by Liz Jensen
Even after the trial and after things had finally quietened down at Manxheath – even then I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. Other people seemed to be making progress: Monica had suddenly turned cynical, the Ossature was now a fatted calf, David was now divorced from Sweetie and in love with Apple Tree, and Max had been transferred to a hospital for the criminally insane for buggering the Institute’s guard dog.
As for Ma, she was out of the woods and back to her clay effigies with mammoth genitalia. The memorial she made for Isabella caused quite a stir: it was a huge green-and-yellow papier-mâché mausoleum to house Isabella Pimento’s molar. The Gridiron craft caucus was alerted to it by the art therapist, and all of a sudden Ma was a leading light in something called Art Brut, with private views and drinks parties and even a small but passionate following of collectors, galleries and other hangers-on. Two art students came to study her ‘methods’.
Ma had finally arrived. I was pleased for her, I suppose, but it all made me feel rather inadequate.
On a visit one day, I caught sight of a forlorn figure in the Day Room, bowed over some embroidery. It was a while before I recognised him. His hair was long, and in a ponytail. It looked dirty. He was wearing glasses. It was Dr Stern. I was about to walk away, but curiosity got the better of me. He didn’t raise his head as I approached. When I spoke, my words shot out bluntly, like from a popgun, before I had time to think.
‘Well?’ I asked him. ‘Are you mad or not?’
I noticed, staring past his head, that the green Regency striped wallpaper had been replaced by impressionistic dots in yellow, red and blue. It looked as though if you stared at them for long enough, reason might suddenly burst in.
‘Mad is a word we prefer not to use here in Manxheath,’ Ishmael responded automatically. ‘Anyway, how should I know?’ he added flatly, his eyes still on the tiny stitching of his embroidery. It was a square design, all in one colour – a deep, dingy purple-brown.
‘I used to have this theory about the mind being a sea of chemicals, but now I’m not so sure. I think a can of worms is the metaphor I’d use now.’
He looked up, and I saw that his eyes were red, and brimming with tears. With care, he finished off a strand of silk and began a new one in the same colour.
‘It’s a Rothko,’ he explained, stroking its lizardy surface. ‘D’you know what your mother said to me the other day in Group? She said, “Healer, heal thyself.” But I can’t. I don’t even know what there is to heal. I don’t know what’s normal any more, Hazel.’
So that Colditz thing was coming true, after all.
‘What’s de Cleranbault’s syndrome?’ I asked him.
‘It’s one of the delusionary complexes,’ he said wearily. ‘Involving the belief that one’s having a relationship with somebody when one isn’t.’ He unpicked a stitch, and re-did it, then added, ‘It’s astonishingly widespread.’
Suddenly, the sight of him made me sad, and muddled. We sat for a while in silence. Despite myself, I took his hand and squeezed it. I didn’t know what to offer him.
‘Do you know what my sister Linda always says?’ I found myself saying eventually. ‘She says life’s a bitch and then you die. So you see, we’re all in the same boat.’
It was the most optimistic thing I could think of to say. And it seemed to give him heart, because for a moment, something that might have been a smile spasmed near his mouth.
I got up and walked slowly across the lino in the direction of the door.
‘I think I love you,’ he called out hopefully as I closed it behind me. But there was something that wavered in his voice, a hint of de Cleranbault.
I’d always wanted something of my own, something to strive for and believe in. Home improvement wasn’t enough, I realised, after I’d paid a fortune to have the house re-vamped to eradicate all trace of Ruby. Nor was motherhood. With Billy at playschool five mornings a week, I needed something else. I was striving for sanity now. It’s normal, isn’t it, to want to be normal. When you’ve got lunatics in the family you need to stay on guard at all times. That much I do know about genetics.
In the end, it was memories of the greenhouse that inspired me. The idea hatched one Wednesday while Jane-next-door was giving me my geranium-scented aromatherapy. Because even though the greenhouse never really existed – can’t have done – it felt right. Is that so wrong?
So I bought one, a real one, with Hooper’s money and a bank loan. It’s not so much a greenhouse, I suppose, as a garden centre. The Gretchenfield Garden Centre. You’ll find it on Donkey Cart Road, in a prime location, next to Handiman and opposite Aqua World, by the pelican crossing. It’s quite big. I have a basic staff of ten. I’m planning a new orchard section for next year, and I’m already famed locally for my range of ornamental shrubs. We do special reductions for pensioners and every now and then I bring in a well-known gardening personality to give a talk on germination or compost or what-have-you. You could say it’s been a sort of lifeline, the whole thing. That business studies course I did all those years ago is finally paying off. And of course I’m rich. Last summer I took Billy to Disneyworld in Florida for a week, and I’ve waved goodbye to Marks & Sparks.
