Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  If you believe she’s just fat, I said to Gregory later, then you’re the one with the delusions. On a success scale of one to ten, the occasion ranked at about minus eight. There was Ruby, smiling and fecund, and Linda, neurotic in my mother’s cast-offs, way too big but bunched together with a cheap belt. Her boyfriend (or her ‘boyfriend substitute’ as Gregory called him later) was silent, as Type Ones always are, and adoring. Linda called him ‘darling’ all the time, as if it was his name. John was his usual self. Over peanuts, he told Ruby the one about the arseless chicken. Later, in the kitchen, he winked at me and slapped my bottom.

  ‘How’s tricks, sister-in-law?’

  ‘I’m fine, John. Can you put this casserole on the table, please, with a mat underneath?’

  That was the extent of our conversation.

  Ruby and Gregory had a lot to say to each other. She had one of those sexual foreign accents mixed in with the twang of Croydon. She was very flirtatious for a fat woman. Or perhaps just very fat for a flirtatious one. Either way, she had a lot of nerve. It wasn’t just my husband she flirted with; it was everybody, male and female. She was nauseatingly charming, complimenting me on the food and cooing over photos of Billy and helping me take out the dishes, insinuating herself. Even the hard-nosed Linda allowed herself to be bewitched, as one professional woman sometimes is by another in a field that does not compete with hers. Perhaps I could have fallen for her too. But I held out, clinging on to a cold thing in my heart, a little shard of mistrust. My instincts rarely deceive me. We were discussing compost, of all things, when Linda decided to launch one of her attacks on Gregory – presumably to impress Duncan.

  ‘Well, I think it’s completely unethical, this Perfect Baby drug,’ she said to Gregory, out of the blue.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she asked the room.

  When nobody answered, Duncan chimed in, ‘Yes, I mean, doesn’t society need handicapped people?’

  Which was brave of him.

  ‘No to both questions,’ Gregory replied, wiping his mouth on a napkin. ‘By the way, Linda, I didn’t realise that you were a devotee of Channel Praise.’

  This was bound to sting Linda, who loathes religion in general, and evangelism in particular. She flashed him an acidic look and muttered, ‘Of course I’m not a devotee. But the evangelicals haven’t got it all wrong.’

  She picked up her fork and began to drag it along the tablecloth like a teeny ploughshare.

  ‘What’s unethical,’ asked Gregory, ‘about wanting the best life for your child, and making sure he isn’t disadvantaged from birth? And the idea of a society needing the handicapped is downright absurd and masochistic. Who needs problems? Who in this room would choose to have a handicapped child for the so-called good of the community? There are other ways of doing good than encouraging stray dogs and tramps, you know.’

  Gregory was a firm believer in this. He was opposed to helping those in need directly, when they came knocking at the door. He would even turn away gypsies selling brushes, tea-towels and gardening gloves. But he wrote generous cheques twice a year to five charities.

  ‘But if all babies were perfect babies,’ said John, ‘wouldn’t the world be a pretty dull place, me old cock? Let’s face it. Think about when they grow up. All the women would be a nubile twenty-year-old Mother Teresa with great tits and all the men would be Jesus Christ with a fat wallet and a huge dong. Personally I rather like being a flawed specimen of humankind.’

  ‘Just as well,’ muttered Linda. I helped everyone to more sauce.

  ‘Not that there’s anything undersized about my meat and two veg – don’t get me wrong!’ John added in the brief silence that followed, and he laughed, whizzing his eyes round the table. I could suddenly picture him at his software sales conferences.

  ‘The Perfect Baby idea is a media distortion of the very serious work we’re trying to do,’ Gregory said tolerantly.

  Of the two brothers, he was the one with the unspoken upper hand. When the boys were thrust together in a step-family, it was because Greg’s dad had money, and John’s mum had been frail. Ruby Gonzalez was smiling a faraway smile and nodding sagely.

  ‘We’re not trying to raise a generation of saints. We’re just trying to eliminate some of the sinners.’

  ‘So what’s a sin then?’ asked Linda sharply. ‘Mental illness, for example?’

  She and Duncan exchanged a look charged with pomposity and circumstance. All those visits to Manxheath had clearly had an effect.

