by Liz Jensen
‘Life’s a bitch and then you die,’ she sighs five minutes later, stubs out her cigarette, and farts again.
She’s halfway through the Bake when suddenly a familiar figure pops up on the screen, clad in a yellow anorak with a red crucifix logo, and wielding a banner declaring ‘we are all perfect babies’. A group of a thousand demonstrators, the reporter is saying, many of them physically challenged. There are shots of the guide dogs, hearing-aids, and wheelchairs of the halt and the lame. The controversial trial drug GR218; controversial merger plans of the Fertility Management Centre and Hooper plc, headquartered in London; the charismatic and controversial babywear, stationery and frozen-food magnate Root Hooper (shot of Root Hooper banging his fist on a table); controversy; heated argument; debate; moral dilemma; outrage; crusade; practicalities; uncertainty.
Now the Reverend Carmichael is addressing the throng through a green megaphone: ‘Big business has put itself behind Frankenstein. Together they will create monsters. The wages of sin is death, saith the Lord! Boycott Hooper products, folks, and show the Big One you’re on the side of righteousness!’
And replacing the megaphone with a pair of giant garden shears, he begins to cut to pieces a miniature towelling Babygro to the sound of frenzied cheering.
‘Whatever the outcome of this dispute,’ the po-faced reporter concludes, ‘one thing’s for certain: the Perfect Baby issue will be on the social agenda for some time to come.’
‘Good on you, Reverend,’ murmurs Linda. ‘As ye sow, Gregory Stevenson, so shall ye fucking reap.’
And opening the packet of Love Hearts, she reads the inscription on the first. It is pink, on a lemon background.
It says: ‘My One True Love’.
You don’t feel like a woman any more after you’ve had a baby. Not a real woman, a sexy one. What mother has time to wax her legs properly and stay awake long enough to get aroused by something which is after all old hat – her husband? What mother of a young child feels an overwhelming sexual desire for the father of her infant, after that infant has vomited milk on her shoulder all day? Give me her name and address. I will write to her and tell her she’s a liar.
I saw the loss of my libido as part of being invisible. Men don’t look at women who push buggies, except in Italy, where as an ensemble you become, momentarily, the manifestation of the Madonna and child, a sort of street icon. (On a trip to Padua, I was a goddess.) But Gridiron isn’t Italy, and no one looked at me, and I became part of that sub-species of womanhood known as the mum, an underclass that forms the great marshmallow cushion on which other lives, more interesting and worthy than ours, are sustained and serviced.
So when, over dinner with Dr Stern, I felt the unmistakable urge for sex, I was as sweatily pole-axed as an adolescent. It all started with a sugarlump. We had driven out to an Italian restaurant in Mutton Acre, the sort of charm-packed village that advertises itself on brochures as a ‘hidey-hole’. I liked being someone who went to dinner there. All the clients of its chic restaurants were professional couples, who either had no children (they drank more, had more fun) or had left their offspring with baby-sitters who lived where I once did, in the Cheeseways near the Works. Baby-sitters whose ambition it was, as mine had been when I baby-sat, making use of their telephones and investigating their larders and their loft conversions, to marry one day and have dinner in Mutton Acre. (‘You’re so conventional,’ Ma always told me. ‘Even the dipsomania.’)
When we had sat down at our table, and the waiter had fussed over us and taken our order and planted a giant pepperpot on the table between us, we clinked glasses and then Ishmael did something strange: he told me to close my eyes and open my mouth. I did what he said, and was shocked to feel a violent sweetness on my tongue. I opened my eyes, crunched and swallowed. The psychiatrist had fed me a sugarlump, like I was a horse. He offered no explanation, and carried on talking about his autism research as though nothing had happened. I was too dumbfounded to mention it. We drank. The salt of the margarita tasted painful and exquisite after the sugar.
And then I felt it, a tingling flush that crept all over my body. Desire. I was surely leaking hormones on the tablecloth, and I wondered whether Ishmael had noticed.
He was looking elegant, as usual. He wore a pink shirt and I felt his eyes flit over me, stirring up rogue elements in groiny places. Suddenly he smiled and put down his knife and fork carefully and touched my hand. His voice was slow and reasonable.
