Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  ‘Yes, Mummy,’ he said, picking up the triceratops and inserting its horny beak into his nostril. ‘Wiv sand and ice-cream.’

  And was sick again, all over the pachycephalosaurus.

  You couldn’t see the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability from the window, which made me glad I’d asked for west-facing. Instead we had a view of the play area in Jaycote’s Park, featuring a frightening maze from which wafted the screams of lost children, and a giant maggot made of old tyres. Twin toddlers crawled into its mouth and emerged a minute later from its arse, minus their anoraks. Their mother slumped on a bench, surrounded by child paraphernalia, gazing on her offspring with drained eyes. Other children rocked violently to and fro on the backs of Disney-type sea-creatures on huge springs, and crowded for a go on the giant frog slide.

  I ordered toasted tuna sandwiches and grapes from room service and we picnicked on the floor. Then I bathed Billy, sang him ‘A Partridge in a Pear Tree’ as far as seven maids a-milking, and put him to bed. I wasn’t in the habit of drinking heavily, because of Gregory’s monitoring, but I was free of all that now – and free to explore my ‘thing’ with alcohol. When I was born, Ma’s cousin Dodie told her I would be a ‘dipsomaniac’ by the time I was forty. Ma latched on to this idea, and as early as five I knew I was going to grow into a raggedy, prastuphulic woman, dependent on alcohol. I had only eight years left to fulfil this family prophesy. So as soon as Billy was asleep, I lay on the bed and watched an Australian road movie starring a zany, devil-may-care platypus, while experimenting my way through the contents of the fridge mini-bar.

  The next morning, after breakfast (croissants for Billy, aspirin for me) and ten goes on the frog slide, I drove Billy across town to the Busy Bee playgroup and then went straight to Manxheath. I spent fifteen minutes in the car-park applying make-up to powder over any evidence of debauchery that might make Dr Stern doubt my word, but as it turned out, he didn’t. Far from it.

  This time I took in more: the halogen lamp that shone light on to Gorgonzola green walls, the rows of books by Jung, Freud and R. D. Laing, the Modern Art calendar featuring a turd-like bronze sculpture on a lawn, the framed degree certificates. The lack of wife-and-kiddies photograph. And Dr Stern himself at his desk, a fountain pen in his breast pocket, licking an envelope. I saw his eyes take in my bandaged wrist, but he didn’t mention it. Instead, he smiled at me genially, and expressed surprise that I hadn’t brought Billy. He repeated that there was a place for him, whenever it was needed, in the hospital crèche. That it would be a huge advantage to have him at Manxheath during the day, whenever that was feasible. I thanked him, and said we’d give it a try, if there was a sandpit, as we were sort of on holiday, and Billy was expecting some sand. I asked after Ma.

  ‘She’s doing much better,’ he told me. ‘Though the fantasies are still quite florid. It’s an expansive disease that tends to, er, unbridle the imagination. And the imagination can be one’s own worst enemy. Some people’s is best kept in check.’

  ‘She’s back to her letter-writing,’ I said, remembering the last one (‘sexual frisson’).

  ‘Not in itself a bad sign,’ he said, and gestured me to sit down.

  He took out his pen and laid it on the table, where he rolled it with his palm like a tiny rolling-pin. Looking up, his zoomy eyes clutched me. He must have been forty-five, but at that moment his excitement made him look like a boy of ten who has stumbled on frogspawn.

  ‘I’d like you and Billy to come for tests,’ he said. ‘But occasionally, later on, I may also need to involve your mother in sessions with Billy. The telepathy thesis needs verification.’

  He hesitated when he saw me stiffen.

  ‘Any problems with that?’ he asked gingerly.

  ‘Yes. I’m not at all keen on the idea,’ I said. ‘I’ve managed to avoid any contact between them so far, and I want to keep it that way.’

  It came out rather bluntly, as I wasn’t used to expressing an opinion. Dr Stern’s eyebrows lifted and disappeared behind a shock of dark hair.

  ‘May I ask why?’ he said.

  A strange question, I thought, trying not to drown in his eyes.

