Egg Dancing (19 page)

     ‘You’re incredible,’ he said.

     He was talking in a low voice and steering me back towards the door like I was some kind of shopping trolley.

     ‘Just incredible. Look, I’m so sorry, but I can’t see you right now. Your
husband
is arriving any minute – and I think it would be best if you
weren’t around
. He wants Billy this weekend. He told me on the phone – is that OK?’

     Of course it is, I tell him, smiling wide and seeing the effect of it, my bright lipstick dazzling his eyes. I can see my whole face and body in his dark irises, bobbing in front of me like a little doll version of myself, in a glassy bubble. It feels good. Everything’s good today – everything.

     ‘Good,’ he echoes aloud, looking me up and down again.

     ‘Good,’ he says again slowly, with that same look, which gives me a little dose of a funny feeling I can’t name. But the thing about feelings is that you can kill them, as you might wring a chicken’s neck out of mercy, if you found it in bad shape.
Insecurity is the curse of women.
Quote, sister Linda,
circa
1983, over a plate of muesli at the Women’s Cafeteria. I needn’t be insecure. I am, after all, in charge.

     ‘Your husband is coming to discuss you, Hazel,’ Stern is saying.

     There’s a mustard-yellow file with my name on it on his desk. He sees me looking at it.

     ‘Just some notes,’ he says, and puts it away in the cupboard. He comes over to me smiling. When he puts his hand on my arm, I feel microwaved, dizzy with love.

     It’s a strange thing, love. You catch it unawares, like a disease. I hadn’t remembered it like this. I had associated it with contentment, not unrest. My eyes slipped away from his and reached instead for comfort. They fastened on the glass paperweight with anemones inside – a little self-contained, unchanging world. I could see why Ishmael kept it on his desk. I wanted, in that moment, to crawl inside it and be a foetal shrimp, frozen in time and space. Something was going wrong. My mouth was dry and my heart was a frenzied chicken in a coop.

     ‘Your husband is coming to discuss you,’ Ishmael whispered urgently. ‘But I won’t let him visit you. I’ve been telling him you’re
depressed
. Don’t worry, I’ve told him you’re quite capable of looking after Billy. And that it’s all
for your own good
.’

     I tore my eyes from the paperweight.

     ‘Look, Hazel,’ he was murmuring. (People were always saying ‘Look, Hazel,’ it struck me.) ‘We still have to
play for time
. I don’t yet have all the information I need. Go now. The last thing I want is for your husband to see you like this.’

     ‘See me like what?’ I asked.

     He paused for a moment, his round eyes blank. The pause was a fraction of a second too long, and the monster doubt hatched.

     ‘Beautiful and happy,’ he said, kissing my cheek and gliding me gently out of the door. ‘Gregory won’t be expecting it.’

     Remember last night, Ishmael, do you remember my dream last night? Here, he said, slipping two yellow pills in an envelope and pressing it into my hand. Take these at six o’clock. I shoved the packet into my handbag and left, with an unconnected image that stuck to the walls of my mind: when we were children, Linda and I had a game where you had to pick up as many sticks as you could from a tightly heaped pile, one by one, without moving any of the others. Spillikins. Leaving Dr Stern’s office, I remembered this game called Spillikins as clearly as if it were yesterday.

     As soon as I came out I saw my husband. He was walking straight towards me, carrying his briefcase. He looked distracted. His hair was greyer than I remembered it.

     ‘Morning,’ he said to me vaguely, and walked past stiffly, as though his joints were riveted. He hadn’t recognised me. I felt drained and shaky, but I carried on up the corridor. Just as I turned the corner, I heard him knock on Dr Stern’s door.

     ‘Greg, come in,’ I heard Dr Stern call in a hearty voice I didn’t know.

     ‘Ishmael,’ said Greg’s voice, loud and smooth.

     First names.

     Then there was another game we played called Categories. That was when we were older. The categories were things like cars, flowers, fruit-and-veg, boys’ names, girls’ names, animals. Someone chose a letter, and then you started filling in the columns on your paper, one word for each category: Ford, forsythia, fig, Frederick, Fanny, fox. Or Jaguar, jasmine, juniper berry, Julian, Jane, jaguar again, because there are very few animals that begin with J. Whoever finished first won. Ma used to win, always. She plays it with Keith now, using different categories: medical conditions, dead authors, flowering shrubs, foreign politicians, racehorses. Keith can’t do flowering shrubs, and Ma makes up the racehorse names, but between them they fill whole sheets of paper. Psoriasis, Proust,
Pyrethrum
‘Brenda’, Pasqua, Play Your Cards Right. Mammary inflammation, Milton, mimosa, Milosevic, Mummy’s Boy. Botulism, Baudelaire,
Belladonna crassiflora
, Bhutto, Beginner’s Luck.

