Altar Ego (33 page)

As the doctor dolloped a globule of cold jelly on to my abdomen I gazed at his third coat button as though it were the eighth wonder of the world. While he ran the scanner over my belly, my mind was as blank as the screen. There was a whooshy echo – but no tattoo of tiny heartbeats. I turned my head. In the bleary black and white of a scratchy pre-war newsreel, tenuous images began to emerge. I peered in on the water-bottle world where my baby should have bobbed, buoyant with life. I searched the little black sack for a grainy profile. Empty. I heard the doctor’s voice from a long way off telling me, kindly, that one in eight pregnancies ended in miscarriage. It was probably a genetic fault. ‘It (he called the baby ‘It’) would have perished a few weeks ago, he said, but it took the body a while to understand. ‘Your hormone levels drop slowly. Why not wait a month, then try again?’

‘Try again?’

On the way home I opened the car window and
breathed
deeply. The air was sharp as lemon juice. For most women this would be the time to draw on inner reserves of strength and integrity and re-examine life’s priorities … but what, I wondered, should
I
do?

‘Well, doll, I think the warranty on your double life has well and truly expired,’ Anouska volunteered.

‘Great. Tell me something I
don’t
know.’

‘Um … I’m going to murder my husband? If I shoot him I get life, but if I run him over with my car I’ll be out in six months. Especially if I’m ovulating at the time,’ Anouska added, veering erratically towards a group of pedestrians on the cement apron who scattered, diving into ditches and local hospital emergency rooms.

‘Hey, don’t worry. You’ll be acquitted on the grounds of insanity. The proof being that you married Darius in the first place.’

And let’s face it, grounds for insanity were something I knew a lot about. Still holding the World Indoor Record for Self-Delusion, I started to tell myself how good it would be to have my body back. Not to feel ill; not to feel caged. ‘Let’s go out on the town,’ I suggested spontaneously. ‘I’ve only got this cleavage for another few hours.
This
,’ I pointed out my bust line to a startled motorist at the traffic lights on Marylebone Road, ‘is
not
a Wonderbra.’

But first I had to tell Julian and Zack that I’d lost the baby. I winced at the thought. God, I was gutless. That’s what I
should
have asked for at the hospital – a
spine
donor. And maybe scruples transplant. It’s just that I needed more time. My body would withdraw slowly from the hormonal high. I, however, would go cold turkey from the drip-feed of attention I’d been taking intravenously. But not, I baulked, if I didn’t tell them straight away … It was a wayward, irresponsible thought. But why not delay, for just a few days, until I got used to the idea myself? It was, after all, only a small fib. And, I duped myself, fibbing is only like a parking infringement on the moral rap sheet. Isn’t it? Providing ultimate proof that the flow of oxygen had been cut off from my brain, I made Anouska promise not to tell Julian or Zack about the miscarriage. At least, not just yet. Okay so it wasn’t exactly rising to the occasion. Show me an occasion and I won’t rise to it. As the Devil will no doubt discover when he surveys my CV, I could hold workshops on non-occasion-rising. But Anouska was unquestioning.

‘Listen, doll. I learnt a long time ago not to repeat anything you ever tell me. And I never will. Not till hell freezes over.’

‘Thanks.’

If I’d had a psychological barometer I’d have been better prepared for what was in store.

Put it this way. ‘Weather Warning. Hell Frozen.’

37
Laugh? I Almost Died

THE TAMPON HAS
done more than any other invention to liberate women. The most obvious thing about it is that it isn’t. It’s complete freedom – with only one string attached. But it wasn’t until Anouska thumped on Zachary’s front door at dawn a week later, that I realized just how versatile the tampon truly is.

I looked at her blearily whilst wondering what triviality could be upsetting her now. A scratch on her nail varnish perhaps? ‘What?’ I yawned, shrugging Zack’s leather jacket over my knickers. ‘Is the bat signal up?’

Her answer came in spasms between shuddering intakes of breath. ‘Remember how I told you that unless I go off to sleep before Darius, he starts snoring? Keeping me wider and wider awake? Until I am forced
to
kick and punch and scream that I am going to kill him? … Well,
I killed him
.’

‘
What?
’ I yanked her in over the threshold.

‘Well, he was snoring and I couldn’t sleep and … Anyway, I put two tampons up his nose. You know. To make him breath through his mouth? But when I woke an hour ago, he … he … well he wasn’t breathing at all!’

