Egg Dancing (12 page)

     Yours sincerely,

   
Moira Sugden

PS: In case you were wondering:
Non, je ne regrette pratiquement rien.

Less is more. On TV I have seen them, the rich women with perfect figures in St Tropez, who wear nothing but a Lycra G-string, a bit of gold jewellery, and round their insect waist a sequinned pochette containing an American Express card and a single condom. Having always admired the luxury and elegance of travelling light, I tried to keep my luggage down to essentials when I packed to leave my husband: two suitcases of clothes, a box of junior nappies, three dummies, Billy’s buggy, sixteen plastic dinosaurs, a spare hanky and a Lego garage. The rest could come later.

     I had always wanted to see the rooms in the Hopeworth. Ours was Number 308, double with cot, reached via a pinging lift and a runway of carpeted corridor, and entered by means of a key to which a brass hand grenade was attached. It was elegantly neutral, with a small but cleverly designed bathroom containing sachets of mauve shower gel, white towels in six sizes, and a shining toilet, the seat of which wore a beauty queen’s ribbon emblazoned ‘Disinfected for your hygiene protection’. The mood of the main living space was beige, with some understated chintz, and from the corner of the ceiling, the giant eye of a television gazed down on the double bed. Billy jumped up and down on the tight-sprung mattress and shouted for an hour while I unpacked, and then we squatted on the floor and laid out the brontosaurus, the stegosaurus, the triceratops, the pachycephalosaurus and the tyrannosaurus rex in a row to graze on the thick pile carpet. Billy managed to eat some of it too, and after I had cleared up his sick as best I could, I told him, ‘This is a hotel. It’s a nice place. We’re on holiday, darling.’

     ‘Yes, Mummy,’ he said, picking up the triceratops and inserting its horny beak into his nostril. ‘Wiv sand and ice-cream.’

     And was sick again, all over the pachycephalosaurus.

     You couldn’t see the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability from the window, which made me glad I’d asked for west-facing. Instead we had a view of the play area in Jaycote’s Park, featuring a frightening maze from which wafted the screams of lost children, and a giant maggot made of old tyres. Twin toddlers crawled into its mouth and emerged a minute later from its arse, minus their anoraks. Their mother slumped on a bench, surrounded by child paraphernalia, gazing on her offspring with drained eyes. Other children rocked violently to and fro on the backs of Disney-type sea-creatures on huge springs, and crowded for a go on the giant frog slide.

     I ordered toasted tuna sandwiches and grapes from room service and we picnicked on the floor. Then I bathed Billy, sang him ‘A Partridge in a Pear Tree’ as far as seven maids a-milking, and put him to bed. I wasn’t in the habit of drinking heavily, because of Gregory’s monitoring, but I was free of all that now – and free to explore my ‘thing’ with alcohol. When I was born, Ma’s cousin Dodie told her I would be a ‘dipsomaniac’ by the time I was forty. Ma latched on to this idea, and as early as five I knew I was going to grow into a raggedy, prastuphulic woman, dependent on alcohol. I had only eight years left to fulfil this family prophesy. So as soon as Billy was asleep, I lay on the bed and watched an Australian road movie starring a zany, devil-may-care platypus, while experimenting my way through the contents of the fridge mini-bar.

     The next morning, after breakfast (croissants for Billy, aspirin for me) and ten goes on the frog slide, I drove Billy across town to the Busy Bee playgroup and then went straight to Manxheath. I spent fifteen minutes in the car-park applying make-up to powder over any evidence of debauchery that might make Dr Stern doubt my word, but as it turned out, he didn’t. Far from it.

