Mantrapped (22 page)

We were now required to write TV ads by rote - so many product-mentions, so many enthusiastic adjectives in the first line, a visual fix within three seconds, and so on, following a strict formula which research claimed had worked in the past. Our masters did not want to subdue our creativity, they assured us, they just wanted an output which would bring predictable profits. We did as we were told, scrupulously. It was an entertaining enough task to write to the new pattern, like solving crossword puzzles, but we knew the new-style ads weren't going to work. Nor did they. They were so dull no one remembered them, let alone the name of the product when it came to point of sale. The more enthusiastic the adjective the less memorable it seems to be.

So they sighed and let us get back to the old hit or miss ways of stabbing at an idea until it felt right, in the hope of netting the Zeitgeist. This taught them a thing or two - namely that they were in a high-risk business and always would be and that we 'the creatives' were born ungrateful; and taught me a few things too, including a general rule that the more lip service is paid to the principle of originality and creativity by management, the less attention will be paid to it. And of course the importance of the wives. Those advertising managers from the big companies, though not averse to being dined, wined and night-clubbed, and sometimes more, really liked to impress the wives. Advertising was not done to make a profit, or only so far as profits imply status. Billboard posters never sold a thing but image, but it was image that the old-style wives liked. They wrapped themselves in their husband's glory as in a fur coat.
Go To Work on An Egg, Guinness is Good for you, Drink a Pinta Milka Day
. Now there are no fur coats the fun has gone out of the thing. Wives like their own status: they don't stay home waiting with slippers. They do research at the local university, or run their own chain of gift shops: they have no time to lift their eyes to their husbands' billboards, or if they do so it is only to jeer and murmur feminist thoughts, and wish the menfolk did something else for a living.

The feeling-tone of the passing decades is there to be seen in the vaults and archives where such things are stored. There is Tony Hancock in the late Sixties, that great comedian, on screen selling eggs, in TV commercials written by me, bewailing the fact that he has to make the advertisement, that he had been reduced to this. Advertising eggs!

It was a true enough glimpse of his life at the time, and painful to watch in retrospect. He was to kill himself soon afterwards. The audience was cruel: his contract had not been renewed, Sid James, his on-screen sparring partner, had won the favour of the crowd, and the big parts and all the money for half the brilliance. Hancock's is the humour of desperation. He and I got on: we would just tell the truth, we agreed. We filmed in a studio in Wardour Street, huddling together on the set as if amongst enemies and changing the script as we went along, me dodging out of the way when the cameras started rolling, but his misery was tangible. So indeed was mine. I had had a terrible row with Ron, as I remember. I was tear-stained and abstracted. Hancock would have to nudge me with his elbow and say, 'Concentrate, concentrate!' I would do the same to him. We were both selling ourselves. Hancock's colleagues would jeer and deride and see the film as evidence of his failure, and he knew it. There is no way out, from time to time, yet his colleagues would take no pity on him. '
Sold out
!' they'd say to him. '
Cock a doodle doo! Tony Hancock, reduced to selling eggs
!' At least I hadn't been finally reduced; I was at the beginning, not the end, crawling my way out of this velvet-lined pit, while he was pitching into it. And, being female, I didn't take opprobrium nearly so much to heart.

Trisha, being female, sails through problems - from lottery-winner to seamstress in one fell swoop, so what? - which would have eaten away at Peter's soul and destroyed him. Demoted from deputy head of research one day to clerk in small ads the next - how would Peter have coped? Badly. For one thing Doralee would probably have left him. Status counts when it comes to love. See how now he's in a female body she's going off him at once?

