Egg Dancing (23 page)

     When I first started seeing Dr Stern, I used to wonder whether I was mad, or whether the world around me was. But suddenly it came to me that it doesn’t have to be a question of either/or. It can be both. Inner and outer insanity don’t rule each other out. Hence:

     Idea 1. This idea I called ‘the personal versus global insanity issue’.

     Meanwhile, things had been taken from me one by one – my husband, my home, my son, my lover, my hotel room. Some of these things I wanted back. So:

     Idea 2. This idea I called ‘my rights’.

     Because of the slippery nature of ‘concepts’ in my life at this stage, I decided to associate these thoughts with an object, as a sort of mnemonic device. The object I chose was the metal-framed chair I was sitting on. It had a red plastic foam cushion.

     That way it would all stay in my head.

     At the end of one session, Dr McAuley seemed to have something urgent to convey to me.

     ‘I’m not hearing what you say, Doctor; you’ll have to write it down,’ I told her.

     She pulled an exasperated face and mouthed at me again, ‘Come to Group this afternoon.’

     But I made her write it down anyway. Give these psychiatrists a centimetre and they’ll take a hectare. Something Ma told me, and she’s right. She wrote it on her pad in black biro. She had that bulbous, low-slung type of handwriting that they teach in secretarial colleges. I should know. Mine is like that, too.

     ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’

     The socially vulnerable knitting circle, Ma called it. I reckoned that if I took my chair with me, I’d cope.

     Later, at lunch, a strange thing happened: Keith flung his cauliflower cheese across the room and then stood on the table, windmilling his arms. Then he ran out, sobbing, followed by Hope.

     ‘Hope rushes in where angels fear to tread,’ Ma usually said when she saw Hope rushing anywhere. Or sometimes she’d say, ‘You can put hope in one hand and spit into the other.’ I don’t quite know why. But she wasn’t there to say either of these things, or to translate what Keith had said, so no one knew what it was about. She turned up later, with earth under her fingernails. When I told her about the cauliflower cheese incident, she said it sounded like Keith had had a premonition.

     ‘A bad one,’ she said, her already pasty face growing pale. ‘Every once in a while, someone here makes an important statement. Keith’s problem,’ she concluded, ‘is epistemological.’

     ‘Are you sure, Moira?’ bleated Monica Fletcher from somewhere near our ankles. ‘I’ve always thought the food here was rather good.’

The socially vulnerable knitting circle met in a windowless room which might once have been a padded cell. I was awarded a place at the very end, nearest the door. I’d brought my red-cushioned chair. It had become a sort of mascot. Keith was there, looking composed, like nothing had happened. If I’d said to him ‘Cauliflower cheese’ he’d probably have gestured: ‘Cauliflower cheese to you, too!’

     Dr McAuley caught me chatting to Isabella about epidurals and remarked that my hearing had improved. Indeed it had; I’d removed the earplugs.

     ‘Now,’ she began the session. ‘Does anyone here have anything they feel they’d like to share?’

     So my mother let rip about how I’d wrecked her Valium display in the greenhouse. She’d been planting pills, apparently, in a ‘miscellaneous medications’ bed. Loony tunes.

     ‘What greenhouse?’ asked Max.

     ‘An interesting figment,’ said Dr McAuley, ‘of Moira’s fertile imagination.’

     ‘Mrs Sugden to you,’ snapped my Ma. ‘And it’s no figment. Hazel’s been there. She’ll testify to it. She stole my whore’s drawers.’

     A McAuley eyebrow lifted in sudden interest. She paid attention to anything knicker-related, being a Freudian.

     ‘
Valium domesticum
is a bugger to germinate, you know,’ Ma added resentfully, her glasses flashing at me. ‘It was in its hour of glory.’

     ‘I gave them to Dr Stern,’ I said.

     ‘In the hope of a quick shag?’ asked Max menacingly.

     Clearly Ishmael and I hadn’t managed to hide our affair all that well.

     ‘But it’s romantic,’ Monica sobbed. ‘Romantic, romantic, romantic.’

     ‘Don’t talk to me about romance,’ muttered a greasy-haired man called David, whose wrists were in bandages.

     ‘Sweetie been screwing you for money again?’ asked my mother, spotting it too. ‘Och, she’s a shameless hyena.’

