by Liz Jensen
She picks up the Scrabble pieces one by one. ‘F for Freddie,’ she says. ‘J for Jug.’
I remember ‘J for Jug’ from my alphabet book when I was little. In some books it’s ‘Jam’.
‘C for Chlorpromazine … A for Afterwards … D for Dog …’ Then she finds an X and gets stuck. Suddenly, her mood changes and she snaps, ‘Well, help me with these letters, will you, I spend my whole life clearing up after you. This isn’t a hotel, you know.’
Dutifully, I help Ma gather up the rest of the letters and we put them in the Scrabble box, while the fat boy continues his whistling scream without ever seeming to stop for breath.
‘Monopoly’s worse,’ says my mother. I can feel her getting rapidly more tense.
I say, ‘I have to go.’
It’s as though I’ve flicked a decompression switch: her face instantly radiates profound relief.
‘Well, I said you shouldn’t feel you have to stay too long. And of course you’ve left your car in the Pay and Display. You don’t want to run over the limit. They can hit you with a hefty fine. You can meet Dr Stern properly another time, if he’s not too busy.’
We leave Dr Stern crouched over the boy, who has rolled himself into a ball on the floor. Dr Stern begins murmuring to him soothingly, like a father, and rubbing his back. There is a ghastly intimacy about it. I follow my mother’s slow shuffle along the corridor.
‘The drugs have all sorts of side-effects,’ she is saying. ‘I’m on seventy-five milligrams a day now. That’s why I’m dry all the time. Parched. Absolutely parched.’
We said goodbye, fumbling again to avoid flesh meeting flesh, and I left her. Halfway down the drive I turned back to see if she’d gone in, but she was still standing in the porch, with her handbag lifted in a sort of salute.
As I walked away I felt something envelop me like a bubble or a shroud. It was a feeling of invisibility. And sure enough, although there were many people in the Pay and Display car-park, all loading their shopping and messing with children and keys, nobody glanced at me even once.
I grew up near the Works, on the Cheeseway Estate, known in Gridiron as ‘the Cheeseways’. The Works manufactures moulded plastic kitchenware, mainly pedal-bins, and its burnt acrylic smell was part of childhood. We were never away from it. So naturally, in later life, I’d wanted to be rid of it. Linda and I grew up believing that, as daughters of a librarian, we were posh intellectuals. Our mother, who raised us in the Cheeseways in her State of Absolute Delusion, told us we were. Ma drew us a map of the class system once, in green felt pen, so we could place ourselves. Aristocrats/the upper class were at the top, and upper middles (e.g. Mr and Mrs Roberts) on the next level down, because they had a dishwasher and he was a dentist. Below that came the lower middle (e.g. us, Mr Staples, Mrs Carnie), followed by upper lowers/the working class (e.g. Dad, the fallen woman from over the road, my schoolfriend Nicky), and finally, at the bottom, lower lower. There was only one example in this category: Aunt Marjorie, Dad’s sister, whom we didn’t officially know.
Some things stick. Oakshott Road, where I live now, is leafy. Everyone has a quality paper delivered, and knows how to ski. It’s at the smart end of Gridiron, as far from the Cheeseways as you can get, I reckon, short of going to live on the moon.
I chose the road and I chose the house.
My next-door neighbour Jane was at home, baby-sitting Billy. Looking back, I realise now that Jane and I had a strange relationship built around mistaken pity. I pitied her her childlessness, and she pitied me my ball-and-chain of a son. When she baby-sat, each of us thought we were doing the other one a favour. We drank tea and I told her about the Scrabble. I cried slightly, without really knowing why. Jane was kind, in her suffering divorcée’s way, but I think she was afraid she might be exposing herself to contamination from the hospital. I can understand that, because I felt it, too.
‘Don’t dwell on it, love,’ she said as she put on her coat and turned to me. ‘And just remember,’ she added with glassy eyes, stabbing her forefinger between my breasts to emphasise her point, ‘the only person who counts in this world, at the end of the day, is you.’
I think this was an idea she’d picked up on one of her Weekends.
