by Weldon, Fay
Miss Jacobs took up her notepad and wrote something in it.
‘What’s that?’ asked Morna Casey, nastily. ‘Your shopping list for tonight’s dinner? Liver? Brussels sprouts?’
‘If you’d lie down on the couch,’ said Miss Jacobs, ‘you wouldn’t see me writing and it wouldn’t bother you.’
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ said Morna Casey. ‘Sorry. Nothing you do bothers me one little bit, one way or another. And nothing will make me lie down on your couch. Reminds me of my father. My father was a doctor. He smoked eighty cigarettes a day and died of lung cancer when he was forty-three and I was seventeen. He’d cough and spit and gasp and light another cigarette. Then he’d inhale and cough some more. I remember saying to my Uncle Desmond – he was a doctor too – “Do you think it’s sensible for Daddy to smoke so much?” and Uncle Desmond replied, “Nothing wrong with tobacco: it acts as a mild disinfectant, and has a gentle tonic effect.” I tend to believe that, in spite of all that research – paid for by the confectionery companies, I wouldn’t be surprised – about the tobacco–lung-cancer link. It’s never been properly proved. The public is easily panicked, as those of us in PR know. My father enjoyed smoking. He went out in his prime. He wouldn’t have wanted to be old.
‘But I’m not here to waste time talking about my father. When you’re dead you’re dead and there’s no point discussing you. I’m here to talk about my dream. It comes in two halves: in the first half Rider is miniaturized – about twenty inches long – and he’s clinging on by his fingertips to the inside of the toilet, and crying, so I lean on the handle and flush him away. I can’t bear to see men crying – and at seventeen you’re a man, aren’t you. That part of the dream just makes me uneasy; but then out of the toilet rise up all these kind of deformed people – with no arms or two heads or their nerves outside their skin not inside so they have a kind of flayed look – and they sort of loom over me and that’s the bit I don’t like: that’s when I wake up screaming.’
Morna Casey was silent for a little. She stretched her leg and admired her ankle.
‘I think I understand the first part of the dream,’ said Morna Casey presently. ‘I gave birth to Rider in the toilet bowl at home. I wouldn’t go to hospital. I wasn’t going to have all those strangers staring up between my legs, so when I went into labour I didn’t tell a soul, just gritted my teeth and got on with it, and it ended up with Hector having to fish the baby out of the water. Now Rider climbs about in potholes – he actually likes being spreadeagled flat against slimy rock faces, holding on with his fingertips. His best friend was killed last year in a fall but I don’t worry. I’ve never worried about Rider. What’s the point? When your number’s up your number’s up. Sometimes I do get to worry about the way I don’t worry. I don’t seem to be quite like other people in this respect. Not that I’d want to be. I guess I’m just not the maternal type. But Rider grew up perfectly okay: he was never much of a bother. He’s going to university. If he wants to go potholing that’s his affair. Do we stop for coffee and biscuits? No? Not that I’d take the biscuits but I like to be offered. Food is an essential part of PR. The laws of hospitality are very strong. No one likes to bite the hand that feeds them. That’s one of the first things you learn in my job. You should really seriously think about it, Miss Jacobs.’
Morna Casey pondered for a while. A fly buzzed round her head but thought better of it and flew off.
‘I don’t understand the second part of the dream at all,’ said Morna Casey presently. ‘Who are all these deformed idiots who come shrieking out of the toilet bowl at me? I really hate the handicapped. So do most people only they haven’t the guts to say so. If there’d been one single thing wrong with Rider, an ear out of place, oesophagus missing, the smallest thing, I’d have pushed him under, not let Hector fish him out. Don’t you like Rider as a name? The rider of storms, the rider of seas? No one knows how poetic I am: they look as I go by and whistle and say, there goes a good-looking blonde of the smart kind not the silly kind, and they have no idea at all what I’m really about. I like that. One day I’m going to give it all up and be a poet. When Hector’s old and past it I’m going to push him under a bus. I can’t abide dribbly old men. When I’m old Rider will look after me. He loves me. He only clambers about underground to make me notice him. What he wants me to say is what I’ve never said: “I worry about you, Rider.” But I don’t. How can I say it; it isn’t true.’
