Egg Dancing (5 page)

     I laughed too. He had certainly cheered me up, with his oceanic metaphor. He said he’d contact me again as soon as there was enough improvement in Ma’s state of mind to allow further visits.

     ‘Thank you so much, Doctor,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

     ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Schizophrenia is very stressful for the whole family. You all have to take it easy and above all
not feel responsible.
’

     After I’d hung up I found myself awash in self-pity and relief, and ate five biscuits rather fast.

     At seven o’clock Linda arrived with her new boyfriend: Duncan. It turned out she met him at the mental hospital. He was another regular visitor – the brother of someone autistic, or ‘blocked’, as Duncan put it. He had that sheepish, modest look that classified him as a Type One, according to the questionnaire, but puzzlingly, he wore a lot of aftershave, which is a Type Two characteristic. So tonight Linda had the best of both worlds.

     ‘Why the fuck don’t you ever have an ashtray in this place?’ Linda accused me.

     ‘Because we prefer people not to smoke here,’ said Gregory in what I call his ‘voice of authority’.

     I could tell Linda was in the mood for a stand-off as she went and fetched an eggcup from the kitchen and lit up in front of him. An hour later Ruby Gonzalez showed up and plonked herself on the sofa. I poured her a huge sherry, but she said she was only drinking fruit juice. She attacked the peanuts with gusto. There was chatter about this and that. The snow, the catalepsy outbreak in Jutland, childcare, the Fish Wars, wallpapering. I had to dash in and out of the kitchen to check the dinner. Then just when we were giving up on him, Gregory’s step-brother arrived. John lived locally and he and Greg only had each other left when it came to family, so he always filled in when we were one missing. As far as I could work out, this was what John was for. I saw no other purpose to him. A dinner-party man, with a range of ten after-dinner anecdotes and jokes, all of which I’d heard. They involved sex, farting and aeroplane journeys, mostly. It took courage for me even to look at Ruby Gonzalez. She gave me a bad feeling, like I was drowning.

     ‘You’re looking great, Ruby,’ I said to her. ‘Are you pregnant, by any chance?’ (I had to know.)

     ‘No, no,’ she said with a big julie of a smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m just fat.’

     If you believe she’s just fat, I said to Gregory later, then you’re the one with the delusions. On a success scale of one to ten, the occasion ranked at about minus eight. There was Ruby, smiling and fecund, and Linda, neurotic in my mother’s cast-offs, way too big but bunched together with a cheap belt. Her boyfriend (or her ‘boyfriend substitute’ as Gregory called him later) was silent, as Type Ones always are, and adoring. Linda called him ‘darling’ all the time, as if it was his name. John was his usual self. Over peanuts, he told Ruby the one about the arseless chicken. Later, in the kitchen, he winked at me and slapped my bottom.

     ‘How’s tricks, sister-in-law?’

     ‘I’m fine, John. Can you put this casserole on the table, please, with a mat underneath?’

     That was the extent of our conversation.

     Ruby and Gregory had a lot to say to each other. She had one of those sexual foreign accents mixed in with the twang of Croydon. She was very flirtatious for a fat woman. Or perhaps just very fat for a flirtatious one. Either way, she had a lot of nerve. It wasn’t just my husband she flirted with; it was everybody, male and female. She was nauseatingly charming, complimenting me on the food and cooing over photos of Billy and helping me take out the dishes, insinuating herself. Even the hard-nosed Linda allowed herself to be bewitched, as one professional woman sometimes is by another in a field that does not compete with hers. Perhaps I could have fallen for her too. But I held out, clinging on to a cold thing in my heart, a little shard of mistrust. My instincts rarely deceive me. We were discussing compost, of all things, when Linda decided to launch one of her attacks on Gregory – presumably to impress Duncan.

     ‘Well, I think it’s completely unethical, this Perfect Baby drug,’ she said to Gregory, out of the blue.

     ‘Isn’t it?’ she asked the room.

     When nobody answered, Duncan chimed in, ‘Yes, I mean, doesn’t society need handicapped people?’

     Which was brave of him.

     ‘No to both questions,’ Gregory replied, wiping his mouth on a napkin. ‘By the way, Linda, I didn’t realise that you were a devotee of Channel Praise.’