  ‘Well, for a start,’ I told the psychiatrist, ‘my mother is mad.’

  ‘Mad is a word we prefer not to use here. Our clients are differently oriented. Their stability is – ’

  ‘Challenged,’ I interrupted. ‘I know, Dr Stern. But she’s my Ma and to me she’s a loony pure and simple. I grew up with her in the community, remember?’

  My head twanged.

  Dr Stern smiled generously and inspected the pristine cuffs of his yellow shirt. His wrists, covered in black hair, were shockingly sexual. I wondered if he realised.

  ‘Challenged stability isn’t catching, Mrs Stevenson.’

  He was still smiling, and for one excruciating nano-second I had a paranoid thought: He’s laughing at me.

  ‘I understand what you’re saying, but try to see the benefits. In view of the allegations you’re making, it’s essential that we get some evidence, and her involvement is crucial. We’ll try to work on your problem reflex in our next session, shall we?’ and his smile broadened to reveal his impeccable teeth, causing my insides to cinch up. I didn’t want to argue with him. I knew he was right. It’s just that I didn’t want Ma –

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dr Stern, reading my thoughts. ‘It’ll all be perfectly well supervised. We have excellent staff here. And your mother’s relationship with your son could turn out to be more fruitful and positive than you think. We’ll get going this week, and then as soon as I’ve got my hands on that GR218 file, I’ll have a clearer picture.’

  He looked at me quizzically, as though he wasn’t sure what to make of me. He was wearing a red-and-green tie today. It had a subtle, swirling design.

  ‘We don’t want to waste each other’s time, do we?’ he went on.

  He had spoken to Gregory at length on the phone. Not only had he convinced my husband I was ill (which took little doing, apparently, on account of the so-called delusions), but he had ordered him not to visit until I was ‘a great deal better’. Part of Manxheath’s policy where relatives are concerned. The clients come first. No exceptions. It might precipitate a mental emergency is how he put it. The phrase rang a distant bell.

  ‘So there’s no question of your husband suspecting you’ve seen the incriminating evidence,’ Dr Stern concluded with a reassuring smile.

  I felt my back and shoulders relax. The man was a rock of sanity. Thanks to him, the plan had worked, so far: Gregory thought Billy and I were staying at the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability at the State’s expense, rather than at the four-star Gridiron Hopeworth, at his. In the meantime, Jane-next-door would by now have assaulted Gregory with her own feminist interpretation of my breakdown. I had been tipped over the edge, the way women are by men. Centuries of oppression, exploitation and manipulation. Nineteen stitches, the Sister said, and just missed the vein. Hazel was breakdown material all right. And who wouldn’t be, with a young child, and none of the fiscal independence that forms the bedrock of a woman’s self-esteem? Did you know the poor creature believed she had become literally transparent?

  So that was how I began my revenge. My head was so cold you could store ice in it. Dr Stern would find out the facts about GR218, and my miscarriages, and Billy. We would analyse them, prepare a dossier, call a press conference, hold hands, step back, and watch the thing explode.

  Five days went by. I picked out the stitches in my wrist, leaving a puckered pink scar that was to itch for a month. The Hopeworth Hotel saw to the daily needs of a toilet roll, BLT sandwiches, laundry and television, so I only went out shopping for essential items unavailable from room service: plastic helicopters and rubber glo-in-the-dark monsters for Billy, Facial Creme and women’s magazines for me.

  It’s only when you read the agony pages that you discover to what extent other people are worse off:

  Dear Ruth, my husband is no
longer interested in sexual intercourse. Ever since I had an abortion sixteen years ago, I have spent every waking minute thinking I am possessed by the devil. I drink a bottle of wine a day, sometimes more if I go out …

  Dear Ruth, my boyfriend says my intimate parts taste of parsnips. Is there anything I can do to remedy this, as he is not keen on the vegetable?

  Dear Ruth, do foreskins matter?

  Dear Ruth, my ex-friend Lulette says I am a ‘disgusting slag’. Help!

