Egg Dancing (13 page)

     Questions that left me quite embarrassed, and inexplicably aroused, though I’m sure they were necessary for the research.

     Then: ‘Tell me about your childhood, Hazel. Were you a little girl who was
loved
?’

     And: ‘When your father died, Hazel, can you remember how you, um,
felt
?’

     Easy questions, really, but the answers are always rather difficult. Dr Stern, who must spend a fortune on dry-cleaning, and who does not wear a wedding-ring, says he is pursuing ‘two separate lines of approach’ with me, whatever that means.

     So as you see, Ruth, I am being looked after better than I could have dared to hope, and thanks to Dr Stern I shall not be weighing down your postbag!

SIX

When I’d been loading the car to leave the marital home, Jane had yelled something to me over the fence about my sister, which disturbed me. I hoped she’d got it wrong, and it was another woman with a bizarre fur hat she was talking about. But it needed checking out, so on that Sunday morning I turned Billy into a sort of chrysalis consisting of duffel coat, balaclava, scarf, gloves and furry boots, heaved him into the buggy, and wheeled us off to Linda’s flat in Bollingate View Terrace, opposite St Manfred’s Church. The bells were clanging furiously, never quite hitting any tune.

     ‘Terrorists!’ Linda shrieked as she slammed the door shut behind us, and continued in a shout, ‘Why do I have to move into a neighbourhood where the only social group is a cell of fucking bell-ringers?’

     ‘Some of them might be Mensa members,’ I ventured.

     ‘I’ve invested in earplugs,’ she decibelled.

     Billy woke up and began to cry; I shoved the silicone nipple of his dummy back in the balaclava and he fell asleep again. I left him in the hall in his buggy and followed Linda through to the lounge, a red velveteen womb with high-backed chairs and fussy footstools.

     My sister turned, sized me up, then shouted accusingly, ‘You’re taller than me again!’

     ‘Heels,’ I mouthed. ‘And no need to shout.’

     I waited while she removed her earplugs with two swift magician’s movements of the little finger, and laid them in a perspex box on the coffee table. I noticed that my face, reflected in its dark wood varnish, was as calm as a fish’s.

     ‘Worth every penny,’ Linda was saying at normal volume.

     The air in her flat was sour with stale cigarettes.

     ‘And useful for meetings. This type of earplug is the Rolls Royce of acoustic minimisers.’ Then looking me up and down again, ‘Even taking the heels into account.’

     ‘Linda, you’re obsessed.’

     ‘Off with them.’

     ‘Linda  – ’

     ‘Off with them!’ she bossed, leaning on the back of a chair and wrenching off her own suede Hush Puppies.

     Sometimes there’s no point arguing with Linda. It’s a question of energy levels. We went through to the bathroom, where we stood barefoot next to each other in front of the mirror, levelling our big toes along a line of grouting. Linda put a copy of
Assertiveness and You
on her head to confirm she was the taller.

     ‘By a good five centimetres,’ I reassured her.

     ‘I’m one metre sixty.’

     ‘And I’m one fifty-five, just like I’ve always been.’

     ‘Not always, you haven’t,’ she said, full of mistrust. ‘You’ve always been up and down. At Florrie’s wedding you were a midget, then last October, that time with John when he got cautioned at the Pizza Hut, your pendant was level with my earrings.’

     ‘Sitting down’s different,’ I calmed her. ‘Body length. You have a short body, and mine’s long. And your earrings go on for ever, if you’re talking about those turquoise Sri Lankan ones.’

     Linda grunted, still suspicious, but finally let it drop. Billy must have woken up while we were drinking tea, and performed a silent Houdini act to escape from his clothes: he tottered into the living-room naked except for his socks.

     ‘The boy is father of the man,’ commented Linda.

     Billy and I began a game of hide and seek. From the kitchen came the crashing of plates as my sister loaded her mini-dishwasher. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, then hid with Billy. I was about to say something about the eggs when Linda, emerging from the kitchen with a plastic basket of ironing, said bluntly, ‘I hear you’ve left your husband.’

     I watched her from behind a chair. I was glad she couldn’t see my face.

     ‘Who told you I’d left Gregory?’ I called as nonchalantly as I could under the circumstances.

