by Liz Jensen
As if I didn’t already have enough on my plate with the greenhouse and Hazel, things have been coming to a head vis-à-vis Isabella’s birthing arrangements. Yesterday morning I was preparing a huge nest of ferns, exotic herbs and jungle moss for her labour when suddenly I heard a cry and saw her outside, capsizing. It was almost in slow motion. I hadn’t realised how many petticoats were involved. I rushed out and heaved her up to a sitting position; luckily she’d fallen on a heap of peat. Peat is always useful. She sat and groaned for a while, then lay down again. It was then that I spotted what the problem was: her belly was churning in a frenzy. The wretched baby was writhing about like she’d swallowed a boa constrictor.
‘Monster, monster,’ she was crying. It was piteous.
‘You’re going to have a good old rest, Signora P,’ I told her. ‘That baby’s more than your match.’
I took her inside and we had a cup of tea in the Day Room. Her abdomen was still in revolt, but the fit was over. I told her about the nest; it was going to be a secret but she was in such a state about the lack of facilities in Manxheath that I had to break the good news to her. Then I stormed into Dr Stern’s pretentious office. He looked shocked. Like so many men, he shies away from confrontation.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re up to?’ j’accuse.
‘Did you make an appointment to see me, Moira?’
‘Mrs Sugden, to you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m a so-called client, aren’t I? I’m here on an urgent matter.’
I saw him press his buzzer to summon a nurse, so I did my best to spit it all out before I got dragged off.
‘The way you’re dealing with Isabella’s pregnancy is a fiasco,’ I told him. ‘You and your staff are in a state of chronic denial. I know the line you’re taking: the baby is a schizoid fantasy – official. Am I right or am I right? You seem to have been losing your grip on reality lately, if I may say so. Dating back to when my daughter Hazel started to pester you, I’d say. I used to revere you, Doctor, but you’ve let me down. Will the dirty nappies be a fantasy, too? Do we have to come and hang them up here in your office? Do you want ocular proof?’
‘Mrs Sugden. I think you’re forgetting your contract here. We supply you with care on condition that you, the client, as you so rightly say – ’ He broke off, seeing the door open. ‘Ah, art therapy calls. See you at our next scheduled session.’
I feel another effigy coming on. When I reported the gist of things to Isabella, she just smiled. She doesn’t get worked up about these staff like I do. She’s fifty-five, and she’s had a hard life, starting with a thing her Uncle Paolo did to her in a laundry-room in Turin. She says ‘experience has taught her’. Either that or she’s finally lost her Marbellas, bless her. I put her to bed with the panda hot-water bottle she’s so devoted to, and tucked her in like a wee girl. (Wee, my arse.)
Yours in all sincerity,
Moira.
Wednesday
Brendan:
Your daughter Hazel is indeed in a serious emotional mess: the alarm bells started ringing when I found a bill for £340-worth of ‘soins intensifs’ in her coat pocket, which can only mean trouble. I phoned Linda at the Butter Mountain immediately and told her to avoid anything that smacked of sexual intercourse if she could.
‘Keep your boyfriend’s appetities at bay,’ I recommended. ‘It’s the recipe for marriage.’ The man in question seems decent enough, though as an under-manager at British Telecom’s Swakely Gap office he hoes a tedious row in life.
‘Don’t worry,’ she told me, ‘I’m a born-again Christian now and I’ve imposed a sex embargo.’
Duncan apparently accepted it with alacrity, so obviously they’re on a good wavelength.
‘Why get yourself born again when you’re so bitter about the first time around?’ I queried, but she said a man called Mr Foley wanted her on the other line and he took precedence.
By coincidence, I bumped into Duncan shortly afterwards. He was in the Day Room, trying to fraternise with his brother, but Keith was ignoring him as usual, and doing The Times crossword. Duncan told me he’s been mooning about in bookshops a lot lately, now that Linda’s got religion, and BT has put him on compulsory flexi-time.
‘More fool Linda, and more fool BT,’ I told him supportively. Apropos the book world, of which I know a thing or two, I was about to share with him some of the fruits of my Strathclyde Municipal Library, Inverness Mobile Book Centre, and Gridiron City Library experience when Keith came and shoved the crossword under my nose, pointing to a clue underlined in red. A toad-in-the-hole of the Vanities, sixteen letters.
‘Codswallop,’ I told him.
And I meant it. Crosswords are a tragic waste of time for someone of his abilities. The thing about Keith is that he really needs to be stimulated on the highest philosophical level, or he fritters away his time on silly brain-teasers. Which is why his whole life has become a displacement activity. Others of us set ourselves complex questions in Manxheath. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I reckon we ended up here for asking them out loud in the first place. Society has a history of punishing the bearers of bad news. The ones who apply the tin-opener to the can of worms. I tried to transmit this idea to Duncan but it was like talking to the wall. He’d become obsessed with the sandwich machine being on the blink ‘for the umpteenth time’.
