Egg Dancing (6 page)

     ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’m thinking.’

     ‘I didn’t think watching Channel Praise was conducive to that,’ he said, seeing the Reverend Carmichael’s moon face filling the TV screen. He hadn’t realised the state I was in. I was choking on a wodge of misery.

     ‘Just go away!’ I yelled at him.

     I
had
been thinking. Horrible thoughts that couldn’t be suppressed. Gregory looked shocked. He wasn’t used to bad behaviour. Nor was I. We’d always been polite.

     ‘Darling Hazel, you must calm down.’

     He said it with the sort of gentle and reasonable voice police negotiators use to stop crazed people jumping off high buildings.

     ‘Your menstrual chart tells me this isn’t a great time of the month for  – ’

     He ducked as I flung my half-empty glass of gin at him, missing his ear by inches.

THREE

Snip, snip.

     High in the glass and steel tower that is the administrative headquarters of the Ministry’s Edible Fats Policy Division, the Assistant Manager (Butter Sub-Unit) is enthroned behind a broad desk in an office with carpet-tiles the colour of dried blood and walls the colour of powdered coffee whitener. She is clipping her nails. Linda Sugden finishes her right hand, the trickiest, and starts on the left, her tongue protruding slightly as she concentrates on obtaining a blunt, business-like oval. Her profile is framed in the light from the window behind her, which shows only the grimy blanket of air that the weatherman on
Good Morning Gridiron
has been cheerily referring to as ‘our old friend, that depressing, unshiftable bit of cloud cover’. It’s been stuck there for days. Far below, Gridiron hums its city tune, while above the swathe of grey cumulo-nimbus, an aeroplane scrapes a chalky path, and fades to a dot.

     It is nine o’clock, and Linda, normally a powerhouse of activity, has neither sorted her in-tray nor drunk her first cup of terrible Ministry tea. All she has done so far is to smoke three cigarettes. Like wedding-day rice, the nail-clippings lie scattered at her feet. She straightens her back, adjusts her focus and continues methodically. Two snips for the thumb.
Snip, snip.
The index.
Snip.
The middle finger.
Snip
. The ringless ring finger. There is a quick knock at the door, and before Linda has time to answer, it opens, letting in a harsh blast of fluorescent light from the corridor. A figure flits in and closes the door softly. Linda tightens her jaw and does not look up.
Snip
. The little finger. Finished.

     Linda believes in short nails.

     ‘Morning, Miss Sugden,’ murmurs Trish, her PA, who believes in long vampy ones, red-varnished acrylic extensions, and special glues for emergency mending. Trish who has small muscular legs clad in oyster Lycra, and who now wafts gusts of Opium from her tart little cleavage. Trish who owns no fewer than six leotards and who for two years was an air stewardess and is therefore used to heights such as this, the twenty-first floor, a work environment on stilts.

     ‘Nice night last night then?’ she asks routinely.

     ‘No,’ Linda scowls, still not looking up, knowing she won’t like what she will see. ‘I had a row with my brother-in-law over this genetic drug he’s working on.’

     She does not mention that the evening was finished off with a second row, this one with Duncan, whose sexual incompetence is hitting a strangely familiar sea-bed of hopelessness.

     ‘I’m not a
charity
,’ she had hissed at him this morning after yet another failure.

     ‘It takes two,’ he had said, as usual.

     ‘That’s the tango, not sex,’ she had snapped. ‘I don’t
have
four hours.’

     She’d slept badly, too. There’d been terrible dreams, culminating in a vile, half-waking nightmare about stirring a cauldron of boiling water and charcoal lumps, preparing a grey ‘vitamin stew’ for a herd of wildebeest from the Gridiron Environment Centre to eat for its midday meal. She had been put in charge of the project, and a deadline was involved. She had woken in a pitch of anxiety, with the dream clambering across her skin. She had stormed out to work, forgetting to apply underarm deodorant, and accidentally-on-purpose smashing a milk bottle on the doorstep, which she had left for Duncan to clear up.

     Now, with controlled violence, she pokes at a cuticle with the claw end of the nail file, while Trish slaps sheets of paper in and out of trays. A minute later, thinking aloud, and unable to stop herself, Linda blurts, ‘Which is worse, a man who starts but can’t for the life of him finish, or one who finishes before he’s started?’

