Egg Dancing (28 page)

     Finally, when the pathologists had sifted through Mrs Pimento’s splinter-filled giblets and the undertakers had filled a coffin with God knows what residual splatterings, there was a cremation (‘They’re turning her into haggis,’ mourned Ma), and a private funeral ceremony to which patients were not invited. We were suffering from ‘post-traumatic syndrome’, and a new doctor was brought in to monitor our drugs. Dr Hollingbroke was shipped off on secondment to Coxcomb Hall for the Socially Disturbed, pending the Inquiry’s report. Ma took to the Art Room with Keith, clutching a molar she’d found on the windowsill and muttering something about a ‘memorial’.

     ‘My world has fallen apart,’ she told me melodramatically over breakfast one day. ‘My greenhouse has been destroyed and my best friend with it. All in smithereens. Now is that a personal tragedy or what?’

     She seldom emerged from the Art Room except for meals. She would eat nothing but Spotted Dick.

     ‘Comfort food,’ said Dr McAuley, who looked like she could do with some herself.

     She had tried in vain to re-start the Group sessions. We were having none of it. Rumour had it that Dr McAuley was also facing disciplinary charges. Manxheath became a house of whispers. Nurses switched allegiance to a higher echelon of management and began to spy on the doctors rather than us. Even Hope did a U-turn, and refused to give me any more injections. Max took to patrolling the premises like a security guard, and would interrogate people about their movements. He had a stopwatch, and would ask things like:

     ‘Why did it take you two minutes and thirty-five seconds to traverse the north wall corridor this morning when you did it in half that time on Tuesday?’

     And: ‘Is this going-to-the-toilet thing of yours some sort of elaborate double bluff?’

     He avoided Ma, after she showed him the molar. She had taken to wearing it on a length of dental floss round her neck, to ward off evil spirits.

     David sat in the Day Room, lizard-like, often motionless for hours, but sometimes he would scribble long letters to lawyers. Monica Fletcher wept snottily in the corners of rooms. She cried so much she had to be put on salt tablets. When my mother’s huge stash of mind-altering medications was discovered in her mattress (far more, the staff swore, than they believed they had in stock; a whole arsenal of pills which she claimed were the harvest of the greenhouse), all patients were removed from drugs, pending ‘re-assessment’. We all went into terrible withdrawal. This took various forms; Max had to be strait-jacketed for a week, and my mother wouldn’t leave the Art Room. The Ossature abandoned her sorrel-and-water diet for a full-scale hunger-strike. In my case, I just felt like I had a bad hangover. The tangerine feeling had gone and I seemed to fit into my body again, but it was as if someone had stolen my world in exchange. I had no place of refuge now the greenhouse had gone. I suppose my mother felt the same way.

     ‘It was to be the pride of Gridiron,’ she whispered to me one day as we passed each other in the corridor like ships in the night. And I knew what she meant. Her face was waxy and her clothes hung off her, giving her the look of a deflated hot-air balloon. The passages of Manxheath no longer echoed with noise, and apart from the hysterical music-’n’-chatter of TV game shows, there was silence. I spent most of the time in my room, thinking about revenge, missing Billy, or reading a book on personal management which Linda had lent me, written by her guru, Klaus G. Armstrong, but sometimes I’d come down and watch six hours of television at a stretch. I came to know game shows quite well.

     One afternoon, Dr Stern walked in, and his eyes settled on mine like desperate search-lamps. I was still giggling from the anecdote on TV, and couldn’t stop.

     ‘Come to my office, please, Hazel,’ he said. And he added, ‘Please.’

     He didn’t sound like a doctor. He sounded like a man again. A man in trouble. His voice was hoarse.

     ‘We have to talk.’

     And so, almost like in the old days, but with sadness rather than sexual anticipation, I followed him into his office. It was still May, according to the bright Modern Art splodges on the calendar, but there was nothing to be merry about. The office was full of removal crates, and the shelves were bare. I was glad I’d stolen his paperweight. It could surely be of no use to him now. Ishmael reached in a drawer for a bottle of whisky and two glasses, and poured us each a large one.

