Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

It’s a strange thing, love. You catch it unawares, like a disease. I hadn’t remembered it like this. I had associated it with contentment, not unrest. My eyes slipped away from his and reached instead for comfort. They fastened on the glass paperweight with anemones inside – a little self-contained, unchanging world. I could see why Ishmael kept it on his desk. I wanted, in that moment, to crawl inside it and be a foetal shrimp, frozen in time and space. Something was going wrong. My mouth was dry and my heart was a frenzied chicken in a coop.

  ‘Your husband is coming to discuss you,’ Ishmael whispered urgently. ‘But I won’t let him visit you. I’ve been telling him you’re depressed. Don’t worry, I’ve told him you’re quite capable of looking after Billy. And that it’s all for your own good.’

  I tore my eyes from the paperweight.

  ‘Look, Hazel,’ he was murmuring. (People were always saying ‘Look, Hazel,’ it struck me.) ‘We still have to play for time. I don’t yet have all the information I need. Go now. The last thing I want is for your husband to see you like this.’

  ‘See me like what?’ I asked.

  He paused for a moment, his round eyes blank. The pause was a fraction of a second too long, and the monster doubt hatched.

  ‘Beautiful and happy,’ he said, kissing my cheek and gliding me gently out of the door. ‘Gregory won’t be expecting it.’

  Remember last night, Ishmael, do you remember my dream last night? Here, he said, slipping two yellow pills in an envelope and pressing it into my hand. Take these at six o’clock. I shoved the packet into my handbag and left, with an unconnected image that stuck to the walls of my mind: when we were children, Linda and I had a game where you had to pick up as many sticks as you could from a tightly heaped pile, one by one, without moving any of the others. Spillikins. Leaving Dr Stern’s office, I remembered this game called Spillikins as clearly as if it were yesterday.

  As soon as I came out I saw my husband. He was walking straight towards me, carrying his briefcase. He looked distracted. His hair was greyer than I remembered it.

  ‘Morning,’ he said to me vaguely, and walked past stiffly, as though his joints were riveted. He hadn’t recognised me. I felt drained and shaky, but I carried on up the corridor. Just as I turned the corner, I heard him knock on Dr Stern’s door.

  ‘Greg, come in,’ I heard Dr Stern call in a hearty voice I didn’t know.

  ‘Ishmael,’ said Greg’s voice, loud and smooth.

  First names.

  Then there was another game we played called Categories. That was when we were older. The categories were things like cars, flowers, fruit-and-veg, boys’ names, girls’ names, animals. Someone chose a letter, and then you started filling in the columns on your paper, one word for each category: Ford, forsythia, fig, Frederick, Fanny, fox. Or Jaguar, jasmine, juniper berry, Julian, Jane, jaguar again, because there are very few animals that begin with J. Whoever finished first won. Ma used to win, always. She plays it with Keith now, using different categories: medical conditions, dead authors, flowering shrubs, foreign politicians, racehorses. Keith can’t do flowering shrubs, and Ma makes up the racehorse names, but between them they fill whole sheets of paper. Psoriasis, Proust, Pyrethrum ‘Brenda’, Pasqua, Play Your Cards Right. Mammary inflammation, Milton, mimosa, Milosevic, Mummy’s Boy. Botulism, Baudelaire, Belladonna crassiflora, Bhutto, Beginner’s Luck.

  Category: doctors. One begins with I, and one begins with G. Their names don’t begin with the same letter so clearly they have nothing in common.

  Did I really listen at the door? I must have done, because I saw myself reflected in the window opposite. There, in the corridor, crouching low, her head squashed up against the wood, was Hazel. The confident, laughing Hazel who spent all that money on her appearance. What is she doing? Hazel down on her knees now at the door, her bum squeezed like toothpaste in that pencil skirt, the poky heels splayed sideways, the head a chestnut mushroom of hair, the eyes screwed up, ear thrust against the wood of the door, intent on listening.

  She couldn’t make it all out, but she heard enough. Words like ‘collaboration’, ‘research project’, and ‘pooling resources’. She heard something about ‘delay the divorce proceedings’, and then Ishmael’s voice: ‘Hazel’s treatment’, and ‘de Cleranbault’s syndrome’, and then ‘if the cap fits’.

