Read Egg Dancing Online

Authors: Liz Jensen

Egg Dancing (9 page)

BOOK: Egg Dancing
10.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

   

I didn’t go into his study much, even to hoover and dust. It wasn’t my territory, and I felt like an intruder. A huge and terrible feeling of doubt rose inside me like vomit. The study smelt of marker pens and other stationery, and a thin light filtered through the drawn blinds. There were files on every shelf, marked neatly along their spines: ‘IVF’, ‘Amniocentesis’, ‘Chronic Infertility’, ‘Over-fertility’, ‘Genetic Systems’, ‘Genetic Patterning’. There was a box of discs, and I spent a while hunting through until I found the one marked ‘Genetic Choice’. It’s a funny word, choice. It seems to have changed since I was a kid. You can have anything you like, Ma said, doling out tea. Fish pie or fish pie. You choose. Now Gregory has created another choice, that has nothing to do with fish pie. That’s progress.

     The body is 80 per cent water. Mine felt like it then, with just my skin holding it in. I didn’t want to know. So what, if my husband and Ruby Gonzalez were cooking something together? And so what, if the thing they were cooking was, for example, a perfect baby? Never, since Ma had been certified, had I felt so close to the State of Absolute Delusion myself. And there in my mind’s eye was Greg, telling a psychiatrist (Dr Stern, perhaps) about Hazel’s ‘unfortunate delusions’ and about her needing treatment like her Ma, all the stress she’s been under, thinking she’s invisible, thinking Dr Gonzalez is the Virgin Mary  . . .

     I’d done a computer course once, as part of business studies, but my knowledge was out of date and it took me a long time to get into Greg’s system, and, once in, to find my way to the right document. Scrolling through, there was a lot I didn’t understand; graphs and charts and genetic maps. The text in between was written in the impersonal, ponderous language of science that I remembered from school. (A bull’s retina was dissected. A Bunsen burner was placed beneath. A current was passed through. A scalpel was applied to.) There was a whole rat section, which concluded that ‘the difficulties involved in assessing the vagaries of rat personality rendered the results impossible to quantify in a satisfactory manner’. Perfect-looking rats had been bred, it seemed, but Gregory couldn’t tell whether or not they had ‘low-grade’, ‘average’, ‘promising’, or ‘class one’ personalities. I laughed at that. Poor Greg, trying to create a Jesus Christ rat. That bit was dated three Christmases ago. I remembered him being gloomy then, about rats. Obsessed. He even thought my Yule log tasted of rats. He’d been up to his ears in them.

     Then I got to the bit about ‘Baby B’. I understood that bit. It was quite simple. Not just the language of it, but the idea. It was too obvious, and I should have guessed. Because you can’t live with a man like Greg, all bottled up like a specimen, without there being a secret sickness in one of you, can you? A regular guy, you think, just a bit introverted, but then they all are, aren’t they, scientists? They have that reputation. I’ve seen them together sometimes, at conferences, standing in little groups stabbing at mushroom quiche on paper plates, their heads angled questioningly. They want to understand things, to know how things work. When my sewing machine broke down, Greg took it apart. Hundreds of tiny cogs, all ranged on the pine table, and screws and nuts and little pieces that probably don’t even have names. And he worked out what was wrong and fixed it and put it all back together again, and when he’d finished and the sewing machine worked he had a look of joy more profound than on our wedding day. I realised then that they need to master a thing, to get at its insides and see how it works and then modify it so that maybe it works better. Maybe perfectly. A sewing machine, a body, a mind. They want to do it better than the manufacturer.

     What I’m getting at is, it turned out that Greg had already used the drug on a woman.

     Me.

 

The mother was administered the drug – without her knowledge – over a period of thirty-nine months. During this time she experienced three mid-term miscarriages and an unknown number of early ‘spontaneous’ abortions (all, presumably, of low-grade foetuses) before a satisfactory conception in June 1996 resulting in the birth of a healthy baby, a boy, on 5 March 1997. The boy is known to the study as Baby B. Early post-natal tests showed a baby of over-average birth weight with no remarkable features.

 

That red cloud again: I recognised it from before. My first thought was that it was absurd, ridiculous and almost funny that our son should be called ‘Baby B’. Was I therefore Mother H? Was Gregory Father G? Or Father Gregory G? It was suitably Catholic-sounding. I actually giggled quite a lot, in a light-headed, shivering way, before I cried. Then, slowly, it began to sink in. Billy was an experiment, like any other, but he was not kept in a cage with rat-droppings. (
Sperm was introduced. An ovule was impregnated
.) The typescript danced in front of my eyes. My boy. I’d thought he was Baby Ordinary. I was proud of how normal he was. How, when he was born, everything was there. Having lost three embryos –

     Gregory had used a medical term for them: ‘blasted eggs’.