I don’t grow any ‘medications’ at the garden centre, or any of that other weird stuff Ma managed to raise. I imagine it would be illegal. She’s a bit scathing about that, when she comes to help as part of what Dr Appleby calls a ‘community enrichment programme’. You can’t say she doesn’t have green fingers. She comes to enrich us on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if she’s not attending a private view, which she calls a vernissage. Sometimes Ishmael tags along, or comes to the garden centre for a cup of tea in our Koffee Korner before wandering off. He and Keith are allowed to leave the hospital sometimes, accompanied by Dr McAuley, for chess tournaments. Ishmael is getting pretty good, and is now an International Master, whatever that means. He keeps asking me to ‘be his wife’ but I change the subject and occupy him in potting up cuttings. His behaviour seems quite mad for a normal person, though I no longer trust my judgement in these matters. I don’t know. It’s dodgy territory. We don’t really talk.
Linda, having received her Ag. and Fish Merit Award, has gone from strength to strength. She ditched Duncan not long ago. She couldn’t tolerate sub-standard sex a moment longer, she told me. Now she’s en route to Brussels for a promotion into something called Euro Ag. Planning. More strangely, I think I’ll actually miss her. She said I could fly out and stay for a weekend, if I could get a baby-sitter for Billy, and if I could try to avoid irritating her. I’m hoping she’ll try motherhood again one day, but she says her fingers have been burned.
It’s Christmas Eve, and Gregory has been allowed out of the Correction Facility for two days because he’s been a model prisoner and because a lot of suicides are predicted for the millennium. The theory is that families prevent, rather than cause them. We decided to have a ceasefire over the holiday season, for Billy’s sake. It looked like I was being more generous than I really was, of course. After all, he didn’t know about the baby-swap, and the extent to which my family had ruined his life. I decided to let him use the spare room, which now has an en suite bathroom with an aubergine toilet and matching bidet. He is Billy’s father, after all. Later I’m having guests round for drinks and festive things on sticks.
I’ve been busy preparing the turkey stuffing (apple and chestnut with ginger) for tomorrow, but in the midst of it all I stop and remember one of those tiny moments of huge significance that stay with you for ever.
It happened this morning, when I’d finished vacuuming in the living-room. Billy and Gregory had built an impressive crenellated castle from Lego, and when by chance I found myself on my hands and knees peering through its tiny portcullis, I had a moment of sublime epiphany: a clear vision of the future, in which all my life was bright and new. Gazing down the corridor that led into the central courtyard, my heart lifted as I saw a little red soldier proudly standing guard over the castle ent
rance. He was wearing a crash helmet that belonged to another Lego scene – the garage one, I think. In his hand was a musket. He would keep that castle safe, you could tell, and guard the valuable furniture inside it with his life. And I realised then: I’m more in charge of things than I ever was.
So here we all are now, the night before Christmas: Ma, Linda, Keith, Gregory, Ishmael, Billy, and me. We’re sitting around in the living-room. Despite the new peach-coloured carpet, I reckon you can still see the dark patch where the mustard and cress grew.
Gregory is stiff and polite with my guests. He sits in a high-backed chair, and avoids eye contact. Earlier he showed us his moderately interesting ammonite collection, a ring-binder containing photocopied photographs and diagrams of fossils found in Lyme Regis by other people. He hasn’t changed much. That luncheon meat look is still there.
We’ve had our mini-sausages on sticks and our sparkling wine. There were quails’ eggs, too, but I’d overcooked them, of course, and Ma had spat one out half-chewed, theatrically, into Linda’s ashtray.
‘It’s hard as a wee gel capsule,’ she’d complained. ‘The kind you stick up your arse.’
Of course no one except Billy would touch them after that. Ma has a way of polluting things.
Now Linda wants to watch Holy Hour Special. I do, too, but I’m worried about what I might see. The Katie-Koo thing: it still haunts my mind. There’s been much speculation in the press about the Reverend Carmichael’s ‘love-child’, but he’s managed to keep her out of public view by cloistering her in his Northumberland ranch.
The show is to be a sort of Yuletide re-launch after the Easter disgrace. The pre-publicity for the show has indicated that the Reverend will be surprising us all again. Needless to say, he has paid his dues, asked the Lord to forgive him his sins, and is Born Again again.
‘He’s bound to say something about her if he’s re-launching himself,’ argues Linda. She’s clearly got over him: she’s crunching on a Love Heart. ‘How can he avoid it? Anyway, it’ll be part of the deal to pull in the ratings.’
Linda has admitted to me that the Katie-Koo period of her life is now a bit of a blur. The Carmichael bit, too. She has forgotten, but not forgiven.
The public, surveys show, has done the opposite. They’ll forgive him anything. Women, especially, will forgive. Pity the struggling and repentant single father. Blame the mystery slag mother who so cruelly dumped a child on him. Who seduced him in a weak moment. Who failed to use either modern birth control or old-fashioned self-restraint. Blame Linda.
The only one of us who doesn’t have mixed feelings about seeing the show is Gregory, of course. He loathes the Reverend more than he ever did.