  ‘A delicate situation,’ said Gregory. ‘And this enormous bill from the Hopeworth …’

  Then they had a drink. Hazel knew that because Gregory began talking about whiskies, Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie and Laphroaig, and their murmuring voices took on the reassuring ocean wash of shared comforts. Hazel stood up and smoothed her pencil skirt about her hips. Slim as a racehorse, she thought. Not a trace of cellulite, no unsightly varicose veins, no unwanted hair, plenty of muscle tone … My mind staggered. I reached in my handbag for a yellow peppermint, and swallowed it whole with an arid throat.

  And for the first time since I was a small child, I fled, hell in my ears, to the fat and unaccommodating bosom of my Ma.

  NINE

  Paperwork, paperwork. The memo about the Polyunsaturated schedule, with copies in triplicate. The briefing documents for this afternoon’s policy brainstorming. The colour-coded priority sheets for Monday’s development symposium. Trish is powering through them swiftly, one eye on the clock. She’s off to lunchtime aerobics on the dot of one. You try and stop her. Linda, forcing open the vacu-pak of her sandwich with her car key, surveys Trish’s competent little sorting movements and wonders how many hours of workout it takes to get one’s bum looking like two crabapples in a bag. What sort of training equipment, what sort of inane compulsiveness, what degree of narcissism. Fancy turning one’s body into a cause. Jealousy mingled with ideological distaste engulfs her, and she breathes in deep to avoid drowning.

  Outside, ravens whirl like rags in a tumble-drier, black against sepia squirls of sky. March: the shittiest month, season of chilly sleet, emotional torment, and for Linda, chronic chilblains. Her birthday is on 24 March. She will be thirty-five. Thirty years ago, on her fifth birthday, she received a small plastic doll called Katie-Koo from Dad and Ma. You filled a little internal pouch with water so it could lachrymate and piss. Hazel had bitten off its head, and shortly afterwards Dad had left home. In Linda’s five-year-old consciousness the decapitation and the abandonment were connected. Lately on Holy Hour the Reverend Carmichael has been preaching about the season of renewal, but the only regenerative impulse Linda can summon concerns her Road Tax Disc.

  Hoiking her feet on to the desk, she bites into the spongy triangle of a chicken tikka sandwich and counts her one blessing, which is that, work-wise, she can afford to relax. The Frozen Fats (Surplus) meeting has gone as planned, and a weight is off her mind: two million metric tonnes, to be precise. Even Mr Foley, who considers Linda Sugden a brilliant mind but a walking attitude problem, has had to admit she has pulled off something of a policy coup with Operation Fatberg, her Arctic ‘sea burial’ initiative.

  But while work has eased off, family matters have been screaming for attention. In particular, Hazel’s breakdown. It neither rhymes nor reasons, and Dr Stern’s theory about ‘nervous exhaustion’ doesn’t bear serious analysis. She’s given him quite a grilling on the phone, and still has only insubstantial answers to some of the crucial questions, e.g. this: Why would Hazel massacre all those chairs when she was so fond of pine? It just didn’t make sense. Or this: Why would she claim to be taking a winter ‘bucket-and-spade holiday’, when the Hopeworth Hotel was miles from the sea?

  Something else jarred, too. A pair of twin elephantine thighs, a triangle of dark hair, an obscenely pregnant belly –

  Bleugh.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ asks Trish, rolling a green leotard in a towel and flexing her buttocks individually.

  ‘Only connect,’ murmurs Linda thoughtfully, chewing on chicken tikka. ‘Connect, connect.’

  ‘You what?’ asks Trish. ‘Connecticut? My ex-boyfriend, he went out there and became a structural e
ngineer. Got two kids now, four and one.’

  ‘Five,’ says Linda automatically.

  ‘What, days in Connecticut? When you off then?’

  ‘No, not Connecticut,’ snaps Linda, throwing her crusts in the bin. ‘I was thinking about my family.’

  Katie-Koo had blue eyes. All dolls seemed to, back in the sixties.

  ‘Oh. But they’re local, aren’t they?’ questions Trish, briefly interested. They say Miss Sugden is from the Cheeseways – the shit end of town.

  Linda says, ‘Except my dad. He went to New Zealand and got poisoned.’

  ‘Oh wow,’ responds Trish, genuinely aghast. ‘How horrific. We used to stop off in Wellington on the long hauls, but there was never much to do after eleven, except a bit of night-surfing. Nightmareville.’

