Egg Dancing (21 page)

     Yours sincerely,

   
Moira

TEN

O Ishmael, Ishmael. Lend me your stethoscope that I may listen to your heart.

     We were in his office. I was sitting in a chair because I couldn’t stand upright. A nurse was there.

     He said, ‘May I
ask
you, Hazel – have you been drinking? I’m told they found you wandering the grounds in quite a
state
. It’s really not
advisable
to mix alcohol with the sort of drugs you’ve been taking.’

     ‘Vitamins, you told me.’

     ‘
Enhanced
vitamins. And something to calm you down. You’ve been through a lot.’

     I looked at the calendar on the wall behind Dr Stern’s head. It was Modern Art. By this I mean it was an abstract – a mess of blobby greys and browns, reminiscent of a baby’s dirty nappy. I’ve never taken to abstracts, and I realised that I cared for them even less now. Like a lot of people, I prefer to know where I am with a painting. I wondered what Ishmael saw in it – and at the same time, I suppose, I wondered whether I really knew him as intimately as I’d thought. After all, if he liked abstracts – understood them, perhaps, even – he spoke a sort of language I didn’t. While I was looking at the painting on the calendar, the greys and the browns began to fuse together. I thought I could see a face in it – a face that I realised, without being shocked, must belong to my father. He was smiling in a watery way, and his lips were moving as though he were trying to tell me something. But I couldn’t make out the words.

     Strange things were happening in my head. I realised with a thud that I couldn’t even remember how I’d got there. How old I was. My full name. Where I’d left Billy. To be honest, the whole thing felt like skyscrapers exploding on film, with all the shattered breezeblock and glass falling in slow motion, and all the horror happening in utter silence, and all the mess being my fault. And the world was laughing at my inability to clear up the debris with the doll’s dustpan and brush I carried in my hand.

     When Billy was born, I blacked out twice with the pain. People die that way, don’t they, parting with babies. It was something I remembered then, when Ishmael sat across from me at his desk and stroked the paperweight and told me Billy wasn’t coming back. He’d be staying at Oakshott Road with his father. It was for the best. I wasn’t to worry. And above all, I wasn’t to feel in any way
guilty
or a
failure.

     ‘Your husband will be taking care of Billy until you’re feeling better,’ Ishmael said. ‘I believe he’s
hired
someone from an
agency
. It’s really the best course of action. The Institute isn’t the best environment for a two year old in the
long
term.’

     My father’s watery face disappeared from the calendar and I forced myself to look at Ishmael. He was writing something with a bulbous fountain-pen, his face set. The nurse was taking my blood pressure, feeling my pulse, banging my knee with a little rubber hammer.

     ‘Stay still now, Mrs Stevenson,’ she said. Her accent was Welsh. ‘I need to see what I’m doing, love.’

     ‘Don’t call me love.’

     ‘Oh sorry, love.’

     So. Billy was gone. Dr Stern was explaining the rest gently, his round eyes blank as tiddlywinks. I looked at the forms he put in front of me, but it didn’t cross my mind to read them. I was still struggling with my middle name. Surely I had a middle name? There was a jar of coloured biros next to the anemone paperweight, and I picked out a green one to sign on the dotted line. I remembered reading somewhere that official documents must be in blue or black ink, or they are null and void.

     ‘Do you mind green?’ I asked him, giving him a chance to realise his mistake, my small betrayal. But he didn’t even notice.

     ‘Any colour you like, Hazel,’ he said in that voice of bedside comfort which only last night, beneath my sheets, had Song-of-Solomoned my breasts, my thighs, my belly a field of wheat set about with lilies. A voice that had sighed and groaned in greed and gratitude as he stormed the ramparts and collapsed the sky. My husband, by contrast, was more controlled – more efficient, I suppose. He never made any noise, except for his funny tune, and sometimes afterwards, when he’d ask if I wanted a Handy Andy.

     He’d rather I had volunteered for treatment myself, Dr Stern was saying, but in the end a Compulsory Section would make me feel more secure.

     ‘For you
own good
, Hazel.’

