by Liz Jensen
Watch. Max puts his head in his hands, and Monica has her just-finished-crying-but-just-about-to-cry-again look. David is a very precise man.
‘10 June 1976. The happiest day of my life. We spent our honeymoon on the Greek islands of Paros and Antiparos. It was – ’ but he’s started to make strangled noises, which is his way of crying, and fumbles for a cigarette.
‘Blissful?’ asks Isabella Pimento, helpfully.
My turn to pipe up: ‘Nice weather?’
‘Romantic!’ That comes from Monica Fletcher. Look at her, Kleenexing for all she’s worth.
Max lifts his badger’s face out of his hands, and looks up, as if dazzled by the light. He barks, ‘All a horrendous farce?’
Silence. Keith will come up with something. Yes, look, he’s gesturing with his hands. I translate for him.
‘The beginning of the end.’ David nods, takes a shaky drag of his fag, and wipes his nose on his sleeve, Monica being too self-obsessed to think of sharing her paper hanky.
‘Yes, it was the beginning of the end, I suppose. Though I didn’t know it then. You see, I’m not very – empowered’ – see us all smile; this is an Institute sort of word – ‘I’m not very empowered sexually.’
‘You mean you’re impotent!’ crows Max.
David shudders and recoils into his cloud of smoke. Dr McAuley’s role is to make sure the big ones don’t throw sand in the little ones’ eyes, to punish and reward, to stir up wee McNuggets of insight in our dumbfounded minds.
‘It sounds like you might have something to share there, Max,’ she suggests helpfully. ‘This is an issue I think we might find ourselves talking around later, but I’d like David to complete first.’
That’s the trouble with communicating with psychiatrists. You have to learn their language.
‘Now, David, you were sharing with us around your feelings of disempowerment.’
‘No,’ says David. He’s addressing himself to Max, like the fool he is. ‘I don’t mean impotent. I mean I was overwhelmed by the way she seemed so experienced for a virgin.’
What’s the betting Max is going to say something about ‘virgin on the ridiculous’?
‘Virgin on the ridiculous, was it, the idea that she was a virgin?’ he guffaws on cue.
‘You could say that,’ replies David. ‘In any case, it made me wonder if I really knew her after all. And it made me have – problems of a sexual nature.’
Now they’re discussing premature ejaculation and expectations of sex. Time for Isabella and me to get out our knitting: no point getting involved in that kind of discussion, though Isabella murmurs that she’s never had any sexual problems with her men. See Keith, off in another world, and the Ossature, in her yogi’s starvation trance, her bony knees clamped together. And look how Monica Fletcher is blushing and looking uncomfortable, and whimpering a little when the language gets explicit. Whoops! She’s in tears and crying out in her poor quavery voice, ‘Are you all mad? I don’t understand how you can talk like this! No one’s saying anything about love!’
Watch us all look up sharply. It’s not like her to be so vehement, even with the beard.
‘Surely if a woman loves a man,’ she’s saying, ‘she’s not going to start criticising how he makes love to her, is she? She’s just going to take everything he wants to give her, and be joyful about it. Love should be unconditional. There you are, talking about – ’ but here she stops for the ugly word will not pass her pretty moustached lips.
‘Orgasms.’ That’s Dr McAuley. Matter-of-fact as a toilet brush, when it comes down to it.
‘Yes, well, there’s no need to, is there. They’re not – they’re not – they’re not – everything!’ and she’s in fresh tears, shocked at her own ferocity, and scrabbling for a fresh Man-Size pack of Kleenex in her bag.
‘Get out your mops, Group,’ says Max gaily. ‘We’re in for a flood, and it’s looking Bangladeshi.’
Note Dr McAuley’s patronising smile.
‘Progress,’ she says. ‘My feeling is that Monica is starting to experience some unexpected growth. But growth is painful.’ She sweeps kindly eyes around the circle.
‘Thank you all. I’d like to complete with you now, and we’ll share again tomorrow.’
A putting away of knitting, a scraping of chairs.
Now look, Brendan! Quick, over there! The Ossature has risen from her seat too fast and collapsed, crashing down like a hat-stand! There’s the gallant David going to the rescue, and there’s Monica quickly unloosing a second, emergency floodgate in her heart. Max is having a good laugh, like he’s sicking something up. Ah, she’s reviving. And she’s up! And she’s yelling something about Daddy! And she’s down again! That’s right, Dr McAuley, give her a slap around the chops and do the biz with your buzzer.
There’s nothing we like better here than a bit of Sturm und Drang. You may well ask what your ex-wife is doing amidst all this commotion. I am singing an old nursery song from days of yore, with Isabella on backing vocals:
There was an old man called Michael Finnegan
First grew fat and then grew thin again
Then he died and had to begin again
Poor old Michael Finnegan begin-again!
Meanwhile see our arses getting smaller, late beloved? That’s us leaving.