  ‘A sin, no. A major inconvenience to the families concerned in particular and to society as a whole, yes. Physical deformity and handicap likewise. Don’t forget that it’s already possible to abort a handicapped baby if it’s diagnosed early enough. I’ve done thousands of abortions of malformed foetuses. All this drug is doing is to flush out – to deselect – the less competitive specimens, often before the woman even knows she’s pregnant. Only the very highest-grade foetus will survive. We’re talking about an intelligent drug – a sorting drug. That’s why it can take years to have a baby using it. The woman may abort, in the very earliest stages, fifteen or twenty times before a foetus makes the grade. It has to pass a physical test but also an intelligence test, you see.’

  ‘A bit like for the FBI?’ asked John.

  Linda and Duncan were exchanging disapproving looks, and muttering.

  ‘By the way, Hazel,’ John said through a mouthful, ‘nice din-dins, not too salty at all, once you get accustomed.’

  ‘Well, I still can’t see anyone opting to use a drug which is going to cause miscarriages,’ I said. This was my main objection to Gregory’s research. ‘I had three before I had Billy. It’s the worst thing any woman can ever go through.’

  There was a bit of a pause then, and Gregory and Ruby exchanged a professional glance.

  ‘Well, that’s one point of view,’ Gregory said, ‘but to answer your point, and Linda’s, there are a lot of very serious-minded people who believe that, in an already over-populated world, everyone should do their best not to create unnecessary or useless or negative life. Those are the people who are going to choose this drug. They’re prepared to wait for that one child who’s got that bit extra to offer, and I salute them for it.’

  Gregory had that missionary light in his eyes, and he turned their beam on us all. No one could say my husband wasn’t intelligent. Cleverer than all of us, that’s for sure, I thought. Even Linda, who has a certificate in her loo proving she’s in the top 2 per cent. I was feeling too hot, like something was about to explode. Gregory, who was toying with his glass, suddenly looked around the table and then across at me.

  ‘Is there any more of that Sancerre, darling?’

  When I came back with a fresh bottle, I thought I saw Gregory move his leg away from Ruby’s under the table. I couldn’t be sure, but the idea of it set my heart mashing with grief and hate.

  ‘We’re living on a threatened planet, you know,’ Gregory was saying. ‘I’m proud to think that I’m doing my bit.’

  The threatened planet. The cliché of the decade. Call me selfish, but what about my threatened marriage? My heart was thumping too hard, the way it does when I think of those babies I lost, and the way Gregory dismisses it like it’s nothing. The way it’s as if they’re attached to me by a string, and the way it doesn’t make sense in words.

  But Linda stood up, her face red.

  ‘Come on, Duncan,’ she said, jerking her head towards the door. The gesture tugged him up from his seat. ‘We’re going.’

  There was a pause as this sank in. Linda likes scenes, or rather she likes to make a show of her principles by boycotting this and that. She’s a crusader by nature; a splinter group of one. (‘I oppose cabbage,’ she told Ma when she was six.) She nagged me for years about buying factory-farmed meat and not bothering to put my empty bottles in the bottle bank. ‘Can’t you see it’s political?’ she’d say, smashing them in. She had clearly impressed Duncan; he’d gone the sickly fawn colour of wheatgerm. />
  ‘I take it that you two won’t be queuing up at Greg’s clinic for a Perfect Baby then,’ said John, but the joke cracked on silence. We watched while they bustled about with coats and Linda put on her Leningrad hat.

  Gregory called out rudely as they were leaving, ‘You could always stay and argue it through rationally, you know, Linda. Or is that too taxing for your intellect?’

  Linda slammed the door behind them both, and Gregory laughed. Ruby Gonzalez smiled a smug smile and patted his arm.

  ‘There will always be people who take that view,’ she said. ‘They have a right to it. I respect that.’

  Then she leaned across the table and patted my arm, too, so that I wouldn’t get jealous.

  ‘What a pity for them,’ she said. ‘They’ll miss out on a second helping of your really most delicious lemon mousse. I know I ought to be on a diet, but do you think I could have some more?’

  Which John took as his cue for the bulimia joke.

  When Ruby and John had finally gone I didn’t even bother clearing away.

  ‘You do it,’ I told Greg. ‘I did the cooking. That was my contribution.’

  To my surprise, he didn’t say anything, but started collecting the dirty plates and glasses.