     And realises immediately that she’s said the wrong thing, and it’ll be round the whole of Ag and Fish by coffee break.

     ‘I’m not sure I’m getting your drift,’ replies Trish. ‘Started what?’ And her pencilled-in eyebrows vault to questioning arcs high in her forehead.

     ‘Well, you know.
It
,’ says Linda, unable to find a way of reversing the conversation, her face hidden as she stows away the manicure equipment in the bottom drawer of her desk.

     ‘It?’

     Linda’s voice, still invisible and somewhere close to floor level, articulates, ‘
It
. The sexual act. Intercourse. So-called lovemaking. Sexual congress, physical union.’ And then, with distaste, ‘Bonking.’

     ‘Oh,
that
,’ replies Trish, catching sight of a Boeing 747. There’d been Mile Highs, foreign hotels, flight captains called Jim or Roger, and the friendly clink of G and T in her flying days. Cabin crew, doors to manual.

     ‘Dunno, really. Depends how long you want it to last, I s’pose. Depends on your attitude to it.’

     (Miss Sugden, she tells Chrissie later, looked like she needed a bit of help. There are some people, aren’t there, who you just can’t imagine
a.
in the nude,
b.
showing their body to a person of the opposite persuasion, and
c.
actually doing
that.
)

     ‘Go on,’ says Linda, lighting her fourth cigarette with relief.

     ‘Well to be quite frank I just let them get on with it at their own pace, myself,’ Trish says, perching herself on the arm of a chair and gyrating her pretty ankle to reveal delicate bones. ‘I like to turn a man on, don’t get me wrong, but at the end of the day I can take it or leave it, because I’m big-hearted.’

     The left ankle stops revolving and the right one starts. Linda watches, fascinated.

     ‘I don’t care what he does or how he does it,’ Trish is saying, ‘as long as I get the champagne before and the cuddles afterwards, and a bit of respect in the morning. I’m a Libra, I think I told you, so fair’s fair’s my motto.’

     Linda’s eyes widen in disbelief, then narrow in smoke, as Trish’s little goldfish mouth clarifies, ‘It’s all in the stars, isn’t it?’

     Linda is a galaxy away. For a moment, there are no words she can reach. Then, with a small brain wave, she musters, ‘I’m an Aries.’

     ‘Well,’ says Trish triumphantly. ‘There you go then. Ambition and stubbornness. Setting your sights too high. Typical.’

     Linda’s jaw tightens, padlocking her face shut. Past embarrassment, they both shuffle papers about for a minute, and search the sky for relief. In the distance, a fire alarm rings. Then Linda stubs out her cigarette, reaches for her biro and lets out a sigh.

     ‘Get me a cup of tea, please,’ she says briskly. ‘And could you tell Norma in Phase Two Marg. that I’m fed up with her memos. Her spelling is appalling, especially in view of her much-vaunted degree in English Language and Literature.’

     Trish skims out on her sexy little legs, flinging the
Gridiron Echo
on Linda’s desk. Trish has already asked for a transfer. Nothing against Miss Sugden
in herself
, she’d explained to the personnel officer, her mascara gaze frank. It’s just that I prefer men. Even if they’re wankers, you know. I just know how to handle them. I can’t deal with Miss Sugden. I think she may have Mercury in her Ascendant or something.

     ‘Champagne,’ Linda mutters, attacking her in-tray with venom. ‘Cuddles afterwards. That girl comes from fucking Mars.’

     She rips open letters, crushes and hurls the envelopes at the bin, signs memos in threatening black ink. Writes a sarcastic letter to deal with a long-standing débâcle in Polyunsaturated. Makes a brief but effective phone call to Jonathan Higgins
vis-à-vis
his sorry performance at Wednesday’s Rancidity Forum planning meeting. Writes a list. Sits back, breathes in deeply, exhales, waits for her tea, reaches for the newspaper. And freezes suddenly in concentration. The photograph on the front page is of a man with a moon face, wearing a peaked cap inscribed with the words ‘God’s Gift’.

     ‘CULT REV IN TOWN’, says the headline.

