Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  My mother stopped to wipe her glasses on her apron, the one I remembered her wearing to roll pastry when I was a child. Then she put them back on and inspected the little thing, which was now bawling croakenly like a distressed sheep. Isabella Pimento heaved her weight on to her elbows and peered at the child through her parted knees.

  ‘The Lord be praze again,’ she said. ‘A lovely, lovely girl.’

  And as if in recognition of her mother’s voice, the small creature, wrinkled and shrieking, let forth a long stream of black mucus from her backside.

  At that moment, quite honestly, I could have done with my chair.

  We were still clearing up the mess an hour later when a phone started to ring. Isabella and the baby were asleep on a bed of moss, exhausted from their ordeal.

  ‘Get that, will you, Hazel,’ called Ma, heaving a bucket from the tap. She was a new woman: brisk, matter-of-fact, in control. ‘It’s that portable phone of yours, in the pram, hen.’

  I did what she said.

  ‘Hello,’ said Linda’s voice. ‘Just calling to see if everything’s OK. Is that you, Ma?’

  ‘No, this is Hazel,’ I said. ‘We’re in the greenhouse.’

  ‘What greenhouse?’ snapped Linda, annoyed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for Ma’s absurd fucking idea about – oh, never mind. Just tell me the news.’

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said, and told her about the birth. After her more-than-scepticism concerning the greenhouse, I wasn’t expecting her to believe that Isabella had just produced a baby, but I was in for a shock: she took the news calmly. It was clearly no surprise to her.

  ‘I thought she’d have had it by now,’ she said briskly.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because,’ she said self-importantly, ‘I gave Ma the signal to induce it a few hours ago. Looks like the drugs worked. I looked them up in a medical encyclopedia. Now, the important question. Girl or boy?’

  ‘A girl,’ I said.

  At this, Linda gave a coyote howl of triumph and then a sort of cackle, which is her laugh. Fancy making such a fuss over an extra female in the population, I thought. She’d always been a feminist, but this was ridiculous. My head was spinning with unanswered questions.

  ‘But how did you know Mrs Pimento was going to – ?’ I asked, frantic for an answer, feeling I must be stupid, or lied to, or both.

  ‘Ma told me.’

  ‘And you believed her?’

  ‘Not at first. But then I had a look, and I realised she was probably right. Anyway, the reason I’m calling is to let you all know that Ruby’s had a baby girl as well.’

  I think I said before that Linda was blunt on the phone.

  ‘They must have delivered more or less simultaneously,’ she said. ‘I’ve just rung the hospital.’ She sounded inexplicably jubilant. ‘Pass me to Ma, will you?’

  I flung the phone in Ma’s direction and from the corner of my eye saw her catch it adroitly and begin an intense, whispered conversation.

  I headed off. I needed that chair.

  Memories.

  When Hazel was six and Linda ten, they played dares.

  ‘I bet you don’t dare stay in the cupboard under the stairs for five whole minutes,’ Linda said to Hazel.

  I did dare, though. The full five minutes – though I came out crying and told Ma Linda had locked me in. The next time they played dares, it was Hazel who set the challenge.

  ‘I bet you don’t dare pee in the road.’ But Linda did. She hitched up her skirt on a traffic island, shut her eyes and pissed. I, Hazel, watching from behind a bush, peed too but by accident, in my knickers, out of panic on my sister’s behalf. Linda would dare do anything. If I’d asked her to crap on the pavement like a dog she’d have done that, too. It was pride.

  Ma knew all about that, and had banked on it when she thought of her plan. That, and Linda’s crusading zeal. Ma knew just how to egg her on.

  ‘Dysfunctional behaviour,’ Dr McAuley would have called it.

  ‘Active Logic,’ would have been Linda’s definition. Active Logic was one of the buzz phrases of her guru, Klaus G. Armstrong.

  The Sacred Bleeding Heart NHS Trust is a modern building, featuring reconstituted stone, acrylic sculptures, and an internal courtyard with a Japanese garden, complete with geriatric Koi carp and raked gravel. The maternity wing is calm and restful, painted in the muted, milky colours of courgette and pecan. There is a smell of flowers with a hint of rot, and the commercial fragrance of baby lotion. Flowers – yes, there is an abundance of flowers, though mixtures of red and white are banned. This is an old nursing superstition. The combination of the two colours is shocking, they say, like blood on a sheet.