‘Are you sure?’

She unscrewed the cap from the Jack Daniel’s bottle she was clutching and swigged down a hefty draught. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. Actually, doll, we’ve been getting on much better lately. I’m a regular fag-hag. But the thing is, I’ve talked so much about murdering him that no one will believe it was an accident!’

I gawped at her. ‘Where is he?’

‘I just left him in the bed.’

‘We’d better get an ambulance around there.’ I dialled 999 with shaking fingers. The Boston Strangler. The Yorkshire Ripper. The Chelsea Tamponist? ‘Toxic Snot Syndrome’ … It somehow didn’t have the same menacing ring. After giving the paramedics a minimal amount of the more believable details, I scraped Anouska up off the floor. ‘Don’t worry, Vivian will be able to get the sentence commuted to a couple of sessions with a Harley Street quack and a Jerry Springer appearance.’ I thrust my legs into a pair of jeans and steered her towards the door. ‘We’ll collect Vivian at Ladbroke Grove – it’s virtually on the
way
to Chelsea – then go on to meet the ambulance.’

‘No!’ Anouska’s heels left skid marks on the hall floor. ‘Not my perfect sister. With the perfect marriage!’ She chugg-a-lugged more whisky.

‘Flattered as I am that you’ve chosen my company over, say, a
psychiatrist
– we really need the big guns now.’ There were times, I reassured her, when there was nothing like having a lawyer in the family.

… What a shame this was not one of those times.

The domestic chaos we encountered at Ladbroke Grove was like World War Two, without the fun. The usually pristine house looked as though a herd of incontinent wildebeest had stampeded through it. Furniture was upended, children were squealing, phones were ripped from walls as Vivian, spinning Simon around on the stripped-pine floor, stomped on his abdomen.

In the corner of a couch, the sound of creaking leather trousers alerted me to the presence of Celestia, the free-fall vegetarian.

‘What the …?’

‘Apparently,’ a dishevelled Vivian elaborated shrilly, ‘she came here for bulimia counselling during which Simon told her that he’d discovered a new multi-orgasmic erogenous zone between the G spot and the cervix.’

‘The AFE,’ Celestia clarified. ‘The Anterior Fornix Erotic zone.’

‘And naturally she wanted to find out if he was right. Unfortunately for her, my legal conference in Manchester unexpectedly finished in time for me to catch the last train – and she was in my bed when I arrived home.’

Simon, who seemed to be wearing the kind of outfit more at home on an Abba comeback tour, then made the mistake of suggesting his wife calm down and get back in touch with her ‘inner earth mother’. But Vivian’s inner earth mother had forged a volatile bond with her inner Hellcat, and the two of them seemed determined to ‘out’ Simon as a hypocritical bastard.

‘Sweetie-pie, pumpkin, little lamb chop. Please. Not in front of the children …’

‘The children?! What do
you
care about the children?’ Vivian pursued him around the room, jabbing his chest with her wedding finger. ‘You can’t keep your hands off the help. The nannies and au pairs demand combat pay.’

‘Well,’ he scuttled backwards, ‘if you hadn’t let yourself go, I wouldn’t need to spice up my sex life!’

‘Let myself go? Where do you think I got these hips? From bearing your genetic line. That’s where!’

‘My genetic line did not tell you to eat three Ben ’n’ Jerry cartons of ice-cream in one sitting, three times a day.’

‘I was pregnant! I had cravings!’

‘Cravings to eat between meals
after
they were born?’

‘If you’d ever given me a satisfying orgasm in all the years we’ve been married, I wouldn’t have
had
to eat.’

‘
What?
But what about all that moaning …?’

‘Those were moans of pain; the emotional pain of having married a big, fat phoney like you!’

In the stunned silence that followed, the only sound I could hear was what I thought was hail; indoor hail. My eyes darted about the room to alight finally on the fridge door. Painted lentils dropped forlornly on to the floor from the latest finger-painted mosaic stuck to it by a magnetic pineapple.

As Anouska and I bundled Vivian out of the house and into the car, a bleary-eyed Celestia piped up dimly. ‘So, um … does this mean you and your wife
don’t
share a transcendental fidelity of the spirit which liberates you from monogamy?’ She really was pitiful – a moth drawn to a fraudulent flame.

In all the mayhem, I hadn’t quite realized how drunk Anouska was until she jumped a red light in the Mall and almost collected an early-morning jogger. Anouska’s only reaction was a demand to breath test the pedestrian. ‘She ran into my car!’ she protested.