‘I expect you’re wondering where things stand, Hazel,’ he said. ‘Where you stand.’
I was expecting him to say something about the attraction between us, so I was almost disappointed when he began to talk about Gregory’s file.
‘My diagnosis is that although you’re upset – disturbed even – by all this, you’re coping very well. I’ve got some one-a-day vitamins for you, by the way, because we need to keep you as well and alert as possible while this is going on.’
He reached in his pocket and slipped out a plastic bottle of pills.
‘You can start them now,’ he murmured.
He opened the child-proof top for me, took one out, and popped it in my mouth.
I swallowed in a reflex.
‘Here,’ he said gently. ‘Wash it down, love. Now, one a day. Don’t forget.’ He screwed back the top and handed me the bottle.
He had called me ‘love’.
‘Your chose to do the right thing about this information,’ he went on. ‘It’s a hot potato, and you picked the right person to handle it for you. I’m aware of the Hooper merger but I still need more time on it. A week should do it. I’ve gone through the file. It’s not really my field but I know enough. Now it’s just a question of completing those tests on your son –’
‘And?’
‘There are some exciting things going on, Hazel,’ he said. ‘Things your husband didn’t think about, because he’s not a psychologist. He should really have – ’ and then he stopped abruptly.
A shadow passed over me, but I shooed it off. He was grasping my hand tightly now.
‘What I’m saying is that he’s on to something very exciting, but he has no idea how to harness it. I need to know more. And I’ll find out,’ he said.
He forked a morsel and posted it in his mouth. For some reason I couldn’t eat. He smiled at me while chewing, and I played with the giant pepperpot.
Swallowing, he sipped at his water and pronounced, ‘Your husband is a good scientist. His records are methodical and his study is elegant – ’ but here he broke off again, and stopped smiling. He took a little stick of bread and dipped it in his seafood sauce. His face was serious now.
‘Elegant,’ he said in a different, censorious tone, ‘but totally unethical. Quite against the code of conduct.’
‘Immoral,’ I said, gulping air.
The vitamins had done something to my system. I felt strange.
‘Yes, if you want to use that word,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, Gregory’s personality is one I’d be interested in exploring out of professional interest one day.’
‘Do you think he could be unbalanced?’ I asked. ‘Clinically speaking, I mean?’
‘Unbalanced – no. It’s just that the scientific spirit got out of hand, and triumphed over the checks and balances. In any case, as I see it, it’s actually a delicate ethical issue. One which you could argue a case for. I’m not saying I think he’s right. I’m just saying that the scientist in me can understand while the man of ethics – the moralist, if you like – disapproves almost entirely of the principle.’
‘And of the result? If everyone were born perfect,’ I said, ‘it would put you out of a job.’
‘That’s right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘An end to mental suffering. That would be quite an achievement.’
‘And Billy? Is he OK?’
‘Fundamentally, yes. Some interesting results have emerged, though. He does seem to be capable of telepathic communication of a limited nature with your mother’ – he raised his pal
m to stop me – ‘but, as your husband suspected, it’s only a one-way thing. He can communicate with her, but she’s only a receptor.’
‘Thank God for that. She won’t be filling his head with junk, at least.’
‘No. He seems to have been busy filling hers with his own little concerns, though. You do have to realise, Hazel, that they are very close.’
‘I suppose they are,’ I said, realising suddenly the significance of the constipation, the McDonalds, the remotely-controlled aeroplane, and the Magic Train, and feeling like an idiot not to have spotted it before.
‘So,’ he concluded, ‘the success of the Baby B experiment was limited to this example of telepathy, with the wrong generation and in the wrong direction.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, according to the file,’ Dr Stern said, ‘one of the aims of Genetic Choice is for the baby to intercept the wishes of parents and act accordingly.’
‘And that’s perfection? I’d never thought of it like that.’
There was a certain Gregory-type logic to it which might make sense on graph paper.
‘It’s part of it,’ he answered. ‘But only a very small part. There’s lot’s more. Other things. It’s a fascinating dynamic, Hazel. Completely fascinating.’ He stroked my arm gently. There was a pause, and then he said, ‘You know, Hazel, in a funny sort of way, I’m jealous of your husband.’