     He had avoided meeting my eyes, but now he looked straight into them with a look that made me gasp. It was just the look he had – intense, dark and powerful – when we were making love. It seemed to reach directly from his soul to mine. I would do anything he wanted; of course I would. I finally dragged my eyes from his down to the piece of paper in front of me.

     ‘Does it mean we can’t go to bed together any more?’ I asked him as I signed.

     I tried to ask in a matter-of-fact way, but it came out messily garotted with emotion. When I looked up again I caught him with raised eyebrows, exchanging glances with the nurse. She sniggered unprofessionally, loading a hypodermic from a small blue bottle. When it was full she sent a little squirt of liquid into the air which descended in a mist of droplets.

     ‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Stevenson,’ he said.

     I was shocked to see a smile tweaking at his mouth. The nurse giggled again, as though there were some kind of joke. She was slim and dark, with cushiony-looking tits. Her name-tag, strategically placed on the nipple area of her right breast, revealed an appropriate Christian name: Hope. Hope Westcott. The elastic belt of her uniform accentuated her trim little nurse’s waist. It would have been ridiculous to kid oneself that Ishmael hadn’t noticed this.

     He said, ‘But we’ll have you back to your normal self in no time. I’ll send someone to fetch your things from your hotel.’

     ‘Just a little prick, love,’ said Hope, and stuck a needle in my vein. She was much younger than I was, perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five.

     Later she showed me my bedroom, a small cubicle with two narrow beds, a washbasin and a mirror. The toilet (in white – a hygienic design with a button flush) was down the corridor. A woman was crying in the room next to mine.

     ‘That’s Monica Fletcher,’ said the nurse. ‘She’s probably been watching the news. Here’s your pillow-slip, love. You’ll be sharing with another girl. Her name’s Peggy but your mother calls her the Ossature. From the Latin
os
, meaning bone, apparently. She’s ever so quiet, but she’s a bit of a vomiter so give the basin a good wipe every time.’

     In the distance, the sound of an ambulance.

     The nurse asked me if I needed anything so I said no, just leave Dr Stern alone, OK? She got my drift. When she’d gone I sat on the bed. The window overlooked the garden, and I stared out. Perhaps I should have been surprised by what I saw, but I wasn’t. Nothing could surprise me much, now. Not with my father’s face appearing in a calendar, and Billy gone to live with Greg, and Dr Stern finished with me and shagging some Welshwoman. You see the world one way, don’t you, all your life, and then when something comes along to turn the whole thing upside-down your vision goes wonky and you start to see things, and recognise them for what they are. Or at least I did.

     The thing I saw was Ma’s greenhouse.

     Its sharp outline was unmistakable. A huge cathedral-like dome, its glass like brittle transparent hide over a carcass of iron, shooting thin spears of light into the morning mist. From nowhere, the thought came to me that this was surely the pride of Gridiron. Through the glass panes I could see bright colours. Flowers. Trees. Things moving. This apparition, this building, this construction, so starkly before me now yet so well camouflaged before, defied logic. Its presence told lies, made wild promises, beckoned and jeered and sang.

     Suddenly I felt powerful and fearless and born again. And I also realised that if I wanted to I could probably fly.

     I stood up, spread the enormous coarse-feathered wings that had sprouted from my shoulders, and fell hard into a profound blackness.

When I woke up, my sister was sitting on the bed waving a huge Venn diagram at me. I felt very sick.

     ‘I’ve put two and two together,’ Linda said, glowing with pride at her own intelligence. She’d always been that way about her brain, like it was some prize pumpkin she’d grown.

     ‘So you’d better tell me everything, and no pissing about.’

     So I did. The invisibility, the GR218 experiment that went wrong, my hunch that Ruby was pregnant, the decision to expose Gregory. The affair with Dr Stern. (She raised her eyebrows when I told her about the sort of sex I reckoned I’d had.) His betrayal. The vision of the greenhouse. Every now and then she groaned or gasped or muttered ‘Idiot’.

     When I got to the bit about what I was doing as an inmate in Manxheath she stiffened.

