Egg Dancing (34 page)

     The article made enough discrediting claims about her work with my husband to get Ethics Committees, church leaders, and Scotland Yard’s Moral Affairs Unit hyperventilating with activity. Within an hour, all the fax machines had clogged. From now on, criminal arson was the least of Gregory’s worries.

     As I have mentioned, the last line gave some sort of insight into her state of mind. It said, ‘This researcher has been forced to conclude that such experiments can only lead to personal tragedy.’

     I have to report that when I first read that line I experienced a minor twinge of a grotesque emotion I could not identify, and can’t to this day. It was very brief, and for all I know it might have been something else: a pang of indigestion, or my body unconsciously registering a minor earthquake on the other side of the world. I have to report also that, later on, an opaque and clinging burden of pity settled on me when I realised just how much trouble Gregory was in. In the old days I would have stroked his forehead, perhaps, got together something stodgy for dinner to help him forget. Now I just felt weary. You can’t jump on a bed for ever.

     As usual, the media took over. The hunt was on for Baby A and her mother. Prizes were offered, and several women with babies came forward claiming to be Dr Gonzalez. The answer to her whereabouts was finally provided by the Venezuelan Press Agency. Dr Ruby Gonzalez had issued a statement through her lawyers. She and the child were living in a Trappist nunnery somewhere in Latin America. (‘Keeping their traps shut,’ Ma said.) According to the press reports, Ruby had given up medicine. It was the devil’s work, according to the new, holy Ruby. She was taking a vow of silence as of today, following this final photo opportunity and press conference, at which the imperfect baby would be on display.

     ‘Nappy rash permitting,’ added the statement, reiterating what Ruby’s article had stated so unequivocally: that Angelica wasn’t perfect at all. Far from it.

     Nappy rash did permit, and I have the photos and the cuttings. They, too, are in the scrapbook. Ruby’s depressed, resigned look. The scrunched-up face of Angelica yelling at all the fuss. The way Dr Gonzalez finally said, simply, ‘That is all,’ lowered her cowl, and spoke not another word.

     They tracked Greg down shortly afterwards. He was holed up in his new lab, where he’d locked himself into a cupboard full of Petri dishes with an electronic key. They found him clutching a file marked ‘Baby A’. He was slapped in Gridiron Correction Facility and charged with arson until they could come up with a strategy to settle the Perfect Gene question once and for all,
vis-à-vis
the law. The great and the good were called in to form an emergency committee.

     There was silence from Hooper. A spokesman said he was hunting in Kenya and could not be located at this moment in time. In fact, as a probing television camera dangled at the window of his penthouse discovered, he was at home, kicking the walls, smashing vases, shouting at his mistress, drinking gallons of Mexican beer and throwing darts at a cardboard cutout of a man he kept on the bathroom wall: generally relaxing. Even in disgrace, Hooper gave good television. When he finally emerged, it was with a ‘No fucking comment’ to the waiting press, before his lawyers whisked him off for consultations.

     The consultations must have involved a discussion about damage limitation, because later that day a despatch rider knocked on my door at the Hopeworth and handed me a bulging envelope.

     I counted the money.

     All two hundred and fifty thousand pounds were there, in fifty-pound notes.

     A year on, I look back on it all now with a certain affectionate wonder. There was no mention of me at Gregory’s trial. I kept interviews to a minimum and made sure not to say anything interesting. I mumbled on the radio. They had to ask me to speak up.

     ‘I was in a nuthouse,’ I said. ‘I know nothing.’

     Some things are worth it for the money.

     Gregory is still doing middle-class time in his white-collar open prison. He’s decided to switch from medicine to fossils, and is taking an archaeology degree. I take Billy to visit him regularly. It’s the least I can do. Boys need fathers, even if they’re as bad as Gregory. I wouldn’t ever dream of telling Billy what his father tried to do. They spend a couple of hours together in a special family unit and a new bond seems to be growing between them, which involves Lego. I don’t see him often myself, since the signing of the divorce papers. I may have hated Ruby, but at least she did the decent thing. I still have fantasies of going to visit her and pouring out all the bottled-up stuff that’s still there, and calling her a cow and all that. But she wouldn’t be able to reply on account of the Trappist thing. I think this might take the edge off our encounter.

