Egg Dancing

by Liz Jensen

  ‘I know,’ says Greg. ‘I feel the same way. We need some time together, just the three of us.’

  Mrs Goody is summoned back.

  ‘Sibling rivalry,’ she pronounces. ‘Quite normal.’

  ‘I want my mummy,’ says Billy.

  ‘Well, Daddy’s here,’ snaps Ruby. ‘And Aunty Ruby and Baby Angelica.’

  Gregory rolls his eyes despairingly.

  ‘Idea, Billy! I’ve got an idea!’ announces Mrs Goody with practised excitement. Cunningly, she takes Billy to one side and whispers in his ear.

  ‘Let’s go on an insect hunt in Jaycote’s Park! Zizzy wasps! Mosqitches! Daddy-long-legses! Now we’re talking, eh, Billy?’ she coaxes.

  Billy looks up from his cars, weighs up what’s on offer, then, without a word or a backward glance, abandons his cars and stomps out after Mrs Goody, fly-swat aloft.

  ‘Bye, Billy!’ calls Gregory as the door closes.

  ‘Goodbye, Dr Stevenson!’ calls Mrs Goody.

  Gregory and Ruby heave a joint sigh, turn to one another and kiss. This I do not know for a fact. It was not in Ruby’s confession. Or Gregory’s. It’s just a guess. But the next thing isn’t: there is a knock at the door and a huge bouquet, all freesias and red roses and ferns and cellophane arrives. It is so big it has to manoeuvre itself in sideways. There is a small envelope attached, which Gregory opens to reveal a card with a picture of a stork carrying a bundle in its beak. ‘A New Arrival’, it says on the stork’s bundle. Inside, elegant handwriting in navy ink. The message: ‘With congratulations to two cherished colleagues on a successful collaboration. Very best wishes, Ishmael Stern.’

  They exchange a look.

  It hadn’t taken Dr Stern long, after I’d given him a copy of the GR218 file, to contact Gregory with a modest proposal. A threat, really, but eloquently packaged. His sugared pill, once boiled down, conveyed the message: share the glory, or be exposed by your wife, whose evidence will be backed up by me.

  If you’d asked me at the time whether I thought Ishmael was capable of this kind of double-dealing, I’d have said no. Hence, with hindsight, the whole tragedy. You think you’re dealing with real coffee and it turns out to be instant.

  The phone call had been enough to send Gregory into a dizzying orbit of paranoia.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he’d shrieked, slamming down the receiver. ‘What a fool I’ve been. I’ll kill Hazel. She found the file and showed it to him. They’re out to destroy my entire career. I’ll murder her with my bare hands.’

  And he stretched them out in front of him and stared at his scrubbed nails with new, aghast eyes.

  Ruby had reacted more practically.

  ‘You won’t need to go that far,’ she’d jostled him sweetly, her brain racing. ‘After all, if we decide to join forces with this psychiatrist, he could perhaps decide that she’s unstable enough to – ’

  ‘To be sectioned!’ Greg finished the sentence for her. ‘Which would mean she’d be locked away in Manxheath!’ A sweaty outbreak of guilt appeared on his brow, but he wiped it away.

  And so they had held a meeting. Discreetly, over cocktails in the Thank God It’s Friday on Bradall Street, where they wouldn’t be recognised. There was no question that Dr Stern’s expertise would be useful – especially in analysing what had gone wrong with Baby B. Dr Stern was, after all, a very eminent psychiatrist, with an understanding of neural chemicals (‘See the brain as the uncharted ocean on a globe’) which they, as mere geneticists and reproductive engineers, could not match. It was a union of minds, that left none of them diminished, and would even add credibility, in the long run, to the venture. Thus the silk-shirted Dr Stern, persuasively, over absurd cocktails with ice and parasols. And, he had reminded them, if he had not been prepared to ‘sway the short-term moral obligation to my patient, Mrs Stevenson, in favour of long-term life-enhancement for all’, they would both have had to stay in South America.

  ‘Make no mistake,’ Gregory had concluded after the first of several meetings in the excruciating nitespot, ‘we’re being shat on from a great height. But we’re talking damage limitation here, and it’s better to have him on our side than on Hazel’s. And that’s the choice we’re faced with. Plus he’s promised to keep her mouth shut.’

  Keeping my mouth shut was an important factor.