     ‘It’s worse this time, eh, Dave,’ barked Max. ‘Dr Stern’s signed the incompetence-due-to-insanity papers. Now she can annul the marriage. She’s marrying that bastard accountant next week.’

     There was silence. David hung his head; the Ossature shivered and pulled her crocheted blanket around her flesh-free shoulders.

     ‘Thank you for sharing that with us,’ said Dr McAuley. ‘Now, everyone, I’d just like to tell you that Moira’s daughter Hazel will be joining us for group sessions from now on, which I’m sure she’ll find empowering-and-enabling.’ She said this as though it were all one word, like ‘cheese-and-onion’ in the case of crisps.

     ‘Hazel’s been very unforthcoming on a one-to-one basis,’ she told the loonies. ‘But I think she’ll really blossom here. Welcome to Manxheath, Hazel.’

     ‘Welcome to my world,’ added Max, and gobbed on the floor. Max’s world can’t have been much different from yours and mine, because everyone pretended not to notice.

     I smiled around the semi-circle, like a contestant at a beauty pageant, and Dr McAuley made a note on her clip-board.

     And so I became a member of the Group. Other perks followed: I was allowed a subscription to
Woman’s Realm
and
New Woman
, and it was agreed that Billy would come to visit once a week, and spend the day, until such time as I was deemed well.

     I’d taken against the wallpaper in the Day Room: I found its Regency design of stylised green flowers in vertical lines had an ironic, mocking tone to it, so I spent most of my time in my room waiting for the Great Pretender Ishmael to come and whisk me off to dinner in Mutton Acre. I kept myself to myself. Being invisible helped.

‘I’d like to propose a toast,’ announces the man on the podium. He is small and tanned and bald. He smiles to reveal a fortune in artful bridgework. ‘To the success of our new partnership.’

     His oily herring’s eyes skim the throng of people before him, a sea of smart suits and little cocktail outfits. The Executive Club Lounge of the Gridiron City Hopeworth is the venue for the gathering of this elite section of the scientific and business worlds. Some have limousined all the way from London for the occasion. Cummerbunds encircle management paunches, earrings jangle beneath big hair-dos. There is a smell of marinated olives, taramasalata, and money.

     ‘Raise your glasses, please,’ says Mr Root Hooper, trillionaire, ‘to the new Hooper Fertility Foundation. Long may it thrive.’

     ‘To the Hooper Fertility Foundation,’ murmurs the throng before they sip.

     ‘Fuck you,’ mutters Linda under her breath, wincing on a lemon slice. Her blonde wig is itching her scalp, and her huge rose-tinted spectacles keep sliding down the bridge of her nose.

     ‘Fuck Hooper, fuck Gregory, fuck the Reverend fucking Carmichael, fuck everyone,’ she adds, expanding on her theme. Linda Sugden is on what Trish would call ‘the psychological rampage’.

     ‘Would you care for an
amuse-gueule
?’ asks an astonishingly handsome waiter, thrusting a silver platter of pineapple and cheese chunks on sticks, biscuits spread with olive paste, and pistachio nuts under her nose.

     ‘And fuck you too,’ says Linda, looking him full in the face. ‘I only eat Twiglets.’

     Root Hooper tilts his flute of champagne towards that of Dr Greg Stevenson, standing next to him on the dais. Their glasses kiss with a tiny ping and they drink. As small streams of bubbles forge effervescent pathways to gullets lined with hors-d’oeuvres, there is a smile on the face of each man. It is an important moment. Hooper plc and Fertility Management Inc. are going to bed together, as the jargon has it. And the white froth of champagne that shoots from the jeroboam of Bollinger (a stream of liquid whose Freudian significance the dark-haired man in the beige Armani suit in the corner of the room notes with a quite professional smirk) is the climax of their courtship. The papers have been signed, the deal struck.

     Linda edges herself round to the table next to where Dr Ruby Gonzalez is sitting and pretends to be reading the Hopeworth’s glossy brochure. She notes, in passing, the shocking prices at the
Soins Intensifs
Beauty Clinic, e.g., £30 for a bikini wax. She snorts, and focuses her rose-coloured lenses on Ruby Gonzalez, who is looking moronically self-satisfied in the way that only pregnant women can, whilst downing orange juice and blue cheese profiteroles. Linda notes with distaste that she’s sitting with her legs spread quite wide apart, Sumo wrestler-style, her belly spilling over the gulf.