  I went to the living-room and slumped in front of the television. They were showing a re-run of one of the Reverend Carmichael’s shows. Holy Hour, it’s called. Channel Praise repeats them throughout the day, with Christian game shows and competitions and Church-approved chart music in between.

  ‘Meddle ye not in the will of the Lord,’ the Reverend Carmichael’s voice buzzed. ‘And the Lord’s will tonight is that ye all phone in our special dial-a-prayer number with a loyalty pledge to our saviour.’

  He fell to his knees and began speaking in tongues, repeating a word that sounded a bit like ‘taramasalata’ over and over again, with little hiccups for punctuation. He was everywhere – on billboards outside Jaycote’s Park, on chat shows, in newspaper photo-features and on the front cover of his book, God Alone Knows, launched to coincide with the opening of Channel Praise. Holy Hour had only been going six months, but the Reverend’s sweaty face and poppy eyes already felt like an institution. The tabloid press adored him because he was happy to provide stunts: Vernon bungee-jumping off the Severn Bridge, Vernon rowing a canoe down rapids to help children with cancer, Vernon weeping at the funeral of a grandmother raped and murdered by hooligans. Vernon at Easter, sporting bleeding stigmata on his hands. He quickly became known as ‘the Raving Rev’, and a poll among women showed that we found him supremely attractive. ‘Vernon the Turn-On’ was the headline verdict – and he obliged by posing shirtless, his hairy pot-belly in unashamed profile, to raise money for Sheep in Need. I don’t know why I was watching him. Perhaps because I knew how much Gregory hated his show. There was something mesmeric about it. The money was pouring in. Glorene from Winchester pledged £1,000, with a prayer asking the Lord to help her with her financial troubles. Slowly, I drank gin. An hour later Greg put his head round the door and asked if I was coming to bed.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘I didn’t think watching Channel Praise was conducive to that,’ he said, seeing the Reverend Carmichael’s moon face filling the TV screen. He hadn’t realised the state I was in. I was choking on a wodge of misery.

  ‘Just go away!’ I yelled at him.

  I had been thinking. Horrible thoughts that couldn’t be suppressed. Gregory looked shocked. He wasn’t used to bad behaviour. Nor was I. We’d always been polite.

  ‘Darling Hazel, you must calm down.’

  He said it with the sort of gentle and reasonable voice police negotiators use to stop crazed people jumping off high buildings.

  ‘Your menstrual chart tells me this isn’t a great time of the month for – ’

  He ducked as I flung my half-empty glass of gin at him, missing his ear by inches.

  THREE

  Snip, snip.

  High in the glass and steel tower that is the administrative headquarters of the Ministry’s Edible Fats Policy Division, the Assistant Manager (Butter Sub-Unit) is enthroned behind a broad desk in an office with carpet-tiles the colour of dried blood and walls the colour of powdered coffee whitener. She is clipping her nails. Linda Sugden finishes her right hand, the trickiest, and starts on the left, her tongue protruding slightly as she concentrates on obtaining a blunt, businesslike oval. Her profile is framed in the light from the window behind her, which shows only the grimy blanket of air that the weatherman on Good Morning Gridiron has been cheerily referring to as ‘our old friend, that depressing, unshiftable bit of cloud cover’. It’s been stuck there for days. Far below, Gridiron hums its city tune, while above the swathe of grey cumulo-nimbus, an aeroplane scrapes a chalky path, and fades to a dot.

  It is nine o’clock, and Linda, normally a powerhouse of activity, has neither sorted her in-tray nor drunk her first cup of terrible Ministry tea. All she has done so far is to smoke three cigarettes. Like wedding-day rice, the nail-clippings lie scattered at her feet. She straightens her back, adjusts her focus and continues methodically. Two snips for the thumb. Snip, snip. The index. Snip. The middle finger. Snip. The ringless ring finger. There is a quick knock at the door, and before Linda has time to answer, it opens, letting in a harsh blast of fluorescent light from the corridor. A figure flits in and closes the door softly. Linda tightens her jaw and does not look up. Snip. The little finger. Finished.

  Linda believes in short nails.

