Mantrapped (19 page)

Mr Kovac is a danger only to his enemies. Smile at him and he'll smile at you. No illegal he. He is happy in the city and loves driving and is proud of his van. He delivers drugs and dry-cleaning around the neighbourhood, and collects money owed on behalf of people of many nationalities. He is a pleasant fellow, without apparent guile, and is trusted. His native tongue is Albanian but he has a smattering of Italian, Iranian, even Afghan. He comes home early if he can and helps his wife with the shutters. His compassion extends however, only to the outer limits of self-interest, and Doralee, foolish girl, has placed herself outside it. Doralee has been trained and encouraged to look a long way afield, beyond her circle of acquaintance, to the rights and wrongs of other countries, other races, to such a degree that she's bad at noticing what goes on next door, or indeed inside herself. She goes on anti-war demos with alacrity -blame lies with other nations, just as in her personal life it lies with other individuals - and feels entitled as a consumer to require Mrs Kovac to keep the shop open late, no matter how tired that hard-working woman is. She can kill her unborn child and forget about it within the month, give or take a few nightmares, while still seeing life as innately precious. She has been well trained by her teachers in her rights and in the art of high self-esteem: she sees herself as honest, kind and good.

Yet only last week Doralee sent an e-mail in Heaven Arkwright's name, sneaking into her office at lunchtime to say no but thanks to a request for Heaven to write up a newly-discovered rainforest herb, which when applied to the skin plumped it up and removed wrinkles. That meant the request would then come Doralee's way. Doralee tells herself that natural justice is on her side, this is a grey area: Heaven deals with complexion issues, true, but the herb is also claimed to promote sound natural sleep. She has done nothing criminal, just read an e-mail not meant for her, replied, and then deleted. Doralee is a relativist, though no one ever told her what the word meant, and she believes the moral universe falls into place around her according to her own advantage.

She, the murderess, killer of her unborn baby, is unaccustomed to seeing herself as morally flawed. Mr Kovac has a better sense of original sin. Yet how scrupulous Doralee will be, should she eventually give birth, a better mother than I, three decades back, could ever be. Doralee will bond with her new baby (she will have no choice; the midwife will thrust the infant head to Doralee's reluctant nipple; the mouth will grab and suck and that will be that). And thus bonded, sentenced to a lifetime's anxiety, she will breast-feed for six months as instructed, until the poor little thing is weak and mewly with hunger, and see herself as irresponsible if she shoves a piece of solid food into its mouth, to watch the tiny teeth, already grown, at last find something satisfactory to bite upon.

But us lot, us mothers of the Sixties and Seventies - how good we were at doing what came naturally. We shoved the bottles in the babies' mouths and put up with the guilt which followed. We knew no fear. We saw ourselves as doing the best we could with the material with which we were supplied, and left the rest to chance. We were protected from anxiety by our own ignorance. Three months pregnant with Nicolas, I caught German measles. These days that would be an instant recommendation for termination, there being a possibility of blindness or deafness in the child, but what did I know about that? Upper left arm, we all had a smallpox inoculation scar but that was as far as preventative medicine went. That a baby could be born less than perfect did not occur to us. Nicolas grew up to be a musician and has 20/20 vision. Neglecting to foster our offspring's moral, physical, psychological or intellectual development, we left them alone to grow, and by and large they did.

I watch my grandchildren and pity their parents, as the little ones are woken out of peaceful slumber to develop their hand-eye coordination, their spatial skills, their empathy with others. These infants must work from the moment of birth; they are taught theories of projection at their mother's knee, learn to empathise with their enemy -
darling, if John hits you it's because you hit him first, and poor John, his mother isn't very nice, is she
- must be conscious of their thoughts and feelings from the start, and scarcely a one is theirs alone but has not been fed to them by the kind and well-intentioned. My ambitions for my children were that they should sleep and give me time to write. Mine slept because they were so bored, no doubt, but sleep they did. I loved them and sang them lullabies and pop songs. They could all chant Doris Day's
Que Sera, Sera
, and I tried not to pass on to them the habit of anxiety. And so through rain, hail, love, disappointment, psychoanalysis, notoriety, disgrace, divorce and pregnancies, rehearsals, lost socks, cooking, laundry and plastic bags, I somehow kept the writing coming. Faster, faster, more, more.