Which was absurd. Gregory was at a gene conference with Ruby in Miami. He was probably probing her ‘birth canal’ even as we spoke.
Dr Stern dropped me off at reception, saying he ‘had to get back’. In the car, he kissed me on the cheek. I could feel the imprint of his lips for a long time afterwards. I knew he had wanted me.
I had a dream that night. He pinned me down on the floor of his office. Its surface was mushy, and soon began to deliquesce to a soup-like liquid. Ishmael’s chest was bare, I remember, and matted with dark hair. We were having sex, in a motion that was tortuously slow and swimming-poolish. We were weightless, and octopus-like, and I have a memory of my legs round his neck and he had one hand on each breast while, miraculously, a third slowly, slowly massaged what Ma always referred to as one’s ‘front bottom’, and then suddenly the pace changed and he was thrusting inside me like a madman with a vision, and I was being food-mixed, my soul and my bum aflame. It was exquisite, but also excruciating, because Gregory was watching us from a corner of the room. He was laughing at me and calling out various taunts, but Ishmael, who couldn’t see or hear him, just kept shrieking in my ear, ‘Hazel, are you safe?’ and I couldn’t remember, because I couldn’t see the chart and had forgotten the dates, and didn’t care, and then I burst and became ectoplasm, and floated out of the room.
EIGHT
Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability
Dear Late Husband,
Something I forgot to ask about your current ‘lifestyle’: is it a question of fluffy clouds, cherubs wielding cornucopias, and Earl Grey tea with a thousand vicars? Or is it more a question of keeping your end up in a sea of faeces? I am curious. One of these days, I shall come and check. Here, apart from some ‘special sessions’ with our grandson, it’s purgatory as usual. Can you see us down here, from your celestial vantage-point? See the bitter-looking female who moves like an eel? She’s Dr ‘Sarah’ McAuley, mine hostess. In charge.
Once a day we sit in a semi-circle, with our ashtrays, our balls of wool and our psychoses, and mouth off about what beached us here, far from our beloved suburbia, with its mortgage and two veg.
Here we are: the Group. Take Max. Look at him with his cunning badger’s face, and then tell me there is no justice in the world, and no God. He’s tall because he was a brigadier. He served in the Falklands and performed secret missions in Beijing, though a blond man of that height in a Chinese community is hard to keep a secret. Lay him end to end and he’d be six foot four, but see the giveaway stoop? That’s guilt at work. They say that if he hadn’t been caught in a series of peccadilloes – whippings, acts of violent buggery with junior officers, obscene phone calls to the high and mighty (that’s what did it) – he’d have been in for a generalship. I don’t know. ‘They’ is only his roommate, David, who believes everything he’s told.
David’s the one next to Max. He of the horn-rimmed glasses, the seventies sideburns and the eternal Silk Cut. He’s talking now, about leather. You are looking, incidentally, at a man broken by circumstances. As evidenced by his bitten fingernails. Nail-biters are to be pitied; they are like Jesus, suffering on the cross that we may be spared. Anyway, when David’s marriage fell apart, so did he. The day his wife walked out, his sanity upped and left with her. He’s obsessed with the legal side of it. The Bar Association conspired to wreck his life, forcing his innocent wife to run off with his company’s accountant. The couple ran a business together, manufacturing inner soles for shoes. They dominated the market in the Midlands, and had trade links with Portugal, fending off the Taiwanese threat when lesser operations went under. Anyway, Wifey and the accountant are running the shoe business now, and there are letters flying about between their lawyers and Dr Stern on the question of ‘incompetence due to insanity’. Wifey visits sometimes, small, tarty, pert, like a wee sweetie in a fancy wrapper, different shoes on each occasion, and calling him ‘darling’, while he looks up at her doggily from his armchair, waiting for her to throw a poisoned bone. I presume the accountant and the legal team wait in the car-park. When the staff aren’t looking, Sweetie pushes papers under his nose, and hands him a pen. He reads them and writes mechanically – but it’s not a signature; it’s a message to the lawyers. ‘Fuck You’ on every document. Wifey reads it and smiles in a pained way.
