Mantrapped (21 page)

At which the Trisha body protested so strongly the Peter body threw up his hands and said, 'Do what you like. You went to college. I never did. I'm sure you know best,' and sulked for a little.

The Peter body decided he was still hungry and insisted on making scrambled eggs. Doralee pointed out they had already used the allocation of three eggs a week they tried to stick to, because of the cholesterol. But the Peter body said he was a big boy now, and needed sustenance, he was used to more flesh on himself, and was too thin and needed to build his body up. The Trisha body said he wanted to be returned to himself slim and healthy, but at the same time said it was a waste to make scrambled eggs using any less than six eggs, so much was always left on the pan, and went to the fridge and took out a pack of six organic eggs, which he handed to the Trisha body. That made Doralee feel very odd indeed. The woman went to her fridge, Doralee's fridge, as if she owned it, and made free with its contents. But then it was Peter doing it, and he was entitled. Or was he? They'd never had a pre-nuptial agreement because there had never been any nuptials. Should this mess get sorted the first thing to do would be to come to some formal agreement as to who owned what, in case of future disagreements.

The Peter body made the scrambled eggs in a non-stick pan, at Doralee's request, using all six eggs, but he used a metal spoon to scrape the eggs off the bottom as it solidified -taking great scratches of Teflon with it. Doralee didn't have the heart to ask him not to. She was already being made to feel she was a nag and a prude.

It was the Trisha body who intervened and said 'careful of the pan,' replacing the metal spoon with a wooden one and taking over the eggs. The Peter body was happy to let her do it. 'Did you notice that, Doralee?' the Trisha body asked. 'It's the Peter me who's driving the spoon, not the Trisha hand. There must be some kind of leakage going on. You can't put a masculine, right-brain led, testosterone-drenched mind into an oestrogen-soaked body and expect there to be no crossover. I am really worried about this. If I find it interesting what do you think the CIA is going to be? It'll be no fun if Trisha and me end up the object of scientific research. Worse, this probably has military significance: the authorities are bound to want to experiment. The Trisha body is hopeless at spatial relationships, by the way. It's affecting me. I look at the dishwasher, try to work out how to load it, and I just can't do it. It's catching. You should see the mess she lives in.' 'I haven't had that opportunity,' said Doralee, formally. 'You haven't told me what went on after you crossed on the stairs. There are a few missing hours.' But the Trisha body seemed to lose concentration and, making no attempt at all to clear up after the mess that was breakfast, wandered off to sort through the piles of old clothes she had lugged over in the black bin bags from Wilkins Parade. The Peter body had managed to burn the bottom of the pan, after all that, and had sloshed in milk, which the real Peter never did, and then overcooked, so that the stuff was like a pile of little yellow crumbs threaded through with browny-black worms.

Doralee called the office to tell them she would not be in that day, she was working from home. She called Peter's office to say he had laryngitis - that was clever, if he had to call the office himself at some time he could claim trouble with his vocal cords. She found that she was trembling and crying. Shock seemed to have bypassed her brain and attacked her body. She thought that perhaps Heaven Arkwright had launched some devilish plot the better to be revenged, that her dead baby was paying her back, that Mrs Kovac was responsible for this disaster - had put some kind of Transylvanian curse upon her. Nothing that had happened to her at school or work had seemed so bad as this, everything had had precedents, was meant to have precedents. If all else failed, if you were raped or widowed or orphaned or robbed, or had a child in prison or on drugs, there was a support group. But for this, for the transfer of your partner's being into someone else's shoddy, badly looked-after body, there was nothing. Then she pulled herself together and got on with setting up appointments.

The Trisha body dithered about who to call first. She waved her hands in the air distractedly. She was wearing jeans with high heels: Dor alee would ask her to take the heels off and borrow her slippers, and the Trisha body would agree, only five minutes later to be back in the heels, complaining that Doralee's feet were too big.