Babies were art objects put out into the living world, not the paper world that writers love, but still there for the editing, for the improvement, taking their turn, piling up in the filing tray, sometimes marked 'urgent', sometimes not. I shall give Doralee a future in which she has a baby. Our personalities are half taken from our parents, half our own. It will have Ruby's eccentricity and Graham's capacity to attract enduring love and partners who dance naked, and Adrienne's liking for little scarves. It will have Doralee's gift for self-interest and Peter's sweetness. It will be just fine. It will have to arrive the other side of the end of this book, in the fictional world, but it's in store for her as a present from me. I hope she's grateful: if she's not at first, I daresay she will be with time.

A good explanation for absence

There was a knocking at the door. Doralee was awake at once. Peter! At last. She would not reproach, she would not ask questions, he was home, that was all that mattered. She would never be snarky again.

They would get married, in a church - or else she would convert to Judaism so as not to upset his mother. She would ask her father to the wedding, she would even invite Eve. She would have a baby. All this between the futon and the door, with a blue pashmina grabbed and flung over the T-shirt she wore to bed. She opened the door eagerly, but it was not Peter, it was a woman of uncertain age, rather overweight with a lot of red hair which needed a good cut. Doralee arranged the pashmina to give herself more cover.

'Oh thank God, thank God, Doralee!' said the woman. 'You're here. I was so scared you wouldn't be. Anything at all can happen. Nothing's what it seems. It's terrifying.'

There was something sinister about the voice. It was some mad imitation of Peter. Perhaps it was a practical joke on the part of the newspaper? A sort of singing telegram: a bizarre apology for absence. If so it was unforgivable. It was the middle of the night. There must be some other way of doing this sort of thing. It would be a divorceable offence if only they were married.

'Who sent you?' asked Doralee. 'Because I'm tired and need to sleep and I'm not in the mood for jokes. Perhaps you want to speak to my husband? I'm expecting him any minute.'

'Partner,' said the woman. 'Not husband. And I am your partner. I only look like this; try and understand. See me as a hermit crab got into the wrong shell.' Only the previous week Doralee had been writing an article about how not to be a hermit crab, and Peter had provided her with useful details about the lifestyle of these strange creatures. Why was this woman talking about them? Could she be his mistress? But that was absurd. Peter's offices were full of interns whose major ambition was to sleep their way to the top, all in their early twenties with double firsts from Oxford, and they might possibly be a temptation, but men like Peter did not go off with women like this. But then her mother had despised Eve, for all manner of reasons, and it had happened. The other, lesser woman was preferred, just because she was lesser.

'Shut your eyes, Doralee,' said the woman. 'Try just listening and believing. I know the voice is peculiar but I'm pitching it down for you, so it sounds more like the real me.'

Doralee's eyes stayed open and staring. The woman clicked her tongue in annoyance, sounding like Peter when the computer crashed or he found George had failed to bring up the mail. Did Peter perhaps have an older sister he had never acknowledged? The woman pushed past Doralee, and walked as if by right to the desk and straight to the drawer where the pens were kept and took Peter's favourite. 'Doralee,' said the woman, 'try and adjust. This isn't like you.'

'It's the middle of the night,' said Doralee, feebly. 'I'll write it down for you. I know you. You only believe things when you've seen them in black and white. Little Miss Cynical!'

Peter would sometimes call her that when she doubted one of the more extreme conspiracy theories he would bring back from the office. Doralee realised she was gawping, as she tended to do when taken by surprise, and shut her mouth. 'Stop looking like a goldfish,' her mother would sometimes say to her. The woman wrote and studied what she had written.

'Thank God,' she said. 'At least my writing hasn't changed. Or not much. It shouldn't, of course. Individual handwriting is conditioned by personality and muscular movement combined, and no two handwritings are the same, in the same way as fingerprints. Not many people know that.' Doralee felt cold and wrapped the pashmina more firmly around her. She felt the more vulnerable because her feet were bare.

