by Liz Jensen
Linda hated her.
If she had bothered to read the section of Rosemary Pithkin’s Baby Bible entitled ‘Problems Big and Small’, she might have come across a section she could relate to. It was a Problem Big, under the heading ‘Bonding, Lack of’.
Symptoms: various, incl.: Mother’s lack of interest in, and affection for, the child. Child’s lack of specific mother-related response.
Causes: various, incl.: Disturbed pregnancy, difficult birth, perinatal shock, early trauma.
Treatment: You really mustn’t give up on this one. One theory in modern paediatric psychology is that some mothers and their babies are simply a ‘bad fit’. I do not subscribe to this theory. Call me old-fashioned, but I have only one answer to your problem: you and your wretched baby must both try harder.
Just as well, perhaps, that Linda hadn’t read the problem section; she might have tracked Dr Pithkin down and personally deep-fried her in baby oil. But Dr Pithkin’s diagnosis, had she been there to make it, would have been correct: Katie-Koo and Linda had not bonded. Katie-Koo smiled at Linda and nestled in her arms as any loving babe should, but she did just the same with complete strangers. There was a seed of mistrust in Linda’s heart that came from she knew not where. Mistrust, and envy: she had cried endlessly as a baby. She had been too hot or cold, or feverish, or bored, or uncomfortable, or uncontrollably angry, ever since she could remember. That was life, wasn’t it? Life’s a bitch and then you die, as one of Linda’s favourite sayings goes. (Or as my bachelor brother-in-law John always said, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you marry her.’) So why should this child escape it? Why should Katie-Koo’s life be so wonderful when Linda’s had been, on reflection, a valley of toil?
When a woman gives birth, a bag of guilt is born with the baby, like an extra placenta. This bag is surely made heavier when the baby is not the woman’s own but one she has stolen.
Linda takes a cold hard look at her little charge, stubs out her cigarette in the overspilling ashtray, and grinds it down with a twist.
On television, the Reverend Carmichael has fallen to his knees, writhing about in ecstasy and sobbing in a sweaty heap. Linda, eyes narrowed and cheeks puckered, shudders uncomfortably for thirty-seven seconds, tears welling glassily in her eyes.
The programme erupts into a jangle-twangle burst of music and spontaneous applause from the studio audience. Close-ups show that some of them are crying, too. As the Holy Hour’s theme hymn becomes a crescendo, a flashing number on the screen reminds viewers of the number to dial to pledge their minimum of £50 to the House of God.
‘Well, Reverend Fucking Carmichael,’ sniffs Linda as the credits roll over the prostrate form of the man of the cloth. The studio audience, arms aloft, stands behind him like a swishing field of green wheat. ‘Tell me one thing, dickhead. Did the perfect infant Jesus drive his mother mad?’
Just then the doorbell rings.
Duncan to the rescue!
The Holy Hour credits are still rolling when, on the other side of the city, Ruby turns her gaze away from the television screen, her beautiful face a blank round cheese of misery. She flicks the remote control, rolls over, and lies still. The room is piled high with boxes of chocolates, fruit, flowers, and cards from well-wishers. Every inch of shelving space is adorned with roses and greetings and little baby-presents: a frilly jump-suit in pink, a musical rabbit that plays ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby’, a miniature water-wheel for the bath. The maternity wing of the Sacred Bleeding Heart is well placed for sunshine, and bright rays stream through the net curtains on to Ruby’s crisp, scented linen and the lace-adorned cot where lies the babe.
The babe. Still there. Still ugly. Still grizzling. She has cried almost non-stop for fourteen days and fourteen nights, and Ruby is at the end of her tether. Even the nurses are shrugging their shoulders and murmuring about ‘natural misery’.
‘Perhaps you should be thinking of going home soon with Baby,’ said the ward sister to her gently – but Ruby had begged to be allowed to stay another week.
‘I’m not ready to go home yet,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I can cope.’
And she raised such a pleading face in the sister’s direction – quite a different face from the confident, arrogant Dr Gonzalez who had arrived on the ward a fortnight earlier and demanded cable TV and fresh guava juice – that the sister relented.