     Linda stares at the photograph. The eyes are shaded by the cap, but the smile is the same fat-lipped Mummy’s-boy smile she has seen on television, and more recently on billboards around Gridiron City. Inside, on page five, is a full-page ad inviting worshippers to join the Reverend Carmichael in Jaycote’s Park tonight. Glancing up to check the door, Linda speed-reads the ‘Message to the Lonely’, doodles a moustache on the evangelist’s upper lip, and gives what Hazel calls ‘one of her snorts’.

     Miles up, outside, the atmosphere spins and waits, while beneath, below ozone, like a bottom on a seat, the weather shifts uneasily. The cloud sinks and broods over Gridiron. The flattened city hugs the planet, a chemical trap.

     At midday, Linda is in the supermarket. She is buying eggs.

     ‘Seen the size threes anywhere, luv?’ asks a wind-cheatered blob next to her in the aisle.

     The smell of furniture polish seems to leak from his glands.

     ‘Between size four and size two,’ snaps Linda, spurning the attempted pick-up. ‘Confusing, isn’t it?’

     And turns her back. Linda has selected five packets of free range. She checks the date-stamp and her mouth twists bleakly. LAID ON JANUARY 20TH. Call it a ‘project’.

     At the checkout, she helps herself to a packet of Love Hearts from the sweetie counter. Call it ‘the greed of emptiness and the emptiness of greed’.

That evening, sitting on a plastic seat in the auditorium, Leningrad hat resting on her lap heavy as a dead cat, knitting needles devouring a ball of mohair, another dream comes back to Linda. It’s the one before the one about the wildebeest. The one she’d forgotten. She and Ma and Hazel are walking along a bumpy road looking for a giant rock which is somehow extremely significant, but there are no signposts. The rain begins to wash away the road, and Hazel’s husband Gregory appears naked with a platter of offal he’s cooked, but he refuses to say whether it’s factory-farmed. Only Hazel eats any, and with such a look of smugness it makes you puke. The dream ends in something sexual and disturbing, which sets Linda off knitting even more furiously. She does not notice people squeezing past her as the auditorium fills, or Carmichael entering. Or even that, suddenly, everyone except her is cheering – until the woman sitting next to her, who has a bad case of eczema, gives Linda a violent nudge.

     ‘Someone else could have had your seat if you’re not interested. They’re turning them away at the gate, you know.’

     ‘I can do what I like,’ hisses Linda. But she puts down her knitting (Ma called it her ‘habit with wool’) and reaches for something from her briefcase, before fixing a long hard gaze on the preacher.

     Words are plopping from his mouth in dollops.

     ‘Welcome tonight, my children. Everyone got a seat now? Everyone comfy?’

     Linda recoils. From where she is sitting, the evangelist is the height and breadth of a patio shrub. As he paces about the stage, his purple robes flap in the breeze, showing white trainers beneath. He has a tiny microphone clipped to his dog-collar and carries a silver tambourine.

     ‘Is this your first time, sir? Yes? Ah, so you’re a virgin, so to speak! Yo! Almighty Alrightey!’

     He jingles his tambourine at a man in the audience. A giggle scutters through the crowd, and the woman next to Linda nudges her and whispers, ‘Quite racy, isn’t he?’

     Linda gives a dead smile that shows teeth.

     ‘Welcome children, welcome all of you. Hallelujah.’

     The accent is transatlantic, and there is a faint reverberation on the microphone as he speaks. Charisma loads his words like extra ketchup.

     ‘God’s with us today, right?’ (A cheer.) ‘I didn’t hear you, boys and girls! Is God with us today?’

     ‘Yeah!’ roars the crowd, and the eczematous woman next to Linda adds, ‘Alrightey!’

     Linda shifts in her seat and nestles something in the belly of the hat.

     ‘Who wants a miracle today?’ yells the Reverend Carmichael.

     ‘We do!’ chants the crowd, and the woman next to Linda begins to call, ‘mi-ra-cle, mi-ra-cle!’

     Others near by take up the cry, and soon the whole of Jaycote’s Park is ringing with pantomime yells. A chorus of gobbledegook sets up at the back, mixed in with Hallelujahs and Praise-the-Lords.