Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  ‘You’re walking on the ferns! Get off the ferns, you wee idiot! Get off! Get off! Get off!’

  I could see nothing but the spikes of frosted grass beneath my feet. Ma’s face had gone bluish in places, and she licked her lips every few seconds. Cavalier. I followed in her footsteps out of wherever we were.

  ‘What did you think of the greenhouse?’ she said afterwards.

  We were sitting in the Day Room, drinking tea from styrofoam cups. Patients wandered in and out aimlessly, or sat smoking in front of the huge aquarium-sized TV. It was as though nothing monstrous had happened.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to find a word. ‘Gorgeous.’

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wanted to run away. A young man with staring eyes edged up to me and said, ‘If that’s your mother you’re in a lot of trouble,’ and he shuffled off, trailing a length of string behind him to which an empty cotton reel was attached. I watched it bounce along the lino after him and thought: Tell me something I don’t know. Ma ignored him, and licked her lips to speak again.

  ‘I call it Project Eden. What d’you think of that for a name? Your father would have approved.’

  ‘Project Eden sounds fine, Ma.’

  I shut my eyes. If Linda had been here, we could have exchanged the glance that said: Abandon Hope. I missed Linda now, for all her obnoxiousness. I missed her suddenly and violently. She would have understood. We have danced the same highway of eggs.

  ‘Linda tells me you’ve left that antiseptic husband of yours,’ she said. ‘And now you’re living it up in the Hopeworth at vast expense to the taxpayer. You always were vainglorious.’

  Her eyes were fencing about behind the greasy lenses of her glasses, but I intercepted the attack.

  ‘The fact is,’ I said, as levelly as I could, ‘Gregory and I have had some marriage problems, and I’ve moved out of Oakshott Road.’

  ‘And I also understand you’ve joined the club.’

  That look again. Never think the mad are powerless.

  ‘What club?’

  She laughed. ‘The loony club, hen. Is there any other? Your stability’s been challenged.’ She smoothed her skirt with an exaggerated wiping movement. ‘You’re one of us now, like it or lump it.’

  I wanted to punch her in the belly, but stopped myself. She licked her lips again.

  ‘D’you think I haven’t noticed that you’re seeing Dr Stern on a doctor-to-patient basis?’

  I caught a whiff of her; she smelt of wallpaper paste and Roquefort cheese.

  ‘I’m seeing him on business,’ I said.

  It was the first thing I could think of. Her glasses flashed in the light. She put back her head and laughed pantomimically.

  ‘Business!’ she said loudly, so that the other patients steered round to look. ‘Business, my farting arse. Did you hear that, everyone? My daughter here thinks she’s seeing the doctor on business!’

  A tall man barked something unintelligible and stomped out. The fat boy I’d seen before playing Scrabble, who’d been attacked by the old lady, was now playing chess. He was looking at me with an unnervingly cold stare, like I was a tacky ornament not worth the money. Between his thumb and forefinger he held the pointed head of a black bishop.

  ‘Bishop to H4, knight to G7, queen to F8 and checkmate in four,’ he said. I had heard that voice before, from Martians in films, and Directory Enquiries.

  ‘That’s Keith,’ said my mother. ‘He’s only twenty, and he’s a Grandmaster. His dad showed me the cuttings. But he’ll only talk about chess, the rest is in sign language,’ she said, smiling towards him and nodding encouragement. ‘Anyway, why d’you think you’d be seeing Dr Stern if you weren’t suffering from psychological disorder of some kind? What makes you the big exception?’

  I sipped at my greyish Institute tea, said nothing. Did I perhaps mention that, once upon a time, she had worn a pinny, rolled dough, made us cheese and pickle sandwiches for packed lunch, explained pi and tectonic plates, taken us to the Tadpole Club? So don’t talk to me about betrayal. When I’d finished my tea I would go.

  ‘You remind me of Signora Pimento, you know, my friend who’s expecting her ninth,’ my mother was saying.

  I knew Mrs Pimento by sight. I had watched her and Ma together the previous day when I was out on a walk. I’d hidden behind a conifer and spied on them reciting the Latin names of shrubs to one another. Mrs Pimento was a heavy woman, placid as a giant aubergine, swollen to bursting with a phantom pregnancy. Indoors, she occupied a wicker throne in the Day Room, and knitted baby clothes in garish acrylic.

