Doctors & Nurses

by Lucy Ellmann

  When they entered the house, Jen felt a strong urge to descend, ALONE, to her den to eat ICE CREAM. But Roger dragged her panting up the stairs with him. They climbed and climbed, followed closely by Francine and the kids, and then the rest of the crowd. Once in the attic, the two kids hid in the kitchen doorway, peeking out at the horde of visitors. They were ALWAYS standing in doorways, as if they had no right to enter a whole ROOM.

  Those kids had learnt to live with a father who was OUT most of the time, a father who seemed to know nothing of joy, and a mother who was out COLD (recovering from her numerous BEAUTY TREATMENTS), a mother who, when conscious, was a MAD thing, dark, wet, stinky and slimy! With her they had often sat up late waiting for Roger to come, since he had declared that a HAPPY family EATS together (he too read Take a Break!). As a result of this edict, they often went to bed with NO supper. Edward and Adele had been quietly biding their time since the announcement of Dr Lewis’s engagement, in the hope that Jen would inject some REGULARITY into the food sitch (she didn’t look like she skipped too many meals).

  Dr Lewis now spread his hands in a theatrical gesture of defeat. ‘As you can probably see, I just can’t cope any more,’ he confided to the assembled throng.

  No one could refute this judgement: everything in the flat seemed to be broken, burnt or WET, every door off its hinges, armchairs with no ARMS, tables lying on their sides, clothing, possibly VOMIT, in every corner. There was a STINK, a cloud of stinks, that included the Leaning Tower of Pisser and chip fat and waiflike children, and the stale fruity smell of the orange flight suit.

  ‘Was there some kind of STRUGGLE here?’ asked the priest, nominating himself, quite erroneously, as the ARBITER of everything.

  ‘No, it just looks like this,’ said Roger.

  ‘So, does your wife live with you?’ asked the nosy new postmistress. (But it WAS her business – she didn’t want letters going astray!)

  ‘She has to,’ said Roger. ‘I have to keep an eye on her at all times. She’s NUTS. That’s why I let her man the phone in the surgery.’

  Everyone stared at Dr Lewis, trying to take this in.

  ‘She went nuts at Disneyland. A few years ago.’

  A murmur of sympathy rose from the crowd. They too had been to Disneyland.

  ‘She went berserk on the plane home. Caught her own reflection in the porthole – she thought she’d seen her MOTHER outside the plane. Threatened to kill all the children on board, didn’t you, my love?’ He turned to Francine, who was burbling to herself on the arm of a broken chair. He stroked her cheek but drew his hand back in a hurry when she tried to BITE it.

  ‘What was the attraction, may I ask?’ the priest enquired.

  ‘What?’

  ‘At Disneyland.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Toad’s Wild Ride,’ Roger affably replied. ‘It was too wild for Francine.’

  ‘I like Pirates of the Caribbean,’ said the priest. Everyone then started shouting out their favourite ride at Disneyland, their various DISAPPOINTMENTS at Disneyland, and the amount of DOUGH they’d sunk into Disneyland. Once the din had died down, Roger resumed his explanation (how he loved a crowd!).

  ‘She’s been making trouble for days about the wedding, I don’t know why. Our marriage has been over for years! I found her trying to destroy the wedding dress last night! The trouble is, Jen reminds Francine of her MOTHER.’

  Everyone was much moved by Dr Lewis’s excuses. They were full of sympathy for the good doctor. Nobody cares about BIGAMY these days (they care a lot more about DISNEYLAND), and everyone wants to think well of their GP! Rising to the occasion, Francine stood on the chair and beat her breast, crying, ‘My mother, my MOTHER!’

  Jen, who had never been to Disneyland, was feeling rather SICK and not just because of the CUMMERBUND: she was thinking about the AEROPLANE, the one on which Roger had supposedly been Hero of the Hour! The woman he’d so effectively SUBDUED on the plane, it seemed, was his WIFE, the mother of his BRATS. Some hero. Sedating and tying up your own wife is the LEAST a man can do!

  Jen might have been able to endure SOME of this, had she not been trussed up like a big fat buttered stuffed oven-ready TURKEY in all those stays and the cummerbund, but they made her feel so OUT OF BREATH! Pushing her way past the priest, who got squished behind a door (as all promulgators of religion SHOULD be), she ran out into the hallway and down the stairs, JEN, who hadn’t run willingly anywhere in years! Inevitably, she tripped on her dress. Down she spun, a barrelling croissant of centrifugal force. It was a long time before people could stop talking behind Jen’s back about the sight of her toppling: red face, white dress, red cummerbund, white-stockinged thighs, red ASS, white shoes, red white red white red white. Like one big BREAST she bounced!