Manxheath, 14 February
Dear Greg,
Happy Valentine’s Day! Roses are red, violets are blue, I’d like a divorce, and so would you. Please write to me confirming this, care of Dr Stern at Manxheath; meanwhile you will be hearing from my lawyer before the end of the month. I assume you will not be contesting my full custody of Billy, since you are about to become a father again. I shall be upholding my right to half of all your assets, including your share of the Fertility Management Centre, and your continued maintenance of myself and Billy until I can support us financially, if Lockwood’s will have me, or perhaps I could go back into travel agenting. Billy and I will be moving back into Oakshott Road as soon as I have recovered from the delusion thing, so you and Ruby had better start flat-hunting.
Hazel
What does it mean, to know a person? There are facts. I am thirty-two, he is thirty-eight. He is a doctor, I have tended to ‘work at home’, which involves a certain amount of dusting and ironing, daily childcare, and an addiction to a soap opera called The Young and the Restless. We have a Fiat, a Volvo and a two-year-old son. Did he keep my three dead foetuses pickled in a jar? I picture them sometimes, their chameleons’ padded fingers pressing against the glass, their faces turned to furious bloated prunes.
Oakshott Road, 16 February
My dear Hazel,
I am sorry it has come to this. However, Dr Stern tells me you are not at all well, and certainly not in a fit state to make any major decisions about your life. We clearly need to talk, but I will respect Dr Stern’s judgement that you are not yet ready for this. He will tell me when you are.
You are quite mistaken about my relationship with Dr Gonzalez. We are simply professional colleagues, and good friends, collaborating on a research project. You know I was never attracted to overweight women. When you are better, we will talk it all through, but in the meantime, there is no question of divorce. I am sorry not to have seen more of Billy, but as you know, Dr Gonzalez and I have been on a fund-raising visit to Latin America and the United States.
Yours ever,
Gregory
PS: The living-room carpet has developed some kind of vegetable growth.
I showed Greg’s letter to Dr Stern. I couldn’t think straight. Ever since my hyper-realistic sex session with Ishmael, I felt groggy all the time. Crazed with love. Yes; love. I recognised it as a form of madness; something clean and pure, that pushes personality out to the chaotic fringes of being. Here, anything can happen. There are no patrols.
‘Leave it at that,’ he said. ‘We need him to believe you’re ill. He mustn’t suspect you’ve seen the file. You’ll get your divorce’ (his hands were on my shoulders n
ow; did he realise what he was doing?) ‘but be patient about it.’
‘But what he’s doing needs to be exposed, Ishmael, before it goes any further. You saw the cutting I gave you. He’s got Hooper behind him now. The money’s huge. I keep feeling we can’t have much time left.’
‘Trust me,’ he said.
Has a woman ever drowned, I wondered, in the oil wells of a man’s eyes?
‘We won’t let him get away with it, Hazel. We’ll stop him. When the time is right. I’m preparing a dossier.’
Did I imagine it, or did he then kiss me on the lips, and pull me down with him on to the floor of his office, strip off my tights and knickers with a practised hand, and within seconds, have us doing it on the floor like frenzied beasts?
The next day I woke at six, and reached out for Ishmael beside me in the bed. I reckoned I could still feel his flesh on mine, but he wasn’t there. My heart hurt. The vitamins he’d given me the other night were next to the bed, in a plastic container. He’d been right to prescribe them: looking in the mirror, I noticed how careworn my face looked. I reckoned that my whole system could probably do with a boost, now that I had something to live for. So when I finally got the lid off, I took five.
Love was a violent, heavy animal. A bull that crashed into me head-on, impaled me on its horn, tossed me in the sky. When I landed, I had bruises on my soul. I planned to deck Ishmael in jewels, like a king. I would. Like a king.
‘Just done a wee-wee,’ said Billy, waking up and removing his sodden nappy.
Staring closer in the mirror, I realised I owed it to myself to get my act together. Today I would spend some time and some money on it. I wanted to be a new woman.
I watched Billy eating cornflakes at breakfast, and cooed over him, ridden with guilt. But he seemed older, and less interested in baby talk. Leaving home seemed to have coincided with a development spurt. Or caused one.
‘Gwanny,’ he said. ‘Wanna see Gwanny.’
‘You will, darling,’ I promised. ‘After the crèche.’
‘Take me there, Mummy,’ he said, his face squashed into a bright little smile. For a brief instant there was something of Greg about his eyes, and I recoiled.
‘Off we go then,’ I said, wiping his face. ‘Mummy will come to fetch you later.’
‘And Gwanny?’ he asked. (Bugger ‘Gwanny’. What does he see in her?)
‘And Granny, if you like.’
‘Good,’ said Billy, getting down from the table and into his buggy. ‘I love my Gwanny.’
Those pills; was it them that made my heart soar like Concorde in the face of such depressing news?
It was early, and I was the only customer in the Hopeworth’s Soins Intensifs Beauty Clinic. Three white-coated beauticians stood behind me in a semi-circle and we gazed into the mirror together.
‘Trust me,’ said the man. His name was Bobby. ‘I’m an artist.’
‘I will,’ I said.
‘I’m Sherine and this is Mabs,’ said Sherine. ‘I’ll get you a coffee.’