Even after the trial and after things had finally quietened down at Manxheath – even then I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. Other people seemed to be making progress: Monica had suddenly turned cynical, the Ossature was now a fatted calf, David was now divorced from Sweetie and in love with Apple Tree, and Max had been transferred to a hospital for the criminally insane for buggering the Institute’s guard dog.

     As for Ma, she was out of the woods and back to her clay effigies with mammoth genitalia. The memorial she made for Isabella caused quite a stir: it was a huge green-and-yellow papier-mâché mausoleum to house Isabella Pimento’s molar. The Gridiron craft caucus was alerted to it by the art therapist, and all of a sudden Ma was a leading light in something called Art Brut, with private views and drinks parties and even a small but passionate following of collectors, galleries and other hangers-on. Two art students came to study her ‘methods’.

     Ma had finally arrived. I was pleased for her, I suppose, but it all made me feel rather inadequate.

     On a visit one day, I caught sight of a forlorn figure in the Day Room, bowed over some embroidery. It was a while before I recognised him. His hair was long, and in a ponytail. It looked dirty. He was wearing glasses. It was Dr Stern. I was about to walk away, but curiosity got the better of me. He didn’t raise his head as I approached. When I spoke, my words shot out bluntly, like from a popgun, before I had time to think.

     ‘Well?’ I asked him. ‘Are you mad or not?’

     I noticed, staring past his head, that the green Regency striped wallpaper had been replaced by impressionistic dots in yellow, red and blue. It looked as though if you stared at them for long enough, reason might suddenly burst in.

     ‘Mad is a word we prefer not to use here in Manxheath,’ Ishmael responded automatically. ‘Anyway, how should
I
know?’ he added flatly, his eyes still on the tiny stitching of his embroidery. It was a square design, all in one colour – a deep, dingy purple-brown.

     ‘I used to have this theory about the mind being a sea of
chemicals,
but now I’m not so sure. I think a
can of worms
is the metaphor I’d use now.’

     He looked up, and I saw that his eyes were red, and brimming with tears. With care, he finished off a strand of silk and began a new one in the same colour.

     ‘It’s a Rothko,’ he explained, stroking its lizardy surface. ‘D’you know what your mother said to me the other day in Group? She said, “Healer, heal thyself.” But I can’t. I don’t even know what there is to
heal
. I don’t know what’s
normal
any more, Hazel.’

     So that
Colditz
thing was coming true, after all.

     ‘What’s de Cleranbault’s syndrome?’ I asked him.

     ‘It’s one of the delusionary complexes,’ he said wearily. ‘Involving the belief that one’s having a
relationship
with somebody when one
isn’t
.’ He unpicked a stitch, and re-did it, then added, ‘It’s astonishingly
widespread.’

     Suddenly, the sight of him made me sad, and muddled. We sat for a while in silence. Despite myself, I took his hand and squeezed it. I didn’t know what to offer him.

     ‘Do you know what my sister Linda always says?’ I found myself saying eventually. ‘She says life’s a bitch and then you die. So you see, we’re all in the same boat.’

     It was the most optimistic thing I could think of to say. And it seemed to give him heart, because for a moment, something that might have been a smile spasmed near his mouth.

     I got up and walked slowly across the lino in the direction of the door.

     ‘I think I love you,’ he called out hopefully as I closed it behind me. But there was something that wavered in his voice, a hint of de Cleranbault.

I’d always wanted something of my own, something to strive for and believe in. Home improvement wasn’t enough, I realised, after I’d paid a fortune to have the house re-vamped to eradicate all trace of Ruby. Nor was motherhood. With Billy at playschool five mornings a week, I needed something else. I was striving for sanity now. It’s normal, isn’t it, to want to be normal. When you’ve got lunatics in the family you need to stay on guard at all times. That much I do know about genetics.