     This was bound to sting Linda, who loathes religion in general, and evangelism in particular. She flashed him an acidic look and muttered, ‘Of course I’m not a devotee. But the evangelicals haven’t got it all wrong.’

     She picked up her fork and began to drag it along the tablecloth like a teeny ploughshare.

     ‘What’s unethical,’ asked Gregory, ‘about wanting the best life for your child, and making sure he isn’t disadvantaged from birth? And the idea of a society
needing
the handicapped is downright absurd and masochistic. Who needs problems? Who in this room would choose to have a handicapped child for the so-called good of the community? There are other ways of doing good than encouraging stray dogs and tramps, you know.’

     Gregory was a firm believer in this. He was opposed to helping those in need directly, when they came knocking at the door. He would even turn away gypsies selling brushes, tea-towels and gardening gloves. But he wrote generous cheques twice a year to five charities.

     ‘But if all babies were perfect babies,’ said John, ‘wouldn’t the world be a pretty dull place, me old cock? Let’s face it. Think about when they grow up. All the women would be a nubile twenty-year-old Mother Teresa with great tits and all the men would be Jesus Christ with a fat wallet and a huge dong. Personally I rather like being a flawed specimen of humankind.’

     ‘Just as well,’ muttered Linda. I helped everyone to more sauce.

     ‘Not that there’s anything undersized about my meat and two veg – don’t get me wrong!’ John added in the brief silence that followed, and he laughed, whizzing his eyes round the table. I could suddenly picture him at his software sales conferences.

     ‘The Perfect Baby idea is a media distortion of the very serious work we’re trying to do,’ Gregory said tolerantly.

     Of the two brothers, he was the one with the unspoken upper hand. When the boys were thrust together in a step-family, it was because Greg’s dad had money, and John’s mum had been frail. Ruby Gonzalez was smiling a faraway smile and nodding sagely.

     ‘We’re not trying to raise a generation of saints. We’re just trying to eliminate some of the sinners.’

     ‘So what’s a sin then?’ asked Linda sharply. ‘Mental illness, for example?’

     She and Duncan exchanged a look charged with pomposity and circumstance. All those visits to Manxheath had clearly had an effect.

     ‘A sin, no. A major inconvenience to the families concerned in particular and to society as a whole, yes. Physical deformity and handicap likewise. Don’t forget that it’s already possible to abort a handicapped baby if it’s diagnosed early enough. I’ve done thousands of abortions of malformed foetuses. All this drug is doing is to flush out – to
deselect
– the less competitive specimens, often before the woman even knows she’s pregnant. Only the very highest-grade foetus will survive. We’re talking about an intelligent drug – a sorting drug. That’s why it can take years to have a baby using it. The woman may abort, in the very earliest stages, fifteen or twenty times before a foetus makes the grade. It has to pass a physical test but also an intelligence test, you see.’

     ‘A bit like for the FBI?’ asked John.

     Linda and Duncan were exchanging disapproving looks, and muttering.

     ‘By the way, Hazel,’ John said through a mouthful, ‘nice din-dins, not too salty at all, once you get accustomed.’

     ‘Well, I still can’t see anyone opting to use a drug which is going to cause miscarriages,’ I said. This was my main objection to Gregory’s research. ‘I had three before I had Billy. It’s the worst thing any woman can ever go through.’

     There was a bit of a pause then, and Gregory and Ruby exchanged a professional glance.

     ‘Well, that’s one point of view,’ Gregory said, ‘but to answer your point, and Linda’s, there are a lot of very serious-minded people who believe that, in an already over-populated world, everyone should do their best not to create unnecessary or useless or negative life. Those are the people who are going to choose this drug. They’re prepared to wait for that one child who’s got that bit extra to offer, and I salute them for it.’

     Gregory had that missionary light in his eyes, and he turned their beam on us all. No one could say my husband wasn’t intelligent. Cleverer than all of us, that’s for sure, I thought. Even Linda, who has a certificate in her loo proving she’s in the top 2 per cent. I was feeling too hot, like something was about to explode. Gregory, who was toying with his glass, suddenly looked around the table and then across at me.

     ‘Is there any more of that Sancerre, darling?’

