Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  The socially vulnerable knitting circle met in a windowless room which might once have been a padded cell. I was awarded a place at the very end, nearest the door. I’d brought my red-cushioned chair. It had become a sort of mascot. Keith was there, looking composed, like nothing had happened. If I’d said to him ‘Cauliflower cheese’ he’d probably have gestured: ‘Cauliflower cheese to you, too!’

  Dr McAuley caught me chatting to Isabella about epidurals and remarked that my hearing had improved. Indeed it had; I’d removed the earplugs.

  ‘Now,’ she began the session. ‘Does anyone here have anything they feel they’d like to share?’

  So my mother let rip about how I’d wrecked her Valium display in the greenhouse. She’d been planting pills, apparently, in a ‘miscellaneous medications’ bed. Loony tunes.

  ‘What greenhouse?’ asked Max.

  ‘An interesting figment,’ said Dr McAuley, ‘of Moira’s fertile imagination.’

  ‘Mrs Sugden to you,’ snapped my Ma. ‘And it’s no figment. Hazel’s been there. She’ll testify to it. She stole my whore’s drawers.’

  A McAuley eyebrow lifted in sudden interest. She paid attention to anything knicker-related, being a Freudian.

  ‘Valium domesticum is a bugger to germinate, you know,’ Ma added resentfully, her glasses flashing at me. ‘It was in its hour of glory.’

  ‘I gave them to Dr Stern,’ I said.

  ‘In the hope of a quick shag?’ asked Max menacingly.

  Clearly Ishmael and I hadn’t managed to hide our affair all that well.

  ‘But it’s romantic,’ Monica sobbed. ‘Romantic, romantic, romantic.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about romance,’ muttered a greasy-haired man called David, whose wrists were in bandages.

  ‘Sweetie been screwing you for money again?’ asked my mother, spotting it too. ‘Och, she’s a shameless hyena.’

  ‘It’s worse this time, eh, Dave,’ barked Max. ‘Dr Stern’s signed the incompetence-due-to-insanity papers. Now she can annul the marriage. She’s marrying that bastard accountant next week.’

  There was silence. David hung his head; the Ossature shivered and pulled her crocheted blanket around her flesh-free shoulders.

  ‘Thank you for sharing that with us,’ said Dr McAuley. ‘Now, everyone, I’d just like to tell you that Moira’s daughter Hazel will be joining us for group sessions from now on, which I’m sure she’ll find empowering-and-enabling.’ She said this as though it were all one word, like ‘cheese-and-onion’ in the case of crisps.

  ‘Hazel’s been very unforthcoming on a one-to-one basis,’ she told the loonies. ‘But I think she’ll really blossom here. Welcome to Manxheath, Hazel.’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ added Max, and gobbed on the floor. Max’s world can’t have been much different from yours and mine, because everyone pretended not to notice.

  I smiled around the semi-circle, like a contestant at a beauty pageant, and Dr McAuley made a note on her clip-board.

  And so I became a member of the Group. Other perks followed: I was allowed a subscription to Woman’s Realm and New Woman, and it was agreed that Billy would come to visit once a week, and spend the day, until such time as I was deemed well.

  I’d taken against the wallpaper in the Day Room: I found its Regency design of stylised green flowers in vertical lines had an ironic, mocking tone to it, so I spent most of my time in my room waiting for the Great Pretender Ishmael to come and whisk me off to dinner in Mutton Acre. I kept myself to myself. Being invisible helped.

  ‘I’d like to propose a toast,’ announces the man on the podium. He is small and tanned and bald. He smiles to reveal a fortune in artful bridgework. ‘To the success of our new partnership.’

  His oily herring’s eyes skim the throng of people before him, a sea of smart suits and little cocktail outfits. The Executive Club Lounge of the Gridiron City Hopeworth is the venue for the gathering of this elite section of the scientific and business worlds. Some have limousined all the way from London for the occasion. Cummerbunds encircle management paunches, earrings jangle beneath big hair-dos. There is a smell of marinated olives, taramasalata, and money.

  ‘Raise your glasses, please,’ says Mr Root Hooper, trillionaire, ‘to the new Hooper Fertility Foundation. Long may it thrive.’

  ‘To the Hooper Fertility Foundation,’ murmurs the throng before they sip.

