by Liz Jensen
He laughed, but there was anxiety in it. With fake nonchalance, he added, ‘And by the way, Ruby isn’t pregnant. As she said to you last night, she’s just a bit overweight.’
I felt flattened. A night of sleeplessness for this. Gregory squinted at me sideways, as if he were puzzling over a diagnosis. Then he gave me his serious, doctor’s look.
‘Two things, Hazel. First of all, I don’t think this is the kind of discussion we should be having in front of our son.’
Billy was chomping his way through his bowl of Fiba-mash, apparently oblivious, but I was nevertheless stung by my old friend, guilt.
‘Secondly, can I suggest you go and have a chat with someone?’
It wasn’t the first time he’d suggested this, but I played the innocent.
‘What d’you mean, a chat with someone?’
‘A chat. With someone. A specialist. How about that psychiatrist at Manxheath? You said he seemed like an excellent doctor. You’re under a lot of stress with your mother, and it might help to talk it through with someone.’
‘You. You’re a doctor. I could talk it through with you, couldn’t I?’
‘But I’m your husband.’
‘Exactly. That’s why I’d like to discuss your infatuation with Ruby Gonzalez with you, and not my mother’s shrink, who has nothing to do with it.’
‘Shwink,’ echoed Billy. ‘Do widdit.’
I remembered the rattle of my mother’s swinging bag and the inexorably erotic handshake Dr Stern had given me. I imagined his slightly puzzled, sympathetic expression as I explained my husband’s infidelity.
‘Listen, Hazel, I’m sorry, but I really must go to work. I’m operating in an hour. Please calm down. Let me get you something.’
In a moment, or perhaps in half an hour, my husband came back with the post and two small white pills.
‘Here, take these,’ he said. ‘They’ll help you relax.’
After he left, I ripped open the post mechanically, then sat and stared into a white space, while in my side vision, Billy’s fat hand reached forwards and closed like a sea anemone around a fistful of Fiba-mash.
‘Shwink,’ he said again, and applied it to his face.
Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability
Dear Hazel,
Strange to see you the other day, after such a long absence. I am trying to work out why you came. Did your guilt build up to unacceptable levels? They say that’s the way with visitors. Especially relatives. It’s practically a recognised syndrome. Do bring my grandson next time: I would like to see him in the flesh, as it is also my flesh. I don’t hold with this modern view that grandparenthood is something one can ignore because one’s had nothing to do with the creation of the child. Of course one has. ‘The chicken is merely the means by which the egg reproduces itself,’ remember? You’re the chicken in this case: the halfway house. Billy and I have a bond that you ignore at your peril.
I’m concerned about him. He’s been sending me rather disturbed telepathic signals, which tell me he may be constipated. You can’t be feeding him properly. Call yourself a mother? When did you last have a good look at his stool?
That wee sexual frisson that passed between you and Dr Stern, by the way, didn’t go unnoticed. I thought it in very poor taste. I’m surprised you had the nerve to try it on. It is the kind of thing that used to happen sometimes in the library when I was Deputy Chief Librarian, usually in the natural history section, of all places. I made a point of disrupting it. Told them they could take their libido outside and do it in the street like dogs. It has to be said you were looking quite dreadful. Thin, but not in an attractive way, and completely washed out. You had ‘poached-egg eyes’.
Not much news to report this end. In Group we’ve been sitting round en silence absolu half the time. Keith has recovered from that fight you saw him have with Mrs Murphy, who is now on enhanced Largactil. Scrabble is her whole life, and she panics when someone cheats or comes up with a word she doesn’t know. It was ‘Spud-u-like’ that did it. Keith’s a genius.
Oh yes – Isabella’s so-called phantom pregnancy is all of a sudden progressing rather rapidly, so perhaps you could bring a few maternity supplies with you when you next get an attack of ‘guilty relative syndrome’. I am also short of fresh compost in the greenhouse so please recycle a few household scraps, but don’t bother with eggshells, they take too long to rot down, despite what that ridiculous woman pundit with the frizzy hair and no proper nose says on TV.