     Category: doctors. One begins with I, and one begins with G. Their names don’t begin with the same letter so clearly they have nothing in common.

     Did I really listen at the door? I must have done, because I saw myself reflected in the window opposite. There, in the corridor, crouching low, her head squashed up against the wood, was Hazel. The confident, laughing Hazel who spent all that money on her appearance. What is she doing? Hazel down on her knees now at the door, her bum squeezed like toothpaste in that pencil skirt, the poky heels splayed sideways, the head a chestnut mushroom of hair, the eyes screwed up, ear thrust against the wood of the door, intent on listening.

     She couldn’t make it all out, but she heard enough. Words like ‘collaboration’, ‘research project’, and ‘pooling resources’. She heard something about ‘delay the divorce proceedings’, and then Ishmael’s voice: ‘Hazel’s treatment’, and ‘de Cleranbault’s syndrome’, and then ‘if the cap fits’.

     ‘A delicate situation,’ said Gregory. ‘And this enormous bill from the Hopeworth  . . .’

     Then they had a drink. Hazel knew that because Gregory began talking about whiskies, Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie and Laphroaig, and their murmuring voices took on the reassuring ocean wash of shared comforts. Hazel stood up and smoothed her pencil skirt about her hips. Slim as a racehorse, she thought. Not a trace of cellulite, no unsightly varicose veins, no unwanted hair, plenty of muscle tone . . . My mind staggered. I reached in my handbag for a yellow peppermint, and swallowed it whole with an arid throat.

     And for the first time since I was a small child, I fled, hell in my ears, to the fat and unaccommodating bosom of my Ma.

NINE

Paperwork, paperwork. The memo about the Polyunsaturated schedule, with copies in triplicate. The briefing documents for this afternoon’s policy brainstorming. The colour-coded priority sheets for Monday’s development symposium. Trish is powering through them swiftly, one eye on the clock. She’s off to lunchtime aerobics on the dot of one. You try and stop her. Linda, forcing open the vacu-pak of her sandwich with her car key, surveys Trish’s competent little sorting movements and wonders how many hours of workout it takes to get one’s bum looking like two crabapples in a bag. What sort of training equipment, what sort of inane compulsiveness, what degree of narcissism. Fancy turning one’s body into a cause. Jealousy mingled with ideological distaste engulfs her, and she breathes in deep to avoid drowning.

     Outside, ravens whirl like rags in a tumble-drier, black against sepia squirls of sky. March: the shittiest month, season of chilly sleet, emotional torment, and for Linda, chronic chilblains. Her birthday is on 24 March. She will be thirty-five. Thirty years ago, on her fifth birthday, she received a small plastic doll called Katie-Koo from Dad and Ma. You filled a little internal pouch with water so it could lachrymate and piss. Hazel had bitten off its head, and shortly afterwards Dad had left home. In Linda’s five-year-old consciousness the decapitation and the abandonment were connected. Lately on
Holy Hour
the Reverend Carmichael has been preaching about the season of renewal, but the only regenerative impulse Linda can summon concerns her Road Tax Disc.

     Hoiking her feet on to the desk, she bites into the spongy triangle of a chicken tikka sandwich and counts her one blessing, which is that, work-wise, she can afford to relax. The Frozen Fats (Surplus) meeting has gone as planned, and a weight is off her mind: two million metric tonnes, to be precise. Even Mr Foley, who considers Linda Sugden a brilliant mind but a walking attitude problem, has had to admit she has pulled off something of a policy coup with Operation Fatberg, her Arctic ‘sea burial’ initiative.

     But while work has eased off, family matters have been screaming for attention. In particular, Hazel’s breakdown. It neither rhymes nor reasons, and Dr Stern’s theory about ‘nervous exhaustion’ doesn’t bear serious analysis. She’s given him quite a grilling on the phone, and still has only insubstantial answers to some of the crucial questions, e.g. this: Why would Hazel massacre all those chairs when she was so fond of pine? It just didn’t make sense. Or this: Why would she claim to be taking a winter ‘bucket-and-spade holiday’, when the Hopeworth Hotel was miles from the sea?

