplanes, pneumatic drills – city noises. He did the ambulance noise and I tried to smile.

     ‘Very good, sweetheart,’ I said in a cooing sort of voice, which sounded phoney.

     ‘I’ve been to see Granny in hospital,’ I told him. ‘I saw a big ambulance.’

     He looked up at me sharply, his blue eyes coins of quizzical light.

     ‘Yes, sweetheart. An ambulance. Granny’s living in a place with lots of ambulances.’

     That set him off again. By the time Linda phoned, he had torn up a whole newspaper into small pieces. A day’s information lay in shreds on the floor. He began stuffing it into an old carrier bag he’d found. Linda wanted to know how the visit had gone. My sister is difficult on the phone. She has never coped with the lack of eye contact, or understood the nature of telephone etiquette, and it makes her even more blunt and aggressive than in the flesh.

     ‘I don’t suppose you stayed long,’ she said.

     ‘She’s looking well,’ I said. ‘She seems happy.’

     I didn’t mention the fat boy and the blood.

     ‘Did you see Dr Stern?’

     ‘Yes, why?’

     ‘Oh, she’s obsessed with him, that’s all.’

     ‘How d’you know?’

     ‘I saw something she made from clay.’

     She refused to tell me what it was. My sister is quite prudish.

     ‘She’s been there for two years and you’ve visited her once. At least when she was over in Coxcomb you had the excuse that it was a long way to go. I bet you didn’t stay more than ten minutes. If you’d been seeing her regularly you’d know about things like her clay.’

     When Linda was seven she was Ma’s little girl.

     ‘
Ma loves me more than she loves you. You’re just horrible, and you’ll fall in a ’normous gigantic cowpat and go to hell, so ber ber ber.
’

     ‘She’s got us muddled up, you know,’ I told Linda. ‘She thought I was you.’

     There was a silence from Linda as this sank in.

     ‘Well, when I go to visit, she knows exactly who I am,’ said Linda.

     ‘Good. But she thought I was you today. She kept calling me Linda.’

     ‘Well, I must go. A pile of work to do.’

     Linda is a civil servant. She hung up.

     Later it snowed, heavy flakes that were dirty before they hit the ground. Gregory came back from his conference in Manchester. Billy was already in his cot asleep, and Gregory was annoyed that he’d missed an evening with him. He was leaving again the next day for a week-long symposium. That night we made love. Gregory is a gynaecologist. He’d made a special chart so that we knew when we could and couldn’t. We didn’t bother much about sex though. We were both too tired, usually, and to be frank the thrill had worn off a bit. It hurt.