Egg Dancing (27 page)

     Face the fear. Feel the pain. It can make you born again.

     The ashtray is full, and the bells of St Manfred’s clang their monstrous din, all but drowning out the sound of the revving cars on television. Linda has been watching the desperate swerving of stock-car racing for an hour, and seen five muddy, bloody crashes, two of them spectacular. She squats at one end of the velveteen sofa, legs apart, knees up, cigarette hanging from her lower lip, holding Katie-Koo’s bottle at arm’s length. The baby, propped at the other end of the sofa, is feeding quietly. She is magnificently pretty, with black eyes and a mass of dark curls.

     ‘ “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking,” ’ croaks Linda as the Perfect Baby finishes her milk, smiles radiantly, and immediately falls asleep. ‘So get fucked.’

     With no great affection, Linda wipes Katie-Koo’s cherubic little mouth with a soiled tea-towel, heaves a disgruntled sigh, and jerks the cushion from under her. But the baby just shifts position, and smiles in her sleep. Linda has not yet managed to make her cry.

     It is two weeks into her new life as a mother-figure, and the day stretches before her, long and vacant – as do the six weeks of leave that lie ahead. Time hangs heavy on Linda as it never did in her busy days at the Butter Mountain, so unexpectedly curtailed by her mission to sabotage the Perfect Baby Project. In fact she has begun to refer to the compassionate break she has taken (citing ‘family problems’ as though these were a temporary aberration rather than the backdrop to her life) as ‘my eternity leave’.

     There is nothing to do, except smoke five packets of cigarettes a day. It’s costing her a fortune.

     Two more cars collide on a muddy slope, and Linda cheers as one bursts into flames. Then she reaches for the phone and dials British Telecom in Swakely Gap.

     ‘My name’s Linda Sugden,’ she announces through her dangling fag. ‘I want to speak to Duncan Proutt.’

     ‘He’s in a meeting, I’m afraid,’ says a voice with a pension plan.

     ‘Well, when he gets out, ask him to come round with a dozen roses,’ she orders him. ‘And tell him I’ve decided to lift that sex embargo.’

     Linda breathes out smoke into the receiver, and miraculously enough, a fit of coughing is induced on the other end.

     ‘Did you get that?’ she barks, annoyed.

     ‘Right you are, Miss Sugden,’ manages the strangulated voice. ‘I’ll pass the message on to Mr Proutt. I’ll tell him you  – ’

     But Linda has slammed down the receiver.

The stock-car racing has finished and
Holy Hour
is beginning. Linda steels herself and reaches for her cornflower-blue knitting. It’s a cardigan for herself. Katie-Koo sighs and puckers her dimpled lips in a sweet smile. Linda looks at her with loathing, and then, with a sudden flash of inspiration, stretches out an arm and jabs at Katie-Koo’s bare foot with the end of the needle. Hard.

     ‘And bugger me,’ she told me later, ‘if she didn’t fucking giggle, like I was tickling her or something! Jesus, when
you
were a baby and I did something like that to you, Hazel, you at least screamed the house down.’

     Motherhood really wasn’t her bag, she told me. She’d speed-read all the books, in particular Dr Rosamund Pithkin’s Baby Bible (a gift from Ma), said to be the definitive work on baby care. And it must have been, because Katie-Koo did everything Dr Pithkin said she should and nothing she shouldn’t. She’d done it, too, at the recommended times and in the recommended amounts, to the minute and to the gramme. Katie-Koo fed well, grew as the charts indicated she should, and slept twenty-two hours a day. Most astonishing of all, given Linda’s stock of small cruelties, she had not yet shed a single tear.

     Linda had heard about sleepless nights, and crying that shatters the nerves and will not be appeased – stories of skin rashes, diarrhoea, wind, colic and infantile
Weltschmertz
, but Katie-Koo was immune. The Baby Bible’s extensive section on ‘problems’ remained unread. Katie-Koo was placid. She was no trouble. She was trouble-free and trouble-less. She was untroubled, untroubling and untroublesome. That was the trouble. There was nothing that prompted in Linda the maternal urge to soothe and protect, and to quell her own exasperation with a martyrish shrug of the shoulders and a nice warm feeling. The Perfect Baby stirred no tugs of conscience, no calls of duty. It was the way Gregory had designed her. ‘To meet the needs of the busy professional couple,’ as his Perfect Baby brochure would have put it.