     It turned out that they were part of the experiment too. The Genetic Choice Programme referred to my little ghosts on a string as ‘natural fallout’. In hospital, where I’d had their remains scraped out by dilatation and curettage, they’d called them ‘the products of conception’. (And I’d thought, in those early years, they were the fruits of passion.) I was lucky, it seemed, only to have lost three. It might have been ten, according to the projected wastage statistics.

     There was more about Baby B, but I had dried up. I had to sit back and drink some water, half a glass, before I could read it.

 

Baby B was breast-fed for six months, and pursued an average growth and learning curve. Follow-ups at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen months showed no features that distinguish Baby B in any way, physically or mentally, from an average healthy male baby of his age. At this stage of the trial of GR218 it is therefore apparent that the drug has had no visible or measurable effect on the baby produced by this type of positive screening, and we conclude that stricter screening criteria be incorporated in the drug in future testing. Furthermore, in a future trial, a change of mother is recommended. Baby B’s mother has a satisfactory IQ level, but it is not higher than average.

 

So the breeding stock had not come up to the mark: Gregory was going to have to identify another silly goose to lay him a golden egg. And it’s true I must have a defective IQ, because if I’d been intelligent as, say, Dr Ruby Gonzalez, I’d have seen all this coming. I’d have guessed a long time ago.

     I carried on reading. There were some more mathematical equations and a series of graphs with Baby B’s head measurements. I noticed my hand on the plastic mouse that controlled the screen was sweating and dead-looking, like in horror films set in catacombs. This can’t get any worse, I kept saying to myself. But it did. At the very end of the document there was a short paragraph in a different style. It was less scientific, less balanced. It might have been written after a couple of drinks, by an exhausted man. In it, Gregory had added the sting. The bit I’ll never forgive him for. The bit that, as I swallowed the words, turned my tongue to ash.

 

Of some concern. The possibility that GR218 has nevertheless had some effect, other than that targeted. No signs to indicate this is the case. As yet. Possible, note possible, that GR218 has selected and enhanced genetic features or functions not factored into the system. E.g. rogue gene, not physical as far aware, poss. psychiatric? Suggest continued assessment of Baby B. Attempt to determine whether this the case. Of crucial importance to further trials of GR218. Also of concern to parents of Baby B: maternal grandmother diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Some apparent, note apparent, evidence child–grandmother telepathic link, one or two-way unclear: stress, hypothesis only. Evidence rogue gene re-enhanced by process?

 

And that was all. No word of remorse. The screen did not explode. No blood poured from it. There was nothing.

     We’d both wanted a baby so much. Not when we were first married, I suppose – not in the days when it was a question of newspapers in bed till midday, trips to Venice and Carpetland, frequent sex, tasteful, pricey living-room curtains and glass coffee-table buying. All the usual upwardly mobile newlywed stuff. I was working in the client charter section of customer services at Lockwood’s, and they’d recently made me a junior manager, so I had self-esteem, as well. We bought the house in Oakshott Road and held a party. I was a pretty woman with a talented husband. We had money.

     I realised that I didn’t have to be a mother like Ma. And with Gregory running the clinic, I was in the best hands. Curiously, when it came to it, Gregory hadn’t taken the miscarriages as badly as I had. Given all the monitoring he’d done, I’d expected him almost to see them as a sort of failure on his part, but he was very philosophical.

     ‘It happens more than you think,’ he’d said, consoling me in my Nil-by-Mouth hospital bed.

     His faith was quite unshaken.

     Hindsight: why’s it never there when you need it?

     I remembered that, when I was pregnant with Billy, and past the stage of worrying about another miscarriage, I’d been happy. I’d smelt pungently hormonal, and I’d spent hours contemplating my inside-out navel, perched like a landmark on my huge belly. Gregory was excited but distanced at the same time. He became more fanatical than ever about my monitoring. He took weights and measurements every day. (And here they were now, in the file.) And then, when I pushed Billy out, shot into a mad orbit of pain and screaming with a dry throat, Gregory put him gently to my nipple and said, ‘A perfect baby boy.’

     I was allowed to hold him for ten minutes, a strange, bloody organ snuffling at my breast in the place where my heart used to be, before Gregory whisked him off for tests. They must have depressed him, those first results. He managed to hide it – or perhaps I was just too elated to notice.