  ‘One of the goldfish he won me was called Ariadne, but I can’t remember the name of the other one. I think it began with R.’

  This galls Linda, who’d won Memory Badges at school, as well as the Tidy Desk medal.

  ‘Richard? Rudolph? Ross?’ Trish volunteers, but Linda is lighting a cigarette, lost in thought.

  ‘Well, see you later, alligator,’ smiles Trish, swinging a bright plastic beach bag over her shoulder, and heading for the gym.

  ‘Goodbye, macaroon,’ murmurs Linda and inhales deeply, getting that giddy feeling she loves, then letting the smoke dragon from her nostrils. Then, cigarette in her left hand, she reaches with her right for a large piece of paper, selects four coloured felt pens, and with a firm professional instinct that has never let her down, begins to draw a diagram.

  The management guru Klaus G. Armstrong maintains that good, efficient management is fundamentally all about working with people. Working with people, using resources, making connections, doing A where a lesser thinker might choose option B, not ruling out C when D, E and F might offer superficially better prospects. Management is also an instinct, a flair, a magical knack like the laying-on of hands, a melding of inspiration, common sense, Olympian vision and a roll-up-your-sleeves, shit-or-get-off-the-pot practicality. It involves an almost biological feeling for structure, an eye for detail, a certain skill in pattern-recognition. Linda has learned a lot from Klaus G. Armstrong’s practical ideas and methods. Who hasn’t.

  In a red circle she writes ‘Hooper plc – Perfect Baby Drug’. She links this circle to another one, in yellow, in which she writes the name Gregory Stevenson, and to another, in green, labelled Dr Ruby Gonzalez. She draws a wiggly yellow line between the circles for Gregory and Ruby, then puts Hazel’s name in blue in another circle, linked to Gregory’s by a solid black line with an axe through it. In a smaller yellow circle below Hazel, she writes ‘Billy’ in blue, and in a smaller green circle below Ruby, draws a stick-figure with a huge head with two hairs sprouting from it, and surrounds it with yellow question marks. On the right-hand side of the page she writes ‘Vernon Carmichael’ in purple. Next to him, a huge cross of righteousness. And takes another huge and giddying drag on her cigarette.

  Yes. It’s all beginning to make sense.

  Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability,

  Friday

  Dear Brendan,

  There’s a story I tell Billy. Once upon a time there was a king with money and a car, and he married Hazel, and they had you. But a wicked witch in a Latin cabaret costume covered in sequins, and dangling a pink feather boa, came pirouetting into the picture, a spinning carousel of the erotic, and the king couldn’t resist, because sex and scientific talent are potent ingredients, and your silly mother is an abhorrence to anyone in their right mind, with her low self-esteem and her nylon Welcome mat. So they set up house, the king and his Bird of Paradise, in a detached house with two bathrooms, and they made the beast with two backs whenever they pleased, and would have lived happily ever after, but for a great tragedy that befell them, whose cause they never discovered, but they blamed themselves, which was only right and proper, and they shrank, shrank, shrank until they were the smallest and least significant people on earth.

  It’s hardly surprising that Hazel is looking peaky these days. She’s demonstrating some fairly florid manifestations of acute mania, and is clearly in more of a sexual pickle than I’d thought. Thank goodness the crèche is reliable, because she most certainly isn’t. The other day I spotted no fewer than three paper-clips in her hair. Today I’d just started on the tiger-lilies in the greenhouse when she came rushing up screaming, dressed in her prostitute’s outfit. I hauled her off to Signora Pimento’s nest, which is near to completion, and poured half a hip-flask of brandy down her, which I’m afraid only aggravated the raving. I ransacked her handbag, and found a portable phone (which I pocketed) and her mysterious red pills, which I planted in the ‘miscellaneous medications’ bed. Then I sat on her. It was all I could think of to shut her up. She always had ‘lungs’. The shock of it seemed to send her into a coma (as you know I am a heavy woman), so I left her there with her silly suspenders showing and got on with the business in hand. The business in hand is two babies to be born – one here, one there. Both are imminent. And I have a plan.