‘It’s your money,’ she said. ‘You can stay as long as you like.’
So see Ruby now, hunched in a foetal ball, the bedclothes bunched around her, her sloping shoulders shuddering as she sobs. On the floor lie reams of computer paper covered in complex graphs and analyses and tables which Gregory had thrown down before he stormed out, sobbing himself, destroyed with rage before the infallibility of the data, setting in stone the unmisinterpretable figures which formed proof of what Ruby had already suspected, but dared not admit to herself: that the worse-than-unimaginable, the barely-believable, the 99.9999-per cent-improbable has happened. Angelica is a normal baby. In all respects – motor functions, weight, eyesight, hearing, muscle tone, appetite, and intelligence, she is completely and tragically average. ‘Pig-ordinary’, to use a phrase of Gregory’s when our son was a baby.
‘Months of work down the bloody drain!’ Greg had stormed, hurling the papers at her. ‘And now we’re stuck with this – mollusc!’
He was adamant: they must leave the hospital before Angelica was placed on a register of babies ‘at risk’. The nurses had already been whispering about Ruby and Gregory’s bizarre attitude problem towards their daughter. Nothing must draw further attention to them. They would take her home and keep quiet about her and eventually …
‘Eventually what?’ snapped a tearful Ruby.
‘Well, you know,’ said Greg.
‘No, I don’t,’ wept Ruby. But she was lying.
‘There’s always the possibility of – ’
The word ‘adoption’ was not spoken. A wall of ice had grown between Ruby and Greg since the first few days after the baby’s birth. The three dozen white lilies he’d bought for Ruby began to emit a powerful odour just the wrong side of rottenness, but he came with no fresh bouquet to replace them. In fact he came to visit less and less, citing pressure of work and his paternal duties to Billy. When he did come, it was armed with tape measures and auriscopes and rubber appliances for weighing and measuring all parts of the body, and pages of instructions for testing Angelica’s IQ, which he did between her bouts of screaming. Then he went off to analyse them. He was spending more and more time at the Hooper Fertility Foundation. Ruby hadn’t even seen the spanking new laboratory that Root Hooper had bought for the Genetic Choice Programme. She had lain in bed most of the time, trying to appease the baby’s ravenous hunger with her sore, cracked nipples, putting pillows over her head to shut out its crying, too awash with maternal guilt and too weak and harassed even to do her pelvic floor exercises to restore her vagina to its former glory.
And now Ruby, surrounded by pungent lilies, a touching icon of misery, raises her dark pleading eyes to the heavens, and weeps big tears of pure silver for the suffering she endures. Welcome, Ruby Gonzalez, to the State of Motherhood. There is no return.
FOURTEEN
We at Manxheath were faring no better. I began to understand why some people go mad. The world is an unpredictable, cavalier sort of place.
The staff whispered in corridors: the local press began to sniff about. How could it be, the Disciplinary Inquiry was to ask, that a woman in Mrs Pimento’s condition of florid delusion could explode into shreds, standing on the lawn, witnessed only by two unsupervised mental patients? Where did all that splintered glass come from? And why was there not a doctor or nurse in sight? It didn’t look good at all; Dr Stern’s hair went grey overnight. His eyes, which used to be so dark and shining, turned the colour of an old anorak. Nurses said in low voices, glancing about as they spoke, that he was going to be hauled up before the Deciding Authority and risked disciplinary action, criminal proceedings, and
having to make a public apology to Mrs Pimento’s relatives, who were arriving from Turin in indignant droves for the funeral. One aged uncle seemed to be particularly affected. He came on a tour of Manxheath, growling ‘Assassini, assassini’, but had to leave in a hurry when Ma chased him up a corridor screaming and waving a large piece of her clay work at him.
Finally, when the pathologists had sifted through Mrs Pimento’s splinter-filled giblets and the undertakers had filled a coffin with God knows what residual splatterings, there was a cremation (‘They’re turning her into haggis,’ mourned Ma), and a private funeral ceremony to which patients were not invited. We were suffering from ‘post-traumatic syndrome’, and a new doctor was brought in to monitor our drugs. Dr Hollingbroke was shipped off on secondment to Coxcomb Hall for the Socially Disturbed, pending the Inquiry’s report. Ma took to the Art Room with Keith, clutching a molar she’d found on the windowsill and muttering something about a ‘memorial’.