'I'd say a priest or a rabbi would be most likely to help,' said the Trisha body. 'There is a full moon, this might be some kind of werewolf thing. On the other hand there is this need for discretion. We don't want someone drunk on communion wine to go blathering to his superiors. Or her's, most likely, these days. And I don't somehow see a woman casting out devils, do you? Nor do I want to go running to some rabbi, having said so often I reject the whole Jewish religious thing. I have a feeling that if we do absolutely nothing, and don't get our knickers in a twist, everything will revert to normal of its own accord. But make up your own mind, Doralee, just get me out of this body. My legs have a peculiar weighted-down feeling - I think it's the varicose veins. And I have a kind of hollow in my middle which feels somehow dangerous, as if it might implode at any time. I couldn't be pregnant, could I? That would be the end.' The body Peter came through from the bathroom wearing lipstick and mascara.

'Chance would he a fine thing,' he said. 'I'm not in a relationship at the moment. But I never feel too good at this time of the month. I've got a period coming on any minute. I get cramps and my ankles swell.' The colour drained from the Trisha body's face. 'Don't worry about it,' said the Peter body. He was staring in the mirror and using his finger to clear away little blobs of mascara. He did it inexpertly and smeared black onto his cheekbones. 'I'm on HRT, so it's not too bad. I've left the pills out in the bathroom for you. I'm five days into the new pack, as you will see.'

'I'm not taking those pills,' said the Trisha body. 'They're dangerous.'

'You go for a long life or a happy one,' said the Peter body,

'and give me the happy one any day. I want my body returned in good order, so kindly keep taking the pills. Now tell me about Viagra.'

Doralee left them to make her phone calls. She arranged to meet Dr Paul Otterman the psychiatrist at three p.m. The anthropologist, Professor Simon Edgard was away in Bali developing his thesis that the outbreaks of violent rage that were once such a feature of Balinese society, and could be matched to the berserker rages of the Norsemen, were not a function of drug usage but of the Balinese custom of preventing their toddlers from crawling. Four feet on the ground was seen as too near the animal kingdom for comfort: the frustration of the natural developmental impulse had bad results.

Thwarted in her desire to see Professor Edgard, whom she remembered as having had the most delightfully gravelly voice, which was why she had listened so hard when he talked about the child-rearing customs of the Balinese, it was agreed that the three of them, after seeing the psychiatrist, would drive down that evening to consult Father Bryant. He was the vicar of Ruby's church, the one where Doralee and her sisters and brothers had all been christened. He had signed her first passport photograph.

Trisha and Peter sat on the sofa and chatted. Doralee thought they should be more agitated than they were. She was getting the feeling that it was she who was out of order, not they, and that she was being unduly officious in seeking help.

Peter had not been over-zealous in describing what exactly had happened in the hours of his absence. She doubted that it was anything sexual, but perhaps they had smoked a lot of dope which hadn't yet worn off.

'If I go upstairs the balance is okay, but when I go down I have to lean back or I topple. It's the breasts. They're so heavy,' the Trisha body was saying. 'And the nipples are meant to point ahead, I guess, but mine are all over the place.'

It seemed to Doralee that they were regressing. They were losing emotional intelligence; they were turning pre-pubertal. It was as if the burdens and responsibilities of the adult body had not yet struck them. They were curious but uninvolved. Did time flow differently for men and women? Perhaps it did. She wished now she had done a degree in human biology not in pharmacology. Not only was there so much she did not know but she might be married to someone rather different from Peter: someone who had an overview, who was not bogged down in detail as were most of the men she knew. Someone whose grasp on his own character, his own personality, his own moral framework, was more strongly rooted than Peter's. The slightest tug from some inferior soul and he had been lost.

What will happen next?

'Novels have form', said Louis, all those years ago, 'shape and pattern'. I took him literally. I worked out a chart and pinned it to the wall. The movements and encounters of my characters made a formal pattern. I followed their progress with coloured stickers. When their lives crossed so did the lines, curved or straight, seesawing or spiralling, as made by their stickers. When they got a mention, their lives moved forward. If the plot became too complicated I would put a black dot and stop that particular subplot there and then. Death. By the time I was a third of the way through the novel the chart fell off the wall.