‘We’re going miles out of our way. We’ll never beat the ambulance at this rate. Pull over,’ I ordered. I yanked at the wheel of the rear-demisted, power-steered juggernaut. Anouska yanked back, sending us veering out into the rush-hour traffic.

The roundabout outside Buckingham Palace is a place where the motoring customs of a dozen
Mediterranean
and Arabic and Caribbean nations fuse into a cacophonous whirlpool of screeching brakes, blaring horns and dodgem-car bumper-ramming. But as far as I know, nobody had ever seen anything like Anouska’s two-wheeled, airborne collision with the giant, inverted shower fitting known as the Victoria Monument. As the windscreen shattered and coruscations of spray jetted into my face and water gushed into the car’s crushed interior, it wasn’t my life that flashed before my eyes. It was Mary-Jo Kopechne’s.

38
Not The Full Matinee Jacket

THERE’S A LOT
of things which frighten the tits off a girl. The Taliban invading London, trying on swimming costumes, wasps (not the ones with wings, but the snooty Mayfair Ladies Who Lunch) … But nothing, absolutely not one thing could be as terrifying as the vision that hit me when I levered open my eyes five hours later in ward twelve of London’s University College Hospital. I saw both my lovers, as I still described them, in a momentary proprietorial delusion, one on each side of the bed. They were glowering at me, then at each other. I slammed my eyelids closed again and feigned catatonia. Did they know about each other? I panicked. I squeezed open one eye and peeked at them both. All was revealed in their eyebrows, and from the air in the room, quivering with a heat haze of tension and anger.

‘Well,’ said Julian in a brittle voice. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

My throat was scratchy, my mouth sour, my tongue swollen and dry. I noticed a plaster cast on my wrist.

‘Um … Toto. I think we’re no longer in Kansas?’ I hazarded.

‘Would you mind enlightening me, if it’s not too inconvenient, as to which of us is the father of our child?’

I felt the heat of shame flush across my neck and chest and seep upwards into my complexion. The fluorescent-lit hospital room was like a tourist brochure for Albania. I tried to lean forward but found myself imprisoned behind a metallic tray, one arm tethered to an IV drip. ‘I’ve died, haven’t I? … And this is Limbo.’

‘You know what, Ms High and Mighty Moral Superiority?’ Zack seethed. ‘You’re getting less and less reason to look down on me, you know that?’

The door creaked enquiringly and Kate’s hesitant head peeped around it. She and Julian held eyes briefly before darting downwards simultaneously to scrutinize their respective footwear. ‘Is everybody all right? Simon rang me …’

‘Ms …’ A clipboard-clutching nurse wielding a thermometer, bounced into the room before anyone could answer. ‘… Steele. Feeling any pain?’

What I felt was that I was going to implode, like one of those deep-sea divers with the bends.

‘Just a few formalities … Marital status?’

I looked at her blankly. Zachary’s dark eyes were jumping around the room. Fumes of rage seemed to be smoking forth from his skull.

‘Are you married?’

‘Well. Yes. No. Kind of. Though, I have a feeling that it’s about to be annulled. I don’t suppose you want my parents, do you, Julian? In the divorce?’ Jesus Christ. What was wrong with me? Could I not stop making cracks? Even
now
?

‘Occupation?’ I looked at the Nurse as though she were speaking some intergalactic-pidgin. ‘What do you do for a living?’ she spelt out. I glanced self-consciously at Kate to find all traces of friendship extinct in her face. She regarded me with dignified disdain. The nurse looked impatiently to Julian. ‘So what did your wife do before you annulled her?’ she asked freshly.

‘A lot of things I didn’t know about,’ Julian replied tartly, before steeling himself. ‘Look. The most important thing is the baby. Is the baby all right. Can you tell us that?’

‘Baby?’ Kate said in a strained, long-haul air-hostess accent. Her eyes vainly sought an explanation from Anouska, who was slumped in an armchair under the window; her only apparent injury a lethal hangover.

‘Listen, Rebecca,’ Julian sighed with wistful resignation. ‘Despite your appalling behaviour, your deceitful, duplicitous dealings and the flagrant
flouting
of road-safety rules by not wearing a seatbelt, I am willing to stand by you and the baby.’ He made an attempt at a smile. ‘After all, my mother is crocheting herself into a coma as we speak.’