  That night, in the maternity wing of the Bleeding Heart, a blonde-haired nurse peers round the door of Ruby Gonzalez’s private room to check she’s asleep. And there Dr Gonzalez lies, hair Pre-Raphaeliting all over the pillow, a sweet smile on her waxy face, and flowers all around. She could almost be laid out for a funeral. The baby lies in a bundle in the perspex cot next to Dr Gonzalez.

  The nurse works quickly. It doesn’t take long to switch the two babies. Out of the perspex cot she lifts Ruby’s sleeping infant, and removes the nametag from its ankle: Angelica Sofia Gonzalez. Then, from a laundry bag on her medicine trolley, she lifts another small bundle, around whose ankle she fits the nametag. She puts her own bundle in the cot next to Ruby, and places the bundle that was formerly Angelica Sofia Gonzalez in the laundry bag. This she replaces on the trolley, gently. Neither baby stirs. The nurse is just turning to leave with the trolley when there is a yawn from Ruby, who is suddenly sitting up.

  ‘I didn’t ring,’ she says. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Night Duty Nurse Rogers,’ whispers the nurse, adjusting her huge glasses and yanking at bed-linen. ‘Just checking on all the first-time mums. Here, drink this.’

  She thrusts at Ruby a plastic cup with a pale-green liquid in it, and observes keenly as Ruby swallows.

  Ruby says, ‘Yuk.’

  The nurse says, ‘Lime juice. Full of vitamins. Now, is everything all right for you here, Miss Gonzalez? Stitches not too painful?’

  ‘Of course they’re too painful. And it’s Dr Gonzalez. You look familiar. Haven’t we met before?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it, Doctor,’ says the nurse. ‘We all look the same in uniform. I’m from an agency. Now try to get some rest.’

  Suddenly Ruby is feeling strangely groggy, but not unpleasantly so. It’s as though someone has chosen to pack the inside of her head with mashed potato. She sighs and peers at the bundle in the cot and smiles.

  ‘She’s got a different face every time I look at her,’ she says lovingly. ‘With or without my contact lenses.’

  ‘That’s babies for you,’ says my sister Linda.

  And she turns out the light, wheels out the trolley with her bag on it, and disappears into the night.

  ‘A baby is a baby is a baby,’ Mrs Pimento had remarked cheerily to Ma as her sleeping offspring was smuggled out of reception that night in Linda’s arms, to a life of vivisection for all she knew. ‘I will have another one in a few months.’

  She’d let her daughter go without a second glance. She was used to it, Ma said afterwards, darkly.

  But how wrong Isabella was about babies. How wrong we all were. A baby is not a baby is not a baby. I’ve had four; three little ghosts and Billy. My mother has had three – me, Linda and a boy called Herman Paul, our brother, also a ghost. Cot death, Ma reckoned. Isabella – an untold number. The ghosts of babies past and present linger in the air. Little, elemental lives, foetuses floating in suspension, not of this planet nor of another, some beneath ground, some in limbo, some pickled in a jar in my husband’s laboratory, some not quite dead, others not quite alive. There are too many children in the world, proclaims Gregory. Too many small parasitic mouths that cannot be fed and are doomed to scavenge. Our beef mountains are their hunger valleys, our milk lakes their dust-bowls of thirst. Let only the respon
sible breed. Let them be the inheritors of our fragile earth.

  Isabella was perky enough the next day, or so it seemed. There were no outward signs that she might be about to shatter. At breakfast she consumed six cups of tea with two spoonfuls of sugar per cup, and five slices of toast heaped with Bovril. I watched the Ossature count them all in, then heard her count them all out again in the user-friendly toilet. Proxy vomiting was her forte.

  Later, in Group, Isabella patted her belly proudly. It was still huge. You wouldn’t have guessed.

  ‘I give birth in greenhouse,’ she announced with triumph. ‘No problem.’

  Silence. Ma shot me a look.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said a tiny woman called Monica, who was crouching on the floor.

  ‘Boy or girl?’ asked the greasy-haired David politely. I wondered if he was sticking to the Institute’s Personal Hygiene Contract. Max didn’t say anything, which was unusual.