Billy doesn’t like to see me cry. He looked at me distantly, like his father would, then tottered off to the other side of the room to play with his toy ambulance. He doesn’t say much, but he’s good at noises: ambulances, cars, aeroplanes, pneumatic drills – city noises. He did the ambulance noise and I tried to smile.
‘Very good, sweetheart,’ I said in a cooing sort of voice, which sounded phoney.
‘I’ve been to see Granny in hospital,’ I told him. ‘I saw a big ambulance.’
He looked up at me sharply, his blue eyes coins of quizzical light.
‘Yes, sweetheart. An ambulance. Granny’s living in a place with lots of ambulances.’
That set him off again. By the time Linda phoned, he had torn up a whole newspaper into small pieces. A day’s information lay in shreds on the floor. He began stuffing it into an old carrier bag he’d found. Linda wanted to know how the visit had gone. My sister is difficult on the phone. She has never coped with the lack of eye contact, or understood the nature of telephone etiquette, and it makes her even more blunt and aggressive than in the flesh.
‘I don’t suppose you stayed long,’ she said.
‘She’s looking well,’ I said. ‘She seems happy.’
I didn’t mention the fat boy and the blood.
‘Did you see Dr Stern?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Oh, she’s obsessed with him, that’s all.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘I saw something she made from clay.’
She refused to tell me what it was. My sister is quite prudish.
‘She’s been there for two years and you’ve visited her once. At least when she was over in Coxcomb you had the excuse that it was a long way to go. I bet you didn’t stay more than ten minutes. If you’d been seeing her regularly you’d know about things like her clay.’
When Linda was seven she was Ma’s little girl.
‘Ma loves me more than she loves you. You’re just horrible, and you’ll fall in a ’normous gigantic cowpat and go to hell, so ber ber ber.’
‘She’s got us muddled up, you know,’ I told Linda. ‘She thought I was you.’
There was a silence from Linda as this sank in.
‘Well, when I go to visit, she knows exactly who I am,’ said Linda.
‘Good. But she thought I was you today. She kept calling me Linda.’
‘Well, I must go. A pile of work to do.’
Linda is a civil servant. She hung up.
Later it snowed, heavy flakes that were dirty before they hit the ground. Gregory came back from his conference in Manchester. Billy was already in his cot asleep, and Gregory was annoyed that he’d missed an evening with him. He was leaving again the next day for a week-long symposium. That night we made love. Gregory is a gynaecologist. He’d made a special chart so that we knew when we could and couldn’t. We didn’t bother much about sex though. We were both too tired, usually, and to be frank the thrill had worn off a bit. It hurt.
The snail has the best sex life, I reckon: no limbs, and no capacity for guilt. Hermaphrodites do as they are done by. No wonder they blow bubbles. My husband’s behaviour in bed was peculiar, but perhaps no more than most men’s. I had had one boyfriend who liked me to pretend I was asleep, and another who always kept his socks on, and another who insisted that I suck his nipples while he twiddled with mine like they were radio dials. So Gregory’s cleanliness thing didn’t seem too way out of line. (And if I still find myself scrubbing my nails four times a day, long after the decree nisi, I have him to thank.) He always insisted that we wash with soap before and after sex, and once, memorably, during. His bare body was so scrubbed it reminded me of Spam. Gregory would always shut his eyes, so I had no idea what was going on in his head, but it must
have been something musical because as matters progressed he would start to hum and then burst into a type of marching tune in rhythm with his thrusts. It was always the same tune, and it wasn’t one I had ever heard elsewhere, so I think it was his own composition. It got faster and faster as he approached orgasm, and ended on a loud, triumphant note of finale. When he finally opened his eyes afterwards, he would often look quite surprised to see me.
‘I think I have a yeast infection,’ I said when Gregory’s tune had collapsed in a dying tuba-honk.
Usually he took an interest in these things, but he just rolled off and grunted.