  Civilisation

  So now begins the lavish period of EXILE, in which Jane Eyre wanders starving across the MOORS, implausibly hooks up with some distant cousins, and considers marrying the sexless SINJUN and converting the INJUNS. All that stuff after the aborted wedding is a FIASCO – and it takes up a third of the book! It’s the biggest black hole in English literature! Brontë’s got the poignant childhood all sewn up, she’s got ROCHESTER, who’s sexy and moving, and she’s got the passionate JANE who, innovatively, is not perfectly beautiful (though couldn’t she have made her a bit UGLIER? Jane doesn’t quite hate herself ENOUGH). And then she goes and BLOWS it, wantonly destroys her own BOOK with that hideously dull WILDERNESS year. WHY? What HAPPENED? Why didn’t somebody STOP her? Such inordinate penitence for the sin of wanting a married man! (And all because of that Belgian PROFESSOR Brontë was so stuck on.) Charlotte, CHARLOTTE!

  JEN’S exile will not be long or lavish – a mere two days! And there will be no STARVING nonsense – Jen has had the foresight to pack her tidy white pearl-beaded BRIDAL BAG with a SWITCH card, and she hasn’t LOST it yet (Jen never mislaid a handbag in her life!). While everyone else in town is still gaping at Dr Lewis’s domestic arena, Jen in her crumpled wedding dress stands outside the bank, trying to extract cash from the cash-point machine. TRIUMPH: money comes out. From there she heads for the train station.

  Sensing that her preternatural calm is about to disintegrate, she rushes into the Ladies and there weeps for a considerable time. She thinks – but how dare we intrude on what Jen is thinking at such a juncture? Are we BARBARIANS? Are we BEASTS? Yes.

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall FRIGHTFUL. Jen is in a spiral of self-hatred, she has reaped the WHIRLWIND by daring to love Roger Lewis. There is fission, there is fusion! Thoughts she usually buries so as to be able to FUNCTION, be SEEN, hold down a JOB, now surface in a MUSHROOM CLOUD of self-disgust. There is no HOPE. Her every mistake looms GARGANTUAN in her mind: Roger’s coldness, Francine’s perfidy, her brother’s scorn, Urma Thurb’s DEFECTION, her father’s revulsion, her MOTHER’s too (preferring DEATH to Jen). ALSO the girls at school who talked about Jen behind her back while she hid in a booth, the OSTEOPATH who fucked her senseless, the SERVING WENCHES who have thwarted her, the repugnance of FISH girls and the like, the BABIES she’s killed, the cats she’s kicked, the hapless Eakinses, the VEIL between herself and the world (Jen is well aware of it!), the huge LONELINESS OF LIFE, characterised by all the clandestine PANCAKES she’s eaten, the garlic bread and buttered POTATOES, the apple CRUMBLES she’s baked herself late into the night, the CHIMICHANGAS!

  And her BODY, that endless fund of grotesquerie with its pockmarked pustuled droopy SKIN, the extravagant, hitherto UNHEARD-OF design of her BREASTS, her upper arms that flap in the wind, her WIND too (Jen is the main source of METHANE in the world), the Niagara Fall of CHINS and her stupid STUPID face, the smug mouth, dead eyes! The BURDEN of having bodies at all (including the problem of having to take HERS somewhere NOW), the HORROR, the TROUBLE they give us! Jen is not immune to the tragedies around her, the diseases; she’s seen what they can do. MOMO syndrome. Eczema. Cirrhosis. Blindness. Dementia. NODULES.

  She wails and wails! She cries for herself and for th
e WORLD, a world in which there are artificial limbs and plastic carrier bags and hiccups and JOBS and Take a Break magazine and the BUSH regime and the general indecision about SMOKING. These things will destroy us all!

  She widens her scope to include just about EVERYTHING. Everything in the world makes her cry more and more, though she TRIES to stop. Trying to STOP makes her cry more! She weeps until she howls with LAUGHTER, which seems to her the saddest sound she’s ever heard. She laughs until she CRIES again! But even in a crisis one is selective. Jen’s meltdown excludes certain things: tulips, two-pound coins, book-binding, and the aurora borealis. Except that she’s never SEEN the aurora borealis and she’s always WANTED to see the aurora borealis and she probably never WILL see the fucking aurora borealis – so she cries about that too!

  Mainly she weeps from lack of hope on a grand scale, GRAND OPERA disappointment. Jen has always been disappointed, as far back as she can REMEMBER (haven’t we all?). And throughout her tears, she sees only one solution: Anna Karenina’s. Jen’s MOTHER’s too: pitched past pitch of grief, women choose the phallic train to die by (a true admission of defeat).