     He took a swig, ignoring me, and put his feet up on the desk. His suit was crumpled, and not in a fashionable way. His beard was streaked with grey. He was smaller and grubbier than I remembered him. There was a defeated look about him.

     ‘Looks like it’s all
over
for me, Hazel,’ he said.

     I didn’t reply, and there was a long silence.

     ‘I got your note, and your
flowers
,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

     ‘
Valium domesticum
,’ I said. ‘Ma grew them.’

     Dr Stern made an exasperated noise, a sort of clucking sigh, like he was spitting out a locust.

     ‘Yes,’ he said, annoyed. ‘I’ve
heard
that story, about how your mother got together her stash, and claims to have
propagated
it. We’ll have to come up with a better explanation than that for the
Investigators,
though.’

     ‘It’s the truth,’ I said.

     The flowers didn’t matter, but I found myself regretting the note. Since I’d come off my drugs I was more cynical about things. I looked at the man I had thought I loved with a more jaded vision. He looked frightened. His eyes were shifting about, restlessly, as though looking for a crack in the ground into which he could creep. All my respect for him had fallen away. Disillusion is a bitter, lonely thing, I have discovered. He wasn’t even sexy any more.

     ‘Look, Hazel,’ he said, reaching in a drawer for a form. ‘I’m going to burn something.’

     And he tapped the sheet of paper.

     He took a cigarette lighter from another drawer and lit the corner of the form. I saw the flame lick over a green signature and turn it, briefly, to violet. The handwriting looked familiar. Then he threw the flaming document in the metal waste-paper bin where we both watched it burn, mesmerised. There’s nothing like a fire for intimacy and comfort – but Ishmael broke the spell.

     ‘There,’ he said. ‘That was the
compulsory section
I put you under. See? It never happened.’

     I shook myself out of my pyromaniac’s trance, staggered at his gall.

     ‘Yes it fucking well did,’ I told him. I shocked myself, because I don’t usually swear. I found myself shuddering with sudden, feverish rage.

     He reached out to place his hand on my arm – an old trick – but it didn’t work this time. I shook him off angrily. If I’d had a sharp pencil to hand I’d have stabbed it into his eye.

     ‘All of it happened. You seduced me, you betrayed me, locked me up, you took away my son, and you filled me with drugs. And now you just burn a piece of paper and say it didn’t happen.’

     ‘Hazel,’ he said simply. ‘It
didn’t
happen.’

     ‘Yes it did!’

     ‘No. You’re quite
wrong
. Nothing happened. Certainly not
all
of it. But  – ’

     ‘But what?’

     I could see he was hedging now.

     ‘But forgive me anyway.’

     The nerve of it left me briefly winded. Then I stood up to hit him across the face. He sat there like he was going to take it. I was just aiming my swing when Dr Appleby walked in, without knocking, and I stopped. I couldn’t do it with her there; like sex, it was too intimate.

     ‘There’s a smell of burning,’ she said coldly.

     ‘Yes, Dr Appleby. Just clearing things out, getting rid of some
junk
.’

     ‘Well, it’s a fire hazard,’ she said. ‘You should know that. Anyway, time to go, Dr Stern. You can clear out your things after the Inquiry has reported.’

     Meekly, he stood up and brushed down his suit.

     ‘Just discharging a
patient
. This is Mrs Stevenson,’ he mumbled.

     ‘It’s for me to do that,’ said Dr Appleby. And addressing me, she said, ‘There will be an in-depth assessment of all patients within the next few days, and we’ll decide then what the best treatment will be.’

     She smiled at me unexpectedly, and I warmed to her.

     ‘And don’t worry, Mrs Stevenson,’ she said, glancing icily at Stern. ‘There will be no more drugs in this establishment for some time yet.’

     I went back to the Day Room and my game show.

   
It didn’t happen. Nothing happened. Hazel, you are quite wrong.

     No, Dr Stern. Not this time.