     When Billy turned a questioning face to me I hugged him so tight I felt his little goose-fleshed ribs might crack.

     ‘The bastard himself. I phoned your house to tell you some good news, but he answered. In quite a state. Said you were having a nervous breakdown, and that you’d turned the furniture to sawdust with some kind of power tool. I said I hoped that pseudo-Regency lampstand had been one of the victims.’

     She paused.

     ‘Well? Is it true?’

     ‘About the lampstand?’

     ‘No, about Gregory.’

     To gain some thinking time, I popped up from behind the velveteen and played my surprise card.

     ‘Well,
I
hear the Reverend Carmichael has a new convert. Was that the good news you were going to tell me?’

     Linda flushed with angry pride.

     ‘How did you hear about that?’

     ‘You know Gridiron. News travels fast. Jane-next-door told me. Her physiotherapist friend was there, with the St John’s Ambulance.’

     ‘Naa-nah, naa-nah!’ sang Billy happily, recognising a word from his vocabulary.

     ‘So it’s all go,’ I went on, dressing Billy again as Linda, all elbows, dashed away energetically with her smoothing-iron. ‘Come on, Lin, let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth. Jane just yelled it to me over the fence when I was loading my car to leave Gregory, but everything she says is garbled, so I didn’t know whether she’d got it right.’

     I had been in such a state myself that when Jane told me about the eggs I was past being surprised by anything. Though given the extent of Linda’s perversity and fanaticism, I had reflected later over the whisky, it somehow figured.

     But Linda wasn’t to be drawn.

     ‘Well? Is it true you’ve left your husband at last?’

     ‘What d’you mean, “at last”? Were you
expecting
me to?’ I asked her.

     Linda returned my stare with a glare.

     ‘Does Dr Stern know you’re here? Gregory said he was treating you in Manxheath.’

     ‘I’m not actually a patient,’ I explained, anxious to keep my cover but riled at being categorised as a loony alongside Ma. ‘Billy and I are staying in the Hopeworth, though I’d rather you didn’t tell Gregory that for now, as it’s ferociously expensive.’

     ‘All right for some,’ grunted Linda.

     ‘So I’m just visiting Manxheath daily to help Dr Stern with some research.’

     ‘Yes, of course,’ said Linda, mustering some tact as she adjusted the heat to woollens. ‘I phoned Dr Stern when I heard. He’s filled me in, up to a point.’

     ‘What did he tell you?’ I asked.

     Linda began to fold a shirt, paying great attention to the sleeves.

     ‘Well?’ I insisted.

     Linda blushed.

     ‘Just that you . . . needed a rest.’

     She looked at me like I was a dangerous soufflé that might explode in her face.

     ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he’s right. I do.’

     Dr Stern must have spun Linda the same line he’d spun Gregory. It was Dr Stern’s suggestion that I tell nobody about what Gregory had done until we had all the facts. That suited me: I wasn’t ready for Linda’s I-told-you-sos, and her organising of demos, and God knows, probably roping in the Reverend Carmichael as well. Let her think I had cracked, if she wanted. Let her think I had joined Ma in the State of Absolute Delusion. Which she clearly did.

     ‘Everyone needs a good rest from time to time,’ said Linda with effort. She was unused to being nice to me, but she soldiered on. ‘And it’s good, this new policy of bringing the community into the care environment. Dr Stern said it means Billy can spend time in Manxheath, and get to know Ma.’

     ‘Yes,’ I said vaguely.

     I wasn’t sure I liked that bit, but there was no avoiding it, if I wanted to discover what Gregory had planted in my son’s genes.

     ‘It’s certainly better than the care-in-the-community thing they had.’ I was keen to make the conversation sound normal. ‘Remember that time they let Ma out of Coxcomb and she hijacked that City Hoppa?’

     We reminisced for a while about some of Ma’s depressing escapades; her famous death threat to the Minister of State for Education, her trip to Bali – then lapsed into silence. Billy and I sat on the floor gazing at Linda ironing. There was something abnormal about her steam button; every time she pressed it, an enormous cloud of vapour emerged, and she would disappear behind it in the manner of a high priestess. When the church bells clanged eleven, Linda shook herself out her housework-induced trance.

     ‘Mind if I catch
Holy Hour
?’