  ‘Mutual gratitude,’ says Greg, arranging the flowers in a plastic bucket on the floor. ‘Which reminds me. Consider this Day One. Our series of tests on Angelica starts today.’

  And from his briefcase he pulls a file marked ‘Baby A’.

  Before them on the silent television, the sweaty face of the Reverend Carmichael communicates with the Lord. His mouth is an O, and his stubby fingers grasp at air.

  ‘Where’s the thingie, Ruby?’

  She passes Gregory the remote control, and in the press of a button the evangelist has disappeared into the no man’s land of the blank screen.

  Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability,

  Wednesday

  Dear Isabella, best friend,

  How I miss you. And the reactive behaviour you’ve caused! I’ve not seen anything like it in all my years in the mental health environment. Compulsive hand-washing, blame/shame syndromes, inappropriate hilarity, obsessive witch-hunting – you name it.

  On a practical level, the pathologists had to scrape you off the exterior surfaces with wee pooper-scoopers. Then into plastic bags and off to the lab for DNA fingerprinting and whatnot. You were everywhere. I was lucky enough to find one of your teeth on the outer-windowsill of the Day Room: I managed to pocket it before they forensically vacuumed. I shall have to check this in a dental encyclopedia, but what’s the betting it’s a molar.

  I’m writing this slowly, as I have all the time in the world. I’m on a new drug that offers you that. You’d have thought I’d have worked my way through the pharmaceutical gamut by now, but Dr Hollingbroke always has an extra trick up his conjuror’s sleeve. So, life in ‘slow-mo’: every message from brain to hand going sea-mail, every journey to the lavatory a snail’s triathlon.

  We’re all in deep mourning for you here in the Manxheath Institute for the Socially Retarded. The team from London keeps interrogating Hazel and me, because we were the only witnesses to your gory death. Talk about style, my dear! Everyone else in the building denies they even heard the bang, apparently. The inquiry team is a ‘Mr Nice and Mrs Nasty’ set-up: they’re addicted to caffeine and bring their own thermos into sessions. They put it next to their tape recorder, which despite being what David calls ‘state of the art’ has developed an infuriating buzz.

  Questions, questions:

  Q: (MR NICE) Have you any idea, Moira, where all the glass came from?

  A: The greenhouse.

  Q: (MRS NASTY) What greenhouse, Mrs Sugden?

  A: My greenhouse.

  Q: (MR NICE) But there is no greenhouse at Manxheath, Moira, is there?

  A: Not now there isn’t.

  Q: (MRS NASTY) Why were shards of glass scattered as far as the Natterjack mini-roundabout on Jobey Road, Mrs Sugden?

  A: Simple physics. An explosion of X force sends detritus zooming across an area of Y square metres.

  Q: (MR NICE) What d’you think caused this, er, ‘explosion’, then, Moira?

  A: More physics. An irresistible force met an immovable object, I presume.

  Q: (MR NICE) And can you tell us, d’you think, Moira, where your impressive collection of pills came from? The pills that were found inside your mattress?

  A: I grew them in the greenhouse.

  Q: (MRS NASTY) What greenhouse, Mrs Sugden?

  Etc., Etc. Vicious circles are debilitating stuff. At half-past eleven, we stop for coffee and exasperation. Then a time-check, a here-we-go look, a scribbling in notepads, and the infuriating buzz resumes.

  Q: (MRS NASTY) Mrs Sugden, how would you describe your relationship with the staff at the Institute?

  You’ve got to laugh.

  Who cares about all
this, I say, now that the thing’s happened. It’s all too late, too late, too late. Why speculate about what physiological Armageddon Isabella wreaked on herself now that she’s mincemeat? I warned Dr Stern, didn’t I? Did I not go to his office and demand maternity facilities? If you’re looking for a culprit for all this, I tell them, look no further than the door of the man himself.

  Q: What man? What door?

  A: Dr Ishmael Stern. That door.

  Silence, except for the buzz.

  From what I can gather, they’re developing a theory about hallucinogens and group hysteria, in which they themselves figure as part of the ‘psychological fallout’. Their whole inquiry, according to this theory, is a symptom of the disease they have been hired to investigate. It’s the only way they can square the circle on paper. It’s what Linda, in her university days, would have called a deconstructive meta-inquiry.

