Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  My room is full of bodies. I killed the puppies, too, the ones they hadn’t had yet; couldn’t cope with more dogs. The smell is really terrible, blood as well as faeces. At last, I lay the knife down. My hand feels limp and useless, dangling from my side now, with nothing more to do. I fumble for a cigarette, remember I’ve no lighter; keep it in my mouth, unlit, as I go to fill the kettle. I don’t want tea; just need to wash the blood off.

  I’m not feeling any better. I imagined I’d revive once I’d disposed of all my rivals, but nothing’s really changed. I hobble to the mirror, examine my reflection. My eyes are only sockets, and I should have washed my hair. ‘Fantastic hair,’ Seton said. ‘It reaches almost to your bum.’ I glance around for Seton, know I had him close once. Perhaps I killed him, too. There’s a body in the corner, bleeding under blankets, which could be his, judging by its size. I wash my hair every day – when I’m feeling well, that is. Seton said it paid; said he liked its glossy sheen, its smell of lime conditioner. It looks awful now, unkempt and limp and tangled; smells of dog, not limes. I tilt my head, so it’s hanging down in one greasy yard-long cascade, hold it very steady with my left hand, while I use the right to reach out for the knife. Two hacks and it’s off. It slithers to the carpet with all the other corpses, coils across a painting – dark on dark.

  I limp back to the mirror. Yes, a real improvement. It’s very short and ragged, makes me fit my name. I know I’ll find John-Paul now. He only went away because he was hoping for a boy-child, praying for a son, and I turned out a freak, a female.

  ‘I’m better now,’ I tell him, as I sit down by the phone, relieved and almost happy as I wait for him to ring and say he loves me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mary sat back in the carriage, smiling at the young girl sitting opposite (and the chubby baby dribbling on her lap); beaming at the old man in the corner, who looked a babe himself with his woolly pompommed hat and missing teeth. She could feel smiles popping out of her, as if she’d swallowed a whole cartonful and they were escaping through her mouth, settling on her coat lapels like pink enamelled brooches. Smiles seemed only natural when she was en route to John-Paul’s. It wasn’t even Friday, but boring washday Monday, yet there she was in her best Windsmoor navy suit, with a package of still-warm mince pies she’d made specially for the Doctor, stowed into her bag – a tiny humble offering to thank him for the privilege of a second session every week, which he himself had suggested.

  Actually, she was getting on so frightfully well, she’d have thought he might have cut the sessions down instead of doubling them, but he’d told her that although he was very gratified by what he called her ‘symptomatic relief’, they had hardly even touched on the underlying problems. She’d lived half her life without knowing she had problems – certainly not the serious ones John-Paul had specified – separation anxiety, pre-genital ambivalence, and several others she couldn’t quite remember, or hadn’t really grasped or understood. (She didn’t always like to ask him to explain things. It made her seem so ignorant, and he was so fearfully clever himself, he probably didn’t realise she’d panicked at exam time and so failed her GCEs.) Still, if it meant more time lying on his couch, then she was almost pleased to be ‘arrested at the genital stage’, or ‘prone to projective identification of a self-undermining kind’.

  In fact, it had increased her basic confidence to feel she had such complex layers and depths to her that even a doctor as brilliant as John-Paul required months – no, years – to plumb them. Her once-tame restricted daily round was now totally transformed by a knowledge of her inner life; that seething hotbed of passions and emotions she didn’t know she felt. Even her childhood had been a succession of explosive stages, each one with a formal name, and each involving conflict and high drama – the oral stage, when she’d attacked the breast, swallowed everything in sight, even gulping down her mother whole; the anal stage, when she’d held on to her faeces, or refused to use her potty and done her business in a corner like a dog; and finally the genital stage, when she’d poked sticks up her knickers to give herself a thrill, or stuffed cushions between her legs. She couldn’t quite imagine doing any of those things; felt sure her angry mother (or disapproving ayah) would have intervened in no uncertain terms, but John-Paul had assured her she was merely suppressing all that early rage and turmoil.