Miss Jacobs raised an eyebrow. Morna Casey looked at her watch.
‘I have a meeting at three thirty,’ said Morna Casey. ‘I mustn’t let this overrun. I’m on a rather important special project at the moment, you may be interested to know. I’m handling the press over the Artefax scare.’
Artefax was a new vitamin-derivative drug hailed as a wonder cure for addictions of all kinds, manufactured by Maltman and considered by some to be responsible for a recent spate of monstrous births – though Maltman’s lawyers had argued successfully in the courts that, as the outbreaks were clustered, the Chernobyl fallout must be to blame – particles of caesium entering the water table in certain areas and not in others.
‘So you’ll understand it’s all go at the moment,’ said Morna Casey. ‘We have to restore public confidence. Artefax is wonderful, and absolutely harmless – you can even take it safely through pregnancy; you’re not addicted to anything, and all it does is have a mild tonic effect. Our main PR drive is through the doctors.’
Morna Casey was silent for a little. Miss Jacobs stared out of the window.
‘Well yes,’ said Morna Casey presently. ‘I see. If I changed my job the dreams would stop. But if I changed my job I wouldn’t worry about the dreams because it wouldn’t matter about the job, would it. All the same I might consider a shift in career direction. I don’t really like working for the same outfit as Hector. It does rather cramp my style – not that he can do much about it. I do as I like. He knows how boring he is; what can he expect?’
‘There’s a good opening coming up,’ said Morna Casey, ‘or so I’ve heard on the grapevine, as head of PR at Britnuc; that’s the new nuclear energy firm. I think I’d feel quite at home with radioactivity: it’s like nicotine and Artefax – in reasonable quantities it has this gentle tonic effect. Of course in large quantities I daresay it’s different. But so’s anything. Like aspirin. One does you good, two cure your headache, twenty kill you. In the Soviet Union the spas offer radioactive mud baths. Radon-rich, they say. They’re very popular.’
‘Thank you for the consultation, Dr – sorry, Miss – Jacobs. I won’t be needing to see you again. I’m much obliged to you for your time and patience: though of course one can always do this kind of thing for oneself. If I ever give up PR I might consider setting up as a therapist. No planning permission required! A truly jolly pièce de rich gâteau, if you ask me.’
And Morna Casey adjusted her short taupe skirt over her narrow hips and walked out, legs long on high heels, and Miss Jacobs, whose hand had been hovering over her appointment book, put down her pencil.
Miss Jacobs, you thought I was safely off your hands. You thought I would never return to lie like an idiot with my feet towards your window, my head towards your chair, at fifty pounds an hour, and think myself lucky. Have you changed the couch since I last lay here? I’ll swear it’s harder. It used to feel like an operating table on which I lay stretched while an operation was performed upon my brain without anaesthetic. But there was at least some padding beneath me. Now it’s more like a coffin: I lie on bare planks, unseasoned, roughly nailed together, as I suppose the coffins of the homeless, of criminals, of derelicts, to be. Those who have nobody. I am a corpse, a talking corpse. Is that what you had in mind for your patients, Miss Jacobs? What you meant when you changed the couch (not before time, I may say: the drumming heels of the desperate, the dying, had quite worn the green velveteen down the far end)? To move us yet further out of comfort into discomfort? Like one of those mean and judgemental parents who say to the ch
ild, ‘You’ve got to learn what the world is like – start now!’
No, before you say anything, my parents were neither mean nor judgemental: on the contrary, they veered towards the over-generous and the careless. They could give nothing its proper attention. They were too busy.
A corpse which talks. Very well, I accept my own definition. That is what it feels like. The mouth continues for a time after death to open and shut, open and shut, and a thin stream of words flows out like liquid forced up by convulsing lungs. When even that fails, I will finally be quiet.
No, I did not kill myself. What happened was that my sister finally killed me. I always knew she would. She made me come home from Minneapolis. She didn’t have to fire a gun into the wedding marquee, or spike my champagne with cyanide; she didn’t have to utter a word of reproach; all she had to do was exist. I don’t blame her. I just hate her.