     ‘Did you sign anything?’

     ‘Yes, but it was in green, so it was null and void,’ I said, but I didn’t feel too sure of myself.

     ‘Jesus, Hazel, how did you get to be such a moron?’ she hurled at me as she scrabbled in her bag for cigarettes.

     Her eyes were doing that strange thing they do when she’s in a rage; going a dark colour and sinking dangerously deep into her head.

     ‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away about all this?’

     ‘Well, I thought you might overreact.’

     ‘Overreact?’ she shrieked, dropping her carton of Rothmans and grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me with vicious gusto.

     When she let me go, she retrieved her fags from under the bed, lit one and inhaled deeply.

     ‘No smoking allowed in the bedrooms,’ I said, pointing to the sign.

     ‘Get fucked,’ she said.

     I said, ‘You see, I thought Dr Stern was on my side. It seemed like such a nifty plan.’

     ‘Yes, well, one person’s nifty plan is another’s catastrophic suicide attempt,’ she muttered.

     She showed me her diagram, which didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.

     ‘I see you have the same suspicion that Ruby’s pregnant,’ I said.

     ‘Suspicion? It’s a fact. I saw her in Bulger’s.’

     I felt the blood drain from my face, and the watery taste that is a prelude to vomiting rise in my mouth.

     ‘How can you be sure she was pregnant?’ I noticed I was shaking. ‘She’s pretty fat. It would be impossible to tell.’ This had been my one hope.

     ‘She was in the nude,’ said Linda.

     ‘What, walking round Bulger’s?’

     I could picture the scene perfectly. Ruby waltzing brazenly through soft furnishings waving her cheque book, tits all over the place and the fruits of my husband’s adultery bulging from her belly.

     ‘No, in a changing room cubicle, idiot. Buying maternity undergarments and looking very pleased with herself.’

     I went to the basin and threw up what looked like coffee and biscuits. Then
chili con carne
, then cup-a-soup, then pasta followed by dry retching. At least my roommate wouldn’t mind. Linda turned her head away and held her nose.

     ‘Jesus, Hazel,’ she groaned nasally.

     ‘Where does Carmichael fit in?’ I asked when I’d cleaned myself up with an Institute flannel.

     ‘He doesn’t – yet. But as soon as he hears about this he’ll be playing a key role, just you wait. It’s your only hope of nailing these bastards. Leave it to me. Ma’s made an interesting suggestion which I may follow through.’ She took another deep drag.

     I was flabbergasted.

     ‘Ma? What are you talking about? She’s a loony! Keep her out of this! Keep her out of my marriage!’

     ‘Hazel, get a life. You haven’t got a marriage. Anyway, I’m not sure how you’d fare against Ma in a sanity contest. Just keep your mouth shut, and refuse all medication. I’ll work on getting you out of here but for the time being I think you should just sit it out. You’re a liability in the real world in the state you’re in. Stay in your room. Read magazines. Do whatever you housewives do.’

     ‘But I’m not a housewife any more!’ I expostulated, and threw myself at the basin once more.

     I’d forgotten yesterday’s muesli.

     ‘I’m nothing!’ I choked through it.

     ‘Well, for Christ’s sake
become
something then!’ Linda spat, buttoning up an absurd bottle-green raincoat with flaps everywhere.

     And she was gone, slamming the door and leaving her fag burning in the tooth-mug.

     She’s always been jealous of me.

True facts are hard to find, but there is one that is acknowledged by all: thirty-five is a desperate age for a childless woman, whether she realises it or not. It is half of threescore and ten, and heralds a time of unique crisis; the onset of middle age. See Linda as a victim of this age of desperation. See her preparing to cross the pain barrier into the second half of her life, and leaving Base Camp way behind. See her in Bollingate View Terrace, applying an unprecedented amount of make-up with a shaking hand. And see her now, four hours later, arriving at a London platform and checking her
A to Z
. See her at Channel Praise headquarters, flashing her Ministry pass at the bored security men. And see her pluck up courage and stomp purposefully towards a door marked ‘Holy Hour Production Offices’.