     The Perfect Baby was like a landscaped garden or an apartment rabbit – a living thing specially designed to require minimum maintenance, and create maximum decorative effect. Even Katie-Koo’s bowel products were odourless. Linda could picture the questionnaire that led to this depressing combination of characteristics. It would have corresponded to the market research the toy manufacturers did when they came up with the original Katie-Koo, the crying, pissing doll. There is no doubt that this was a perfect baby.

     Linda hated her.

     If she had bothered to read the section of Rosemary Pithkin’s Baby Bible entitled ‘Problems Big and Small’, she might have come across a section she could relate to. It was a Problem Big, under the heading ‘Bonding, Lack of’.

Symptoms: various, incl.: Mother’s lack of interest in, and affection for, the child. Child’s lack of specific mother-related response.

     Causes: various, incl.: Disturbed pregnancy, difficult birth, perinatal shock, early trauma.

     Treatment: You really mustn’t give up on this one. One theory in modern paediatric psychology is that some mothers and their babies are simply a ‘bad fit’. I do not subscribe to this theory. Call me old-fashioned, but I have only one answer to your problem: you and your wretched baby must both try harder
.

Just as well, perhaps, that Linda hadn’t read the problem section; she might have tracked Dr Pithkin down and personally deep-fried her in baby oil. But Dr Pithkin’s diagnosis, had she been there to make it, would have been correct: Katie-Koo and Linda had not bonded. Katie-Koo smiled at Linda and nestled in her arms as any loving babe should, but she did just the same with complete strangers. There was a seed of mistrust in Linda’s heart that came from she knew not where. Mistrust, and envy:
she
had cried endlessly as a baby.
She
had been too hot or cold, or feverish, or bored, or uncomfortable, or uncontrollably angry, ever since she could remember. That was life, wasn’t it? Life’s a bitch and then you die, as one of Linda’s favourite sayings goes. (Or as my bachelor brother-in-law John always said, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you marry her.’) So why should this child escape it? Why should Katie-Koo’s life be so wonderful when Linda’s had been, on reflection, a valley of toil?

     When a woman gives birth, a bag of guilt is born with the baby, like an extra placenta. This bag is surely made heavier when the baby is not the woman’s own but one she has stolen.

     Linda takes a cold hard look at her little charge, stubs out her cigarette in the overspilling ashtray, and grinds it down with a twist.

     On television, the Reverend Carmichael has fallen to his knees, writhing about in ecstasy and sobbing in a sweaty heap. Linda, eyes narrowed and cheeks puckered, shudders uncomfortably for thirty-seven seconds, tears welling glassily in her eyes.

     The programme erupts into a jangle-twangle burst of music and spontaneous applause from the studio audience. Close-ups show that some of them are crying, too. As the
Holy Hour
’s theme hymn becomes a crescendo, a flashing number on the screen reminds viewers of the number to dial to pledge their minimum of £50 to the House of God.

     ‘Well, Reverend Fucking Carmichael,’ sniffs Linda as the credits roll over the prostrate form of the man of the cloth. The studio audience, arms aloft, stands behind him like a swishing field of green wheat. ‘Tell me one thing, dickhead. Did the perfect infant Jesus drive his mother mad?’

     Just then the doorbell rings.

     Duncan to the rescue!

The
Holy Hour
credits are still rolling when, on the other side of the city, Ruby turns her gaze away from the television screen, her beautiful face a blank round cheese of misery. She flicks the remote control, rolls over, and lies still. The room is piled high with boxes of chocolates, fruit, flowers, and cards from well-wishers. Every inch of shelving space is adorned with roses and greetings and little baby-presents: a frilly jump-suit in pink, a musical rabbit that plays ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby’, a miniature water-wheel for the bath. The maternity wing of the Sacred Bleeding Heart is well placed for sunshine, and bright rays stream through the net curtains on to Ruby’s crisp, scented linen and the lace-adorned cot where lies the babe.

     The babe. Still there. Still ugly. Still grizzling. She has cried almost non-stop for fourteen days and fourteen nights, and Ruby is at the end of her tether. Even the nurses are shrugging their shoulders and murmuring about ‘natural misery’.