I cross my hands on my chest as if I were the corpse she made me. My breasts stick up too high for comfort and convenience. She always envied me my breasts. They are too large for corpsely grace, for true refinement. But she won’t accept that: she would rather envy me. Envy is her stock in trade. When we were thirteen we measured ourselves and compared notes. My chest was definitely half an inch larger than hers, yet we were supposed to be identical in every way. Minnie took it as yet another sign of my privilege, the unfair blessing which fate kept heaping upon my poor bowed shoulders. Personally, I longed to be flat-chested, then as now. Clothes hang better. But try telling Minnie that.
Minnie my murderer. Miss Jacobs, I swear I did not know that Tom came from Minneapolis. The Midwest, he said. A city of lakes, of spires, of flour mills old and new, of grace and contemporary art; well, sixties art – a Rauchenberg, a Lichtenstein or so in the Walker, a splatter-burst of mess contained in the cleanest white shapes available to the architectural imagination.
What, you haven’t been to the Walker, Miss Jacobs? Of course you haven’t. You have sat here in this room for ever, you will be here for ever: you are the dustbin into which we scrape all our left-overs; we, me and my siblings, your other clients. The ones you so carefully don’t let me see. Come in this door, go out that! Once I stood in the shadows of the trees on the other side of the road for a whole Tuesday and watched your back door. They came out at hourly intervals but there was no one amongst them I knew, or anyone who was of any interest to me. Such a dull collection of others, denatured because they had left so much of themselves with you, the analyst. You are going out of fashion, I hope you know that? Freud is debunked – a Viennese neurotic: Klein neglected – what is this good breast bad breast junk? Adler exposed – family order, tests tell us, has no effect whatsoever upon personality. Only Jung is in fashion, with his yin and yang, his animus and anima, all that dreamy let’s-love-one-another touchy-feely stuff. Are you listening to me? Are you asleep? Or are you knitting again? Click, click, click! You told me you were taking notes, that was what the sound was, but I think you were lying. Knitting needles click; pens don’t. Or perhaps you’re chewing gum and your dentures are loose? I would push myself up and turn my head and look but I daren’t: I might see the devil’s face, I might see you weren’t there at all, just a black cat sitting in your chair, the Dark Thing, and anyway I can’t move, I’m dead. Minnie killed me. I can see my clasped hands in front of me. White dead hands. Tom loved my hands. The polish on my right little fingernail is chipped. Fancy lying in a coffin with a chipped nail. I thought they were supposed to see to that sort of thing.
Yes. I believe there is always a They about to clean up and explain, even as they persecute. Silly old me.
I know you believe I chose Tom because he came from Minneapolis, in order to upset Minnie more. But I didn’t choose. He just happened along. A millionaire from the Midwest, a transatlantic knight in shining armour to pluck me out of the muddy swamp, detect my beauty through my tangled hair and carry me off to happiness and prosperity. His City of Exit didn’t seem too important to me. Look, there aren’t so many knights in shining armour around. Had one come along from Milwaukee, I’d have gone for him. Honest.
Minnie was a stupid name anyway. Neither of us liked it. They called me Rosamund because that was the name Frank and Tillie had chosen for their first-born. Frank and Tillie are my parents. What was that you murmured? Christ, she actually spoke. Miss Jacobs, who gets a pound a minute, actually spoke! ‘I haven’t forgotten.’ That’s what you say. How am I supposed to know when you’re listening or when you’re asleep? Whether you’ve absorbed everything, or nothing? Whether you’ve forgotten what once you knew, or whether you never knew to begin with? The permutations of your not knowing are endless. And it has been a year since I was last here. More time than you’d need to forget.
Nothing is making me angry. What makes you think I’m angry? I’m upset, that’s all, lying here again, having to push and shove amongst your other patients, waiting for a cancellation. What do you think that feels like? Do you understand my humiliation? I thought I could cope and I can’t. I’m unhappy. I loved Tom. Where am I ever going to find another man like him again? He’ll never speak to me again. Everything was organized: a wedding ceremony in a chapel of love with the kind of service Americans love: bits and pieces of poetry and flute solos, and his parents, and his grandparents, and his friends and their friends and apple pie; and I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I said I wouldn’t. It was the moon. Oh Christ. Can I go to the loo? I suppose I’m allowed?