     This time I took in more: the halogen lamp that shone light on to Gorgonzola green walls, the rows of books by Jung, Freud and R. D. Laing, the Modern Art calendar featuring a turd-like bronze sculpture on a lawn, the framed degree certificates. The lack of wife-and-kiddies photograph. And Dr Stern himself at his desk, a fountain pen in his breast pocket, licking an envelope. I saw his eyes take in my bandaged wrist, but he didn’t mention it. Instead, he smiled at me genially, and expressed surprise that I hadn’t brought Billy. He repeated that there was a
place
for him, whenever it was
needed,
in the hospital
crèche.
That it would be a huge
advantage
to have him at Manxheath during the day, whenever that was
feasible.
I thanked him, and said we’d give it a try, if there was a sandpit, as we were sort of on holiday, and Billy was expecting some sand. I asked after Ma.

     ‘She’s doing much better,’ he told me. ‘Though the fantasies are still quite florid. It’s an expansive disease that tends to, er,
unbridle
the imagination. And the imagination can be one’s
own worst enemy.
Some people’s is best kept in check.’

     ‘She’s back to her letter-writing,’ I said, remembering the last one (‘sexual
frisson
’).

     ‘Not in itself a
bad sign
,’ he said, and gestured me to sit down.

     He took out his pen and laid it on the table, where he rolled it with his palm like a tiny rolling-pin. Looking up, his zoomy eyes clutched me. He must have been forty-five, but at that moment his excitement made him look like a boy of ten who has stumbled on frogspawn.

     ‘I’d like you and Billy to come for
tests,
’ he said. ‘But occasionally, later on, I may also need to involve your mother in sessions with Billy. The telepathy thesis needs
verification.
’

     He hesitated when he saw me stiffen.

     ‘Any
problems
with that?’ he asked gingerly.

     ‘Yes. I’m not at all keen on the idea,’ I said. ‘I’ve managed to avoid any contact between them so far, and I want to keep it that way.’

     It came out rather bluntly, as I wasn’t used to expressing an opinion. Dr Stern’s eyebrows lifted and disappeared behind a shock of dark hair.

     ‘May I ask why?’ he said.

     A strange question, I thought, trying not to drown in his eyes.

     ‘Well, for a start,’ I told the psychiatrist, ‘my mother is mad.’

     ‘Mad is a word we prefer not to use here. Our clients are
differently oriented.
Their stability is  – ’

     ‘Challenged,’ I interrupted. ‘I know, Dr Stern. But she’s my Ma and to me she’s a loony pure and simple. I grew up with her in the community, remember?’

     My head twanged.

     Dr Stern smiled generously and inspected the pristine cuffs of his yellow shirt. His wrists, covered in black hair, were shockingly sexual. I wondered if he realised.

     ‘Challenged stability isn’t catching, Mrs Stevenson.’

     He was still smiling, and for one excruciating nano-second I had a paranoid thought: He’s laughing at me.

     ‘I understand what you’re saying, but try to see the benefits. In view of the allegations you’re making, it’s essential that we get some evidence, and her involvement is crucial. We’ll try to work on your
problem reflex
in our next session, shall we?’ and his smile broadened to reveal his impeccable teeth, causing my insides to cinch up. I didn’t want to argue with him. I knew he was right. It’s just that I didn’t want Ma –

     ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dr Stern, reading my thoughts. ‘It’ll all be perfectly well
supervised
. We have excellent staff here. And your
mother’s
relationship with your
son
could turn out to be more
fruitful
and
positive
than you think. We’ll get going this week, and then as soon as I’ve got my hands on that GR218 file, I’ll have a
clearer picture.
’

     He looked at me quizzically, as though he wasn’t sure what to make of me. He was wearing a red-and-green tie today. It had a subtle, swirling design.

     ‘We don’t want to waste each other’s time, do we?’ he went on.

     He had spoken to Gregory
at length
on the phone. Not only had he convinced my husband I was ill (which took little doing, apparently, on account of the so-called delusions), but he had ordered him not to visit until I was ‘a great deal better’. Part of Manxheath’s policy where relatives are concerned. The clients come first. No exceptions. It
might precipitate a mental emergency
is how he put it. The phrase rang a distant bell.