     ‘Perhaps you should be thinking of going home soon with Baby,’ said the ward sister to her gently – but Ruby had begged to be allowed to stay another week.

     ‘I’m not ready to go home yet,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I can cope.’

     And she raised such a pleading face in the sister’s direction – quite a different face from the confident, arrogant Dr Gonzalez who had arrived on the ward a fortnight earlier and demanded cable TV and fresh guava juice – that the sister relented.

     ‘It’s your money,’ she said. ‘You can stay as long as you like.’

     So see Ruby now, hunched in a foetal ball, the bedclothes bunched around her, her sloping shoulders shuddering as she sobs. On the floor lie reams of computer paper covered in complex graphs and analyses and tables which Gregory had thrown down before he stormed out, sobbing himself, destroyed with rage before the infallibility of the data, setting in stone the unmisinterpretable figures which formed proof of what Ruby had already suspected, but dared not admit to herself: that the worse-than-unimaginable, the barely-believable, the 99.9999-per cent-improbable has happened. Angelica is a normal baby. In all respects – motor functions, weight, eyesight, hearing, muscle tone, appetite, and intelligence, she is completely and tragically average. ‘Pig-ordinary’, to use a phrase of Gregory’s when our son was a baby.

     ‘Months of work down the bloody drain!’ Greg had stormed, hurling the papers at her. ‘And now we’re stuck with this – mollusc!’

     He was adamant: they must leave the hospital before Angelica was placed on a register of babies ‘at risk’. The nurses had already been whispering about Ruby and Gregory’s bizarre attitude problem towards their daughter. Nothing must draw further attention to them. They would take her home and keep quiet about her and eventually  . . .

     ‘Eventually what?’ snapped a tearful Ruby.

     ‘Well, you know,’ said Greg.

     ‘No, I don’t,’ wept Ruby. But she was lying.

     ‘There’s always the possibility of  – ’

     The word ‘adoption’ was not spoken. A wall of ice had grown between Ruby and Greg since the first few days after the baby’s birth. The three dozen white lilies he’d bought for Ruby began to emit a powerful odour just the wrong side of rottenness, but he came with no fresh bouquet to replace them. In fact he came to visit less and less, citing pressure of work and his paternal duties to Billy. When he did come, it was armed with tape measures and auriscopes and rubber appliances for weighing and measuring all parts of the body, and pages of instructions for testing Angelica’s IQ, which he did between her bouts of screaming. Then he went off to analyse them. He was spending more and more time at the Hooper Fertility Foundation. Ruby hadn’t even seen the spanking new laboratory that Root Hooper had bought for the Genetic Choice Programme. She had lain in bed most of the time, trying to appease the baby’s ravenous hunger with her sore, cracked nipples, putting pillows over her head to shut out its crying, too awash with maternal guilt and too weak and harassed even to do her pelvic floor exercises to restore her vagina to its former glory.

     And now Ruby, surrounded by pungent lilies, a touching icon of misery, raises her dark pleading eyes to the heavens, and weeps big tears of pure silver for the suffering she endures. Welcome, Ruby Gonzalez, to the State of Motherhood. There is no return.

FOURTEEN

We at Manxheath were faring no better. I began to understand why some people go mad. The world is an unpredictable, cavalier sort of place.

     The staff whispered in corridors: the local press began to sniff about. How could it be, the Disciplinary Inquiry was to ask, that a woman in Mrs Pimento’s condition of florid delusion could explode into shreds, standing on the lawn, witnessed only by two unsupervised mental patients? Where did all that splintered glass come from? And why was there not a doctor or nurse in sight? It didn’t look good at all; Dr Stern’s hair went grey overnight. His eyes, which used to be so dark and shining, turned the colour of an old anorak. Nurses said in low voices, glancing about as they spoke, that he was going to be hauled up before the Deciding Authority and risked disciplinary action, criminal proceedings, and having to make a public apology to Mrs Pimento’s relatives, who were arriving from Turin in indignant droves for the funeral. One aged uncle seemed to be particularly affected. He came on a tour of Manxheath, growling ‘
Assassini, assassini
’, but had to leave in a hurry when Ma chased him up a corridor screaming and waving a large piece of her clay work at him.