‘Transform me,’ I told them, feeling the potent rectangle of Gregory’s credit card in the pocket of my ski-pants. Mabs went and got some thin rubber gloves. The beauticians turned out to be quite a trio.
First Bobby waxed my legs and depilated my bikini line while Sherine and Mabs massaged my body with coconut oil.
‘Milk and Hermesetas?’ asked Sherine.
‘Or are you artificially sweet enough already?’ joked Bobby.
Then the three of them put me in a tub to steam and went off for a cigarette.
Twenty minutes later, when I was itching and tingling all over, they threw me in a pool of freezing water. When they’d pulled me out, Sherine covered me in something called Galilee Mud. She applied it as though she were icing a cake. She was left with a great smear of it on one cheek, but I didn’t say anything.
After it had set, and cracks began to develop, Bobby came and hosed me down with warm foamy water.
Mabs laid me on a giant paper cloth and applied Miracle Body Cream in a slapping motion. It smelt of floor-cleaner. Sherine set to work tinting my eyebrows and lashes deep black, while Bobby did my nails. Sherine spilt the dye all over Mabs’s coat. It made a stain whose shape was reminiscent of a pair of Fallopian tubes.
Then we all had more coffee, and Mabs washed my hair.
Bobby dyed it, which involved more chemicals and some strangely folded aluminium foil.
Sherine cut and re-styled it. That took an hour.
Bobby, who had been to drama school, applied daring new make-up. That took another hour.
Then they all said together, ‘There.’ And smiled.
I smiled too. My mirror image, a bright, sassy woman with clipped chestnut hair and a bold red mouth, smiled back. God, she was beautiful. I didn’t recognise her as me.
I didn’t read the bill. I just signed.
‘Bye,’ called out Bobby, Mabs and Sherine as I left. ‘Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!’
‘Buy yourself some frocks!’ Mabs’s voice called after me faintly as the door closed to.
‘Yeah!’ echoed Bobby. ‘Go mad!’
My body buzzed all over, and my mind quivered on the edge of things. There was a brightness and newness to the world. I knew how new-born babies must feel. I phoned my mother and asked her if she could fetch Billy from the crèche and take care of him until I got back.
‘I’ve fetched him already,’ she replied. ‘We’ve been in with Dr Stern for tests. Billy isn’t missing you at all. In fact, he’s forgotten you exist. So don’t worry.’
Rather than stinging me, this heightened my jubilation. I decided to follow Mabs’s advice, and took a taxi into town and spent £558.99 on clothes, including some lacy underwear. As I looked at myself over the course of that afternoon, in various mirrors, and from different angles, I marvelled at the beauty of my reflection. Walking down the street I passed myself in more mirrors, and only recognised myself minutes later, so unfamiliar was this new woman. She was beautiful, happy and in love.
When Ma saw me, she shook her head.
‘Don’t see what was wrong with your hair the colour it was,’ she remarked. ‘Too much eyeliner, too much colour in your cheeks. The overall effect is that of a cupcake. Billy thinks so too, don’t you, pet?’
And it was true that he seemed to be shrinking away from me. He hid in Ma’s skirt, then popped out his little face, shocked, aghast, and shouted, ‘Mummy!’ as if to warn me of something I couldn’t see. But a few hugs and smiles set him right, and I let him try on my new Bloody Hell lipstick. A streak of it transformed his lips into a clownish gash, and I laughed. In fact I couldn’t stop laughing.
‘What’s got into you, Hazel?’ asked my mother, looking at me strangely. ‘What sort of pills are you taking?’
‘Red ones,’ I said. ‘Dr Stern gave me some, just in case.’
I was still laughing at Billy, who was smearing lipstick on his teddy bear’s nose.
‘Just in case of what?’ she asked, her face all twisty.
‘Athletes use them, Ma. Multi-vitamins, to perk you up. Don’t you realise how run-down you get coping with a small child?’
Ma said, ‘Did I hear you say coping?’
She was looking pissed-off, which was fairly typical of the way she reacted to any shred of happiness in my life, so I just gave her my new, gorgeous smile. My Bloody Hell smile, which at that moment began to stretch independently across my face until it hurt.
I suppose, looking back, it was a sort of defection. I’d always known there was a place I could go if ever I needed to – a corner of my mind that was waiting for me. It wasn’t frightening. It was somewhere I almost knew; I’d grown up with a view of it, and a free pass. It was just across the way, and I had family there.
I used to like the story of Alice in Wonderland. She fell down that rabbit-hole, didn’t she, into a world where things were at the same time unusual and familiar. The important thing was, I was in control.
‘H
azel!’ murmured Stern when I swung into his office in a satin bomber jacket, a tight pencil-skirt and three-inch heels.
‘I – hardly recognised you. What have you done?’
He looked aghast, but then, as his eyes took me in, the shock turned to –
It must have been love, because suddenly he was looking like he had to wrestle with something, to rein it in.
‘I’ve stopped being invisible,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’
I was breathless with ecstasy, and my heart was pounding in a way I hadn’t felt since I was fifteen, when a boy at school put his hand inside my knickers.
‘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.