     There was a woman contestant on the show. It was called
Confession
. She was a quality control supervisor at a DIY concession called Grout-a-Matic, and her hobbies were knitting and scuba-diving.

     ‘Not both at the same time, I hope!’ chuckled the host.

     That raised a laugh. The contestant was skinny, with bandy legs like a nutcracker in rather racy fishnet stockings. She had a page-boy haircut from the seventies, and a floral dress, and glasses far too big for her face. It was like she was wearing two televisions. The host, Tyrone Jiggers, wore a suit of pillar-box red and a spangled top hat. His tie had flashing light bulbs on it. Jiggers gave the Grout-a-Matic woman a giant banana that said ‘The £300 Confession’ on it.

     ‘How do I hold it?’ she giggled.

     ‘Any way you like, my darling, but don’t squeeze it too hard!’ he replied, quick as a flash. That raised an ‘Oooo!’ and another laugh.

     The idea was that she had to recount her most embarrassing moment ever. The one when she’d felt the most publicly humiliated. They have some interesting ideas, don’t they, these television producers.

     Mrs Grout-a-Matic was explaining how she’s got two daughters, right, and one day they set up this blind date with Kim’s brother’s friend at a car-boot sale, right –

     But that’s always the trouble, isn’t it. Whenever you get stuck into a good programme, something happens to interrupt you: a phone call, someone coming to check the gas meter, a mealtime gong, a scuffle. Quite a noisy scuffle, in fact.

     It was Ishmael being pinned to the floor by two thickset males nurses and the slim Hope. Dr Appleby was remonstrating with him.

     ‘Please, Dr Stern, you are abandoning all your professionalism here,’ she was saying, trying to coax him to a sitting position. ‘Try to retain some dignity, please, Dr Stern. This is very distressing.’

     Ishmael was trying to grind his teeth and sob at the same time. He was breathing in great theatrical gasps. I flicked the television off and observed him closely as he tried to stuff his whole fist in his mouth. Saliva ran down his arm, followed by a small stream of blood.

     It looked fishy to me. Too many symptoms, I reckoned. He was over-egging it. Dr Stern knew a lot about breakdowns. They were his job. For someone like him, I realised, they would be quite easy to fake, if the alternative was a prison sentence for negligence. A World War Two prisoner in
Colditz
managed to escape that way, by posing as a harmful loony. The problem was, he stayed that way after the war; the mask fused to him. Dr Appleby clearly hadn’t seen that episode of
Colditz
. No, she was insisting, there was no time for Dr Stern to fetch anything from his office or to change his clothes. He was going straight to London for the Inquiry Team to pronounce its sentence on his conduct as Medical Director of the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability. Did he really want to make a spectacle of himself in front of his staff and patients? Wisely, he didn’t answer. Still, it’s hard to see a grown man cry, even when it’s pretend. Several of us were on our feet now, staring at him as he writhed beneath the weight of the two male nurses. Hope had given up.

     ‘Well, well,’ said Max. ‘The fallen idol.’

     And with an excellent aim, he spat a gob of greenish phlegm that landed in the middle of Ishmael’s forehead. I wanted to cheer, but instead an older instinct took over, and I found myself coming forward with a Kleenex and wiping the brow of my former lover, feeling guilty as though I’d spat at him myself. Then I wiped the blood off his hand, too, and pressed the Kleenex to the small wound he’d made with his teeth.

     ‘Thank you, Hazel,’ whispered Ishmael. ‘Can you forgive me?’

     ‘No,’ I said. And left.

     Later, from my window, I saw them dragging him across the lawn to a waiting ambulance, and a sadness enveloped me. Maybe he really was having a breakdown. The dividing line between worlds is so thin: the normal world, and the world where the table is laid with its knives and forks the wrong way round, its cruet set askew, and its misshapen candelabra burning the noxious bright flame of things irredeemably amiss. And as I discovered – and remembered, thanks to my red-cushioned chair – you can straddle this dividing line, with a foot on either side.