Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  Gregory had used a medical term for them: ‘blasted eggs’.

  It turned out that they were part of the experiment too. The Genetic Choice Programme referred to my little ghosts on a string as ‘natural fallout’. In hospital, where I’d had their remains scraped out by dilatation and curettage, they’d called them ‘the products of conception’. (And I’d thought, in those early years, they were the fruits of passion.) I was lucky, it seemed, only to have lost three. It might have been ten, according to the projected wastage statistics.

  There was more about Baby B, but I had dried up. I had to sit back and drink some water, half a glass, before I could read it.

  Baby B was breastfed for six months, and pursued an average growth and learning curve. Follow-ups at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen months showed no features that distinguish Baby B in any way, physically or mentally, from an average healthy male baby of his age. At this stage of the trial of GR218 it is therefore apparent that the drug has had no visible or measurable effect on the baby produced by this type of positive screening, and we conclude that stricter screening criteria be incorporated in the drug in future testing. Furthermore, in a future trial, a change of mother is recommended. Baby B’s mother has a satisfactory IQ level, but it is not higher than average.

  So the breeding stock had not come up to the mark: Gregory was going to have to identify another silly goose to lay him a golden egg. And it’s true I must have a defective IQ, because if I’d been intelligent as, say, Dr Ruby Gonzalez, I’d have seen all this coming. I’d have guessed a long time ago.

  I carried on reading. There were some more mathematical equations and a series of graphs with Baby B’s head measurements. I noticed my hand on the plastic mouse that controlled the screen was sweating and dead-looking, like in horror films set in catacombs. This can’t get any worse, I kept saying to myself. But it did. At the very end of the document there was a short paragraph in a different style. It was less scientific, less balanced. It might have been written after a couple of drinks, by an exhausted man. In it, Gregory had added the sting. The bit I’ll never forgive him for. The bit that, as I swallowed the words, turned my tongue to ash.

  Of some concern. The possibility that GR218 has nevertheless had some effect, other than that targeted. No signs to indicate this is the case. As yet. Possible, note possible, that GR218 has selected and enhanced genetic features or functions not factored into the system. E.g. rogue gene, not physical as far aware, poss. psychiatric? Suggest continued assessment of Baby B. Attempt to determine whether this the case. Of crucial importance to further trials of GR218. Also of concern to parents of Baby B: maternal grandmother diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Some apparent, note apparent, evidence child–grandmother telepathic link, one or two-way unclear: stress, hypothesis only. Evidence rogue gene re-enhanced by process?

  And that was all. No word of remorse. The screen did not explode. No blood poured from it. There was nothing.

  We’d both wanted a baby so much. Not when we were first married, I suppose – not in the days when it was a question of newspapers in bed till midday, trips to Venice and Carpetland, frequent sex, tasteful, pricey living-room curtains and glass coffee-table buying. All the usual upwardly mobile newlywed stuff. I was working in the client charter section of customer services at Lockwood’s, and they’d recently made me a junior manager, so I had self-esteem, as well. We bought the house in Oakshott Road and held a party. I was a pretty woman with a talented husband. We had money.

  I realised that I didn’t have to be a mother like Ma. And with Gregory running the clinic, I was in the best hands. Curiously, when it came to it, Gregory hadn’t taken the miscarriages as badly as I had. Given all the monitoring he’d done, I’d expected him almost to see them as a sort of failure on his part, but he was very philosophical.

  ‘It happens more than you think,’ he’d said, consoling me in my Nil-by-Mouth hospital bed.

  His faith was quite unshaken.

  Hindsight: why’s it never there when you need it?

  I remembered that, when I was pregnant with Billy, and past the stage of worrying about another miscarriage, I’d been happy. I’d smelt pungently hormonal, and I’d spent hours contemplating my inside-out navel, perched like a landmark on my huge belly. Gregory was excited but distanced at the same time. He became more fanatical than ever about my monitoring. He took weights and measurements every day. (And here they were now, in the file.) And then, when I pushed Billy out, shot into a mad orbit of pain and screaming with a dry throat, Gregory put him gently to my nipple and said, ‘A perfect baby boy.’