And this was at a time when eggs were a good, healthy, pure kind of product, before research began to prove that eggs weren't good for you at all - they contained cholesterol, and cholesterol and heart attacks were linked, and the more eggs the worse, and the Egg Marketing Board collapsed. Advertising, our egg producers complained, never sold eggs. Wait another twenty years and their image would improve again, the Board would be back in business, the little lion stamp be back on the eggs, and cholesterol divided into two kinds, the good kind, as in eggs, which saves you, and the bad kind which kills you. In the meantime Hancock still lives down there in the archives, and offers himself as a sacrifice to the God of mirth, that ravaged, desperate, quizzical, untidy, un-dieted, un-exercised old-fashioned face staring out of the screen, as intimate and communicative as ever. And without the Egg Marketing Board there was really no need for Ogilvie and Mather to hire me. I charged too much for my services, and took nothing seriously, or appeared not to, and was probably getting on with my own work in the firm's time. But I didn't: I was always honourable in this respect.

Old work is always unsettling. I see in it the confidence of knowing that I am right, all the energy and determination of the young, the insistence that there is something I know which others don't, which will be to their benefit if I pass it on. I wrote what I saw, as best I could through the lens of my own experience, folly, self-delusion, miscomprehension, no doubt, but moving over time as a landscape and noticing the changes.

I don't look at my own early novels if I can help it. Reading them makes me feel uneasy, and envious of my own past. I feel as if I took some unholy leap into places where I had no right to be. My mother stopped writing for that very reason. '
It unsettles people and puts ideas into their beads; false hopes, false expectations
,' was how she put it. '
It's immoral
.' But I think she just thought it was too much responsibility.

I didn't quite get that far. I put my duty to my family - my obligation to feed and clothe them, before my duty to society - and she scarcely did, and she may have been right. Without fiction, without the film, the soap opera, the TV ads, the diet of stories on which we all live today - and without the complicity of the therapist culture which presents us to ourselves as simple narratives rather than the sum of random events - we might be more interesting and individual people than we have become. Trisha and Peter have souls, of course, but they are very loosely tethered; the little cloud above Pooh Bear's head, in that early vision of mine, flimsy and thin and all but dissipated.

Trisha, Doralee and Peter visit the psychiatrist

He was a bent, pale, elderly man who looked as if the juices had been sucked out of him long ago. His skin was like old parchment, fragile, papery-white and crinkled. His bedside manner was impeccable, but his smile thin and evil. 'Miss Thicket,' said Dr Paul Otterman, extending his hand in welcome, 'How good to see you again! How can I help you? My secretary was a little vague as to the purpose of your visit - something about a sex change? You are writing an article, perhaps? My wife is such an admirer of your work. It's all I can do to get her to see her GP, she is so convinced of the efficacy of alternative cures.'

Doralee wondered why she had thought he would be friendly. Perhaps he was seeing her just to get his revenge. People did that sometimes. He had got rather drunk at the charity dinner, felt her knee under the tablecloth, quoted chunks of Wordsworth, tried to arrange a tryst with her to see the ruins of Tintern Abbey, and then fallen asleep with his nose in the little pile of mushrooms served with the chicken. Doralee had tactfully woken him and helped him wipe and straighten his tie, and at the time he had affected to be effusively grateful. But here in his surgery, he was distant and somehow savage. It occurred to her that the events of that evening, which she had all but forgotten until now, were the most dreadful and painful embarrassment to him. He sat Peter and Doralee down but left Trisha standing. 'Can't Trisha sit too?' asked Doralee. 'All three of us do really need to be here. The problem relates to them, but I am better than the other two, at the moment, at explaining what happened.'

'Three of you!' he said, seeming surprised. 'I could have sworn only two people came into this office. But you are quite right, there are three.'

And he drew up the extra chair, and then re-arranged the blind as if to improve the light. It seemed perfectly adequate to Doralee, but she could see his problem. There was an insubstantiality about both Peter and Trisha now, as if it took two to make one. The hard-edged look had gone: they seemed fuzzy about the edges. They were easy to miss. The taxi driver on the way had shut the door too soon and almost caught the body Trisha a blow. 'Sorry,' he'd said in his defence, not sorry at all, 'I didn't think she was there. If there are men, they usually show the woman in first.' Everyone these days felt they had a right to give an opinion, even when not asked.