  And all those other terms he used had added to her feeling of importance. She might not have her A-levels, but she had ego-instincts, libidinal cathexes, something called ‘affects’ (with the stress on the first syllable); obsessions, sublimations and repressions. She’d always seen herself as rather boring, a dabbler with a shallow mind, whom even Jonathan dismissed as ‘dumb’ when she couldn’t understand his prep-school maths. John-Paul thought otherwise, reached deep inside her psyche and pulled out plums – maybe mouldy ones, in some cases, but still with curves and colour, ripe flesh surrounding deep-embedded stones, themselves a promise of new fruit.

  James had been a little less delighted about the extra weekly session – in fact, really quite unpleasant, if she was honest with herself, but it was probably less John-Paul than Larry Crawshaw who was making him so crotchety, plus all the other hassles at his work. She’d have to make it up to him, maybe go to Austin Reed and buy him some new shirts (which would prove a boon for her, as well, since she hadn’t ironed his old ones in a fortnight). She’d already tried to mollify him by reporting John-Paul’s four-week break, which the doctor planned to take from the seventeenth of December to the fourteenth of January, and which would therefore mean a reduction in his bill. Of course she wouldn’t dream of saying so, but she’d have gladly paid the bill in full, even paid it twice, if she could only stop him going in the first place. Two more footling weeks and he’d be off to Rome for Christmas and the Congress, leaving her bereft – well, extremely busy with all the cooking and the shopping and the boys home, but still reduced to a mere housewife and a dimwit, instead of a complex femme fatale.

  She leaned forward to retrieve her Woman’s Journal which had slipped down off her lap. The baby reached a hand out, grabbed a fistful of her hair, kept tugging really hard. ‘Lovely girl,’ she murmured to its mother, while trying to unclasp the tiny fingers.

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. He’s got such pretty curls, I thought … What’s his name?’

  ‘Brian.’

  ‘Oh, Brian.’ She subsided in her seat, returned to Woman’s Journal – how to make Christmas decorations from silver foil and pastry-cutters. She hadn’t wanted to think of Bryan – not till Friday, anyway, when she’d be forced to see him at the class – again. She’d spent all last Friday’s train journey worrying about him, after that quite extraordinary session in the pub. She’d only suggested a drink at all because James was out till late that night, and anyway she’d been skimping on her charities, neglecting her lame ducks, and Bryan was clearly crying out for help. Of course, she’d never realised the poor soul was homosexual, had never really met one in her life before, or known anything much at all about what the media called ‘gays’, until she’d started ploughing through her new dictionary of psychology which she’d bought just last weekend. There’d been a whole long article on homosexuality (under D for Deviance, though you weren’t meant to call it that), which had helped her understand poor Bryan, explain his eccentricities.

  She’d been suspicious at the time, in fact, when they were sitting in the pub and he’d kept ogling other men, whipping round to leer or gawp every time a male passed near their table, especially big and brawny ones, or young lads in skin-tight jeans. And then that whole sad and sorry business with his father. The article had emphasised the very frequent problems gays had with their fathers, especially if those fathers were insecure themselves about their masculinity and felt threatened by a weak effeminate son. Things were obviously extremely bad between Bryan and Skerwin senior. To pretend not to even know his son did seem especially heartless, but if Bryan often cried in public, broke down in pubs
or evening-classes, his father probably couldn’t handle the shame and sheer embarrassment. She’d been a little thrown herself, with everybody looking and him shouting ‘I don’t care’ like that (which was presumably an attempt to ‘come out of the closet’, to use another phrase she’d learned). James had never cried in the fifteen years she’d known him, not even when his mother died of a combined stroke and heart attack, and they’d found her, cold already, at the bottom of the stairs.