  I was allowed to hold him for ten minutes, a strange, bloody organ snuffling at my breast in the place where my heart used to be, before Gregory whisked him off for tests. They must have depressed him, those first results. He managed to hide it – or perhaps I was just too elated to notice.

  Had he ever seen our son as anything other than a failed experiment? He was always a loving father, but I never understood the pity that seemed mixed in with the tenderness. And though I developed, early on, a gut feeling that Greg felt disappointed in Billy, I never voiced it. When he spoke to Billy harshly, it was with a reproach in his voice that was in no way justified by whatever misdemeanour Billy had perpetrated. I put that down to Gregory’s high standards, his punishing work schedule. But now it was clear: Billy was living proof that Genetic Choice hadn’t worked. ‘Pig-ordinary’, Greg called him once, when he was only a few weeks old.

  ‘I’m glad he’s pig-ordinary,’ I’d said. ‘Isn’t that all any mother has the right to hope for? That her child has a head, two arms and two legs? And all the right organs in the right places? And can smile?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Greg said, ruffling the baby’s head in a crude sort of way.

  And he cleared his throat and gave a tight, bright, horrible smile which made me flinch. I was about to say something about it when Billy vomited down my back and matters moved on.

  My head was reeling as I gulped more water, this time straight from the tap, in the bathroom next to the study. Billy. Baby B. Me. ‘The mother’. For the first time in my life I drank all the water I wanted. Little more than a pint, I suppose, but it felt like three gallons. I’ll get intoxicated like my father, I thought. Drown from the inside. But finally I couldn’t swallow any more, and as the cold water splashed in my face I felt my brain swivel into a strange mode. With hands that were still shaking, I took out the disc and put it back neatly, exactly where I’d found it. It was a quarter to eleven, so I had just under forty-five minutes left before I had to fetch Billy from the Busy Bee.

  I’m not proud of what I did next, but I did it. What else was there to do? In the worst extremities, I’ve always resorted to hooliganistic violence – a small souvenir of behaviour I’d been party to in the State of Absolute Delusion. Driven by an instinct that seemed to come from somewhere you retch from, I began to smash up the house.

  I started in the kitchen. Bottles, jars. Oil and kidney beans and rice and apple-and-ginger barbecue sauce. I even found the bicarbonate of soda – I’d been looking for it for months – but I smashed the jar on the floor anyway. Months. It was strangely satisfying. Anyway.

  My heart was pounding and I could hear myself shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. I got more inventive in the living-room. I took a whole fistful of Billy’s wax crayons and wrote, ‘YOU BASTARD’ on the pristine white wall. (‘White is the only colour for an internal wall,’ Gregory’s mother had told him on her deathbed. The hospital walls had been a liverish green.) I emptied two packets of mustard and cress seeds on the carpet and watered them. Then I wrote, ‘FRY IN HELL, RUBY GONZALEZ’ on the door and set fire to Greg’s favourite childhood memento: a church he’d built from matchsticks at the age of fourteen, before he lost his faith. It burnt beautifully, but I doused it with water just before the end, so he could see what the ashes consisted of. I’d get to the Airfix later. With relish I smashed the photograph of his dead mother who had left m
e, in her will, the two gallstones she’d had removed in 1989. It was the only photo of her he had. They say that no one should do that, destroy mementos of loved ones. But I was almost enjoying myself, killing his past, killing mine, killing our present. I found a tube of tomato purée and wrote, ‘OUR LIFE IS A LIE’ on the pale blue Persian rug which had been a wedding present from Don and Jade. Then I remembered the Black and Decker power saw that Gregory kept in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d always wanted a go with it. It made a hell of a noise as I got to work on all the pine. I amputated two and a half table legs, so the whole thing crashed into a slope like a Dali. I went to work on the chairs next. Legs, back seats. Little pieces, big pieces. The dresser. In half. I swear, I cut it dead in half. And crashing down it all came, with all those carefully chosen bits of china, all those nicky-nackies that tell you you’ve been places and done things on holiday. Have you ever sawn pine? God, the smell. Pure heaven. It was worth it for the smell alone, and the hellish noise that hurt so much it was like I was actually sawing my own head off. There was something savage and free about wrecking that home I’d worked for. It was like a primitive rite, in which you create one part of yourself by destroying another. I was just starting on the bathroom, emptying bottles of pills and smashing up all the mirrors (I gashed my hand and wrist on some glass, but didn’t notice till later) when Jane-next-door rushed in and grabbed me by the hair and dragged me out of the bathroom. She must have used the spare key we’d given her.