I concluded that by now I could do without one. I believed in fate more strongly then than I do now.
Female Friends
is about three girls who were evacuated together in the early 1940s and remained friends through life, when they weren't betraying one another and stealing each other's boyfriends. I had observed that when the chips were down women helped one another, fought for one another, but in the good times they could be just horrible.

Also that women fell into piles of three. You could sort them out like cards from a pack into the erotic, who were in love with their bodies, the maternal, cosy nest-making creatures, and the effective, who loved getting things done. In this scheme of things Trisha is the erotic, Ruby the maternal and Doralee the effective. In the old days, when girls married as virgins, or were meant to, they scarcely knew who they were and married men not particularly suited to them and suffered greatly as a result - the effective type ended up looking after babies, the erotic married a poor man and the nest-maker never got to marry at all. Women are better these days at sorting themselves out. Trisha seduces, Ruby suckles, Doralee functions - look at her now making telephone calls. Just as in time of conflict the mother ant produces more soldiers, in famine more workers, and in time of fruitfulness more nurses, so I reckon more of the functioning kind are born today, though to what end I cannot be sure. Doralees are everywhere, while Trishas and Rubys become scarce.

I finished
Female Friends
in 1973, rising before the rest of the household to work in secret. Understandably children would rather their mothers did not write, but paid them full attention. I used to hate to see my mother writing - she too would rise in the early morning to cover sheets of paper with tiny little words by the tens of thousands, though by now it was accepted at home that I was a 'writer'. I actually had an antique brass-bound captain's desk of my own, and an upholstered wheelchair, of the kind used by eighteenth-century gout-victims who found it too painful to put foot to ground, and in which I am sitting now - these two pieces of furniture must have had a dozen different homes since then, but have survived them all.

I took the completed manuscript to MacGibbon and Kee, who had published the two previous books, but when I got to their offices, behind Golden Square, found that they had shut up shop for good that very morning. I asked a remaining member of staff, left to label the last packing cases, what she thought I should do with it, and she said she believed there was a publisher round the corner called Heinemann, why didn't I leave it at reception there? They did novels, she thought.

So I went round to Heinemann's and left it at reception to see if anyone was interested. Sometimes it is better not to know too much. If you don't look after your manuscript's interests, the Gods of the muses must, and may well make a better job of it than you. A week later I got a phone call from a Mr Charles Pick to say they would be happy to publish it, why didn't I call by. So I did. I signed the contract they put in front of me. I gave away all rights - foreign, film, TV. What did I know? Penguin owns the novel now, and will neither put it on the shelves nor give the rights back to me. It is still in print but doesn't seem to earn royalties, and I never see it in the shops. They just like to own things, I guess, and claim the reward for their initial judgement. It had a very nice pale blue jacket of three Muses, and was well reviewed, and I was asked round to have a glass of whisky in Charles Pick's offices. It was before the days of writer's tours or TV appearances; books sold or did not according to their own merits. Publishing was still a gentleman's profession, and rather dull.

The two earlier novels,
The Fat Woman's Joke
and
Down Among the Women
, have been reissued many times since and are now with HarperCollins, who actually keep new editions on the shelves, all these years later. For which thanks be to them, and the God of short novels and trusting novelists.

Good reviews and public attention did not help my marriage. I had given up paid employment. I say 'given up', but I had, in fact, been fired. Ogilvie and Mather had been bought up, taken over by a US firm. Work methods changed. Our new bosses were trying to whip us into order, turn us into proper professionals. It was their ambition to get the element of chance rooted out from the business of advertising. We, their employees, could spend months working and still fail to make them a profit, might even make them a laughing stock, which mattered to the wives, or on the other hand we could mess about for a couple of drunken hours and make them a fortune and bring credit to their dinner tables. In the meantime we demanded wages, heating, office overheads, insurance stamps. Why could we not get it right every time?