     ‘No, go ahead,’ I replied.

     My turn to be tactful. She pressed the remote control and there knelt the Reverend Carmichael before us, his face shiny with faith.

     We watched for a while as Carmichael chewed his way through a rambling prayer full of thees and thous about catalepsy, adultery, and bullying in old people’s homes. After the Amen, he wiped the sweat from his brow with a tiny olive-green handkerchief and gave the signal for the hymn. The silver band orchestra began a smooth, catchy tune and the voices of a choir sprang from nowhere. Next to me, the soft sound of Linda’s slippered foot tapping in time to the music.

     ‘So, Linda, is it really true you’ve been converted by him – in person?’

     ‘I’ve found the Lord, yes,’ muttered Linda, her face all fixed-over as if she had applied a cleansing gel masque that mustn’t crack.

     ‘But you were an atheist,’ I said cautiously.

     ‘Well, now I’m a Christian,’ she snapped. ‘And it’s none of your business. So if you want to take the piss you can bugger off.’

Tests: personality, intelligence, co-ordination, Rorschach. I had them coming out of my ears. Joining dots, saying why such-and-such a word (billiard ball, pathos, handbrake, flying fish, Neptune) was the odd one out, talking to Billy and being recorded on video playing with educational toys. He thought it was all a game, which increased the pressure on me: I knew just how serious it all was. My son’s brain was at stake.

     Meanwhile Ma’s crisis had ‘resolved’, according to Dr Stern, and she was looking quite perky and less mottled about the mouth, though she still shuffled. I caught sight of her sometimes in corridors, and avoided her when I could. She joined Billy for the sessions that concerned ‘hereditary factors’, while I shopped or went over for a swim in the hotel pool. I bumped into her in the Day Room after we had been coming to Manxheath for about a week, and it emerged she had developed an uncanny rapport with Billy: she seemed to know everything about him: the origin of every little scar on his knee, the names of his playmates, his aversion to broccoli, his conviction that a policeman would kill him. Yet he could barely talk.

     ‘I’m surprised Linda should have remembered so much about him, and then told you in such detail,’ I said.

     I meant it, because Linda always tried to ignore Billy as if he were some buzzing fly. She must have been scraping around for things to say on her visits, I supposed.

     ‘Oh no, it wasn’t Linda,’ said my mother. ‘I told you before, Billy was sending me messages.’

     Oh well, I thought. They had put her on a new drug.

     ‘Slow-release capsules,’ she whispered to me conspiratorially. ‘I’m going to take a leaf out of Keith’s book and insist on suppositories. It drives the psychiatrists mad. I’m trying to convert the whole Group, but Monica’s holding out; she says her arms aren’t long enough.’

     Dr Stern was the go-between when it came to arrangements with my husband over Billy. Gregory no doubt thought the psychiatrist was on his side: one’s wife has nutted up, dear colleague. Your syringe or mine?

     Gregory and Dr Stern had agreed that Billy should spend the weekends at home, but Gregory wasn’t insisting. Better things to do, I suppose. He took Billy to McDonald’s one Saturday, acting like a typical male divorcé before he’d even got divorced. Then took him home and let Billy watch him play with a remotely-controlled fighter plane in the garden all afternoon. At least that’s what Ma said, with great firmness, when I bumped into her in the Day Room.

     The day we went to print out the disc, Dr Stern seemed very calm, but I could sense his excitement under the surface. I chose a time when I knew Jane was at her karate morning. Dr Stern waited outside in the car, wearing his scarf round his mouth and hiding behind the
British Medical Journal
– though I said to him later that’s a sure way to stand out from the crowd in Oakshott Road, we’re staunch
Telegraph
readers. The house was still a wreck. Part of me yearned to get out my mop, and another part rejoiced in the disorder I had wreaked. Gregory hadn’t even put the shelves back, though he, or Ruby Gonzalez, had sponged the floor quite efficiently. There was a slimy smell, and I noted with interest that the mustard and cress had taken root in the living-room carpet. My messages of hate, although smeared, were still decipherable. I was glad I’d left Dr Stern in the car. He might have made something of it. I noticed Gregory’s portable phone lying on the floor; I hesitated for a moment, then put it in my handbag.