Mantrapped (16 page)

Too bloody right I haven't, thinks Trisha. What am I, a slave? What did your last one die of?

Trisha pushes open the door to the stairs. She has to ease a half-unpacked box out of the way to get it open. The room is full of cardboard boxes and bin bags: she can hardly get to the cooker to make a cup of tea. Where is she going to put everything? Bin bags are depressing by their very nature, colour, texture. They resemble nothing in the growing, living world. 'I didn't quite catch that,' Trisha calls down to Mrs Kovac, though she can hear well enough. 'Some stupid idiot's coming round to collect the mattress-cover,' shrieks the other. 'I need it down here straight away.'

Trisha goes back into the flat, and finds the mattress-cover. She has already levered off five of the melted buttons and replaced them with new cheap but metal ones; there are five to go. She takes her time. She hears altercations from below. Fury boils up in her. She starts down the stairs and meets Peter on the way up. She thinks he is rather attractive but she doesn't have time for that kind of nonsense any more, and anyway she wants to give Mrs Kovac a piece of her mind. By the time she gets to the bottom of the stairs she is feeling faint.

Trisha sits down on the bottom stair. What is the matter with her? She is staring at a man's shoe. It is on the end of her leg. How did that get there? She can see things very clearly, sharply defined. Her eyes seem to be wider open than normal. She feels different but cannot quite make out how. She has dropped the mattress-cover on to the stairs. It looks ordinary and everyday, a piece of linen fabric of the kind that never folds completely flat and is a nuisance to have around, but nothing remarkable. What a stupid thing, what a stupid piece of fabric, to be the source of such a fuss. The smell of urine is strong, too strong for comfort. She should not be sitting on these filthy stairs. She stands up. The man's shoe is still on the end of her foot. It is a good, expensive shoe. She bends to do up the lace which after the manner of thin, round, expensive laces tends to undo itself. Those are not her hands either: hers are soft and white and tender: these are knobbly and brown and have hairy patches on the knuckles. They couldn't thread a needle. The hands could bring pleasure, she can see that, but they are not hers. So whose hands are they? The fingers move up to touch her chin. She can't stop them. Curiosity seems part of her. The skin she feels is firm but prickly. A young male chin, recently shaved, but now reasserting a beard. Her crotch feels unfamiliar. She feels for it. It's bumpy, something bulky beneath fabric. She snatches the hand away: she is being indelicate. It comes to her that she is a man. The mind is having to work overtime, really hard, to make sense of the signals it is receiving, and as soon as it receives them it rejects them. She shuts her eyes. So long as she does not see she is a man she need not be a man.

In the good days Rollo once took Trisha and Spencer to see a crop circle. There were four circles of squashed corn in the corner of a flourishing field of grain, arranged in a rectangle. One of the branches of the tree above was torn and damaged. Oh yes, she thought without surprise at the time, that's obvious, a flying saucer has landed here. That's what the four engines would do to when they landed, flattening the grain beneath. The broken bit of branch is where it took off again. Only then did she remember there was no such thing as a flying saucer. The mind likes to make sense of what it sees, or else alarm ensues. Wake in the night when there's a bump on the bed: fall asleep as soon as you've told yourself it was only the cat. You don't get up to check. The mind will take risks, but only so many. Two bumps and only one cat, and you're out there with the poker, flailing.

Two male shoes on the end of her feet, and she knows she is a man. But out of whose eyes is she looking? She needs a mirror.

She sees that the other woman now standing at the top of the stairs is perplexed and pale, looking down at her. She has curly, reddish hair, rather inexpertly hennaed. Why so pale? Is she ill? She looks familiar. She could have sworn it was a man who passed her on the stairs, rather young and fanciable. What is going on? Is this an out-of-body experience? Is she dying? The woman on the top of the stairs topples and falls. She has fainted. Her mouth is open. It looks ugly, but at least she has white fillings not the old black kind. When Trisha won the lottery and had money to burn she had all the mercury fillings taken out. All the same, the woman wearing her clothes would look better if she shut her mouth. She badly needs a face-lift, too. Her chin flops into her neck. Trisha goes to the woman's aid but, leaping up the stairs, finds balancing difficult. Her body is weighted wrongly. And why is she wearing chinos? Why are her hands so large? They are definitely not hers. She would have plucked those dark hairs out one by one.