Where was I? Oh yes, Minnie being Minnie and me Rosamund. How could Frank and Tillie have done it to her? To me? Something else for her to moan about. The first and final straw. Minnie the afterthought. Well, she was, wasn’t she? Out she popped after me, completely unexpected, two pounds lighter, two inches shorter, for all we were meant to be identical. People in the States seem to think there are degrees of identical: but how can that be? Monozygotic is what it says. One cell split. Same genes exactly. Except it isn’t like that, is it? I reckon between us Minnie and I have a hundred per cent of various qualities and we share them out, not necessarily evenly. Niceness, for example. I have seventy per cent. Minnie has thirty per cent. Envy. I have twenty per cent. Minnie got the eighty per cent. Minnie’s envy has killed me.
Other children spend their lives saying, ‘It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.’ I have to spend mine saying, ‘I can’t help it.’ I can’t help being prettier than her (I reckon that’s another kind of quality, nothing to do with actual looks: a lot to do with self-image: I had sixty per cent, she had forty per cent), cleverer than her, fifty-five: forty-five (but enough to get me to college, her not), luckier than her (well, look at her children!), funnier than her (eighty: twenty), more sociable than her (sixty-five: thirty-five). The friends came to see me: she tagged along, sulking. But I loved her, Miss Jacobs. That made it worse. She knew I loved her, and she couldn’t even do that: love me back. She resented me too much. Capacity for love: Rosamund ninety per cent, Minnie ten per cent. She made my life miserable. If I passed an exam, fell in love, had a baby, bought a house, I couldn’t rejoice. All I could think was, oh my God, will it upset Minnie? How can I hide it?
When Peter and I discovered our first house had dry rot and it was going to cost thousands to repair, the first thing I thought was, thank God, that’ll make Minnie feel better. When Peter was killed in his car accident I remember thinking, at least now I’m a widow, that’s something. But all she said was, ‘My, you do look good in black. Is that why you’re wearing it?’
Going over old ground? You actually remember the ground we trod? Good Lord! I left suddenly, didn’t I? I didn’t think you’d notice. You sent me a massive bill and a kind of note. It registered pathetic, the way notes from former lovers do; all the energy drained away. What was once important no longer is. You ought to come back, you said; you left too soon. Finish your treatment. It sounded like Minnie-talk to me. The reproach there, even if others don’t hear it. Ought, ought, ought: never enjoy, love, live! Minnie, murderer of my life. Sharer of my womb.
I never complain that she took my nourishment from me: she’s always going on about how greedy I was, pushing past her at the post. They said I was lying further back than her: by rights I was the one who should have been born second. She would have been first, would have been given ‘Rosamund’, the great prize: I would have been Minnie. And I’d still have been me, and now would be living in Minneapolis. Minnie of Minneapolis. Why in God’s name didn’t she have the guts to elbow me out of the way? Because she’s so feeble, that’s why.
Minneapolis is a twin city. Did you know that? I didn’t, till we were on this aircraft and the captain said, ‘Fifty thousand feet and on our way to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul,’ and I said to Tom, ‘What does he mean, what does he mean?’ We were flying First Class. Have you ever flown First Class? I shouldn’t suppose so. It’s so comfortable. You feel better than anyone else in the world. I was surprised Minnie hadn’t somehow got herself on to the flight, Economy Class, of course, pushing her head through the curtains with the snarl she uses for a smile, saying, ‘Hi, Rossie.’ She’d never call me Rosamund. Since she didn’t have a Minnimund equivalent, she wouldn’t. Whenever I really wanted to wind her up I’d call her Minnimund. And Frank and Tillie would be there in Club Class looking uneasy and doing nothing to stop her except saying, ‘We love you too, Minnie; you’re very dear to us. All the dearer because you were unexpected.’ Lies, lies. Rearing twins is hell. They never had any more children after us: they couldn’t face it. I reckon Minnie, by being born, deprived another two or three putative children of life, I really do.