Perhaps it was at that point, just before the Politics of Reproduction Symposium in Madrid, that I should have started to wonder, but I didn’t. I’d never thought much about him being a gynaecologist until I married him, and I began to worry about all the other vaginas in my husband’s life. He assured me there was nothing in the least bit sexual about looking up women’s orifices – ‘birth canals’, he called them – all day long. But I wondered sometimes. He had certain preoccupations. All the monitoring he insisted on. Urination, defecation, menstruation: he’d make me register all my bodily excreta in a notebook in the bathroom. I felt like one of the early astronauts from the days when human guinea-pigs were shot into space for the greater glory of mankind. Then there were the pills: pills for conceiving, folic acid pills for maximal maternal health in the peri-conceptual period, blue pills in the morning, red at night. I’d been taking two of each every day for the last three years, and I was rattling with them. I wondered sometimes if other doctors took such methodical care of their wives, or whether it was just those on the obs and gynae side. Habit didn’t make it any easier. I’d pretend to read a magazine when he gave me my monthly check-up. My bare feet in the stirrups, he’d glide the Vaselined speculum in, open it with a screw-turn and peer in to take his swab. By the end, my brain was on the ceiling, flattened and clinging on.
He delivered babies and did abortions, too. They said he was very talented.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about that word ‘voluptuous’, which was the last one I’d use to describe Gregory’s tight, disinfected looks.
I went shopping the next morning when I’d dropped Billy off at playgroup. Gridiron is at its most stark in winter, whittled down to the bare essentials of a generic Lego town: red-brick buildings, themed shopping malls, grimy pubs, churches, hospitals, Jaycote’s Park with its ancient sycamore trees, their bark almost black from car exhaust, the Cheeseways Works in the distance. Ma always used to say she liked Gridiron because it ‘wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small’. For what, we never knew. But walking about that morning, it seemed to make some kind of sense. Gridiron is a place to lose yourself in, almost-but-not-quite. A medium-sized pond for medium-sized fish. And a few big ones, like Gregory. He’d always wanted to move to London, but I didn’t. Gridiron is my city. I like to know where I am.
Walking along the High Street I caught sight of a woman in a mirror outside Boots. She had longish, wispy hair and a thin, quite attractive, raddled-looking face. I recognised her as one of the mums from Billy’s playgroup, Mrs Something-or-other, but it wasn’t until I’d got home and unloaded my shopping that I realised with a shock who it was, and that I’d become invisible even to myself.
The invisible woman. I’d first sensed it when I was leaving the hospital after seeing my mother. It was then I put a name to it, there in the Pay and Display. When it was nameless I could dismiss it. But now, having just walked straight past my own mirror image without recognising myself, I could no longer afford to ignore it. When I told this to Gregory he just laughed and gave me a look, the look he gave me when I reminded him too much of Ma.
All winter I was thinking about it, though. ‘Fostering my delusions’, as Gregory would have put it. I tried to keep quiet about them for the sake of peace. Meanwhile Gregory was very preoccupied with the desire to be famous. It was wearing him down, this obsession with renown. Every night he lectured me about his prospects. He’d stand there in the kitchen with his hands deep in his pockets, making himself taller every now and then by standing on the balls of his feet, while I was giving Billy his dinner or cooking. He’d pour himself a whisky, and a gin-and-Slimline for me, and hold forth. He always made me stop at two measures of gin because of my uterus, but more often than not I’d slip myself another, and sometimes I got quite drunk. Then one night in late January he came back excited and flushed. I’ve seen mountaineers on TV with the same look when they’ve planted a flag at the summit of something. I couldn’t help wondering if it was to do with Dr Ruby Gonzalez, but it turned out to be something else.
It’s not enough to be talented, Gregory was telling me, not for the first time, but with an extra gleam in his eyes like he was building up to something. He makes Airfix models, and it was that Airfix look, the one when you’re putting the last piece in place – usually the pilot’s seat or the tail-lights. You have to be brilliant to get anywhere worth going in gynaecology these days; brilliant or lucky. That was it. Gregory thought he was about to get lucky. Some very promising tests had just come through, he said; a sort of breakthrough he and ‘a colleague’ had made. I wouldn’t understand the detail of it. He was talking about the drug he’d invented. He’d been tinkering with it for years, and he still didn’t have any concrete results, but he’d always had faith in it, ever since he started working on it way back when we were first married. (The Airfix stuff, I reckon, was a way of coping with the long-term nature of his research. You get a quick result with a model glider.) ‘Genetic Choice’, it was called. The tabloids called it the ‘Perfect Baby drug’. Reverend Carmichael of Channel Praise called it ‘the Devil’s work’. He’d been lobbying against it, intermittently, ever since news of Greg’s work first emerged in the scientific press. Gregory got so irate at one of the Reverend Carmichael’s smear campaigns that he had the TV in his clinic waiting-room fixed so that Channel Praise became a jumble of dancing lines, with fuzzy, indecipherable sound. If women want to listen to that maniac, Gregory said, they have no business coming to my clinic. Anyway, he was saying, Genetic Choice still didn’t actually work. Yet. But he’d had a small, important breakthrough.