  ‘Hysteria, they used to call it when I was a wee one. Don’t know what it’s called now, but some of the drugs are similar to mine,’ Ma is saying. ‘My diagnosis is that you’re just a bit hysterical, like her. You’ve sailed through umpteen pregnancies, I tell her, so why worry about this one? The older you get, the longer you gestate. But there’s no convincing her.’

  She was in one of her animated moods, and her cheeks were the kind of pink that comes from fever or a sharp slap. I had always feared her like this. Anything could happen. But suddenly she was smiling at me generously, her face askew.

  ‘Don’t worry hen – I’m sure Dr Stern’s looking after you.’

  I was shocked to find that I needed to lick my lips before I spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Dr Stern’s being ever so supportive.’

  Her glasses had quite cleared. A change of mood. Sometimes on television they show the speeded-up movements of clouds. They seem to be about to do one thing and then they do another. They swirl one way, and then a ridge of unexpected, inexplicable high pressure sends them whirling off to do damage in another corner of the map. My Ma is like that, only there is no map.

  ‘Do you know whose brother Keith is?’ she’s asking me brightly, winking at Mrs Pimento, who has just walked in. I tell my mother no, I don’t know whose brother Keith is. I don’t want even to look at Keith.

  ‘Go on, ask him who his brother is,’ urges Ma.

  ‘Do you have a brother?’ I ask him in a too-loud voice, as though he’s deaf.

  He replies in a complex choreography of the hands. They are butcher’s hands, too raucous for elegance. When he finishes, he folds them on his lap with finality. His face shows no expression.

  ‘He wants to know if you play chess,’ translates my mother, and before I can reply she turns back to Keith.

  ‘No, course she doesn’t. She’s not very intelligent, this daughter. Try Linda, she’ll give you a game.’ And she announces loudly to the room, ‘My other daughter’s a civil servant, you know.’

  ‘Anyway, I was going to tell you who Keith’s brother is,’ she tells me. ‘It’s Duncan! Have you met Duncan? A very nice young man – blond, he doesn’t look at all like Keith, but that’s today’s gene pool for you, he’s Linda’s new boyfriend. Now isn’t that an amazing coincidence?’

  ‘Holy Mary be praze,’ says Mrs Pimento, crunching into an apple and staring through the window into the frosty garden.

  ‘Apropos of nothing – ’ says my mother, but Mrs Pimento interrupts with a strange cry:

  ‘Aaaw!’

  It could be misery or pleasure, or the two combined. As it turns out, it is just that. Both.

  ‘I see two beautiful magpie out there in garden. First I just see one, and I think sorrow, then I see second one, for joy.’

  ‘For every depressive a manic,’ says my mother, not looking. ‘Anyway, Keith, apropos of nothing, to tell you the truth, Hazel and her husband are getting divorced.’ She says it so matter-of-factly that to begin with I don’t take it in. Then I try to laugh.

  ‘We’re doing nothing of the sort.’ I mean to sound scoffing, but the words come out all smashed up.

  Keith, to whom all this is addressed, is lining up his pawns for a fresh game, and takes no notice of either of us. I try to laugh again.

  ‘What a ridiculous idea,’ I say, although of course it isn’t ridiculous, and has been on my mi
nd incessantly. In my mouth, the sudden taste of brine. I am aware that the argument is a public one, even though the audience is indifferent.

  ‘The lady doth bang on too much, methinks,’ says my mother, catching Keith’s eye and winking at him.

  He makes an impatient gesture with one hand, as though to brush away a fly, and looks the other way. Ma begins picking at a loose thread in her tweed skirt. I catch her glancing across at me to test my reaction, her mouth already working, chewing on silence, to form another sentence.

  ‘It’s not a coincidence at all,’ I say quickly, switching back to the subject of Linda and Duncan. ‘Duncan and Linda first met here.’

  ‘Even more of a coincidence,’ retorts my mother triumphantly, to infuriate me, then reaches for the tea tray and inserts an entire rock cake into her mouth.

  ‘I can’t speak now,’ she manages through it. ‘I’m chock-a-block.’