‘My world has fallen apart,’ she told me melodramatically over breakfast one day. ‘My greenhouse has been destroyed and my best friend with it. All in smithereens. Now is that a personal tragedy or what?’
She seldom emerged from the Art Room except for meals. She would eat nothing but Spotted Dick.
‘Comfort food,’ said Dr McAuley, who looked like she could do with some herself.
She had tried in vain to re-start the Group sessions. We were having none of it. Rumour had it that Dr McAuley was also facing disciplinary charges. Manxheath became a house of whispers. Nurses switched allegiance to a higher echelon of management and began to spy on the doctors rather than us. Even Hope did a U-turn, and refused to give me any more injections. Max took to patrolling the premises like a security guard, and would interrogate people about their movements. He had a stopwatch, and would ask things like:
‘Why did it take you two minutes and thirty-five seconds to traverse the north wall corridor this morning when you did it in half that time on Tuesday?’
And: ‘Is this going-to-the-toilet thing of yours some sort of elaborate double bluff?’
He avoided Ma, after she showed him the molar. She had taken to wearing it on a length of dental floss round her neck, to ward off evil spirits.
David sat in the Day Room, lizard-like, often motionless for hours, but sometimes he would scribble long letters to lawyers. Monica Fletcher wept snottily in the corners of rooms. She cried so much she had to be put on salt tablets. When my mother’s huge stash of mind-altering medications was discovered in her mattress (far more, the staff swore, than they believed they had in stock; a whole arsenal of pills which she claimed were the harvest of the greenhouse), all patients were removed from drugs, pending ‘re-assessment’. We all went into terrible withdrawal. This took various forms; Max had to be strait-jacketed for a week, and my mother wouldn’t leave the Art Room. The Ossature abandoned her sorrel-and-water diet for a full-scale hunger-strike. In my case, I just felt like I had a bad hangover. The tangerine feeling had gone and I seemed to fit into my body again, but it was as if someone had stolen my world in exchange. I had no place of refuge now the greenhouse had gone. I suppose my mother felt the same way.
‘It was to be the pride of Gridiron,’ she whispered to me one day as we passed each other in the corridor like ships in the night. And I knew what she meant. Her face was waxy and her clothes hung off her, giving her the look of a deflated hot-air balloon. The passages of Manxheath no longer echoed with noise, and apart from the hysterical music-’n’-chatter of TV game shows, there was silence. I spent most of the time in my room, thinking about revenge, missing Billy, or reading a book on personal management which Linda had lent me, written by her guru, Klaus G. Armstrong, but sometimes I’d come down and watch six hours of television at a stretch. I came to know game shows quite well.
One afternoon, Dr Stern walked in, and his eyes settled on mine like desperate search-lamps. I was still giggling from the anecdote on TV, and couldn’t stop.
‘Come to my office, please, Hazel,’ he said. And he added, ‘Please.’
He didn’t sound like a doctor. He sounded like a man again. A man in trouble. His voice was hoarse.
‘We have to talk.’
And so, almost like in the old days, but with sadness rather than sexual anticipation, I followed him into his office. It was still May, according to the bright Modern Art splodges on the calendar, but there was nothing to be merry about. The office was full of removal crates, and the shelves were bare. I was glad I’d stolen his paperweight. It could surely be of no use to him now. Ishmael reached in a drawer for a bottle of whisky and two glasses, and poured us each a large one.
He took a swig, ignoring me, and put his feet up on the desk. His suit was crumpled, and not in a fashionable way. His beard was streaked with grey. He was smaller and grubbier than I remembered him. There was a defeated look about him.
‘Looks like it’s all over for me, Hazel,’ he said.
I didn’t reply, and there was a long silence.
‘I got your note, and your flowers,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Valium domesticum,’ I said. ‘Ma grew them.’
Dr Stern made an exasperated noise, a sort of clucking sigh, like he was spitting out a locust.