     In the end, it was memories of the greenhouse that inspired me. The idea hatched one Wednesday while Jane-next-door was giving me my geranium-scented aromatherapy. Because even though the greenhouse never really existed – can’t have done – it felt right. Is that so wrong?

     So I bought one, a real one, with Hooper’s money and a bank loan. It’s not so much a greenhouse, I suppose, as a garden centre. The Gretchenfield Garden Centre. You’ll find it on Donkey Cart Road, in a prime location, next to Handiman and opposite Aqua World, by the pelican crossing. It’s quite big. I have a basic staff of ten. I’m planning a new orchard section for next year, and I’m already famed locally for my range of ornamental shrubs. We do special reductions for pensioners and every now and then I bring in a well-known gardening personality to give a talk on germination or compost or what-have-you. You could say it’s been a sort of lifeline, the whole thing. That business studies course I did all those years ago is finally paying off. And of course I’m rich. Last summer I took Billy to Disneyworld in Florida for a week, and I’ve waved goodbye to Marks & Sparks.

     I don’t grow any ‘medications’ at the garden centre, or any of that other weird stuff Ma managed to raise. I imagine it would be illegal. She’s a bit scathing about that, when she comes to help as part of what Dr Appleby calls a ‘community enrichment programme’. You can’t say she doesn’t have green fingers. She comes to enrich us on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if she’s not attending a private view, which she calls a
vernissage.
Sometimes Ishmael tags along, or comes to the garden centre for a cup of tea in our Koffee Korner before wandering off. He and Keith are allowed to leave the hospital sometimes, accompanied by Dr McAuley, for chess tournaments. Ishmael is getting pretty good, and is now an International Master, whatever that means. He keeps asking me to ‘be his wife’ but I change the subject and occupy him in potting up cuttings. His behaviour seems quite mad for a normal person, though I no longer trust my judgement in these matters. I don’t know. It’s dodgy territory. We don’t really talk.

     Linda, having received her Ag. and Fish Merit Award, has gone from strength to strength. She ditched Duncan not long ago. She couldn’t tolerate sub-standard sex a moment longer, she told me. Now she’s
en route
to Brussels for a promotion into something called Euro Ag. Planning. More strangely, I think I’ll actually miss her. She said I could fly out and stay for a weekend, if I could get a baby-sitter for Billy, and if I could try to avoid irritating her. I’m hoping she’ll try motherhood again one day, but she says her fingers have been burned.

It’s Christmas Eve, and Gregory has been allowed out of the Correction Facility for two days because he’s been a model prisoner and because a lot of suicides are predicted for the millennium. The theory is that families prevent, rather than cause them. We decided to have a ceasefire over the holiday season, for Billy’s sake. It looked like I was being more generous than I really was, of course. After all, he didn’t know about the baby-swap, and the extent to which my family had ruined his life. I decided to let him use the spare room, which now has an
en suite
bathroom with an aubergine toilet and matching bidet. He is Billy’s father, after all. Later I’m having guests round for drinks and festive things on sticks.

     I’ve been busy preparing the turkey stuffing (apple and chestnut with ginger) for tomorrow, but in the midst of it all I stop and remember one of those tiny moments of huge significance that stay with you for ever.

     It happened this morning, when I’d finished vacuuming in the living-room. Billy and Gregory had built an impressive crenellated castle from Lego, and when by chance I found myself on my hands and knees peering through its tiny portcullis, I had a moment of sublime epiphany: a clear vision of the future, in which all my life was bright and new. Gazing down the corridor that led into the central courtyard, my heart lifted as I saw a little red soldier proudly standing guard over the castle entrance. He was wearing a crash helmet that belonged to another Lego scene – the garage one, I think. In his hand was a musket. He would keep that castle safe, you could tell, and guard the valuable furniture inside it with his life. And I realised then: I’m more in charge of things than I ever was.