  And talking of mothers, Bryan was obviously devoted to his own, could hardly bear to tear himself away from her, either literally or conversationally; had spent a good half of the coffee-break embroidering on her endearing little ways, explaining all her fads and fancies, and always circling back to her, every time she’d tried to change the subject. That, too, was a symptom. According to the article, gays were often hung up on their mothers, stayed close to them emotionally when normal men had married or moved on. And his obsession with illness was also most suspicious, probably springing from a basic fear of AIDS. He’d told her he was frightened she had died, simply because she’d missed a couple of classes, but he was clearly harping on his own death, and only disguising it as hers. That was called ‘projection’, a term John-Paul had taught her (in another context, actually, but the point was still the same). The poor soul’s voice had broken as he stuttered the word ‘death’. Could he be infected, what they called HIV positive, with only months to live?

  It really was quite tragic, a man as young as he was, and all that pathetic business about his childhood and no parties. Even walking to the station, he’d brought it up again; how he’d never kept his birthday, never had a party or any treats at all. She’d seen through him straight away. He was angling for an invitation to meet her own three sons, to attend Jon’s little junket and indulge his lust for soft-skinned eight-year-olds. Well, that she couldn’t have; wouldn’t dream of letting any child within an arm’s length of a deviant, let alone her pure and precious sons.

  ‘Mama!’ screeched the baby, lunging out at her again and pulling not her hair, but her blue Venetian beads. She tried to save her necklace, an expensive one from James, whilst hoping the poor infant wasn’t suffering from an identity crisis at quite so young an age. ‘I’m not your Mummy, darling. There’s Mummy over there.’

  ‘I’m not his Mum – no fear!’ The girl tugged the squirming child back, slapped his sticky hand. ‘Sit still, you little monster!’

  The baby’s howls rose to fill the carriage, seemed trapped in it, circling round and round. The woolly-hatted pensioner had got out at Surbiton, but two younger men had slammed in shortly afterwards, and were now casting surly glances round their Daily Telegraphs. Mary scrutinised them shyly – one tall, with long and powerful legs; the other almost pudgy, but with thick fair hair, a sensuous wide-lipped mouth. She had never really noticed men before, except as rather alien beings who were usually bad-tempered and always in a hurry, and needed lots of other people like wives or maids or secretaries to keep them functioning at all (and even then, were forced to recuperate in golf clubs or join expensive health clubs to help them bear the tension of their lives – lives far more meaningful, momentous, than any poor mere woman’s). But she was becoming more aware of men, recently, excitingly; not just their jobs or needs or shirts, but the bodies underneath the shirts, the hands which held the briefcases (which she sometimes wickedly imagined straying down her tautly naked breasts). She had even found herself glancing at the space between their legs – or rather not the space …

  Ashamed, she dragged her eyes away. Neither man looked exactly wild with passion. Both were clearly irritable, fidgeting and muttering as the baby’s screams crescendoed. She longed to hold the frantic child, soothe his desperate wailing. All he needed was a cuddle, not a slap – and an instant change of nappy, judging by the damp patch on his rompers. Where was his mother, she wondered almost angrily? Doctors like John-Paul were invariably so busy just because of mothers who gave up on their role, entrusted their own flesh and blood to callous substitutes.

  And yet it worried her, the theory that all crime and mental illness was a result of faulty parenting. Did it mean you couldn’t blame even hardened vicious criminals, but excused, say Adolf Hitler, because his mother fed him Cow and Gate instead of offering him the breast, or felt sorry for the Yorkshire Ripper because he’d been potty-trained too early? Or suppose a man like Bryan did something most unpleasant to her darling Jonathan, would it be wrong to want to murder him, instead of sympathising? She’d tried to bring the matter up with James, who sometimes helped unsnarl her muddled views, but when she’d mentioned Hitler, he’d gone off at a tangent and said that bloody Larry Crawshaw was a little Hitler in himself and if someone didn’t take a stand, it would be gas chambers for his firm.