     Had he ever seen our son as anything other than a failed experiment? He was always a loving father, but I never understood the pity that seemed mixed in with the tenderness. And though I developed, early on, a gut feeling that Greg felt disappointed in Billy, I never voiced it. When he spoke to Billy harshly, it was with a reproach in his voice that was in no way justified by whatever misdemeanour Billy had perpetrated. I put that down to Gregory’s high standards, his punishing work schedule. But now it was clear: Billy was living proof that Genetic Choice hadn’t worked. ‘Pig-ordinary’, Greg called him once, when he was only a few weeks old.

     ‘I’m glad he’s pig-ordinary,’ I’d said. ‘Isn’t that all any mother has the right to hope for? That her child has a head, two arms and two legs? And all the right organs in the right places? And can smile?’

     ‘Yes, of course,’ Greg said, ruffling the baby’s head in a crude sort of way.

     And he cleared his throat and gave a tight, bright, horrible smile which made me flinch. I was about to say something about it when Billy vomited down my back and matters moved on.

     My head was reeling as I gulped more water, this time straight from the tap, in the bathroom next to the study. Billy. Baby B. Me. ‘The mother’. For the first time in my life I drank all the water I wanted. Little more than a pint, I suppose, but it felt like three gallons. I’ll get intoxicated like my father, I thought. Drown from the inside. But finally I couldn’t swallow any more, and as the cold water splashed in my face I felt my brain swivel into a strange mode. With hands that were still shaking, I took out the disc and put it back neatly, exactly where I’d found it. It was a quarter to eleven, so I had just under forty-five minutes left before I had to fetch Billy from the Busy Bee.

     I’m not proud of what I did next, but I did it. What else was there to do? In the worst extremities, I’ve always resorted to hooliganistic violence – a small souvenir of behaviour I’d been party to in the State of Absolute Delusion. Driven by an instinct that seemed to come from somewhere you retch from, I began to smash up the house.

     I started in the kitchen. Bottles, jars. Oil and kidney beans and rice and apple-and-ginger barbecue sauce. I even found the bicarbonate of soda – I’d been looking for it for months – but I smashed the jar on the floor anyway. Months. It was strangely satisfying. Anyway.

     My heart was pounding and I could hear myself shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. I got more inventive in the living-room. I took a whole fistful of Billy’s wax crayons and wrote, ‘YOU BASTARD’ on the pristine white wall. (‘White is the only colour for an internal wall,’ Gregory’s mother had told him on her deathbed. The hospital walls had been a liverish green.) I emptied two packets of mustard and cress seeds on the carpet and watered them. Then I wrote, ‘FRY IN HELL, RUBY GONZALEZ’ on the door and set fire to Greg’s favourite childhood memento: a church he’d built from matchsticks at the age of fourteen, before he lost his faith. It burnt beautifully, but I doused it with water just before the end, so he could see what the ashes consisted of. I’d get to the Airfix later. With relish I smashed the photograph of his dead mother who had left me, in her will, the two gallstones she’d had removed in 1989. It was the only photo of her he had. They say that no one should do that, destroy mementos of loved ones. But I was almost enjoying myself, killing his past, killing mine, killing our present. I found a tube of tomato purée and wrote, ‘OUR LIFE IS A LIE’ on the pale blue Persian rug which had been a wedding present from Don and Jade. Then I remembered the Black and Decker power saw that Gregory kept in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d always wanted a go with it. It made a hell of a noise as I got to work on all the pine. I amputated two and a half table legs, so the whole thing crashed into a slope like a Dali. I went to work on the chairs next. Legs, back seats. Little pieces, big pieces. The dresser. In half. I swear, I cut it dead in half. And crashing down it all came, with all those carefully chosen bits of china, all those nicky-nackies that tell you you’ve been places and done things on holiday. Have you ever sawn pine? God, the smell. Pure heaven. It was worth it for the smell alone, and the hellish noise that hurt so much it was like I was actually sawing my own head off. There was something savage and free about wrecking that home I’d worked for. It was like a primitive rite, in which you create one part of yourself by destroying another. I was just starting on the bathroom, emptying bottles of pills and smashing up all the mirrors (I gashed my hand and wrist on some glass, but didn’t notice till later) when Jane-next-door rushed in and grabbed me by the hair and dragged me out of the bathroom. She must have used the spare key we’d given her.

BOOK: Egg Dancing
10.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Good Day In Hell by J.D. Rhoades
Madness by Marya Hornbacher
Calcutta by Moorhouse, Geoffrey
Spiral by Levine, Jacqueline
Texas Hellion by Silver, Jordan