  ‘Fuck you,’ mutters Linda under her breath, wincing on a lemon slice. Her blonde wig is itching her scalp, and her huge rose-tinted spectacles keep sliding down the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Fuck Hooper, fuck Gregory, fuck the Reverend fucking Carmichael, fuck everyone,’ she adds, expanding on her theme. Linda Sugden is on what Trish would call ‘the psychological rampage’.

  ‘Would you care for an amuse-gueule?’ asks an astonishingly handsome waiter, thrusting a silver platter of pineapple and cheese chunks on sticks, biscuits spread with olive paste, and pistachio nuts under her nose.

  ‘And fuck you too,’ says Linda, looking him full in the face. ‘I only eat Twiglets.’

  Root Hooper tilts his flute of champagne towards that of Dr Greg Stevenson, standing next to him on the dais. Their glasses kiss with a tiny ping and they drink. As small streams of bubbles forge effervescent pathways to gullets lined with hors-d’oeuvres, there is a smile on the face of each man. It is an important moment. Hooper plc and Fertility Management Inc. are going to bed together, as the jargon has it. And the white froth of champagne that shoots from the jeroboam of Bollinger (a stream of liquid whose Freudian significance the dark-haired man in the beige Armani suit in the corner of the room notes with a quite professional smirk) is the climax of their courtship. The papers have been signed, the deal struck.

  Linda edges herself round to the table next to where Dr Ruby Gonzalez is sitting and pretends to be reading the Hopeworth’s glossy brochure. She notes, in passing, the shocking prices at the Soins Intensifs Beauty Clinic, e.g., £30 for a bikini wax. She snorts, and focuses her rose-coloured lenses on Ruby Gonzalez, who is looking moronically self-satisfied in the way that only pregnant women can, whilst downing orange juice and blue cheese profiteroles. Linda notes with distaste that she’s sitting with her legs spread quite wide apart, Sumo wrestler-style, her belly spilling over the gulf.

  As Gregory Stevenson and Root Hooper approach, Ruby’s generous lips broaden into a big smile. Linda shifts in her chair and narrows her eyes to observe. Root Hooper is lunging forward to kiss Dr Gonzalez’s hand, but suddenly her smile has twisted into pain and she’s pulling backwards into her seat as though to shrivel away from him, still holding a profiterole aloft in one hand. Something is wrong with Ruby. She appears to be arc-welded to her chair, and there’s something panicky squirming in her eyes.

  ‘I can’t get up,’ she says tremulously, her face red. ‘Greg!’ she calls plaintively. ‘Help! Oh, do excuse me, Mr Hooper, I really shouldn’t have come. I just wanted to – ’

  She shifts in the chair in an attempt to cross her legs; it’s then that Linda notices the dark patch spreading across Ruby Gonzalez’s silk dress. A pungent smell begins to spread. The woman is awash with liquid.

  ‘I wanted to celebrate with you,’ Ruby soldiers on bravely. There is a small, uncomfortable silence, and Linda slaps a hand over her mouth to prevent laughter, screaming or vomiting. She watches Ruby’s thighs and sees the plastic chair beneath her fill with liquid which overflows and splashes on the parquet floor. Ruby’s eyes, too, are fixed on the broad puddle that is spreading towards Root Hooper’s polished leather shoes. Gregory, Spam-faced, is looking annoyed.

  ‘I thought you’d like to meet our new partner,’ he tells Ruby sternly – in much the same tone that he would adopt with Hazel when, as usual, she had put too much salt in the cooking.

  ‘Yes, darling, of course I’m delighted to meet Mr Hooper.’

  Linda gags. Hazel has told her about the gruesome business of childbirth. The prying fingers of midwives, the horror of the
mucus plug, the excruciating agony of pushing something the size of a Yorkshire terrier through an unyielding sleeve of flesh, the moment you clap eyes on the juddering, livid afterbirth – the whole shebang.

  ‘This is very embarrassing,’ says Ruby Gonzalez at last, ‘but my waters have broken.’

  ‘Your what?’ asks Root Hooper, genuinely puzzled. ‘Beg pardon, Dr Gonzalez?’

  ‘Oh Ruby,’ intervenes Greg with a sigh of irritation. ‘I told you this was a bad idea, coming along at a time like this.’

  ‘My shoes!’ cries Hooper, suddenly spotting the puddle. ‘Hey, get a cleaner here pronto, someone. There’s some kind of mess on the floor.’

  Ruby begins to give strange strangulated gulps.

  ‘And an ambulance,’ she gurgles.