  ‘Christ Almighty, I thought you were being raped and tortured by a sociopath,’ she said in a choked voice.

  She forced me down on the sofa and pinned me there, looking about her wildly.

  ‘Jesus, Hazel, have you gone completely crazy?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I breathed.

  It felt so free. Suddenly I went faint, and grabbed her arm. She made me do some respiratory exercises which reminded me of childbirth classes, then picked her way through the mess to make me a cup of tea in what was left of the kitchen, while I bled on to the sofa. When she came back she had the face of a prison warden, and handed me a steaming mug.

  ‘Drink this,’ she said, as though it were the antidote to snake-bite.

  I sipped and scalded my tongue and gums.

  ‘I’m going to phone Gregory right away,’ Jane said, after she’d picked most of the glass out of my wrist.

  I let her go through the palaver of phoning the clinic and getting transferred from extension to extension before a nurse told her he was busy on a Caesarean and he’d call back if it was urgent.

  ‘Tell him his wife is extremely ill,’ said Jane frostily, and put down the receiver.

  I could see she was close to tears from the shock of having a madwoman on her hands. It’s not something that occupational aromatherapists usually have to cope with. She drove me to casualty at St Mary’s hospital. I watched her mouthing something to the receptionist, her eyes darting to and fro, a twisted look on her face.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hazel, but I just can’t handle blood. I’ll fetch Billy for you,’ she called as she ran like a bat out of hell through the opaque vinyl swing doors. I waited on a moulded plastic seat, slightly sticky, to be stitched up and bandaged. The man next to me had dislocated both his shoulders at the fitness club, he told me, doing an exercise called the Reverse Pec Strut. There was an old woman with two carrier bags which she kept her life in, I’d say. She had stinking, suppurating sores on both legs. I wanted her to die. It took a long time before they saw to me, but I was off floating in my own murk, a fish that had strayed too deep and beyond direction.

  They stitched me up in a room with a poster on the wall that said in gothic writing:

  It’s nice to be important –

  But it’s more important to be nice!

  It hurt like crazy, but after you have given birth all pain is relative. The nurse, labelled Ward Sister Fagin, wore orange foundation but she was cold as stainless steel. Staff in casualty wards don’t take kindly to self-inflicted injuries. Afterwards I waited on a bench. An hour later Jane came back, without Billy.

  ‘I’ve left him at my mum’s,’ she said breathlessly. ‘She’s looking after my niece, so he’s got a playmate there. He’s quite happy, by the look of it. I didn’t think he should see you in this state.’

  ‘Thank you, Jane, God, thank you. So much. Now please, please take me home,’ I begged her. ‘I have to pack my things. I have to leave my husband. He comes from hell.’

  ‘All husbands come from hell,’ snapped Jane, as though it were obvious, and we drove back to Oakshott Road in her white Renault 5. She dropped me at my door.

  ‘Call me if you need me. I’ll bring Billy back around four.’