     Something else jarred, too. A pair of twin elephantine thighs, a triangle of dark hair, an obscenely pregnant belly –

     Bleugh.

     ‘Beg pardon?’ asks Trish, rolling a green leotard in a towel and flexing her buttocks individually.

     ‘Only connect,’ murmurs Linda thoughtfully, chewing on chicken tikka. ‘Connect, connect.’

     ‘You what?’ asks Trish. ‘Connecticut? My ex-boyfriend, he went out there and became a structural engineer. Got two kids now, four and one.’

     ‘Five,’ says Linda automatically.

     ‘What, days in Connecticut? When you off then?’

     ‘No, not Connecticut,’ snaps Linda, throwing her crusts in the bin. ‘I was thinking about my family.’

     Katie-Koo had blue eyes. All dolls seemed to, back in the sixties.

     ‘Oh. But they’re local, aren’t they?’ questions Trish, briefly interested. They say Miss Sugden is from the Cheeseways – the shit end of town.

     Linda says, ‘Except my dad. He went to New Zealand and got poisoned.’

     ‘Oh wow,’ responds Trish, genuinely aghast. ‘How horrific. We used to stop off in Wellington on the long hauls, but there was never much to do after eleven, except a bit of night-surfing. Nightmareville.’

     ‘One of the goldfish he won me was called Ariadne, but I can’t remember the name of the other one. I think it began with R.’

     This galls Linda, who’d won Memory Badges at school, as well as the Tidy Desk medal.

     ‘Richard? Rudolph? Ross?’ Trish volunteers, but Linda is lighting a cigarette, lost in thought.

     ‘Well, see you later, alligator,’ smiles Trish, swinging a bright plastic beach bag over her shoulder, and heading for the gym.

     ‘Goodbye, macaroon,’ murmurs Linda and inhales deeply, getting that giddy feeling she loves, then letting the smoke dragon from her nostrils. Then, cigarette in her left hand, she reaches with her right for a large piece of paper, selects four coloured felt pens, and with a firm professional instinct that has never let her down, begins to draw a diagram.

     The management guru Klaus G. Armstrong maintains that good, efficient management is fundamentally all about working with people. Working with people, using resources, making connections, doing A where a lesser thinker might choose option B, not ruling out C when D, E and F might offer superficially better prospects. Management is also an instinct, a flair, a magical knack like the laying-on of hands, a melding of inspiration, common sense, Olympian vision and a roll-up-your-sleeves, shit-or-get-off-the-pot practicality. It involves an almost biological feeling for structure, an eye for detail, a certain skill in pattern-recognition. Linda has learned a lot from Klaus G. Armstrong’s practical ideas and methods. Who hasn’t.

     In a red circle she writes ‘Hooper plc – Perfect Baby Drug’. She links this circle to another one, in yellow, in which she writes the name Gregory Stevenson, and to another, in green, labelled Dr Ruby Gonzalez. She draws a wiggly yellow line between the circles for Gregory and Ruby, then puts Hazel’s name in blue in another circle, linked to Gregory’s by a solid black line with an axe through it. In a smaller yellow circle below Hazel, she writes ‘Billy’ in blue, and in a smaller green circle below Ruby, draws a stick-figure with a huge head with two hairs sprouting from it, and surrounds it with yellow question marks. On the right-hand side of the page she writes ‘Vernon Carmichael’ in purple. Next to him, a huge cross of righteousness. And takes another huge and giddying drag on her cigarette.

     Yes. It’s all beginning to make sense.

Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability,

Friday

Dear Brendan,

     There’s a story I tell Billy. Once upon a time there was a king with money and a car, and he married Hazel, and they had you. But a wicked witch in a Latin cabaret costume covered in sequins, and dangling a pink feather boa, came pirouetting into the picture, a spinning carousel of the erotic, and the king couldn’t resist, because sex and scientific talent are potent ingredients, and your silly mother is an abhorrence to anyone in their right mind, with her low self-esteem and her nylon Welcome mat. So they set up house, the king and his Bird of Paradise, in a detached house with two bathrooms, and they made the beast with two backs whenever they pleased, and would have lived happily ever after, but for a great tragedy that befell them, whose cause they never discovered, but they blamed themselves, which was only right and proper, and they shrank, shrank, shrank until they were the smallest and least significant people on earth.