‘Some tests have come up positive,’ is all he would say about it.
I was glad for him about the breakthrough. But I felt uncomfortable as well; always had. To be frank, the whole enterprise gave me a slightly odd feeling – a bit like the excreta-monitoring thing. But I’d tried to be supportive, in the way I was about all the aerodynamics cluttering the loft. There was still a lot of lab and rat work to do, and then the clinical trials. They’d take years, and then there’d be all the battles with the licensing authority, not to mention the Reverend Vernon Bloody Carmichael’s lot.
‘Plus Christ knows what else,’ he added, with that weary breadwinner look on his face.
So in the meantime he was planning his own trial. He wouldn’t say precisely what, though. The Perfect Baby. What a thought. Not that Billy’s not perfect. Though Gregory said to me once, let’s face it, he’s not showing any signs of great intelligence – he thinks he’s an ambulance.
‘We have a normal boy on our hands here, Hazel,’ he said, in a rather wistful way. ‘A perfectly normal, average, ordinary boy.’
Which goes to show he knows nothing, I thought afterwards.
A few days later, I could tell that Dr Gonzalez had been working at the clinic again. She and Gregory ‘collaborated’ sometimes, and it always showed on his face afterwards. There was that look about him. Distant. Voluptuous, even. He always said she had a very womanly way of carrying herself. I suppose it was true, though I could only ever see her faults. I’ll admit, though, that she had a certain light in her eyes, which were dark, lovely eyes, the kind men call mysterious, slightly greasy on the lids, but not unpleasantly so. Bedroom eyes. I’d only met her three or four times, over the course of a couple of years. I suppose she was exotic: she was born in Caracas and had sp
ent most of her life in Croydon. Funny, but she’d always looked six months pregnant to me, though logically I supposed it wasn’t possible. Gregory always liked visibly pregnant women; he said they were a heavenly sight. As I expect they were, in his line of work. I’d always tried to avoid meeting Ruby. She gave me a bad feeling. Inadequacy, I think.
I reckoned that, with a name like Gonzalez, the chances were she had Catholic origins. Gregory was a lapsed Catholic. Well, you have to be pretty lapsed to perform abortions, don’t you. He said he was thinking of making Dr Gonzalez a ‘member of the team’.
‘Don’t you think she looks like the Virgin Mary?’ I asked him, remembering the way she’d sat once, in her blue-and-white clinician’s garb, with sloping shoulders and upraised palms.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a strange, soft smile. ‘It’s funny you should say that, because it’s her nickname at work.’
So someone else had spotted it, too, that weird resemblance she had to the mother of Jesus.
TWO
Dr Stern sent his letter to Linda. It was a short note to say that our mother, Mrs Moira Sugden, was entering a ‘crisis period’, and could the family refrain from making any unexpected visits over the next two weeks, as she was always ‘agitated’ after seeing blood relatives, and any kind of shock could ‘precipitate a mental emergency’. Linda came round and read it to me aloud, in a censorious voice, her clever steel eyes cutting through the text. She was wearing one of her frumpy frocks and a huge brooch of Ma’s, and her winter hat, which she bought in Leningrad, on a package tour of the Soviet Union, as was. Despite the cuddly headgear, she was all spikes. Even after all these years, and all we’ve been through with Ma, my love for Linda is no more than a bad habit. The proof of it is that I can’t get to like her much: I’ll make an effort to, and she’ll spoil it.
‘It’s all your fault,’ she accused. ‘I’ve been visiting her twice a week for months on end, and then three days after you decide to show up at the hospital, this happens.’ She slapped the letter in disgust. ‘What does he mean,’ she complained. ‘How can anyone get agitated after seeing blood relatives?’