  ‘Little girl,’ said Isabella. ‘But she gone now. We swap her for Moira daughter Hazel husband mistress baby. Linda look after that one.’

  More silence, punctured by a genteel cough from Monica.

  ‘Linda, Moira other daughter,’ Isabella explains, ignoring Ma’s throat-cutting gestures. ‘Work on Butter Mountain.’

  ‘Shall we leave it there, Isabella?’ begs Dr McAuley. ‘But may I say I’m pleased – I think we’re all pleased, and Dr Hollingbroke in particular I know will be pleased – that you’ve decided to let go of your pregnancy. I think, don’t you’ – she smiles with horrible gentleness – ‘that it was becoming a burden to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ intervenes Ma with surprising coolness and poise, hitching up a corner of her blouse and polishing her glasses. ‘What a relief for all of us. Does that liberate us to turn our attention to other matters?’

  ‘By all means,’ replies Dr McAuley, fiddling with her excruciating bun. ‘Any suggestions from the Group?’

  A pause. Ten seconds, eleven maybe. Dr McAuley never let it go much past twelve.

  ‘Well, perhaps I could suggest a discussion topic then,’ she smiled. ‘What we might talk around today, I feel, might be responsibility. Taking Responsibility for One’s Actions.’

  She said this as though it were some new concept she’d developed.

  ‘Does anyone have anything they’d like to share around Responsibility?’

  Max heaves a loud, weary sigh.

  ‘OK, confession time,’ he announces with a strange smirk.

  We all look up in surprise at the notion of Max confessing anything. Max clears his throat, and waits for complete silence to fall before he utters the four words that are to change the course of hospital-management history.

  ‘I am the father.’

  Bedlam!

  ‘No!’ screams Ma, and rises from her seat and strides over to Max. She reaches up, snatches at the collar of his safari suit and begins to shake him violently. I have seen this kind of behaviour before, and I watch with something that’s not quite nostalgia, but more a prickling feeling of recognition. I know this territory: Ma as severe gale force nine, Ma as hurricane, Ma as typhoon, tornado and tidal wave, Ma as an element in her element.

  ‘No, no, no!’ she’s screaming.

  David and Dr McAuley have hurled themselves in, trying to unclamp the two rocking bodies. But just as suddenly, Ma has pulled back and slumped down into a chair. I’ve never seen her look lost and hopeless before, and it’s quite a revelation.

  Max is brushing down his safari suit, stamping his feet like a frisky colt, and laughing uncontrollably.

  Isabella has fled.

  Dr McAuley reaches for her clip-board and makes a long note in her flattened handwriting. Then looking up, she explains gently, ‘More painful personal growth.’ And addressing Max, ‘And some interesting reaction to it.’ Max smirks. ‘I think we should all take our hats off to Isabella for relinquishing her fantasy. She may be in for some “post-partum blues”, so let’s all bear that in mind, shall we?’

  It was then that we heard the first huge bang.

  We knew what it was – or at least Ma and I did, because in an instant we were both thundering down the corridor towards the garden. No one else followed. As we discovered later, they never heard a thing, or at least that’s what they claimed. Just as we arrived in the Day Room a second huge crack of noise rent the air, and outside, through the french windows, we saw the greenhouse explode.

  Looking back later, there was something magnificent about the way the whole thing seemed to shudder before lift-off. The scale of it, too. It was operatic. It called for Wagnerian chords. But at the time it was like a glimpse of hell. Not least when a third blast shuddered across the blue air and a glittering shock of glass fountained up. Ma dropped to the floor and covered her ears. I just stood there. And we watched as a small human shape, like a doll, zoomed skywards. Isabella seemed to stay suspended in the air for a long time before she burst. With a faint pop, she became a red firework that blossomed in all directions.

  Ma screamed and screamed and screamed.

  THIRTEEN

  On the other side of Gridiron, post-partum elation. It’s the morning after the perfect birth.

  ‘Another toast,’ says Greg to Ruby, reaching for two disposable beakers.

  When Root Hooper finally realised that Ruby Gonzalez was in labour, he had persuaded the ambulance to take a case of champagne to accompany the parents-to-be to the Sacred Bleeding Heart NHS Trust. My husband did full justice to the gift. Into the small hours he had drunk the best part of two bottles unaided, before finally crashing out on a plastic bench in the waiting-room. By the time Linda, alias Night Duty Nurse Rogers, passed by the open door with her laden trolley, he was sleeping like a baby.