Today is the anniversary of your father’s death, so spare him a thought, silly bugger though he was. I wonder whether that Texaco woman Bernice remembers him. I expect not. I expect the erotic young creature (who is probably pushing fifty, now I think of it), I expect she has moved on to fresher and more available pastures. Thanks to art therapy, I now have a good likeness of her in effigy, but haven’t decided on the most –
Must go. Collection time. Get your son’s hair cut.
Yours sincerely,
Your Ma,
Moira Sugden
It was an average kind of letter to get from my mother. Recently she’d reverted to writing her letters on paper, which meant I was more likely to read them. There was a time when everything was in black ink on scraps of cardboard in her tall, loopy handwriting. Then there were the sheaves of stained Kleenex, which I assumed had writing on them. For about six months her missives came written on old-fashioned waxed toilet paper of the kind I remembered from the municipal public conveniences of my childhood – paper which Linda used to complain ‘doesn’t so much wipe anything, as move it around’. There was a time when she’d written on what looked like banana leaves. I chucked them straight in the bin. Sometimes, I chose not to read the legible ones anyway. They had a bad effect on me. The one she’d written after I married Gregory left my neck rigid. It felt like rheumatism, but my GP diagnosed rage, known in the trade as anxiety. This morning’s letter I’d opened distractedly, my mind still on the conversation with Gregory. The mild annoyance it stirred in me (‘poached-egg eyes’) seemed an irrelevance after the night I’d just been through. But I had to admit she was right about Billy’s constipation, despite all the Fiba-mash. His hair was also very long; I’d never had the heart to cut his curls. It was slightly uncanny, the way she seemed to have an instinct about him. She’d faxed Gregory at work one time to say Billy was coming down with chickenpox. And three days later he did. When Linda and I were younger, and the three of us were all living at home in the Cheeseways, the house was a cauldron of psychic surveillance. Outright spying, too. One day Ma boasted to me that she’d read my diary systematically over the years. And my letters from boyfriends. A red cloud flew in front of my eyes. Then came the dreams about hitting Ma, but she was made of rubber, or sometimes jelly.
I threw the letter in the kitchen drawer, on top of a hundred other of her epistles from the State of Absolute Delusion and, clutching my two white pills, headed for the toilet.
We had two in our house. The downstairs was a white porcelain Armitage Shanks, with a black plastic seat. It was next to the utility room, where we kept the washing machine and the dryer and a cupboard with the Hoover and various brooms and dustpans in it. The upstairs was more fancy, with a low-slung bowl in oyster grey and a wooden pine seat. I hesitated about which to choose, and then decided on the downstairs. It was more toilet-like. I flushed the pills away and watched the last gurgle of water disappear before the bowl refilled. Then I bundled Billy up warm in his buggy and took him to the Busy Bee Playgroup. He gave me a wet goodbye kiss and toddled across to the sandpit to join a potato-faced girl with plaits wielding a plastic spade.
‘I’m digging to Australia,’ she told him, ‘and I’ll do a wee-wee when I get there.’
‘And I’ll do a poo,’ said Billy, grabbing a purple rake.
I looked at my watch; it was nine-thirty. I had nearly three hours. As I walked home, down Woolcott Road, past the small park, the post office, B and Q, the betting shop and Tesco’s, the
shard inside me grew colder and colder. I thought about my husband and realised he was a perfect stranger to me. It was a short walk home, but on the way I decided something.
Some men are their work. Gregory was one of them. The fact that I knew rather little about what he did – the bare minimum, in fact – had seemed an advantage. Until now. I’d only visited the clinic a couple of times. It was Gregory’s private territory, like the loft full of Airfix. It made me slightly nervous. It was the kind of small, intimate private clinic that sprouted in the late eighties and early nineties for specialised ‘luxury’ problems. Babies, in this case. Either too many or not enough. Gregory liked to call his business ‘fertility management’, because that covered both the creation and the destruction side. The clinic had the hushed, neutral ambience you’d expect in a bank or an insurance office – the abiding calm of a place designed to welcome mature women who’d taken calm and rational decisions about what to do with their wombs, and the contents or vacancy thereof. The nurses wore pastel uniforms that matched the wallpaper, and they ushered clients into a waiting-room where frazzled nerves were soothed by Dire Straits at low volume, the Economist, home decoration magazines and glossy, well-fed pot-plants. Every day a stream of elegant heels crossed the threshold. Not just Gridiron heels: heels from all around the country. Like the Reverend Carmichael, but on a smaller, more discreet scale, my husband Gregory had something of a following.