‘Yes,’ he said, annoyed. ‘I’ve heard that story, about how your mother got together her stash, and claims to have propagated it. We’ll have to come up with a better explanation than that for the Investigators, though.’
‘It’s the truth,’ I said.
The flowers didn’t matter, but I found myself regretting the note. Since I’d come off my drugs I was more cynical about things. I looked at the man I had thought I loved with a more jaded vision. He looked frightened. His eyes were shifting about, restlessly, as though looking for a crack in the ground into which he could creep. All my respect for him had fallen away. Disillusion is a bitter, lonely thing, I have discovered. He wasn’t even sexy any more.
‘Look, Hazel,’ he said, reaching in a drawer for a form. ‘I’m going to burn something.’
And he tapped the sheet of paper.
He took a cigarette lighter from another drawer and lit the corner of the form. I saw the flame lick over a green signature and turn it, briefly, to violet. The handwriting looked familiar. Then he threw the flaming document in the metal waste-paper bin where we both watched it burn, mesmerised. There’s nothing like a fire for intimacy and comfort – but Ishmael broke the spell.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That was the compulsory section I put you under. See? It never happened.’
I shook myself out of my pyromaniac’s trance, staggered at his gall.
‘Yes it fucking well did,’ I told him. I shocked myself, because I don’t usually swear. I found myself shuddering with sudden, feverish rage.
He reached out to place his hand on my arm – an old trick – but it didn’t work this time. I shook him off angrily. If I’d had a sharp pencil to hand I’d have stabbed it into his eye.
‘All of it happened. You seduced me, you betrayed me, locked me up, you took away my son, and you filled me with drugs. And now you just burn a piece of paper and say it didn’t happen.’
‘Hazel,’ he said simply. ‘It didn’t happen.’
‘Yes it did!’
‘No. You’re quite wrong. Nothing happened. Certainly not all of it. But – ’
‘But what?’
I could see he was hedging now.
‘But forgive me anyway.’
The nerve of it left me briefly winded. Then I stood up to hit him across the face. He sat there like he was going to take it. I was just aiming my swing when Dr Appleby walked in, without knocking, and I stopped. I couldn’t do it with her there; like sex, it was too intimate.
‘There’s a smell of burning,’ she said coldly.
‘Yes, Dr Appleby. Just clearing things out, getting rid of some junk.’
‘Well, it’s a fire hazard,’ she said. ‘You should know that. Anyway, time to go, Dr Stern. You c
an clear out your things after the Inquiry has reported.’
Meekly, he stood up and brushed down his suit.
‘Just discharging a patient. This is Mrs Stevenson,’ he mumbled.
‘It’s for me to do that,’ said Dr Appleby. And addressing me, she said, ‘There will be an in-depth assessment of all patients within the next few days, and we’ll decide then what the best treatment will be.’
She smiled at me unexpectedly, and I warmed to her.
‘And don’t worry, Mrs Stevenson,’ she said, glancing icily at Stern. ‘There will be no more drugs in this establishment for some time yet.’
I went back to the Day Room and my game show.
It didn’t happen. Nothing happened. Hazel, you are quite wrong.
No, Dr Stern. Not this time.
There was a woman contestant on the show. It was called Confession. She was a quality control supervisor at a DIY concession called Grout-a-Matic, and her hobbies were knitting and scuba-diving.
‘Not both at the same time, I hope!’ chuckled the host.
That raised a laugh. The contestant was skinny, with bandy legs like a nutcracker in rather racy fishnet stockings. She had a page-boy haircut from the seventies, and a floral dress, and glasses far too big for her face. It was like she was wearing two televisions. The host, Tyrone Jiggers, wore a suit of pillar-box red and a spangled top hat. His tie had flashing light bulbs on it. Jiggers gave the Grout-a-Matic woman a giant banana that said ‘The £300 Confession’ on it.
‘How do I hold it?’ she giggled.
‘Any way you like, my darling, but don’t squeeze it too hard!’ he replied, quick as a flash. That raised an ‘Oooo!’ and another laugh.
The idea was that she had to recount her most embarrassing moment ever. The one when she’d felt the most publicly humiliated. They have some interesting ideas, don’t they, these television producers.