  But first Jen has to blow her nose. She blows and BLOWS it! Don’t you wish sometimes that it would all just COME OUT – snot, spit, pee, shit, vomit, tears, sperm, blood – in one final SPASM of evacuation and LEAVE YOU BE? Or alternatively, that you could shove it all IN – food, water, alcohol, drugs, sounds, smells, sperm, tampons, EYE OINTMENT, asbestos particles – and be done with it? But it doesn’t work! Always you need MORE.

  She throws her wedding bouquet down the loo, there being no sign forbidding the disposal of wedding bouquets down the loo, and no wedding-bouquet INCINERATOR handy (though there SHOULD be – women will be pissing on Jen’s flowers for weeks to come!). Then she splashes water on her forehead FOR THE LAST TIME. She splashes it all over her FACE, but the tears still spurt. She dries herself on her veil, but still the tears spin out and plop on to the wide white satin LINTEL of her breasts which, so tightly and brightly swaddled, have merged pragmatically into one. Looking a little GREEN amid all that white, Jen wanders out on to the platform.

  By the time a train appears in the distance she’s calmer and PINKER, but still resolved on death, the only dignified way out of her present predicament. The GLADIATOR’s way out. She steps bravely forward to meet her end. But her stupid dress gets caught by the leg of a bench! Jen battles with that bench as if it were a LION. It’s clear from the start who the VICTOR will be, but it all takes too long! By the time she’s pulled herself free from its claws and given the lion the coup de grâce with her HANDBAG, the train has already entered the station and is moving at a speed that lacks melodrama.

  But it offers escape of a sort. On the spur of the moment, Jen decides to get on it! She doesn’t care where it’s going, so long as it takes her to a bigger railway terminus where there might be more HIGH-SPEED trains on offer: an Anna Karenina jump is not something you want to MUFF.

  C-Shapes

  Jen heaves herself on to the train, but there’s a TICKET COLLECTOR barring her way! Not just because she is a BRIDE IN DISARRAY, but because she has boarded the train via the FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGE. If ever there was a moment when a little ideological LENIENCE might not go amiss, this is IT. But no. The ticket collector launches into a TIRADE about the impudence of entering the first-class carriage when not in possession of a first-class ticket.

  Jen asks if she can just walk through the first-class carriage to get to the low-class UNDERCARRIAGE. No. She then volunteers to get OFF the train and use another door, if it’s not too late. But it IS: the train has started to move while they debate the rights and wrongs of entering a first-class carriage. I should be drinking CHAMPAGNE right now, Jen thinks. (CHEAP champagne.) In the end he gives in and allows Jen to proceed through the first-class carriage, but then feels it necessary to remind her that the whole point of the first-class ticket RULE is to stop first-class passengers being annoyed. ‘Don’t disturb anybody.’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ Jen snaps, glowering at him. Then she stomps through the first-class area, smothering many in the many folds of her manifold finery, KICKING a few too (but they seem to LIKE it!). Soon enough, she’s in a PLEB seat surrounded by pleb NOISE. Not only the deafening ANNOUNCEMENTS at every station telling you where the fuck you ARE (but never WHY), and the Buffet Service Manager reminding you there’s a BUFFET car on board serving light and dark drinks and high and dry snacks, but also all the people talking on their FUCKING mobile phones: I’m on the train … yes, the train … I’m calling from the train … we’ve just left … we’ll be getting in at … the TRAIN, I TOLD you …

  There’s a guy opposite Jen eating CHEESY WOTSITS, his crunching RELENTLESS. Computer-game sounds, snippets of electronic SCARLATTI, abruptly truncated and then REPEATED. Elsewhere, the z-zz-zzzz-BOOMPH of somebody’s Walkman. A woman behind Jen is talking on the phone to her hubby (?) about the ROUTE the train’s taking and the loveliness of the DAY and how much she wishes he were there beside her now. The whole carriage has to LISTEN to this! She speaks Very Clearly, in a sort of KINDERGARTEN TEACHER voice. She’s turning them all into her new baby class!

  There IS a baby on board somewhere, a squalling, mewling, farting, stinking BABY. But Jen was one herself once, left to mewl and piss and fart in an empty compartment for hours (she still does so whenever she gets the chance!). As instructed by the woman behind her, she stares out of the window. Pheasant. Deer in a soggy field. Rabbits. Sheep. Clouds. Hills. Water. Sun. But Teacher Lady is strangely quiescent when they pass a pen full of PIGS. Perfect pigs – mit PIGLETS! They’re dark and frisky, and the perfect pig SHAPE. What, hubby doesn’t care about PIGS?