     As Gregory Stevenson and Root Hooper approach, Ruby’s generous lips broaden into a big smile. Linda shifts in her chair and narrows her eyes to observe. Root Hooper is lunging forward to kiss Dr Gonzalez’s hand, but suddenly her smile has twisted into pain and she’s pulling backwards into her seat as though to shrivel away from him, still holding a profiterole aloft in one hand. Something is wrong with Ruby. She appears to be arc-welded to her chair, and there’s something panicky squirming in her eyes.

     ‘I can’t get up,’ she says tremulously, her face red. ‘Greg!’ she calls plaintively. ‘Help! Oh, do excuse me, Mr Hooper, I really shouldn’t have come. I just wanted to  – ’

     She shifts in the chair in an attempt to cross her legs; it’s then that Linda notices the dark patch spreading across Ruby Gonzalez’s silk dress. A pungent smell begins to spread. The woman is awash with liquid.

     ‘I wanted to celebrate with you,’ Ruby soldiers on bravely. There is a small, uncomfortable silence, and Linda slaps a hand over her mouth to prevent laughter, screaming or vomiting. She watches Ruby’s thighs and sees the plastic chair beneath her fill with liquid which overflows and splashes on the parquet floor. Ruby’s eyes, too, are fixed on the broad puddle that is spreading towards Root Hooper’s polished leather shoes. Gregory, Spam-faced, is looking annoyed.

     ‘I thought you’d like to meet our new partner,’ he tells Ruby sternly – in much the same tone that he would adopt with Hazel when, as usual, she had put too much salt in the cooking.

     ‘Yes, darling, of course I’m delighted to meet Mr Hooper.’

     Linda gags. Hazel has told her about the gruesome business of childbirth. The prying fingers of midwives, the horror of the mucus plug, the excruciating agony of pushing something the size of a Yorkshire terrier through an unyielding sleeve of flesh, the moment you clap eyes on the juddering, livid afterbirth – the whole shebang.

     ‘This is very embarrassing,’ says Ruby Gonzalez at last, ‘but my waters have broken.’

     ‘Your what?’ asks Root Hooper, genuinely puzzled. ‘Beg pardon, Dr Gonzalez?’

     ‘Oh Ruby,’ intervenes Greg with a sigh of irritation. ‘I told you this was a bad idea, coming along at a time like this.’

     ‘My shoes!’ cries Hooper, suddenly spotting the puddle. ‘Hey, get a cleaner here pronto, someone. There’s some kind of mess on the floor.’

     Ruby begins to give strange strangulated gulps.

     ‘And an ambulance,’ she gurgles.

     By now she is surrounded by people who have all come to look at the spectacle she’s made of her chair, the floor, the dress.

     ‘Good God,’ gasps a Hooper executive, whipping out a small packet of Kleenex from his breast pocket and waving a lone tissue in Ruby’s direction. ‘We seem to be flooded.’

     ‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ Linda calls into the back of the throng as she grabs her handbag and prepares to hurtle off.

     ‘Don’t worry – I’ve already called one,’ says a voice.

     Linda looks up and her eyes meet the yellow silk shirt, peacock tie and beige Armani suit of her mother’s psychiatrist. Linda quickly adjusts her wig and whisks her scarf across her mouth.

     ‘It’ll be here in two minutes,’ says Dr Stern. And he smiles at Linda. Beneath the dark moustache, a row of white and perfect teeth.

TWELVE

I’ve always been fond of jigsaws – perhaps because, as a child, I was better at them than Linda, who was supposed to be the clever one. Linda never had the patience. She was more of a diagram person. She liked to make associations swiftly and in broad, radical terms. But my story was one that had to be pieced together, doggedly, afterwards. This was a jigsaw story. Linda helped me with it, of course, by offering her own pompous self-glamorising recollections. But there were plenty of other pieces: my own experience, Ruby’s article in the
Lancet
, the Inquiry report, Ma’s loony letters, the scientific evidence that emerged at the trial.

     Though I’m the first to admit that, while the shit was actually hitting the fan, nothing made sense. I couldn’t see for whirling excrement.