I had been there for the inauguration of the Fertility Management Centre, of course, as the Principal Scientist’s wife, but the first time I saw it as a working clinic was when I’d locked myself out of the house, and had gone round for Gregory’s key. I hadn’t bothered phoning first; I knew he’d be there. All the women glared at me – it must have been my trainers. Or the baby in his pram, bawling for milk. When Greg arrived, I could see from his face he was furious. He practically threw the key at me. He wouldn’t let me breastfeed in the waiting-room, and bundled me into a specimen room to do it. It smelt of ointment and urine and I asked myself why I’d married him and I couldn’t remember.
‘It’s bad for morale to bring a baby into a clinic like this,’ he hissed at me as I wrestled with the hydraulics of my maternity bra. ‘You fool.’
He was right. It was bad for morale. Mine. As the tears juddered in my eyes, he ordered me a taxi home. He must have felt guilty about it though, because that night we made unscheduled love, and he said sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I was so awful. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, he went on, sorry, sorry, and I was swept off to sleep on a wave of his ghastly remorse. Looking back, perhaps the extra sorriness was for other things. Anyway, he was himself again in the morning.
I only went to the clinic twice after that, but never with Billy, and I made sure to phone first. I thought the whole thing was crazy – those women in the waiting-room, I mean. Half of them desperately wanting a baby, the other half wanting to get rid of one – why didn’t they all show some sisterhood and just swap about? That’s how calf embryos are transported to Australia – in the wombs of rabbits. I read it in the Reader’s Digest. I made the mistake of telling Greg this. He told me it was one of the most stupid things he’d ever heard me say. So after a while I stopped asking questions about the clinic, and Greg’s work, and the drug called Genetic Choice. But now I was regretting it. Now I wished I knew more. That remark he’d made about making Ruby a member of the team: I couldn’t get it out of my head. Greg isn’t a team person. He hates teams. He likes sex, though, sort of. And he likes Ruby, who looks pregnant, and who is working with him on the Perfect Baby drug. You can see my line of thought. Deluded, Gregory would have said, shaking his head.
I’d always known that Gregory kept a backup copy of the Genetic Choice document on floppy disc in his study. I could hardly not have known, the amount of time he spent on it. Most evenings, after dinner, he’d go and work on it while I caught up on some ironing and watched tired old movies with Anthony Holden or Lee Remick on television. But it had never crossed my mind, until now, to read it. It had never seemed like it might contain any great secret. It was just there. We lived with it. Gregory talked about his research a lot, but he’d been doing it ever since we were married and I’d learned to switch off. I understood a few rudiments of science, but Gregory never learned the knack of explaining ideas simply, and the things he got passionate about were what seemed to me minutiae – the vagaries of quality evaluation and gene selection processes and clone perfection indexes. I sometimes worried that he got so bogged down in the detail that he lost sight of the whole thing. I never said so – though Linda, being Linda, did.
‘Aren’t you worried you’re going to overlook something very simple?’ I remember her asking him once, with the eager, dangerous shine her eyes have when she disapproves.
‘Ah, the wood and the trees argument,’ he’d said. ‘No. You need to see the trees individually first. They make up the wood. When you’ve counted all the trees, you have your wood.’
I couldn’t help laughing at that.
‘Oh Greg, you’re so pedantical,’ I teased.
‘Pedantic, you mean,’ he corrected me sternly.
See what I mean?
I saw a pregnant woman on my walk home from the Busy Bee, and I took it as a sign. She was floating along in the drunken, milky trance of the third trimester, and I hated her. I decided that, when I got back, I would become a spy, like Ma. Just once. And I felt the blood drain from my innards, as though a plug had been pulled very suddenly, and the future was being sucked out.