  Now, brain churning and stomach a-fizz, Gregory inhabits the shaky neutral zone between drunkenness and its aftermath.

  ‘To Angelica Sofia Gonzalez, and to the Genetic Choice Programme of The Hooper Fertility Foundation,’ he announces, twisting wire and sending a fat cork rocketing to the ceiling with a pop. He pours, and holds aloft two plastic cups of yellowish foam.

  ‘May we bring hope of perfection to an imperfect world.’

  There is no pride like the pride of a new father. Especially when he believes the infant he has sired to be the world’s first Perfect Baby. Without realising it, Gregory has begun to hum his sex tune.

  Ruby smiles valiantly, refuses champagne, and drinks deep from a huge flask of water by her bedside. She too is feeling groggy and nauseous. As well she might.

  ‘Feeding time in a minute,’ she murmurs, joining in Greg’s happy gaze at the little creature in the cot. All babies look beautiful to their parents. Even ugly ones.

  ‘She doesn’t look quite herself this morning,’ Gregory remarks, squinting into the lace-quilted cot.

  It’s true. She isn’t herself at all. She must, they agree, have had a bad night. Ruby’s had a bad night, too. She had a weird dream, she’s been telling Greg, about red and white carnations growing through her pillow, turning vicious, and choking her.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Gregory soothes. ‘You’re going to be the perfect mother.’ Ruby sighs, reaches for a fancy chocolate, unwraps it, and rolls it in her mouth, feeling the bitter darkness of it dissolve on her taste buds. Soft classical music is playing from the sound system, and Angelica is sleeping at last. Her parents’ eyes, shiny with love and weariness, are glued to the sight of her compact body which snuffles, grunts, farts, and winces with weird grimaces such as you see on neurology videos.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Ruby is saying. ‘How can a baby gain a whole pound in weight overnight? And even her hair’s grown since yesterday! And don’t you think her face has changed?’

  Greg takes another gulp, and pronounces, ‘Don’t forget this is a very special baby we have here, darling. If her growth rate is remarkable, it’s a sign that things have gone according to plan. I think we can say we have a professional success on our hands here, as well as a personal one.’
>
  Dreamily, Ruby closes her eyes and gives a big satisfied sigh. Love and work, work and love. Two birds killed with one stone. No wonder, throughout the pregnancy, she has had a tendency to resemble the Virgin Mary, and to smirk.

  The nanny arrives, bearing Billy and a fly-swat. Ruby and Greg have employed Mrs Goody on the ‘100 per cent availability option’ indicated by four red stars in the agency’s price range. This means she is on tap twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The agency comes recommended to Greg by none other than the vice-president of Hooper plc, a family man himself, and it specialises in the type of nanny who will not have an affair with the children’s father. This means mutton dressed as mutton. Mrs Goody is certainly that. She has a ‘thing’ about insects, but apart from that seems quite sensible. Mrs Goody settles Billy on the floor and then withdraws discreetly to await further orders and consult the Gridiron City bus timetable.

  Billy now begins to make infuriating car noises. He is playing with the expensive new set of Formula One racers that his father has bought him to cushion the blow of his sister’s arrival.

  ‘Brrrrr! MMMRRRMMMM! MMMRRRMMMM!’

  It’s clear that Billy doesn’t think much of Angelica Sofia Gonzalez, with her little wrinkled face and tangle of black hair. Or of the way his dad and Ruby are cooing over her.

  ‘She’s got your solid legs, hasn’t she?’ Ruby is saying to Gregory.

  ‘But your colouring. Your eyes. Almost black.’

  ‘BBBRRRRRMMMMMM!’

  ‘Quiet, Billy darling. You’ll wake your baby sister. And she’s got your chin. That’s your chin! That is absolutely your chin, Greggie.’

  Angelica is in fact the spitting image of someone else altogether.

  From beneath the bed, more car noises, louder and more insistent: ‘MMMMMMMMMMMMMM! MMMM-MRRM-MRRM!’

  Ruby says, ‘It’s not that I don’t want him here.’