  I devoured these magazines, with their glossy photographs of mistresses (I saw one advertising nail varnish who looked a little bit like Ruby Gonzalez; I stuck her on the wall with a drawing pin through her eye), and opposite those same photographs of perfection the tragic stories of the imperfect, those women like me whose man or whose life has let them down. Hungrily, I ingested their lives as a vampire bat sucks blood. The woman who finds out that her husband is a transvestite. The woman whose daughter is such a kleptomaniac she steals things from herself. The woman whose baby twins starved to death inexplicably. The woman who has ‘never knowingly had an orgasm’. Oh the pity of it. I even started to write my own letter to Ruth.

  Dear Ruth, I have been depressed ever since I discovered my husband genetically engineered our baby. Now that his mistress is pregnant, I feel as if morsels of me were breaking off and floating away downstream like a waterlogged loaf made from the wrong ingredients. Is there a cure for disintegration? A type of glue, perhaps? I read somewhere, or did I dream, that there is a new spray on the market called Domestic Bliss, to waft happiness into the home, attacking the chemicals that cause bad blood. You know, Ruth, I could do with a friend …

  But here I stopped, scrunched the letter in a ball and flung it in the bin: I had no need to write to Ruth now that I was seeing Dr Stern on a daily basis. He was most attentive. His brain was an Alka Seltzer of energy, his intellectual deftness mirrored in quick little physical movements which quite disrupted me. He was forever interrogating me, during those professional yet extraordinarily intimate sessions, about Gregory and our relationship. He would sit in his swivel chair by the window, and I would face him. The light behind him often resembled a halo.

  ‘How often do you have sex, would you say, on average? Once, twice a week?’

  Really quite personal questions. I explained about our fertility chart.

  ‘And how would you describe your role during intercourse? Active or passive? Are you more a physical or more a romantic person, would you say? Or a mixture, perhaps?’

  Questions that left me quite embarrassed, and inexplicably aroused, though I’m sure they were necessary for the research.

  Then: ‘Tell me about your childhood, Hazel. Were you a little girl who was loved?’

  And: ‘When your father died, Hazel, can you remember how you, um, felt?’

  Easy questions, really, but the answers are always rather difficult. Dr Stern, who must spend a fortune on dry-cleaning, and who does not wear a wedding-ring, says he is pursuing ‘two separate lines of approach’ with me, whatever that means.

  So as you see, Ruth, I am being looked after better than I could have dared to hope, and thanks to Dr Stern I shall not be weighing down your postbag!

  SIX

  When I’d been loading the car to leave the marital home, Jane had yelled something to me over the fence about my sister, which disturbed me. I hoped she’d got it wrong, and it was another woman with a bizarre fur hat she was talking about. But it needed checking out, so on that Sunday morning I turned Billy into a sort of chrysalis consisting of duffel coat, balaclava, scarf, gloves and furry boots, heaved him into the buggy, and wheeled us off to Linda’s flat in Bollingate View Terrace, opposite St Manfred’s Church. The bells were clanging furiously, never quite hitting any tune.

  ‘Terrorists!’ Linda shrieked as she slammed the door shut behind us, and continued in a shout, ‘Why do I have to move into a neighbourhood where the only social group is a cell of fucking bell-ringers?’

  ‘Some of them might be Mensa members,’ I ventured.

  ‘I’ve invested in earplugs,’ she decibelled.

  Billy woke up and began to cry; I shoved the silicone nipple of his dummy back in the balaclava and he fell asleep again. I left him in the hall in his buggy and followed Linda through to the lounge, a red velveteen womb with high-backed chairs and fussy footstools.

  My sister turned, sized me up, then shouted accusingly, ‘You’re taller than me again!’

  ‘Heels,’ I mouthed. ‘And no need to shout.’

  I waited while she removed her earplugs with two swift magician’s movements of the little finger, and laid them in a perspex box on the coffee table. I noticed that my face, reflected in its dark wood varnish, was as calm as a fish’s.

  ‘Worth every penny,’ Linda was saying at normal volume.

  The air in her flat was sour with stale cigarettes.