  A raisin flies out and hits Mrs Pimento on the forearm. She snaps out of her trance and swings the big canon of her belly around to accuse us. Her bright skirt, straining its elastic waistband, falls over the great mound in a bulging waterfall of fabric.

  ‘That’s some pregnancy you’ve got there, Mrs Pimento,’ I tell her, marvelling despite myself at the concrete form delusion can take. The phantom appears to shift about.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ she says sweetly. ‘The doctors take photographs, use camcorder and all that, zoom, profile, close-up. I will star in a book about challenge.’

  Then suddenly childlike, swinging back her greying locks, she makes a hook of her index finger and gestures with it for my mother to come hither. For a frozen moment she is the exact replica of Demis Roussos.

  ‘We go look at plants in garden, Moira, my fren’?’ she asks lovingly, in a whisper. ‘Look at Chimonanthus, Jasminum nudiflorum, see if that ‘Soleil d’Or’ Narcissus bloomin’ yet? Come on, Moira, my fren’.’

  Then louder, ‘An’ you, Keith, you lookin’ pale, you need breath fresh air, bit of movin’ about, good for your alimenti canal, boy.’

  But Keith is engrossed in his game. He is playing both sides of the board, and I wonder who he’s rooting for.

  ‘King pawn F3, rook G5, pawn takes knight, and check,’ comes the voice, through lips that are barely parted.

  ‘You coming, Mr Kasparov?’ calls my mother gaily.

  Keith does not lift his eyes from the board, but he raises a hand and waves in the direction of the two departing women, who sail arm in arm through the french windows and out into the open sea of the lawn.

  I am left indoors with the loonies.

  An article in the paper the next morning sent a despairing chill through me.

  The baby-care, stationery and frozen vegetable conglomerate Hooper plc is rumoured to have made a £4m. offer to the Fertility Management Centre in return for a 51 per cent share of the ‘Perfect Baby’ trial drug GR218. Last night, Hooper spokesmen were refusing to confirm or deny the sum involved, but conceded that merger talks were at an advanced stage. The news was greeted with dismay by ecologists and church leaders. The Reverend Carmichael denounced it as a ‘devil’s pact’ and urged an all-out boycott of Hooper products on his influential satellite television programme, Holy Hour.

  There was more, but I put the paper down, my heart tightening in a lonely spasm. Hooper had finally delivered. Gregory and Root Hooper had been doing a complicated merger dance for the last year, which involved me driving out to the Savacentre to buy ingredients for elegant soirées for the millionaire and his entourage. Much whisky was downed during these evenings, but none of it ever seemed to go to anybody’s head. Root Hooper would always present me with a waxy-looking white orchid in a plastic box with ‘Sincerely Yours’ on a card, and kiss my hand elaborately while staring at my tits with his yellow herring’s eyes.

  ‘If I can clinch that deal,’ Gregory always said afterwards, without fail, ‘I’ll be free for pure science.’

  But somehow the deal had never got past the orchid and lumpfish canapé stage – until now. Coincidence, or was something up? That ‘breakthrough’ Gregory had been so excited about, perhaps. Was Ruby’s baby due? She’d looked a good seven months gone to me, that night of our loathsome dinner party. Or might Gregory have guessed that my ‘nervous breakdown’ was a cover, and that the guinea-pig mother had read the file and passed it on? I cut out the article carefully with nail scissors and wrote at the top, ‘Ishmael: Swift action???’

  Later that morning, I slipped it under his door. There was no floor covering on the other side, thank goodness, so there would be no tragic misunderstanding, like in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which we’d done at school. She wrote Angel a letter, didn’t she, saying she wasn’t a virgin but he never got it because the mat was in the way.

  The article got me thinking. Greg wasn’t stupid. If he ever suspected I knew what was in the file, he would panic. He would realise that he was treading on thin ice, and that he might have to try shutting me up.

  Strangely, Ishmael didn’t contact me about the cutting. The next day I was heading for his office for my session when I bumped into my mother and Billy. She said straight away, ‘I borrowed him from the crèche. Now listen, Billy wants me to read him the story about the Magic Train. But I can’t find it. Did you bring it with you?’