  By now she is surrounded by people who have all come to look at the spectacle she’s made of her chair, the floor, the dress.

  ‘Good God,’ gasps a Hooper executive, whipping out a small packet of Kleenex from his breast pocket and waving a lone tissue in Ruby’s direction. ‘We seem to be flooded.’

  ‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ Linda calls into the back of the throng as she grabs her handbag and prepares to hurtle off.

  ‘Don’t worry – I’ve already called one,’ says a voice.

  Linda looks up and her eyes meet the yellow silk shirt, peacock tie and beige Armani suit of her mother’s psychiatrist. Linda quickly adjusts her wig and whisks her scarf across her mouth.

  ‘It’ll be here in two minutes,’ says Dr Stern. And he smiles at Linda. Beneath the dark moustache, a row of white and perfect teeth.

  TWELVE

  I’ve always been fond of jigsaws – perhaps because, as a child, I was better at them than Linda, who was supposed to be the clever one. Linda never had the patience. She was more of a diagram person. She liked to make associations swiftly and in broad, radical terms. But my story was one that had to be pieced together, doggedly, afterwards. This was a jigsaw story. Linda helped me with it, of course, by offering her own pompous self-glamorising recollections. But there were plenty of other pieces: my own experience, Ruby’s article in the Lancet, the Inquiry report, Ma’s loony letters, the scientific evidence that emerged at the trial.

  Though I’m the first to admit that, while the shit was actually hitting the fan, nothing made sense. I couldn’t see for whirling excrement.

  What happened next took place in the greenhouse. The event itself was real enough, but the location –

  To this day I don’t know.

  It seemed real enough at the time. To me, to Ma, to Isabella, and to Keith, at least. In that respect we were at odds with the rest of the world, which, with hindsight, went along with the theory formulated by the Inquiry. Its report states:

  The so-called greenhouse was a potent hallucinative figment, created by Mrs Moira Sugden for her own escapist and symbolic purposes but later shared by weaker personalities, including her daughter, the other key witness. Its function as an emotional refuge made it especially attractive to those clients of Manxheath whose Lithium dose had been gradually increased over the preceding two months, under the auspices of Dr Donald Hollingbroke. Parallels can be drawn between this phenomenon and the mass hysteria evidenced when religious miracles, such as the alleged apparition of the Angel Gabriel over Birmingham last June, are ‘perceived’ by a gullible and vocal section of the population.

  The shared hallucination theory about the greenhouse seemed quite plausible to Linda and the rest of the world. But then Linda and the rest of the world never saw it. Ever since, I have borne something of a grudge against them for that.

  Even those of us who experienced it couldn’t agree on what it was like. To me, for instance, it had been an ill-organised sort of place that was heavily sexual. Ma reckoned it was functional – municipal, even, and based on something which Dad, with his double glazing experience, had in mind for Jaycote’s Park. Keith wouldn’t comment. We never got to hear Isabella Pimento’s version, though in her own way she had the last word. Now that it’s all over, and the thing’s in smithereens, I doubt all versions, my own included. After all, thanks to the soft-bottomed Dr Hollingbroke, I was a cocktail of chemicals, a pharmaceutical arsenal. Put a lighted match to me and I might have emitted green smoke. Touch my skin and the moisture from my pores might have stung or shrivelled you. Say a kind word and I might have disintegrated.

  It began on a Thursday night. The Ossature had finished her evening vomiting session in the toilet down the hall, which seemed to be the most user-friendly, and we’d read our horoscopes. Mine said, ‘Take advantage of this peaceful time to get a few household chores out of the way. And romance could flower unexpectedly, so hang on to your hat!’

  I saw the word ‘flower’, in the context of romance, as a reference to Ishmael. It meant he had probably reacted well to my bouquet. The Ossature’s said, ‘It’s time to tighten your belt,’ so she was pleased, too. Then we’d said goodnight and gone to bed. As evenings spent on psychotropic drugs go, it seemed quite normal.

  But I couldn’t sleep. In the end I tossed and turned so much I fell out of bed. So I got up and drew the curtains. The greenhouse was there, as it sometimes was of an evening, but there was a light on inside. This was disturbing. I tried closing my eyes and opening them again, but it was no use. The light was still there.

  I fought my way into my yellow flannel Institute dressing gown and staggered downstairs and out into the garden. It was chilly, but as soon as I entered the greenhouse I was struck by a blast of hot steam. The light – and the strange noises I began to hear – seemed to be coming from the centre of the building, and I followed them into a big domed room that housed a miniature jungle.

