Egg Dancing (24 page)

What happened next took place in the greenhouse. The event itself was real enough, but the location  –

     To this day I don’t know.

     It seemed real enough at the time. To me, to Ma, to Isabella, and to Keith, at least. In that respect we were at odds with the rest of the world, which, with hindsight, went along with the theory formulated by the Inquiry. Its report states:

The so-called greenhouse was a potent hallucinative figment, created by Mrs Moira Sugden for her own escapist and symbolic purposes but later shared by weaker personalities, including her daughter, the other key witness. Its function as an emotional refuge made it especially attractive to those clients of Manxheath whose Lithium dose had been gradually increased over the preceding two months, under the auspices of Dr Donald Hollingbroke. Parallels can be drawn between this phenomenon and the mass hysteria evidenced when religious miracles, such as the alleged apparition of the Angel Gabriel over Birmingham last June, are ‘perceived’ by a gullible and vocal section of the population.

The shared hallucination theory about the greenhouse seemed quite plausible to Linda and the rest of the world. But then Linda and the rest of the world never saw it. Ever since, I have borne something of a grudge against them for that.

     Even those of us who experienced it couldn’t agree on what it was like. To me, for instance, it had been an ill-organised sort of place that was heavily sexual. Ma reckoned it was functional – municipal, even, and based on something which Dad, with his double glazing experience, had in mind for Jaycote’s Park. Keith wouldn’t comment. We never got to hear Isabella Pimento’s version, though in her own way she had the last word. Now that it’s all over, and the thing’s in smithereens, I doubt all versions, my own included. After all, thanks to the soft-bottomed Dr Hollingbroke, I was a cocktail of chemicals, a pharmaceutical arsenal. Put a lighted match to me and I might have emitted green smoke. Touch my skin and the moisture from my pores might have stung or shrivelled you. Say a kind word and I might have disintegrated.

     It began on a Thursday night. The Ossature had finished her evening vomiting session in the toilet down the hall, which seemed to be the most user-friendly, and we’d read our horoscopes. Mine said, ‘Take advantage of this peaceful time to get a few household chores out of the way. And romance could flower unexpectedly, so hang on to your hat!’

     I saw the word ‘flower’, in the context of romance, as a reference to Ishmael. It meant he had probably reacted well to my bouquet. The Ossature’s said, ‘It’s time to tighten your belt,’ so she was pleased, too. Then we’d said goodnight and gone to bed. As evenings spent on psychotropic drugs go, it seemed quite normal.

     But I couldn’t sleep. In the end I tossed and turned so much I fell out of bed. So I got up and drew the curtains. The greenhouse was there, as it sometimes was of an evening, but there was a light on inside. This was disturbing. I tried closing my eyes and opening them again, but it was no use. The light was still there.

     I fought my way into my yellow flannel Institute dressing gown and staggered downstairs and out into the garden. It was chilly, but as soon as I entered the greenhouse I was struck by a blast of hot steam. The light – and the strange noises I began to hear – seemed to be coming from the centre of the building, and I followed them into a big domed room that housed a miniature jungle.

     The noises alarmed me, because I swiftly identified them as emanating from a couple having violent sexual intercourse. The woman was laying it on quite thick, groaning and sighing and at times almost screaming, but the man was ominously silent: there were no grunts of accompaniment, and none of the fumbling, thumping, panting, sucking (or in my husband’s case, tunefulness) that you might expect from a normal copulation. The woman didn’t appear to be enjoying it much. There was an edge to her voice.

     It was a while before I located the action. I saw the red thermos first, on a plant-stand, gushing steam. The whole place was a sauna. Then I heard my mother’s voice whisper, ‘Come on, Isabella, come on, you can do it!’

     So that was it! My mother and Mrs Pimento were two lesbians!

     Then I saw Ma. She was dressed in a doctor’s white coat and sitting on the floor, putting on green washing-up gloves. Next to her Mrs Pimento was lying prostrate, starkers, with her knees raised and her legs parted. Her pallid, naked rump shifted as she moaned, and the huge moon of her belly shuddered.

     Good God. She wasn’t having sex at all. She was giving birth.