I didn’t go into his study much, even to hoover and dust. It wasn’t my territory, and I felt like an intruder. A huge and terrible feeling of doubt rose inside me like vomit. The study smelt of marker pens and other stationery, and a thin light filtered through the drawn blinds. There were files on every shelf, marked neatly along their spines: ‘IVF’, ‘Amniocentesis’, ‘Chronic Infertility’, ‘Over-fertility’, ‘Genetic Systems’, ‘Genetic Patterning’. There was a box of discs, and I spent a while hunting through until I found the one marked ‘Genetic Choice’. It’s a funny word, choice. It seems to have changed since I was a kid. You can have anything you like, Ma said, doling out tea. Fish pie or fish pie. You choose. Now Gregory has created another choice, that has nothing to do with fish pie. That’s progress.
The body is 80 per cent water. Mine felt like it then, with just my skin holding it in. I didn’t want to know. So what, if my husband and Ruby Gonzalez were cooking something together? And so what, if the thing they were cooking was, for example, a perfect baby? Never, since Ma had been certified, had I felt so close to the State of Absolute Delusion myself. And there in my mind’s eye was Greg, telling a psychiatrist (Dr Stern, perhaps) about Hazel’s ‘unfortunate delusions’ and about her needing treatment like her Ma, all the stress she’s been under, thinking she’s invisible, thinking Dr Gonzalez is the Virgin Mary …
I’d done a computer course once, as part of business studies, but my knowledge was out of date and it took me a long time to get into Greg’s system, and, once in, to find my way to the right document. Scrolling through, there was a lot I didn’t understand; graphs and charts and genetic maps. The text in between was written in the impersonal, ponderous language of science that I remembered from school. (A bull’s retina was dissected. A Bunsen burner was placed beneath. A current was passed through. A scalpel was applied to.) There was a whole rat section, which concluded that ‘the difficulties involved in assessing the vagaries of rat personality rendered the results impossible to quantify in a satisfactory manner’. Perfect-looking rats had been bred, it seemed, but Gregory couldn’t tell whether or not they had ‘low-grade’, ‘average’, ‘promising’, or ‘class one’ personalities. I laughed at that. Poor Greg, trying to create a Jesus Christ rat. That bit was dated three Christmases ago. I remembered him being gloomy then, about rats. Obsessed. He even thought my Yule log tasted of rats. He’d been up to his ears in them.
Then I got to the bit about ‘Baby B’. I understo
od that bit. It was quite simple. Not just the language of it, but the idea. It was too obvious, and I should have guessed. Because you can’t live with a man like Greg, all bottled up like a specimen, without there being a secret sickness in one of you, can you? A regular guy, you think, just a bit introverted, but then they all are, aren’t they, scientists? They have that reputation. I’ve seen them together sometimes, at conferences, standing in little groups stabbing at mushroom quiche on paper plates, their heads angled questioningly. They want to understand things, to know how things work. When my sewing machine broke down, Greg took it apart. Hundreds of tiny cogs, all ranged on the pine table, and screws and nuts and little pieces that probably don’t even have names. And he worked out what was wrong and fixed it and put it all back together again, and when he’d finished and the sewing machine worked he had a look of joy more profound than on our wedding day. I realised then that they need to master a thing, to get at its insides and see how it works and then modify it so that maybe it works better. Maybe perfectly. A sewing machine, a body, a mind. They want to do it better than the manufacturer.
What I’m getting at is, it turned out that Greg had already used the drug on a woman.
Me.
The mother was administered the drug – without her knowledge – over a period of thirty-nine months. During this time she experienced three mid-term miscarriages and an unknown number of early ‘spontaneous’ abortions (all, presumably, of low-grade foetuses) before a satisfactory conception in June 1996 resulting in the birth of a healthy baby, a boy, on 5 March 1997. The boy is known to the study as Baby B. Early post-natal tests showed a baby of over-average birth weight with no remarkable features.
That red cloud again: I recognised it from before. My first thought was that it was absurd, ridiculous and almost funny that our son should be called ‘Baby B’. Was I therefore Mother H? Was Gregory Father G? Or Father Gregory G? It was suitably Catholic-sounding. I actually giggled quite a lot, in a light-headed, shivering way, before I cried. Then, slowly, it began to sink in. Billy was an experiment, like any other, but he was not kept in a cage with rat-droppings. (Sperm was introduced. An ovule was impregnated.) The typescript danced in front of my eyes. My boy. I’d thought he was Baby Ordinary. I was proud of how normal he was. How, when he was born, everything was there. Having lost three embryos –