  Meanwhile the aforementioned Linda, nudged on delicately by me, is putting her ideological ‘Operation Sabotage’ project into its second phase. This involves sliding off the Butter Mountain for a while in order to play zookeeper to the Perfect Baby, having appointed herself guardian of the planet’s morals. Did I tell you she was a zealot from the age of three? She disapproves of anything genetic. Her nickname for Gregory, by the way, is the Wanker.

  Operation Sabotage is a purely personal crusade now, she tells me. It was all mixed up with religion at one point, but she’s become inexplicably cheesed off with Born-Againness, and that tubby preacher on the telly who she threw the eggs at has suddenly become the Antichrist in her book.

  ‘The more fraudulent people like Carmichael are,’ she stormed on her last visit, banging her fist on the formica, ‘the more principled we evangelical atheists have to be about ethical issues!’

  There were tears in her eyes. I smell sex again.

  ‘So I take it the Greens are getting you on the rebound?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll be single-handedly putting human genetic engineering back ten years,’ she sniffed, ignoring me. ‘And if I have to steal twenty of Gregory’s guinea-pigs to keep that drug out of Joe Public’s reach, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Let us hope it doesn’t come to that,’ I told her. ‘You’ll get done for factory-farming, and be crowned Queen of Hypocrisy.’

  She’s named the Perfect Baby Katie-Koo, after a doll my husband Brendan and I gave her when she was a child. Hazel bit off its head, which is why the two girls have always hated each other.

  ‘Some way of healing the rift!’ I told her. For an intelligent girl, my daughter Linda can be transcendentally stupid.

  ‘Where’s the baby now?’ I asked. I’d seen no sign of a pram.

  ‘Back at the flat,’ she snapped. ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘That’s illegal!’ I informed her. I should know, having done the same thing myself and been hauled in for it.

  ‘Katie-Koo’s different,’ she explained. ‘She’s not an ordinary baby. You can leave her and she just sleeps.’

  All right for some, eh, Isabella?

  The other daughter, Hazel, is being paranoically schizophrenic about the whole thing. On the one hand she is delighted we’ve landed Gregory and Ruby with your offspring, but on the other she is bitter and scathing about Linda’s new role foster-mothering the fruits of adultery. To the point of derangement.

  ‘Why should she have to look after the Perfect Baby?’ she screamed at me over breakfast the next morning. ‘Couldn’t we just dump it somewhere, or kill it?’

  She had a crazed look, and wouldn’t let go of her wretched chair. She has developed a way of sitting on it with her feet gripping its legs. I offered her some Valium but she just put her hands over her ears and shouted, ‘No more pills! No more pills!’ over and over again.

  Families. Strange, don’t you think, Isabella, that family trees are not the other way up? I would put the babies at the top, like fresh shoots. The dead, their ancestral roots, below. I read that the remains of a prehistoric man were found, frozen. His testicles were miraculously intact after thousands of years. The contents of these testicles, carefully refrigerated, are still viable. My son-in-law would no doubt like to get his hands on them. Use them to inpregnant a woman: muddle up past and future, in-breed across time-zones, turn the family tree into a tangled bush, roots and shoots all arse about face. As if he hasn’t buggered things up enough already. Did I tell you, he brought a pocket calculator to his own wedding?

  Ciao.

  Yours affectionately,

  Moira.

  Belief in the creed of the Reverend Vernon Carmichael thrives, like woodlice, in the most unexpected places. But the heart of my sister Linda is no longer one of them. She has declared it a ‘crap-free zone’. The Lord has let her down, and has been relegated, along with Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, to the rank of those who need their heads examined.

  Since the day the Reverend betrayed her, not a single Love Heart has passed Linda’s lips.

  Nor can she look an egg in the face again.

  But she still watches Holy Hour. It’s part of the cathartic process. When John Two ran off with that bitch from Corporate Accounts, she forced herself to sit near him in the canteen every day. And when Terry called her a harridan, she checked its exact meaning in the dictionary, photocopied and blew up the definition, and pinned it above her bathroom mirror, near the Mensa certificate. ‘Harridan: A haggard old woman; a vixen; a “decayed strumpet”; usu. a term of abuse.’

  Face the fear. Feel the pain. It can make you born again.

  The ashtray is full, and the bells of St Manfred’s clang their monstrous din, all but drowning out the sound of the revving cars on television. Linda has been watching the desperate swerving of stock-car racing for an hour, and seen five muddy, bloody crashes, two of them spectacular. She squats at one end of the velveteen sofa, legs apart, knees up, cigarette hanging from her lower lip, holding Katie-Koo’s bottle at arm’s length. The baby, propped at the other end of the sofa, is feeding quietly. She is magnificently pretty, with black eyes and a mass of dark curls.