     ‘Come on, Isabella,’ whispered Ma as she dipped her gloved hand in a bowl of what looked like methylated spirit and then slid it between Mrs Pimento’s thighs. Her whole arm seemed to disappear inside her friend’s cavity. I was shocked. Ma hates physical contact of any kind, as a general rule.

     And this!

     I have visited an abattoir. I have miscarried. I have seen a huge sewer rat being run over by a moped. And Ma once dragged Linda and me to see a Shakespeare play called
Titus Andronicus
. So I’ve been round the block a few times, so to speak, when it comes to nauseating spectacles. But this was in the far reaches of the monstrous.

     Ma was shrieking, ‘You must be a good twenty-five centimetres dilated and I think I can feel its wee head now!’

     ‘Don’t you worry, Moira,’ croaked Mrs Pimento through the pillow she gripped in her teeth. And the muffled voice added, ‘I done this many times before, I can do in my sleep. I nearly ready to push.’

     Keith emerged from the shadow of a castor-oil tree and grabbed the thermos. Catching sight of me he gestured to me to help. Quickly we began soaking towels and flannels. I found it hard to watch the birth. I remembered having Billy: bright lights, bossy nurses, the smell of antiseptic. Greg standing next to the bed, watching me critically as I got the breathing wrong. Then the stupefying need to force the baby out. Did you know that it kills millions of brain cells in one fell swoop, and your vagina is never the same again?

     ‘Bear down, Isabella, bear down!’ my mother was urging. And she called to me in a hoarse whisper, ‘In the nick of time, Hazel!’

     Isabella’s moans were now clearly moans of agony, and Ma mopped her friend’s forehead and her own with a monster sanitary towel.

     ‘Keep your voice down, hen,’ she told her. ‘The staff’ll hear your bawling and then we’ll be in a fine mess!’

     I wondered what she thought we might be in now. But at least she seemed prepared for the event. Apart from the hot water, towels, gloves and flannels, I could see a small Moses basket and a pack of nappies in a corner beneath a fig tree. I could even glimpse, behind a curtain of hanging geraniums, what looked like a pram.

     I didn’t really want to watch, but I found my eyes sliding over in the direction of Isabella’s parted knees. She seemed to be thriving on her pain – riding on a wave of it. I had shrieked at mine, a craven jelly, a woman of straw who, if Satan had come along, would have signed away anything – her soul, her photo of Dad, her fondue set – to have it stop. Why not? But Isabella didn’t see it that way; bizarrely, she was behaving as though childbirth were some kind of natural bodily function.

     Just then she gave a different kind of groan, and suddenly, out from between her thighs shot a baby. It was striped with blood, and attached to a bulbous and knotted-looking umbilical cord. Keith, moving snappily, caught the baby in a towel, rugby-style, and passed it straight back to Isabella who folded it into the mountain range of her body while Ma applied two clothes pegs to the cord, and then cut it with a pair of secateurs. For a moment everything was jellied in time, and then:

     ‘A miracle, the Lord be praze!’ Isabella shouted, with surprising energy after what she’d just gone through. Then she gave a sort of primal scream – muffled sharply by my mother covering her face with the pillow – and disintegrated into smothered tears. Ma and Keith set to work dabbing at the baby with wet flannels.

     My mother stopped to wipe her glasses on her apron, the one I remembered her wearing to roll pastry when I was a child. Then she put them back on and inspected the little thing, which was now bawling croakenly like a distressed sheep. Isabella Pimento heaved her weight on to her elbows and peered at the child through her parted knees.

     ‘The Lord be praze again,’ she said. ‘A lovely, lovely girl.’

     And as if in recognition of her mother’s voice, the small creature, wrinkled and shrieking, let forth a long stream of black mucus from her backside.

     At that moment, quite honestly, I could have done with my chair.

We were still clearing up the mess an hour later when a phone started to ring. Isabella and the baby were asleep on a bed of moss, exhausted from their ordeal.

     ‘Get that, will you, Hazel,’ called Ma, heaving a bucket from the tap. She was a new woman: brisk, matter-of-fact, in control. ‘It’s that portable phone of yours, in the pram, hen.’

     I did what she said.

     ‘Hello,’ said Linda’s voice. ‘Just calling to see if everything’s OK. Is that you, Ma?’

     ‘No, this is Hazel,’ I said. ‘We’re in the greenhouse.’