  The noises alarmed me, because I swiftly identified them as emanating from a couple having violent sexual intercourse. The woman was laying it on quite thick, groaning and sighing and at times almost screaming, but the man was ominously silent: there were no grunts of accompaniment, and none of the fumbling, thumping, panting, sucking (or in my husband’s case, tunefulness) that you might expect from a normal copulation. The woman didn’t appear to be enjoying it much. There was an edge to her voice.

  It was a while before I located the action. I saw the red thermos first, on a plant-stand, gushing steam. The whole place was a sauna. Then I heard my mother’s voice whisper, ‘Come on, Isabella, come on, you can do it!’

  So that was it! My mother and Mrs Pimento were two lesbians!

  Then I saw Ma. She was dressed in a doctor’s white coat and sitting on the floor, putting on green washing-up gloves. Next to her Mrs Pimento was lying prostrate, starkers, with her knees raised and her legs parted. Her pallid, naked rump shifted as she moaned, and the huge moon of her belly shuddered.

  Good God. She wasn’t having sex at all. She was giving birth.

  ‘Come on, Isabella,’ whispered Ma as she dipped her gloved hand in a bowl of what looked like methylated spirit and then slid it between Mrs Pimento’s thighs. Her whole arm seemed to disappear inside her friend’s cavity. I was shocked. Ma hates physical contact of any kind, as a general rule.

  And this!

  I have visited an abattoir. I have miscarried. I have seen a huge sewer rat being run over by a moped. And Ma once dragged Linda and me to see a Shakespeare play called Titus Andronicus. So I’ve been round the block a few times, so to speak, when it comes to nauseating spectacles. But this was in the far reaches of the monstrous.

  Ma was shrieking, ‘You must be a good twenty-five centimetres dilated and I think I can feel its wee head now!’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Moira,’ croaked Mrs Pimento through the pillow she gripped in her teeth. And the muffled voice added, ‘I done this many times before, I can do in my sleep. I nearly ready to push.’

  Keith emerged from the shadow of a castor-oil tree and grabbed the thermos. Catching sight of me he gestured to me to help. Quickly we began soaking towels and flannels. I found it hard to watch the birth. I remembered having Billy: bright l
ights, bossy nurses, the smell of antiseptic. Greg standing next to the bed, watching me critically as I got the breathing wrong. Then the stupefying need to force the baby out. Did you know that it kills millions of brain cells in one fell swoop, and your vagina is never the same again?

  ‘Bear down, Isabella, bear down!’ my mother was urging. And she called to me in a hoarse whisper, ‘In the nick of time, Hazel!’

  Isabella’s moans were now clearly moans of agony, and Ma mopped her friend’s forehead and her own with a monster sanitary towel.

  ‘Keep your voice down, hen,’ she told her. ‘The staff’ll hear your bawling and then we’ll be in a fine mess!’

  I wondered what she thought we might be in now. But at least she seemed prepared for the event. Apart from the hot water, towels, gloves and flannels, I could see a small Moses basket and a pack of nappies in a corner beneath a fig tree. I could even glimpse, behind a curtain of hanging geraniums, what looked like a pram.

  I didn’t really want to watch, but I found my eyes sliding over in the direction of Isabella’s parted knees. She seemed to be thriving on her pain – riding on a wave of it. I had shrieked at mine, a craven jelly, a woman of straw who, if Satan had come along, would have signed away anything – her soul, her photo of Dad, her fondue set – to have it stop. Why not? But Isabella didn’t see it that way; bizarrely, she was behaving as though childbirth were some kind of natural bodily function.

  Just then she gave a different kind of groan, and suddenly, out from between her thighs shot a baby. It was striped with blood, and attached to a bulbous and knotted-looking umbilical cord. Keith, moving snappily, caught the baby in a towel, rugby-style, and passed it straight back to Isabella who folded it into the mountain range of her body while Ma applied two clothes pegs to the cord, and then cut it with a pair of secateurs. For a moment everything was jellied in time, and then:

  ‘A miracle, the Lord be praze!’ Isabella shouted, with surprising energy after what she’d just gone through. Then she gave a sort of primal scream – muffled sharply by my mother covering her face with the pillow – and disintegrated into smothered tears. Ma and Keith set to work dabbing at the baby with wet flannels.