     ‘So there’s no question of your husband suspecting you’ve seen the incriminating evidence,’ Dr Stern concluded with a reassuring smile.

     I felt my back and shoulders relax. The man was a rock of sanity. Thanks to him, the plan had worked, so far: Gregory thought Billy and I were staying at the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability at the State’s expense, rather than at the four-star Gridiron Hopeworth, at his. In the meantime, Jane-next-door would by now have assaulted Gregory with her own feminist interpretation of my breakdown. I had been tipped over the edge, the way women are by men. Centuries of oppression, exploitation and manipulation. Nineteen stitches, the Sister said, and just missed the vein. Hazel was breakdown material all right. And who wouldn’t be, with a young child, and none of the fiscal independence that forms the bedrock of a woman’s self-esteem? Did you know the poor creature believed she had become literally transparent?

     So that was how I began my revenge. My head was so cold you could store ice in it. Dr Stern would find out the facts about GR218, and my miscarriages, and Billy. We would analyse them, prepare a dossier, call a press conference, hold hands, step back, and watch the thing explode.

Five days went by. I picked out the stitches in my wrist, leaving a puckered pink scar that was to itch for a month. The Hopeworth Hotel saw to the daily needs of a toilet roll, BLT sandwiches, laundry and television, so I only went out shopping for essential items unavailable from room service: plastic helicopters and rubber glo-in-the-dark monsters for Billy, Facial Creme and women’s magazines for me.

     It’s only when you read the agony pages that you discover to what extent other people are worse off:

Dear Ruth
, my husband is no longer interested in sexual intercourse. Ever since I had an abortion sixteen years ago, I have spent every waking minute thinking I am possessed by the devil. I drink a bottle of wine a day, sometimes more if I go out  . . .

   
Dear Ruth,
my boyfriend says my intimate parts taste of parsnips. Is there anything I can do to remedy this, as he is not keen on the vegetable?

   
Dear Ruth,
do foreskins matter?

   
Dear Ruth,
my ex-friend Lulette says I am a ‘disgusting slag’. Help!

I devoured these magazines, with their glossy photographs of mistresses (I saw one advertising nail varnish who looked a little bit like Ruby Gonzalez; I stuck her on the wall with a drawing pin through her eye), and opposite those same photographs of perfection the tragic stories of the imperfect, those women like me whose man or whose life has let them down. Hungrily, I ingested their lives as a vampire bat sucks blood. The woman who finds out that her husband is a transvestite. The woman whose daughter is such a kleptomaniac she steals things from herself. The woman whose baby twins starved to death inexplicably. The woman who has ‘never knowingly had an orgasm’. Oh the pity of it. I even started to write my own letter to Ruth.

Dear Ruth,
I have been depressed ever since I discovered my husband genetically engineered our baby. Now that his mistress is pregnant, I feel as if morsels of me were breaking off and floating away downstream like a waterlogged loaf made from the wrong ingredients. Is there a cure for disintegration? A type of glue, perhaps? I read somewhere, or did I dream, that there is a new spray on the market called Domestic Bliss, to waft happiness into the home, attacking the chemicals that cause bad blood. You know, Ruth, I could do with a friend  . . .

But here I stopped, scrunched the letter in a ball and flung it in the bin: I had no need to write to Ruth now that I was seeing Dr Stern on a daily basis. He was most attentive. His brain was an Alka Seltzer of energy, his intellectual deftness mirrored in quick little physical movements which quite disrupted me. He was forever interrogating me, during those professional yet extraordinarily intimate sessions, about Gregory and our relationship. He would sit in his swivel chair by the window, and I would face him. The light behind him often resembled a halo.

     ‘How often do you have
sex
, would you say, on
average
? Once, twice a week?’

     Really quite personal questions. I explained about our fertility chart.

     ‘And how would you describe your
role
during intercourse? Active or passive? Are you more a physical or more a romantic person, would you say? Or a
mixture
, perhaps?’