     ‘What greenhouse?’ snapped Linda, annoyed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for Ma’s absurd fucking idea about – oh, never mind. Just tell me the news.’

     ‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said, and told her about the birth. After her more-than-scepticism concerning the greenhouse, I wasn’t expecting her to believe that Isabella had just produced a baby, but I was in for a shock: she took the news calmly. It was clearly no surprise to her.

     ‘I thought she’d have had it by now,’ she said briskly.

     ‘How come?’

     ‘Because,’ she said self-importantly, ‘I gave Ma the signal to induce it a few hours ago. Looks like the drugs worked. I looked them up in a medical encyclopedia. Now, the important question. Girl or boy?’

     ‘A girl,’ I said.

     At this, Linda gave a coyote howl of triumph and then a sort of cackle, which is her laugh. Fancy making such a fuss over an extra female in the population, I thought. She’d always been a feminist, but this was ridiculous. My head was spinning with unanswered questions.

     ‘But how did you know Mrs Pimento was going to  – ?’ I asked, frantic for an answer, feeling I must be stupid, or lied to, or both.

     ‘Ma told me.’

     ‘And you believed her?’

     ‘Not at first. But then I had a look, and I realised she was probably right. Anyway, the reason I’m calling is to let you all know that Ruby’s had a baby girl as well.’

     I think I said before that Linda was blunt on the phone.

     ‘They must have delivered more or less simultaneously,’ she said. ‘I’ve just rung the hospital.’ She sounded inexplicably jubilant. ‘Pass me to Ma, will you?’

     I flung the phone in Ma’s direction and from the corner of my eye saw her catch it adroitly and begin an intense, whispered conversation.

     I headed off. I needed that chair.

Memories.

     When Hazel was six and Linda ten, they played dares.

     ‘I bet you don’t dare stay in the cupboard under the stairs for five whole minutes,’ Linda said to Hazel.

     I did dare, though. The full five minutes – though I came out crying and told Ma Linda had locked me in. The next time they played dares, it was Hazel who set the challenge.

     ‘I bet you don’t dare pee in the road.’ But Linda did. She hitched up her skirt on a traffic island, shut her eyes and pissed. I, Hazel, watching from behind a bush, peed too but by accident, in my knickers, out of panic on my sister’s behalf. Linda would dare do anything. If I’d asked her to crap on the pavement like a dog she’d have done that, too. It was pride.

     Ma knew all about that, and had banked on it when she thought of her plan. That, and Linda’s crusading zeal. Ma knew just how to egg her on.

     ‘Dysfunctional behaviour,’ Dr McAuley would have called it.

     ‘Active Logic,’ would have been Linda’s definition. Active Logic was one of the buzz phrases of her guru, Klaus G. Armstrong.

The Sacred Bleeding Heart NHS Trust is a modern building, featuring reconstituted stone, acrylic sculptures, and an internal courtyard with a Japanese garden, complete with geriatric Koi carp and raked gravel. The maternity wing is calm and restful, painted in the muted, milky colours of courgette and pecan. There is a smell of flowers with a hint of rot, and the commercial fragrance of baby lotion. Flowers – yes, there is an abundance of flowers, though mixtures of red and white are banned. This is an old nursing superstition. The combination of the two colours is shocking, they say, like blood on a sheet.

     That night, in the maternity wing of the Bleeding Heart, a blonde-haired nurse peers round the door of Ruby Gonzalez’s private room to check she’s asleep. And there Dr Gonzalez lies, hair Pre-Raphaeliting all over the pillow, a sweet smile on her waxy face, and flowers all around. She could almost be laid out for a funeral. The baby lies in a bundle in the perspex cot next to Dr Gonzalez.

     The nurse works quickly. It doesn’t take long to switch the two babies. Out of the perspex cot she lifts Ruby’s sleeping infant, and removes the nametag from its ankle: Angelica Sofia Gonzalez. Then, from a laundry bag on her medicine trolley, she lifts another small bundle, around whose ankle she fits the nametag. She puts her own bundle in the cot next to Ruby, and places the bundle that was formerly Angelica Sofia Gonzalez in the laundry bag. This she replaces on the trolley, gently. Neither baby stirs. The nurse is just turning to leave with the trolley when there is a yawn from Ruby, who is suddenly sitting up.