     When I came back with a fresh bottle, I thought I saw Gregory move his leg away from Ruby’s under the table. I couldn’t be sure, but the idea of it set my heart mashing with grief and hate.

     ‘We’re living on a threatened planet, you know,’ Gregory was saying. ‘I’m proud to think that I’m doing my bit.’

     The threatened planet. The cliché of the decade. Call me selfish, but
what about my threatened marriage?
My heart was thumping too hard, the way it does when I think of those babies I lost, and the way Gregory dismisses it like it’s nothing. The way it’s as if they’re attached to me by a string, and the way it doesn’t make sense in words.

     But Linda stood up, her face red.

     ‘Come on, Duncan,’ she said, jerking her head towards the door. The gesture tugged him up from his seat. ‘We’re going.’

     There was a pause as this sank in. Linda likes scenes, or rather she likes to make a show of her principles by boycotting this and that. She’s a crusader by nature; a splinter group of one. (‘I
oppose
cabbage,’ she told Ma when she was six.) She nagged me for years about buying factory-farmed meat and not bothering to put my empty bottles in the bottle bank. ‘Can’t you see it’s political?’ she’d say, smashing them in. She had clearly impressed Duncan; he’d gone the sickly fawn colour of wheatgerm.

     ‘I take it that you two won’t be queuing up at Greg’s clinic for a Perfect Baby then,’ said John, but the joke cracked on silence. We watched while they bustled about with coats and Linda put on her Leningrad hat.

     Gregory called out rudely as they were leaving, ‘You could always stay and argue it through rationally, you know, Linda. Or is that too taxing for your intellect?’

     Linda slammed the door behind them both, and Gregory laughed. Ruby Gonzalez smiled a smug smile and patted his arm.

     ‘There will always be people who take that view,’ she said. ‘They have a right to it. I respect that.’

     Then she leaned across the table and patted my arm, too, so that I wouldn’t get jealous.

     ‘What a pity for them,’ she said. ‘They’ll miss out on a second helping of your really most delicious lemon mousse. I know I ought to be on a diet, but do you think I could have some more?’

     Which John took as his cue for the bulimia joke.

     When Ruby and John had finally gone I didn’t even bother clearing away.

     ‘You do it,’ I told Greg. ‘I did the cooking. That was my contribution.’

     To my surprise, he didn’t say anything, but started collecting the dirty plates and glasses.

     I went to the living-room and slumped in front of the television. They were showing a re-run of one of the Reverend Carmichael’s shows.
Holy Hour,
it’s called. Channel Praise repeats them throughout the day, with Christian game shows and competitions and Church-approved chart music in between.

     ‘Meddle ye not in the will of the Lord,’ the Reverend Carmichael’s voice buzzed. ‘And the Lord’s will tonight is that ye all phone in our special dial-a-prayer number with a loyalty pledge to our saviour.’

     He fell to his knees and began speaking in tongues, repeating a word that sounded a bit like ‘taramasalata’ over and over again, with little hiccups for punctuation. He was everywhere – on billboards outside Jaycote’s Park, on chat shows, in newspaper photo-features and on the front cover of his book,
God Alone Knows
, launched to coincide with the opening of Channel Praise.
Holy Hour
had only been going six months, but the Reverend’s sweaty face and poppy eyes already felt like an institution. The tabloid press adored him because he was happy to provide stunts: Vernon bungee-jumping off the Severn Bridge, Vernon rowing a canoe down rapids to help children with cancer, Vernon weeping at the funeral of a grandmother raped and murdered by hooligans. Vernon at Easter, sporting bleeding stigmata on his hands. He quickly became known as ‘the Raving Rev’, and a poll among women showed that we found him supremely attractive. ‘Vernon the Turn-On’ was the headline verdict – and he obliged by posing shirtless, his hairy pot-belly in unashamed profile, to raise money for Sheep in Need. I don’t know why I was watching him. Perhaps because I knew how much Gregory hated his show. There was something mesmeric about it. The money was pouring in. Glorene from Winchester pledged £1,000, with a prayer asking the Lord to help her with her financial troubles. Slowly, I drank gin. An hour later Greg put his head round the door and asked if I was coming to bed.