Mrs Kovac calls up the stairs.

'Trisha? He's coming up. I couldn't stop the bastard. Don't give that bloody cover back if he doesn't pay up. I wouldn't put it past him. Twenty-seven pounds seventy-five, or it comes off your wages.'

Hang on a moment, thinks Trisha. Mrs Kovac's charging him twenty-seven pounds seventy-five? Cleaning would be seven pounds seventy-five, okay, but that leaves twenty for the buttons. She pays me two quid. That's just not on. And anyway, Trisha thinks, I won the
lottery
. I cannot be spoken to in this way by this woman.'

Trisha finds her voice.

'Oh shut up you old bag,' she shouts, and the voice from her mouth is deep and powerful. She rather likes it.

The girl who looks like an older version of herself opens her eyes, looks up, and passes out again. Trisha drags her into the flat by her familiar shoes and shuts the door behind her, looks in the mirror without more ado and discovers that she is indeed a man.

Doralee waits

The olive oil in the bottom of the pan grows cold. The couscous, partly cooked, swells and grows stodgy. It will be inedible. A whole hour passes. Peter does not return. Doralee finds a box of chocolates and eats the lot. She feels nervous. It is a long time since Doralee waited like this for a man. On the whole men wait for Doralee. She blames Peter for taking such a long time and driving her to chocolate. It was absurd. She did not want it, did not like it, was not hungry. It was not even organic. It will give her spots and make her fat. Really she should not have chocolates in the house at all. Something like this always happened. Someone bought them for Peter for his last birthday: they would not have had the courage to offer them to Doralee. She would regard it as an attack. One of Doralee's few fears is that she will take after her mother, who was a reasonable size until she had Doralee and then never managed to lose the weight again, if she was ever trying, and just put on more and more and more. Size 22. It is inconceivable. An embarrassment. 'But at least it means she won't get married again,' says Peter.

No one wants mothers to remarry. Besides being rather a disgusting idea it complicates matters of inheritance. The court gave Ruby the house when Graham ran off with his yoga teacher, as was only reasonable. It is a very pleasant old house, in its own grounds, which was once a rectory. The church next door is not the quaint heritage site it used to be, being topped with a mobile phone aerial, and having had its pews removed, and the bongo drums and the chanting make it a noisy place on a Sunday morning - which is not good for property prices - but the rectory is still worth at least half a million. She can't expect much, of course, since there are six siblings, but she has friends whose mothers have remarried, and the new husband tends to end up with everything if anything dreadful happens. Ruby's layer of insulating fat at least protects her family from this kind of complication. If Ruby ends up in a nursing home and the house has to be sold to pay the fees, and all the money gets used up before the government steps in to pay, so be it. That's life. But the weight Ruby carries at least isn't going to increase her chances of longevity: there may be some inheritance left for the children. Doralee doesn't like thinking in this way about her own mother but you have to be realistic. It is really difficult to save.

Peter's mother Adrienne is thin as a rake and always looks good in little suits and scarves, but has no suitors, which is a relief to her family. She keeps her eyes lowered and does not lift them to meet the eyes of men, other than to stare them out at business meetings, asserting her dominance in decision-making. All her erotic energy and softness got used up in her early twenties when she married Peter's father. When he died there was not much left for anyone else, even the boys. Adrienne had a hysterectomy after a cancer scare and the doctors will not give her hormones and her skin is dry but at least she is thin and wears her clothes well. Adrienne has a lot to be proud of, and was well provided for by her husband's insurance, but that dies when she does. All the more reason for Peter to save.

And where is Peter? Doralee feels sick. It is probably the chocolates. Most were marzipan. She does not like marzipan. Why then did she eat them? She does not understand herself. She hopes she is not pregnant, and catching herself hoping it, feels mean. Peter wants a child, her mother wants a grandchild, so does Adrienne, on balance. Doralee had imagined not getting married would save her from this kind of family pressure, but it hasn't. Another person growing and growing inside her and then bursting out of her? It is an appalling idea, yet how calmly others take it, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. But it isn't, it's primitive and bizarre. Just because it happens in nature doesn't make it right. She is not an animal. It will damage her body and lower her income. She doubts that they can do key-hole caesareans: if she is pregnant she will be left with a scar. It is not pain that frightens her, pain is in the head and leaves no marks, but knives cut flesh. Ruby had a caesarean with the twins, and her wrinkled, stretched, scarred, fat and muscle-less stomach is still a horror. Doralee thinks she will have to go to the bathroom and make herself throw up. But her throat and stomach seem to have gone into a state of stasis. Tickle as much as you like and nothing happens. She coughs and retches but no product is delivered. She weeps.