  Hazel came to a few hours later, still raving about her bad luck with men. I tried explaining to her that it was worse than bad luck; it was choice. (Hundreds of hours of group therapy have left their mark.) You actively pick them, I was explaining. You’re obviously addicted, psychologically speaking, to a mean-spirited personality type who fails to meet the most fundamental requirements of interpersonal relationships. It’s clearly your father’s fault (that’s you, Brendan), and if you don’t come to terms with it – perform your own personal Gestalt – you’ll never be what I would term a complete human being. But she was in no mood for advice. In fact I’m not sure she heard a word I said, or recognised who I was. She was taking huge swigs of brandy. Her make-up was all smeared across her face and she reminded me of how she looked when I dressed her up once for a fancy-dress party as a child – a hobgoblin, I think – but the greasepaint melted and she came home frantic and screaming because all the other little girls were fairies and Snow White. I can see her now, shouting at me, stamping, stamping, stamping that wee foot, with its shiny wee party shoe with the wee buckle, saying, ‘I hate you, Mummy, you made me look ugly and everyone laughed at me!’ the tears skidding across the oil. Such a joke she looked, I couldn’t help laughing myself. I didn’t laugh at her now, though, lipstick all across her cheek, mascara smudged, because she’d done it herself this time. My conscience was clear.

  Then she clutched her knees to her chest in just the same way as Monica Fletcher does when she’s attention-seeking in Group, and rocked to and fro. She’d had this incredible dream, she said, all about being in Eden, an oasis of tropicana, where she was raped by an enormous snake.

  ‘It went right up through me and emerged via my throat,’ she groaned. ‘And a wodge of white gob splatted out.’

  Even her subconscious is a gutter. A pity Dr McAuley wasn’t there; it would have been right up her street.

  ‘Well, you got at least one aspect of it right,’ I told her; ‘you are in a sort of Eden.’

  She glanced around her, but didn’t seem to take it in. When I told her I had a master plan she just said I could do what the fuck I liked, whoever I was, she didn’t care, as long as I just fucked off. I learned a long time ago not to expect gratitude from the likes of my daughter. Fancy not recognising her own Ma. I left her choking over the bottle, looking like the whore she is.

  On the way to Group, I came face to face with our son-in-law Gregory carrying Billy on his shoulders. He told me he’d fetched Billy from the crèche and was taking him home for the weekend, with Hazel’s agreement via Dr Stern. He looked happy: his eyes were glazed, and I could smell whisky on his breath. He read my thoughts, and told me he’d just been enjoying a ‘quick aperitif’ with Dr Stern. Chatting, colleague to colleague. Man to man. His eyes were darting about madly, and he seemed desperate to say something that wouldn’t come out, but then it finally did.
/>   ‘Discussing Hazel, actually.’

  Surprise, surprise. If he jogs Billy up and down like that any more, I thought, the lad will vomit.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t recognise her. She’s quite come apart at the seams.’

  ‘So Dr Stern tells me. I’m sorry it’s come to this.’

  ‘Like hell you are,’ I told him, and I gave him a look.

  This was followed by what he would term ‘an embarrassing pause’, in which he joggled my poor grandson some more. Billy just sat there like Buddha and listened with his big eyes, serious, thinking: This is my dad, come to see me.

  ‘Bye-bye, my poppet,’ I told him.

  I’m not much of a kisser, but I took his tiny hand in mine and gave it a squeeze. And I thought: Have a lovely weekend with the King and his new Queen, Ruby Gonzalez, MD., Ph.D., greedy eater of lemon soufflé, and usurper of my daughter’s throne. And watch out for her, Billy boy. Her belly is a poisoned chalice.

  ‘Cheerio, Moira,’ said my gynaecologist son-in-law, and swung off with Billy in the direction of the car-park.

  It’s a Pay and Display.

  Yours sincerely,

  Moira Sugden

  Manxheath Institute for the Morally Deranged,

  Tuesday

  Dear departed,

  Spring is in the air and the greenhouse is a triumph: termites burrowing, bulbs shooting up, chrysalises cracking open, hormones whizzing about. My miscellaneous medications bed is inching into bloom; the Valium turns out to have pinky-green leaves and a fluffy puce flower that resembles cotton. I plan to send a photograph to that terrible gardening programme where the earth is never dirty; they have a competition. After a shaky start with germination, which I put down to the type of capsule, the Largactil is now in bud, and promises to be a flamboyant, cabaret sort of flower. I had high hopes of my Lithium, but it has let me down; it’s hairy and covered in a black insect called bloat-fly. Hazel’s so-called vitamins were equally disappointing. I put them out of their misery.