‘You should watch out, David,’ I warned him once. ‘Those lawyers will change your name to Fuck You by deed poll, and you’ll have signed away your life.’
So he agreed to alternate it with ‘Bollocks’.
Dr McAuley thinks the lawyers are a fantasy, but she’s never seen Sweetie’s antics. The way these doctors put so much faith in people who are supposedly sane, and turn a blind eye to the fact that they’re cunning cut-throats who’d sell their children’s kidneys for a go on a one-armed bandit. No case notes, no case to answer. That’s doctors for you: pedantic. Look at our son-in-law, Greg Stevenson. Carries a tape measure everywhere, in case someone says ‘How long is a piece of string?’ Hazel always lacked imagination herself. She just wanted a nice life, I suppose – and she has one, if hideous curtains from John Lewis, a designer-splotched thing in pastel, at £21.75 a metre are proof of it.
Can you see how we’re sitting? How the semi-circle is arranged around Dr McAuley to make her feel useful and in control? We are encouraged not to sit in the same place each time, so we do. I’m there in the middle, with Keith to my left and Isabella to my right. Next to Isabella, an emaciated, desperate wee figure, with bulging eyes. Is it a dragonfly? Is it a cricket? No, it’s an anorexic, a creature defined by the medical dictionary as an ‘ossature’ – that’s Latinate for bag of bones – who squeezes in where she can. And there’s Monica Fletcher. Over there, in the navy Popsox, all scrunched up in a ball. She crouches on the floor when she’s feeling low. She’s very geographical; the day we find her perched on a high shelf, we’ll know they’ve found the right drug combination – but no chance of that, I fear. You’d be surprised at the sheer volume of water that comes out of her. She takes the world very personally. Every starving baby is one she has given birth to, every torture victim and every murderer on Death Row is her husband or son, every rape victim is her sister or best friend, every hunted fox, drowned dog, or sexually abused tortoise, her pet. Frankly, her selflessness ends up being rather invasive, bless her.
The doctors have been experimenting with hormone therapy, the theory being that she’s too feminine, too inclined to self-sacrifice and frailty. They assume this is a purely physical phenomenon – a question of oestrogen balance. So they give her doses of testosterone, and she grows a fetchin
g crop of facial hair, and she carries on, all lace and dimples and wee seed-pearls of tears trickling forever down her pink-and-white face, forever writing billets-doux to her husband saying sorry, sorry, sorry. I found one and read it: darling this and darling that, sorry, sorry, are you OK, my love, oh I’m so looking forward to another honeymoon in Clermont-Ferrand, sorry, sorry, I love you etc, your loving wife Monica. Clermont-Ferrand!!?? That made me laugh. An industrial metropolis of rusting iron and belching smoke, if I remember rightly. He should be the one apologising.
Keith is playing chess in his head again. You can tell from the way his eyes flicker. He doesn’t participate in the Group, being indifferent to humans on the whole, and not speaking. Right from the start, I took a liking to him. He makes me think of how our son might have turned out, if I hadn’t sat on him. I remember, years ago, Hazel came home from school one day with a whole load of jokes about dead babies. I made her tell me each of them at least three times, standing on the kitchen table. I laughed till the tears ran down my face.
Look, Brendan: Isabella’s talking now, about her cervix dilation, waving her arms in that operatic Latin way, fecundity and motherhood written all over her. Born to breed. She’s had so many, she tells me, whole litters of them, she’s lost count. All given up joyously for adoption, in that spirit of altruism I so much admire in her. Breastfed and vaccinated, and then off into the wide world. But this latest offspring – how long has she been carrying this creature? Eighteen months? Two years? (Dr McAuley, who is childless herself, said once she reckoned the swelling was wind. If that’s the case, I told her, may you be the first to be blown to kingdom come when Signora P. lets loose that fart.)
‘It’s usually nine months with me,’ Isabella told me yesterday. ‘Sometimes ten. Eleven maximum. But never this long before. I try not to worry.’
Best friends we may be, but she won’t tell me who the father is.
Now Dr McAuley’s turning to David: ‘Shall we carry on with your story, now? We’d just got to your marriage, I think.’