  ‘ “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking,” ’ croaks Linda as the Perfect Baby finishes her milk, smiles radiantly, and immediately falls asleep. ‘So get fucked.’

  With no great affection, Linda wipes Katie-Koo’s cherubic little mouth with a soiled tea-towel, heaves a disgruntled sigh, and jerks the cushion from under her. But the baby just shifts position, and smiles in her sleep. Linda has not yet managed to make her cry.

  It is two weeks into her new life as a mother-figure, and the day stretches before her, long and vacant – as do the six weeks of leave that lie ahead. Time hangs heavy on Linda as it never did in her busy days at the Butter Mountain, so unexpectedly curtailed by her mission to sabotage the Perfect Baby Project. In fact she has begun to refer to the compassionate break she has taken (citing ‘family problems’ as though these were a temporary aberration rather than the backdrop to her life) as ‘my eternity leave’.

  There is nothing to do, except smoke five packets of cigarettes a day. It’s costing her a fortune.

  Two more cars collide on a muddy slope, and Linda cheers as one bursts into flames. Then she reaches for the phone and dials British Telecom in Swakely Gap.

  ‘My name’s Linda Sugden,’ she announces through her dangling fag. ‘I want to speak to Duncan Proutt.’

  ‘He’s in a meeting, I’m afraid,’ says a voice with a pension plan.

  ‘Well, when he gets out, ask him to come round with a dozen roses,’ she orders him. ‘And tell him I’ve decided to lift that sex embargo.’

  Linda breathes out smoke into the receiver, and miraculously enough, a fit of coughing is induced on the other end.

  ‘Did you get that?’ she barks, annoyed.

  ‘Right you are, Miss Sugden,’ manages the strangulated voice. ‘I’ll pass the message on to Mr Proutt. I’ll tell him you – ’

  But Linda has slammed down the receiver.

  The stock-car racing has finished and Ho
ly Hour is beginning. Linda steels herself and reaches for her cornflower-blue knitting. It’s a cardigan for herself. Katie-Koo sighs and puckers her dimpled lips in a sweet smile. Linda looks at her with loathing, and then, with a sudden flash of inspiration, stretches out an arm and jabs at Katie-Koo’s bare foot with the end of the needle. Hard.

  ‘And bugger me,’ she told me later, ‘if she didn’t fucking giggle, like I was tickling her or something! Jesus, when you were a baby and I did something like that to you, Hazel, you at least screamed the house down.’

  Motherhood really wasn’t her bag, she told me. She’d speed-read all the books, in particular Dr Rosamund Pithkin’s Baby Bible (a gift from Ma), said to be the definitive work on baby care. And it must have been, because Katie-Koo did everything Dr Pithkin said she should and nothing she shouldn’t. She’d done it, too, at the recommended times and in the recommended amounts, to the minute and to the gramme. Katie-Koo fed well, grew as the charts indicated she should, and slept twenty-two hours a day. Most astonishing of all, given Linda’s stock of small cruelties, she had not yet shed a single tear.

  Linda had heard about sleepless nights, and crying that shatters the nerves and will not be appeased – stories of skin rashes, diarrhoea, wind, colic and infantile Weltschmertz, but Katie-Koo was immune. The Baby Bible’s extensive section on ‘problems’ remained unread. Katie-Koo was placid. She was no trouble. She was trouble-free and trouble-less. She was untroubled, untroubling and untroublesome. That was the trouble. There was nothing that prompted in Linda the maternal urge to soothe and protect, and to quell her own exasperation with a martyrish shrug of the shoulders and a nice warm feeling. The Perfect Baby stirred no tugs of conscience, no calls of duty. It was the way Gregory had designed her. ‘To meet the needs of the busy professional couple,’ as his Perfect Baby brochure would have put it.

  The Perfect Baby was like a landscaped garden or an apartment rabbit – a living thing specially designed to require minimum maintenance, and create maximum decorative effect. Even Katie-Koo’s bowel products were odourless. Linda could picture the questionnaire that led to this depressing combination of characteristics. It would have corresponded to the market research the toy manufacturers did when they came up with the original Katie-Koo, the crying, pissing doll. There is no doubt that this was a perfect baby.