  Billy’s fat little hand disappeared inside her huge one, and the rest of him was buried in the folds of her skirt. I caught sight of the grey petticoat, and for a brief moment, felt unable to breathe.

  ‘You’ve no right to take him out of that crèche without asking me!’

  But I saw Billy look crestfallen, and I let it drop.

  ‘How d’you know he wants the Magic Train?’ I asked her. ‘He can’t even say the words.’

  But she just snorted in disgust.

  ‘Honestly Linda,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Hazel.’

  ‘Well, honestly, Hazel, or Linda, what’s the difference, two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s obvious he wants the Magic Train. What kind of a mother are you? Come on, wee poppet,’ she said to Billy and she veered off, her man’s slippers flapping on the linoleum.

  Billy gave me a smile, and was pulled along after her.

  ‘This is no place for a child,’ I called out at Ma’s retreating back.

  ‘Och, bollocks it isn’t,’ she foghorned, not bothering to turn. ‘Dr McAuley says I can provide him with some positive input on a semi-permanent supervised one-to-one basis, and Dr Stern agrees!’

  ‘Do you resent that?’ Stern asked when I crashed into his office and poured all this out.

  ‘Yes. I can’t see how Billy can like her.’

  ‘Well, there’s no accounting for children’s taste. They don’t have the same prejudices we do.’ He stopped and smiled. ‘Take advantage of it. Get her to babysit. You need a bit of time to be yourself.’

  Be myself? I didn’t quite understand what this meant, but he said it with his usual gentle tact and sympathy. There was a generosity about him that was almost spiritual. It was in that moment that I realised something: Dr Ishmael Stern actually cared for me. When I looked back into his dark eyes I felt the vertigo of a weird epiphany.

  ‘I don’t have plans to go out,’ I said.

  ‘Well, maybe you should.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Who with?’ I finally asked.

  An unfamiliar flush swamped my thighs, and a voice sang high in my head. The psychiatrist smiled.

  ‘Me.’

  I smiled back, aware of my teeth.

  There was a huge gaping silence, and then he said, ‘Hazel, can I tempt you?’

  Doctor Ishmael Stern. I noticed he always wore Italian suits, good shoes, a tie that complemented his shirt – a rare thing in a British man. At the Institute he was the calm heart of a perpetually busy machine, in which phones rang, secretaries rushed in and out, and nurses hovered. And there is always something about dark men that makes them seem extraordinary powerful, like they stalk the earth outlined in blac
k felt-tipped pen. You could say I was in love with him. Or you could say I’d been reading too many women’s magazines. Or you could say this always happens: women and shrinks, sex and God.

  ‘I want to take you out to dinner,’ he was saying. He had his hand on my arm now, and his grip was firm. ‘We both need to get out of here. It’s been too intensive. And I need to talk to you about a few things.’

  Funny, that word ‘need’. Its power; its mesmeric insistence. I need you.

  ‘About Billy? Is he going to be all right? And the cutting? Did you get it?’

  I found myself speaking fast, but in a way that passed for normal. Couldn’t the man see that he had fried my heart?

  ‘Wednesday evening OK?’ he asked, as though I hadn’t said anything.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at eight.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Yes, Ishmael. Yes, yes, yes.

  The light is on in the window of Flat 17, Bollingate View Terrace, and through it a spiky form can be seen darting to and fro, wielding cutlery and an ashtray. In her small kitchen with its artificial oak units, Linda Sugden is microwaving her TV dinner. When the machine pings, she slides the meal on to a plate, moves into the lounge and settles in a red velveteen chair to watch the news. A mug of Nescafé sits before her, planted on a cork-and-melamine place-mat depicting a Thai flower-market scene. She lifts the cardboard lid from the aluminium meal tray and the exotic vapours of Ham, Aubergine and Coriander Bake burst forth.

  ‘Comfort and joy,’ murmurs Linda to herself, releasing a pneumatic fart and lighting a cigarette.

  Comfort and joy, and a packet of Love Hearts for afters. The Rancidity Forum has come to a close, and Linda feels exhausted but fulfilled. This week has proved to be something of a watershed in Storage Policy. Her eyes glaze over as the latest figures from the Fish Wars appear in a complex graphic, and the Energy Minister launches a nationwide compost appeal.