  She unbuttoned her thick jacket and the top button of her blouse. It was stifling in the carriage, and probably full of germs. One of the Daily Telegraphs had a really nasty cold, kept trying to find a clean spot on his stained and soggy handkerchief, which she wished she could take home to wash and iron. If she’d been sitting by the window, she could have opened it a crack, let in some fresh air; watched the streets and houses flashing past the pane, glimpsed dreary Monday housewives hanging out their washing or making shepherd’s pies. That had been her own life just a month or so. ago – a worthy round of cooking, ironing, church work, which ignored the wild exotic realms she’d discovered only recently: New Worlds between her open legs, undiscovered territories between her marvelling skull-bones.

  She closed her eyes a moment, thought back to Friday’s session with John-Paul. She’d been telling him quite shyly (though slowly gaining confidence as she sensed his quiet approval) about her so-called ‘Thrill-Kit’ – her new vibrator-plus which came complete with a dozen separate snap-on heads described as ‘Happy Endings’, and a clitoris-excitor with seven different speeds. She ran it in her mind again, revved the switch from purr to roar, added the rattling of the wheels, the juddering of the train, watched the signal rise, the lights change from red to green, as the 125 went racing up the incline and down the other side, finally thwacked against the buffers exhausted but triumphant.

  ‘Two hundred and five,’ she whispered, as she dabbed her sweaty forehead with her glove, gave a secret gloating smile to the Minister of Health who was facing her on page three of the Telegraph. ‘Housewife Snatched From Death-Trap’, she read, several columns down. So Bryan had thought she’d died. Well, she had died, in a sense – died of pleasure, anyway. A climax was a sort of death, or so the sex books said, and one tome had even mentioned that seventeenth-century poets used the word ‘die’ or ‘death’ as a sort of pun or double entendre meaning orgasm. They’d never taught her that at school, nor words like soixante-neuf or detumescence. She was learning such a lot these days – forget ‘Science and Society’ – she only went to that to keep James happy, prove she wasn’t quite the bird-brain he assumed, though, if she were truthful with herself, she could hardly grasp a word that Skerwin said; sometimes suspected he was teaching a quite different class from the one described in the prospectus, or was so involved in his own high-powered research, he’d totally forgotten that his students weren’t all physics graduates with doctorates from Oxbridge. But once she moved from science to psychology, then she had surely earned her doctorate by now, if not a few gold stars.

  She unfastened the next button of her blouse, imagined John-Paul leaning over to pin the gold star on her chest (breast); his strong male hand making contact with the nipple, lingering a moment before creeping down her cleavage …

  ‘Stop that!’

  She jumped, removed the hand, swiftly did up both her buttons, looking round for angry Nanny who would slap her any moment, send her to her room. She heard the slap resound, but it was the baby who’d received it, right across his buttocks. ‘Shut up, you noisy bastard, or you’ll get a harder one.’ The girl shook the child quite callously, as if he were a kitchen mat or pillowcase and not a fragile psyche. She kn
ew she shouldn’t interfere, but if someone didn’t take a stand, then in another twenty years or less he’d be lying on the couch.

  ‘Could I hold him for a moment? I’ve got three boys myself, so …’

  ‘By my guest,’ the girl said, as she dumped the howling infant on Mary’s ample lap, retuned her Walkman, lit a cigarette, ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ signs.

  ‘Hush now, precious. What’s the trouble? Teething, are we? Let me look. Oh, dear, it is sore, isn’t it? Poor pet, poor wee mite.’ Mary rocked the red-faced infant to and fro, let him bite her finger, stroked his fuzz of hair. The wild yells slowly quietened, changed to shuddering gasps, one final choking hiccup, then silence, blessed silence. Mary could feel the tension dropping in the carriage. The two men settled back, both turning over pages of their newspapers, as if to prove they could concentrate once more on the rise in the inflation rate or the car bomb in Beirut. The girl blew lazy smoke rings, one foot gently tapping to the private rhythm of her Walkman. Even the train itself seemed to decrease its feckless speed, stopped lurching quite so violently, as it rattled over points. Mary longed to rock and soothe them all: blow that poor man’s nose for him, rub some Vaseline on his swollen reddened nostrils; remove the young girl’s cigarette and replace it with a dummy; gently chide the train for making too much noise, distract it with a picture-book or jigsaw.