Now the body Trisha sprawled in her consulting chair, and the body Peter dangled his legs in his. Doralee wished they would sit up and behave. The body Peter had insisted on wearing a kilt, which he wore once a year to a Burns Night dinner, complete with sporran and long red-tagged green socks. Doralee had refrained from asking about underpants, for fear of the answer. She knew well enough, from dealing with her own young brothers and sisters that it was futile to argue about clothes. You just had to go out prepared to be embarrassed. The body Trisha was wearing a green track-suit from Doralee's cupboard, claiming to hate every stitch Peter had brought along with him in the plastic bags, refusing to return to Mrs Kovac's place to get something else, anything more, dropping her own discarded garments disdainfully in the washing basket.

Trisha and Peter seemed to be getting younger by the minute. They fidgeted and giggled. Dr Otterman listened politely. Doralee could see, even as she spoke, that Dr Otterman was going to be a waste of time. He licked his lips with a tiny little pink poking tongue, which flickered in and out like a snake's.

'I think you are describing a
folie à deux
,' he said, 'but a rather remarkable one, since the two parties have not grown into one another over time but apparently have only just met. Or so you tell me. Joint delusions are rare but not unknown. You are sure Trisha and Peter are being honest with you, Miss Thicket? The relationship between them has not been going on for some time, just unknown to you?' 'You don't understand,' said Doralee. 'They don't think they've switched: they have switched. He's in her and she's in him. They have each other's memories. I ask her, and she remembers him. Until yesterday they were perfect strangers. They crossed on the stairs and their souls jumped. That's why people are not meant to cross on the stairs. It's an old superstition.' 'It's true,' they chorused.

'But how could you tell such a thing?' the doctor asked. 'Other than because two people claim that it is true. Perhaps it's a
folie à trois
?'

'Obviously,' said Doralee, 'you could do tests to verify their claim. Look into their backgrounds. Heaven knows what's happened to their DNA. We need a university department to investigate. Probably several. Psychology, I'd say, and philosophy.'

'But to what end, Miss Thicket? Even if there were funds available, even if you yourself are not deluded, there is hardly going to be any course of treatment available. I suppose a wide spectrum anti-depressant or psychotic agent - but I would hesitate to prescribe such a thing.' 'I told you so,' said the Trisha body. 'This is but totally the wrong guy.'

'Nyah-nyah-ni-na-na,' said the Peter body, to Doralee. Dr Otterman looked at them with distaste. So much for wiping his tie and his chin free of chicken and mushroom, so much for believing one good turn would deserve another. So much for putting up with his hand on her knee.

._-**_

'Go to the authorities,' he went on, 'and I fear they will decide you are in no fit state to be out, and are likely to commit a crime. Under the terms of the new Mental Health Act they may decide to put you in preventative detention. Which I must say would be my recommendation if I were to be involved in the dicussion. People profoundly out of touch with reality can be a danger to themselves and others.' 'Perhaps reality isn't what we think it is,' said Doralee, quoting her stepmother. 'Everything changes. This might be the next new thing.'

Dr Otterman stared at Doralee for a long time. Then his gaze switched to Peter, whose kilt was rucked up. 'Your husband?' he enquired. 'He holds down a job?' 'My partner,' said Doralee, 'not my husband. Yes he does. A very good job.'

'Perhaps you could ask him to cross his legs. I see a little too much of him.'

The Peter body obligingly crossed his legs, showing a length of long male leg with black hairs showing across the top of the socks, which he swung enticingly. The doctor looked away but the Trisha body ogled. Doralee felt inclined to slap her. 'There may well be new drugs on the street,' said the doctor, 'which interfere with the mind's normal responses, and distort the sense of self. I do not know for sure, though I have heard something of the kind, but until the casualties begin to turn up at this office, there is nothing I can do. People who resort to mind-altering substances without proper medical supervision must do so at their own risk.' 'In other words, you don't believe me; if I don't shut up I'll be locked up; I must have been taking drugs; and you haven't a clue,' said Doralee.

Dr Otterman rose to his feet. 'It might be better if you all left. I presume this is some sort of journalistic stunt? I don't take to it very kindly. I have made space in my diary to see you, to my inconvenience and that of others. If anyone has been taking photographs or using recording devices I warn you there will be legal consequences.'