  ‘And useful for meetings. This type of earplug is the Rolls Royce of acoustic minimisers.’ Then looking me up and down again, ‘Even taking the heels into account.’

  ‘Linda, you’re obsessed.’

  ‘Off with them.’

  ‘Linda – ’

  ‘Off with them!’ she bossed, leaning on the back of a chair and wrenching off her own suede Hush Puppies.

  Sometimes there’s no point arguing with Linda. It’s a question of energy levels. We went through to the bathroom, where we stood barefoot next to each other in front of the mirror, levelling our big toes along a line of grouting. Linda put a copy of Assertiveness and You on her head to confirm she was the taller.

  ‘By a good five centimetres,’ I reassured her.

  ‘I’m one metre sixty.’

  ‘And I’m one fifty-five, just like I’ve always been.’

  ‘Not always, you haven’t,’ she said, full of mistrust. ‘You’ve always been up and down. At Florrie’s wedding you were a midget, then last October, that time with John when he got cautioned at the Pizza Hut, your pendant was level with my earrings.’

  ‘Sitting down’s different,’ I calmed her. ‘Body length. You have a short body, and mine’s long. And your earrings go on for ever, if you’re talking about those turquoise Sri Lankan ones.’

  Linda grunted, still suspicious, but finally let it drop. Billy must have woken up while we were drinking tea, and performed a silent Houdini act to escape from his clothes: he tottered into the living-room naked except for his socks.

  ‘The boy is father of the man,’ commented Linda.

  Billy and I began a game of hide and seek. From the kitchen came the crashing of plates as my sister loaded her mini-dishwasher. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, then hid with Billy. I was about to say something about the eggs when Linda, emerging from the kitchen with a plastic basket of ironing, said bluntly, ‘I hear you’ve left your husband.’

  I watched her from behind a chair. I was glad she couldn’t see my face.

  ‘Who told you I’d left Gregory?’ I called as nonchalantly as I could under the circumstances.

  When Billy turned a questioning face to me I hugged him so tight I felt his little goose-fleshed ribs might crack.

  ‘The bastard himself. I phoned your house to tell you some good news, but he answered. In quite a state. Said you were having a nervous breakdown, and that you’d turned the furniture to sawdust with some kind of power tool. I said I hoped that pseudo-Regency lampstand had been one of the victims.’

  She paused.

  ‘Well? Is it true?’

  ‘About the lampstand?’

  ‘No, about Gregory.’

  To gain some thinking time, I popped up from behind the velveteen and played my surprise card.

  ‘Well, I hear the Reverend Carmichael has a new convert. Was that the good news you were going to tell me?’

  Linda flushed with angry pride.

  ‘How did you hear about that?’

  ‘You know Gridiron. News travels fast. Jane-next-door told me. Her physiotherapist friend was there, with the
St John’s Ambulance.’

  ‘Naa-nah, naa-nah!’ sang Billy happily, recognising a word from his vocabulary.

  ‘So it’s all go,’ I went on, dressing Billy again as Linda, all elbows, dashed away energetically with her smoothing-iron. ‘Come on, Lin, let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth. Jane just yelled it to me over the fence when I was loading my car to leave Gregory, but everything she says is garbled, so I didn’t know whether she’d got it right.’

  I had been in such a state myself that when Jane told me about the eggs I was past being surprised by anything. Though given the extent of Linda’s perversity and fanaticism, I had reflected later over the whisky, it somehow figured.

  But Linda wasn’t to be drawn.

  ‘Well? Is it true you’ve left your husband at last?’

  ‘What d’you mean, “at last”? Were you expecting me to?’ I asked her.

  Linda returned my stare with a glare.

  ‘Does Dr Stern know you’re here? Gregory said he was treating you in Manxheath.’

  ‘I’m not actually a patient,’ I explained, anxious to keep my cover but riled at being categorised as a loony alongside Ma. ‘Billy and I are staying in the Hopeworth, though I’d rather you didn’t tell Gregory that for now, as it’s ferociously expensive.’

  ‘All right for some,’ grunted Linda.