  ‘Morning, Miss Sugden,’ murmurs Trish, her PA, who believes in long vampy ones, red-varnished acrylic extensions, and special glues for emergency mending. Trish who has small muscular legs clad in oyster Lycra, and who now wafts gusts of Opium from her tart little cleavage. Trish who owns no fewer than six leotards and who for two years was an air stewardess and is therefore used to heights such as this, the twenty-first floor, a work environment on stilts.

  ‘Nice night last night then?’ she asks routinely.

  ‘No,’ Linda scowls, still not looking up, knowing she won’t like what she will see. ‘I had a row with my brother-in-law over this genetic drug he’s working on.’

  She does not mention that the evening was finished off with a second row, this one with Duncan, whose sexual incompetence is hitting a strangely familiar sea-bed of hopelessness.

  ‘I’m not a charity,’ she had hissed at him this morning after yet another failure.

  ‘It takes two,’ he had said, as usual.

  ‘That’s the tango, not sex,’ she had snapped. ‘I don’t have four hours.’

  She’d slept badly, too. There’d been terrible dreams, culminating in a vile, half-waking nightmare about stirring a cauldron of boiling water and charcoal lumps, preparing a grey ‘vitamin stew’ for a herd of wildebeest from the Gridiron Environment Centre to eat for its midday meal. She had been put in charge of the project, and a deadline was involved. She had woken in a pitch of anxiety, with the dream clambering across her skin. She had stormed out to work, forgetting to apply underarm deodorant, and accidentally-on-purpose smashing a milk bottle on the doorstep, which she had left for Duncan to clear up.

  Now, with controlled violence, she pokes at a cuticle with the claw end of the nail file, while Trish slaps sheets of paper in and out of trays. A minute later, thinking aloud, and unable to stop herself, Linda blurts, ‘Which is worse, a man who starts but can’t for the life of him finish, or one who finishes before he’s started?’

  And realises immediately that she’s said the wrong thing, and it’ll be round the whole of Ag and Fish by coffee break.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m getting your drift,’ replies Trish. ‘Started what?’ And her pencilled-in eyebrows vault to questioning arcs high in her forehead.

  ‘Well, you know. It,’ says Linda, unable to find a way of reversing the conversation, her face hidden as she stows away the manicure equipment in the bottom drawer of her desk.

  ‘It?’

&
nbsp; Linda’s voice, still invisible and somewhere close to floor level, articulates, ‘It. The sexual act. Intercourse. So-called lovemaking. Sexual congress, physical union.’ And then, with distaste, ‘Bonking.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ replies Trish, catching sight of a Boeing 747. There’d been Mile Highs, foreign hotels, flight captains called Jim or Roger, and the friendly clink of G and T in her flying days. Cabin crew, doors to manual.

  ‘Dunno, really. Depends how long you want it to last, I s’pose. Depends on your attitude to it.’

  (Miss Sugden, she tells Chrissie later, looked like she needed a bit of help. There are some people, aren’t there, who you just can’t imagine a. in the nude, b. showing their body to a person of the opposite persuasion, and c. actually doing that.)

  ‘Go on,’ says Linda, lighting her fourth cigarette with relief.

  ‘Well to be quite frank I just let them get on with it at their own pace, myself,’ Trish says, perching herself on the arm of a chair and gyrating her pretty ankle to reveal delicate bones. ‘I like to turn a man on, don’t get me wrong, but at the end of the day I can take it or leave it, because I’m big-hearted.’

  The left ankle stops revolving and the right one starts. Linda watches, fascinated.

  ‘I don’t care what he does or how he does it,’ Trish is saying, ‘as long as I get the champagne before and the cuddles afterwards, and a bit of respect in the morning. I’m a Libra, I think I told you, so fair’s fair’s my motto.’

  Linda’s eyes widen in disbelief, then narrow in smoke, as Trish’s little goldfish mouth clarifies, ‘It’s all in the stars, isn’t it?’

  Linda is a galaxy away. For a moment, there are no words she can reach. Then, with a small brain wave, she musters, ‘I’m an Aries.’

  ‘Well,’ says Trish triumphantly. ‘There you go then. Ambition and stubbornness. Setting your sights too high. Typical.’

  Linda’s jaw tightens, padlocking her face shut. Past embarrassment, they both shuffle papers about for a minute, and search the sky for relief. In the distance, a fire alarm rings. Then Linda stubs out her cigarette, reaches for her biro and lets out a sigh.