  Looking across the aisle, Jen sees a girl engrossed in celeb magazines. Suddenly Jen is maddened by it all. Rising up out of her seat, she yells, ‘Hey, we’re supposed to be trying to have a CIVILISATION around here!’ But it does no good! Nobody listens – nobody can HEAR her over the dreadful din. So she sinks back down and only now notices that the white metal back of the seat in front of her is adorned with the words:

  I LIKE PUSSY

  Jen wants to add ‘I LIKE COCK’, but she’s scared of the ticket collector. He might see her and think she STARTED it. She doesn’t want to be ARRESTED. On her WEDDING day!

  GRAFFITI BRIDE CAUGHT

  SCRIBBLING FILTH ON TRAIN

  A large unaccompanied woman wearing a bridal gown illegally boarded a train via the first-class carriage and was later found defacing railway property with graffiti of an obcene and wholly uncalled-for nature.

  She is being held in the slammer until someone can vouch for her, which is unlikely since she has no friends and is in fact motherless, fatherless, rootless, ruthless, angry and alone.

  The appealing sound of the food trolley! But it rushes by without stopping! I should be eating CHICKEN ROULADE by now, Jen thinks, before falling into a deep, post-weep sleep. She’s woken by a girl plopping clumsily into the seat beside her, KICKING Jen in the process. Why must people announce themselves this way? Jen wants to THROTTLE her. I am going to have to kill you now. The things we’d DO, if we knew we could get away with it. (The Roman emperors SHOWED us what we’d do and it ain’t pretty!)

  ROGUE BRIDE KILLS FELLOW PASSENGER

  BECAUSE ‘HUNGRY’

  A big fat woman wearing an ill-fitting wedding dress struck without warning when a fellow passenger just happened to sit down next to her on a train.

  To the alarm of other passengers, the unarmed victim was beaten to a pulp in the unprovoked attack, then tarred, feathered, hung, drawn, quartered, and flayed.

  In her defence, the bride said she had been feeling ‘a little hungry’ at the time.

  The image of the PASTA MACHINE Urma Thurb gave her as a wedding present comes into Jen’s head. I WANT MY PASTA MACHINE! She feels like crying about the PASTA MACHINE now but CAN’T, because of a guy in front who won’t stop PEEPING at her through the gap between the ‘I LIKE PUSSY’ seat an
d the window. Jen keeps catching his EYE, just ONE eye. It’s disconcerting. To avoid him, she looks out of the window again.

  Twilight. Damp stucco houses by a river. Probably NEVER dry out, stuck there on their dead end. But what do THEY know about DEAD ENDS? Black rushing water of the river. Above, a crescent moon. Below, the white C-shapes of foam as the water hits big rocks in the shallow riverbed. In the darkness all Jen can SEE are these C-shapes – like BREASTS – and the buttocklike clefts of hills. The body is our metaphor always for interpreting the world.

  Jen has lost her appetite for suicide. She’s too HUNGRY to DIE! All she wants now is a bed for the night, and something nice for supper. When the train starts to slow for the next station, she gets stiffly to her feet in her tight little white wedding shoes and stumbles towards the door. On the way though, she leans sweatily over the creepy Kindergarten Lady and says confidentially, ‘The body is our metaphor for interpreting the world. Call your husband and tell him THAT, lady!’ – before lugging her own sorry ass off the train.

  The Wedding Night

  Jen found herself in the dark cold station of some small dark town. It felt like the NORTH POLE, or at least the ROOF OF EUROPE, whatever that is.

  Outside the station she was immediately accosted by a sneering young man who’d spotted her huge white form in the darkness. He made some unintelligible comment about her HAIR. Jen would have punched him but she was reluctant to be punched BACK, alone with him there in the dark on the brink of time.

  But within sight was the Station Hotel, so Jen hurried on over there and lunged through the doors, SWING doors like a Wild West SALOON. She was relieved to find that her accoster didn’t dare follow her in – this hotel wasn’t big enough for the two of them!

  She rang the bell at the desk but no one came, so she followed the sound of chatter coming from the bar. Everybody shut up when Jen entered, like she was JESSE JAMES or something! The barman even stopped laughing at his own joke. Two old ladies having their dinner in a corner let the peas roll off their forks as they stared at Jen. Quick on the draw, she ordered a whisky, gulped it back and asked for another. ‘Keep ’em comin, pardner!’ she snarled. Cuz this was after all her rip-roarin’, hard-shootin’, darn-tootin’ WEDDIN’ DAY.