Tomorrow she must go to Heather's baby shower after work and pretend to envy her. Though already Heather, at seven months, has grown sleepy and vague and vast, and there is nothing whatsoever to envy her for. Heather is indecently proud of the way the baby's movements can be seen under her dress; Doralee thinks the foetus would be better sedated but has too much sense to say so. You are meant to admire insensate growth, for some reason. The blind searching movements remind her of what Peter's penis does sometimes in his sleep at night when he turns towards her and embraces her.

She will wear the black dress with the thin shoulder straps - it rolls up into almost nothing and can be just shaken out and slipped on in a second: she hates the way her colleagues try to party themselves up in the toilets by just putting on a necklace, slapping on more mascara over old and hoping for the best. If Peter manages to get the dress back from the bitch at the dry-cleaners. There seem to be more and more people like that around - rude, unhelpful and officious, with no idea of service, let alone making a profit. The rules of the game more important than the game. Perhaps there was an article in that?

Perhaps she should take over the couscous, but it needs to be made fresh. Leave it to keep warm and it goes to stodge: it ought to come from the pan fluffy and white, the tiny grains separated. Ruby won't have the stuff in the house, saying you can do anything you need by way of carbohydrate with old cold potatoes. (This is no doubt why Peter and Doralee eat couscous so often.) But she's hungry. She no longer feels pregnant. It will be all right: she can continue to be the heroine of her own life, not share the position with some brat.

She slips down one of her mother's birth-control pills to be on the safe side. She found a store of them, years old, in the third bathroom of the Rectory, the one no one uses because of the old wasps' nest, and stole them. It's like drinking tap-water, a gesture, an act of defiance, nothing more, to show she's her own mistress: of course a glass of water here, a pill there, won't make any real difference. She's just giving fate a little nudge, to make it work for her rather than against her. If she goes on not getting pregnant she and Peter will have to go to the fertility clinic and really concentrate: that will be the time to take the plunge. Peter should have hurried home or at least called her on her mobile. Men are unreliable, even Peter, always led astray by impulse. How they ever win wars she cannot imagine. They'd be leading a bayonet charge and then come across a fossil on a rock and everything would have to stop while they investigated. What does she need a man for anyway? It's just that that blind, stirring, questing, pursuing, sticking-up horrible phallic thing seems to be not just its own imperative, but hers as well.

Gynaecological dreams

Doralee had an abortion once, I write spitefully, telling tales out of school. She was sixteen, and Ruby took her to the doctor who sent her to the hospital where she had a procedure done and was home that afternoon. They did not mention it to the boyfriend, Ken, who was seventeen. He had started work as trainee electrician, there being no low-paid apprenticeships any more, so he earned more than most boys his age still in school. He had a car, which appealed to Doralee. Ruby would rather her daughter had taken up with a medical student or someone with a more ambitious background, but she had always encouraged her children to believe with Jesus that all men were equal, so she could hardly complain. At the same time she did not want her daughter to marry an electrician.

She was relieved when Doralee took up with Peter, who though hardly the county set was at least well-bred North London, the mother from a Jewish family which had apostatised. The county set themselves viewed Ruby and her children with some suspicion. She lived in a good house and was active in proper country pastimes, and a stalwart of the village fete, but she came from the North, and was too unpredictable in her ways to be considered one of them. Ruby did not particularly want to be one of them, but it is always more pleasant to be accepted than not, and for Doralee to have a baby at sixteen by an artisan apprentice would not have been good. Ken was to be a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five, of course, having gone into electrical contracting for the government, but that was not to be known in advance. Ruby took Doralee down to the clinic with reluctance - her worry, even then, was a scarcity of grandchildren. The more you educate girls, the more worldly ambition you inculcate in them, the more you teach them independence from men, the fewer children they have. And the more babies you have, the more you know what is lost when you refuse to let them come into the world. Still, she did it, for her daughter's sake.