  I had to know if my son was going to go strange and turn into Ma. If, or when. Or could he be touched by the rogue gene already? He did unusual things sometimes – things I’d taken to be ‘boy behaviour’: squashing woodlice, hitting objects inexplicably with a stick, impersonating emergency vehicles. In a way, it all fitted together. Where I come from, the bus to misery arrives promptly and drives fast. I’m not a resourceful woman. So I sat down on our marriage bed and cried like a four year old. Who could I turn to? My family were useless – a loony mother, a father dead from water poisoning and a sister whose hobby was Schadenfreude. As for friends – well, I didn’t have many, when I came to think of it – just mothers, really, people to discuss potty training with over coffee and custard creams. Jane, who’d just proved herself adequate in a crisis, wasn’t someone I could confide in. It would have to be someone in a position to help. Someone to whom Genetic Choice already meant something. Someone with power, who knew the system – who would know how to stop Gregory. If it wasn’t already too late. And I thought of Ruby, with her smug smile and her robust tits, and her bloody nerve. I needed someone on my side. A stranger who would take my story seriously, and who could help me find out whether my son was born with an unrefundable ticket to la-la land. The ‘rogue gene’. One particular tree Gregory had failed to count in his nightmare wood of factors and indices. I pictured myself collaborating with my saviour, the two of us working over a sheaf of documentation, heads bowed, the light burning late in his office, preparing the case against Greg for the General Medical Council. Or the police. It was a noble and heroic portrait.

  And yes, I admit it, there were other things too, about Dr Stern. His sympathetic ear. His dependability and assurance. His eyes. And the handshake that squeezed my heart. On the phone to him I was shaking, but I spoke very coldly and clearly. Yes, he said, he’d heard about Dr Stevenson’s Genetic Choice work. Very interesting, very, er, controversial. Hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting him personally, as far as he knew, though their paths may have crossed, once or twice …

  ‘Meeting him personally is no pleasure, Dr Stern,’ I said. ‘I’m regretting it by the minute.’

  I told him everything. The pills. The miscarriages. Ruby, and the fact that she might already be pregnant. The possibility of Billy having a thing. You know, a hereditary factor. A rogue gene, something telepathic which meant they could talk even if they weren’t together. A time-bomb of dangerous psychology. What Greg called somewhere in his report a ‘variable’.

  ‘I have to know about Billy,’ I said. ‘Then I can decide what to do.’

  ‘These are very serious allegations,’ said Dr Stern.

  ‘I know,’ I said. There was a silence.

  ‘Can you, er, back them up in any way? Provide some kind of paperwork on this?’

  When I told him all about the disc, and what sort of things were on it, he became excited and intrigued. He asked me a lot about what I’d understood. How familiar was I with scientific terminology? Very, I told him. It’s my muzak. Then there were quite a lot of questions about me ‘as a person’, since we hadn’t had a chance to get to know each other when I’d visited my mother. He spoke gently, picking his words very carefully, like flowers for an important bouquet. He was clearly trying to work out whether I was telling
the truth or whether I’d gone mad, like Ma. I didn’t blame him.

  ‘Is there any way you can bring me the disc?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Not without Greg noticing it’s gone,’ I told him. ‘It’s too risky.’

  In the end, we agreed that I should leave without it, but go back to the house in a couple of days, while Gregory was out at work, and copy it or print it out.

  ‘I’ll contact your husband,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell him I’ve taken you into my care at your own request.’

  ‘I’m not coming to Manxheath,’ I said quickly, picturing Ma’s bulky silhouette in the doorway.

  ‘Of course not, Mrs Stevenson. But it might be better for your husband to think that. I’ll convince him that it’s best to keep your son with you while you’re … ill. Have you got somewhere to go?’

  ‘I’ll book into a hotel. With Billy.’

  ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Somewhere like the Hopeworth?’

  The Hopeworth. The pride of Gridiron City. The brightest star in its small firmament. A sign that Gridiron is on the up and up. Executives stay there on business. It’s the venue for Lion’s Club lunches, multi-charity dinner-dances, the Gridiron Floral Experience, Gala Nites. It’s across the park from Manxheath, but a whole world away. It has a coffee shop that serves the best whipped cappuccino in the North. It has little racks of postcards depicting views of Gridiron: Gridiron by night, Gridiron at dawn, and a little pie-chart showing panoramas of Gridiron with fireworks and a cartoon Mickey Mouse doing cartwheels in the foreground. It is a haven of sanity.