‘You can like it or lump it here, sonny Jim,’ Ma tells Greg.
‘Can I offer anyone a cheese cracker?’ sighs my ex, trying to make out it’s his house we’re in, with his wife, his new loose covers, his friends, his new dado railing, his aubergine bidet, his sparkling wine. We ignore him.
‘Fancy a game of chess, anyone?’ asks Ishmael. ‘It’s supposed to be very Freudian – all about killing one’s father.’
‘We’ll kill him later, hen,’ says Ma. ‘Can’t you see we’re engrossed?’
Ishmael sighs, reaches for his embroidery bag, and pulls out the Rothko and a bodkin.
‘The devil finds work for idle hands,’ bitches Ma.
‘So what does that make your mausoleum, Mrs Sugden?’ ripostes Ishmael, but Ma pretends not to hear.
The music is thumping away; the Reverend Carmichael is looking jovial and serene; he is dressed as Joseph. Then the camera pulls out to reveal that he is surrounded by a whole nativity scene with real sheep and goats, and kneeling men dressed in shepherds’ costumes. There is even a medium-sized cow, chewing lasciviously on some straw.
There is no Mary; just a crib.
We hold our breath.
‘No!’ yells Linda suddenly. ‘He won’t have the fucking nerve!’
Gregory is looking puzzled; I signal to Linda to shut up and she valiantly restrains herself. The truth has gone no further than our family and we’re keeping it that way. As far as Greg’s concerned, the Perfect Baby never happened: Baby B was a ‘failure’, and Baby A, also a ‘failure’, was now a Trappist to boot. Gregory will never have any idea what really happened to his daughter.
Meanwhile, it transpires that the Reverend Carmichael does have the nerve. He reaches inside the crib and props up a cherubic, curly-haired baby on a golden cushion.
It’s weird. Katie-Koo looks scarcely any older than she did a year ago. A design fault, perhaps. She is angel-faced.
‘Rejoice!’ cries Carmichael, his voice shuddering with paternal pride. ‘For unto us a child is born!’
Linda groans, her eyes glassily fixed on the screen. And we all gaze in wonder and fear as the Perfect Baby sits up in her little cot, smiles benignly on Carmichael, the menagerie and the audience, and cries out in the tiny, tinkling voice of a wind-up toy, ‘Happy Christmas to you from God’s own Child! And a prosperous New Year to Holy Hour viewers everywhere!’
The studio audience gasps. What an extraordinary baby! Even Ishmael’s eyes change shape in astonishment as the dolly-child gets to her tiny feet. She is wearing a white lace nightie and a headband with a gold star that flashes through her dark curls.
Then, in a small, quavery, breathy voice, she begins to sing.
Today’s the day
The time is now
Let Jesus in
It’s Holy Hour!
I look at Gregory. His face is all twisted.
‘She’s perfect!’ he mutters. The tears are zig-zagging recklessly down his face. ‘A Perfect Baby!’
‘Almost a miracle, eh, Gregory,’ says Linda, who also seems to be choking on an emotion.
‘Looks like God won the race for perfection, sonny,’ comments Ma. ‘Who’s for guacamole?’
On television, they’re voting with their knees: members of the studio audience are descending into prayer posture, like a herd of resigned camels, before the miracle. For a ghastly moment I think Gregory is about to join them, but he grips the edge of his chair with white knuckles to stop himself. I’ve never actually seen him cry before.
Cry me a river.
Linda, Ma and I exchange a shaky triangular glance.
‘Well,’ declares Ma, sinking her chops into a pistachio-flavoured Turkish Delight. ‘That’s kakistocracy for you.’
Linda is wiping her nose on her sleeve and blinking back tears of what might be rage, nostalgia, envy, or a curious Linda-ish mixture of all three.
Now Katie-Koo is waving and blowing kisses. Perhaps she sees the same sort of future I do: the one I saw this morning in Lego.
‘Expect a new world,’ the Reverend is pronouncing, ‘and the Lord shall provide it.’
It’s then that Billy appears like a little security guard in the middle of the room, brandishing the remote control, and presses the Off button.
The TV corner is suddenly cast into darkness, and into the darkness floods that gorgeous and unfathomable feeling of joy that is surely to be mine from now on.
My castle is safe. There it stands, fast and miraculous and inviolate as an egg.
And yes: I’m more in charge of things than I ever was.
Acknowledgements
With warmest thanks to Polly Coles for her sharp critical eye and her friendship, and to Michel Coleman for his love and support.
A Note on the Author
Liz Jensen was born in Oxfordshire in 1959. She has worked in Britain and the Far East as a journalist and in France as a sculptor. She now lives in South London. Egg Dancing is her first novel.
COPYRIGHT PAGE
This electronic edition published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 1995
This paperback edition published 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Liz Jensen
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute,
transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2 Soho Square, London W1V 6HB
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408813607
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for
newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Copyright page