'You should have bought slippers when I told you,' said the woman. That was the kind of thing men said, not women. Men hid their concern behind reproaches. It was annoying, but forgivable. She was wearing a short suede skirt and a white frilly blouse off which a button had burst and a horrible jacket with fake fur collar. There was a tear in her fishnet tights and black smudges beneath her eyes where her mascara had run. Doralee had the feeling she had just been in some kind of fight.

The woman handed the piece of paper to Doralee. On it was written in capital letters which could be Peter's handwriting or not, 'This is not me. This is Peter. I am in the wrong body.'

'Hang on a moment there,' said Doralee. 'Are you in the wrong body, or is it the right body and the wrong you?' 'Doralee,' said the person, who might or might not be Peter. 'Please don't get metaphysical at this point. It's the middle of the night. We have to do something, and fast. I have a feeling the longer this is allowed to go on the more difficult it's going to be to get back to normal.' She walked briskly round the room; she was like Peter, anxious and active, making little nervous movements, yet not like Peter. Perhaps this was his mother, a teenager when he was born, and Adrienne only his adoptive mother? That would explain a lot. But why would he send his mother along and get her to pretend she was her own son? Or perhaps she was deluded, insane? Perhaps he visited his mad mother in the loony bin every week and talked to her about hermit crabs and so on. How would one ever know where men really went? They said they were at the office and you couldn't be checking up on them all the time. In the meanwhile the woman was wearing thin stiletto heels which could only be bad for the floorboards. 'If you're going to walk about the room could you kindly take off your shoes to do so?' she asked. 'That's better,' said the woman. 'That's my Doralee.' And she took off her shoes and sat down with a thump. 'I really like heels', she said, 'but you have to get used to them and they don't half pinch. When I come to think of it, she's got far the best of the bargain. My body is fifteen years younger, and see these varicose veins? They're disgusting. And I keep wanting to pee and I hate being so short. I can't reach things. And I have a wrinkly belly. I tried doing a press-up and it was hopeless. At the same time it's kind of cosy in here. But it can't be allowed to go on. Now Doralee, we have to keep this very quiet. I guess we'll both have to take time off work. I don't know who you see about this kind of thing. Doctor? Psychiatrist? Priest? Rabbi? Somehow I think the Rabbi would have the best grasp of what was going on, all those golems and so on. If only I believed in God.' There was a ring on the bell. 'I expect that's the men in white coats,' said Doralee snarkily, 'come to collect you.' She was still angry with Peter. He had left her with uncooked couscous, failed to return with her cleaning, hadn't even bothered to phone, and worried her to pieces. She realised she was now on the verge of accepting that what he said was true, that this was Peter in the wrong body, and it made her crosser still. There was now untold confusion and trouble to look forward to. 'It'll be Trisha,' the woman said. 'I told her to come here. She went back to her flat to collect a few things. But we had to get out
of
there fast. I would have gone, but she's in the man's body so she can look after herself. At least physically - mentally I reckon she's in a worse state than me.' 'Trisha?' said Doralee. '
Trisha
!'

'Not your type,' said the woman. 'I'm sorry about that, but I wasn't doing any choosing here.' Doralee went to answer the door.

'It occurs to me,' said the woman, after her, 'it might be some kind of alien attack. There may be hundreds like us out there. We might need the CIA.'

'That is just simply not on,' said Doralee, and opened the door to Peter, His clothes were dusty and looked as if they had been slept in. His nails were broken and his hands were dirty. There was something tentative and empty about him: he looked ripe for throwing away, like a soft toy that had lost its stuffing, or a discarded handbag. But perhaps he just needed a bath and some sleep. He had two black plastic sacks with him, stuffed with God knew what.

'What on earth has happened to you?' asked Doralee. 'And where have you been?'

'Didn't he tell you?' said Peter. 'Men never get to the point, do they. I'm not Peter, I'm Trisha.'

Doralee held the door open and Peter walked in.

'I don't want you to think -' said Peter, '- I mean, there was nothing going on. We were just passing on the stairs. It felt ever so strange.'