‘OK, if you’d prefer a conversation on a more practical level,’ I told him, ‘you can give us a hand getting in a few baby supplies.’
He finally agreed to buy a second-hand pram for Signora Pimento ‘as a present from the Sugden family’. It was the idea of being part of the family that persuaded him; he’s obviously quite hung up on Linda, sex embargo or no. I even told him he could have the pram back when Isabella had finished with it, as he and Linda might find a use for it once they were married.
‘She’s pushing forty,’ I reminded him, ‘and her biological alarm clock has been ringing loud and clear for some time. I could do with some more grandchildren, since it transpires that Billy’s not exactly normal.’
‘I’ll take that as a sign of approval, if I may, Mrs Sugden,’ he said.
It was a rash assumption to make, but I didn’t say so, as there were other things on the shopping list – namely nappies, baby clothes, Q-tips, etc.
‘Hang on,’ said Duncan as I checked off the list of essentials from Dr Rosemary Pithkin’s Baby Bible. I could tell that all this was beginning to try his patience. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a phantom pregnancy,’ he said.
And do you know what I replied, quick as a flash?
‘Well, there’s just the Ghost of a chance it isn’t!’
When he’d gone I wrote a letter to Linda outlining my grand plan and asking for a decent book on aquatic horticulture.
I added a PS: ‘Probably better the man from Swakely Gap than no man at all.’ I underlined the ‘probably’. But he must be doing her some good; she’s stopped wearing clothes from Oxfam, and a weird light has begun to shine in her eyes.
Yours sincerely,
Moira
TEN
O Ishmael, Ishmael. Lend me your stethoscope that I may listen to your heart.
We were in his office. I was sitting in a chair because I couldn’t stand upright. A nurse was there.
He said, ‘May I ask you, Hazel – have you been drinking? I’m told they found you wandering the grounds in quite a state. It’s really not advisable to mix alcohol with the sort of drugs you’ve been taking.’
‘Vitamins, you told me.’
‘Enhanced vitamins. And something to calm you down. You’ve been through a lot.’
I looked at the calendar on the wall behind Dr Stern’s head. It was Modern Art. By this I mean it was an abstract – a mess of blobby greys and browns, reminiscent of a baby’s dirty nappy. I’ve never taken to abstracts, and I realised that I cared for them even less now. Like a lot of people, I prefer to know where I am with a painting. I wondered what Ishmael saw in it – and at the same time, I suppose
, I wondered whether I really knew him as intimately as I’d thought. After all, if he liked abstracts – understood them, perhaps, even – he spoke a sort of language I didn’t. While I was looking at the painting on the calendar, the greys and the browns began to fuse together. I thought I could see a face in it – a face that I realised, without being shocked, must belong to my father. He was smiling in a watery way, and his lips were moving as though he were trying to tell me something. But I couldn’t make out the words.
Strange things were happening in my head. I realised with a thud that I couldn’t even remember how I’d got there. How old I was. My full name. Where I’d left Billy. To be honest, the whole thing felt like skyscrapers exploding on film, with all the shattered breezeblock and glass falling in slow motion, and all the horror happening in utter silence, and all the mess being my fault. And the world was laughing at my inability to clear up the debris with the doll’s dustpan and brush I carried in my hand.
When Billy was born, I blacked out twice with the pain. People die that way, don’t they, parting with babies. It was something I remembered then, when Ishmael sat across from me at his desk and stroked the paperweight and told me Billy wasn’t coming back. He’d be staying at Oakshott Road with his father. It was for the best. I wasn’t to worry. And above all, I wasn’t to feel in any way guilty or a failure.
‘Your husband will be taking care of Billy until you’re feeling better,’ Ishmael said. ‘I believe he’s hired someone from an agency. It’s really the best course of action. The Institute isn’t the best environment for a two year old in the long term.’
My father’s watery face disappeared from the calendar and I forced myself to look at Ishmael. He was writing something with a bulbous fountain-pen, his face set. The nurse was taking my blood pressure, feeling my pulse, banging my knee with a little rubber hammer.
‘Stay still now, Mrs Stevenson,’ she said. Her accent was Welsh. ‘I need to see what I’m doing, love.’
‘Don’t call me love.’
‘Oh sorry, love.’
So. Billy was gone. Dr Stern was explaining the rest gently, his round eyes blank as tiddlywinks. I looked at the forms he put in front of me, but it didn’t cross my mind to read them. I was still struggling with my middle name. Surely I had a middle name? There was a jar of coloured biros next to the anemone paperweight, and I picked out a green one to sign on the dotted line. I remembered reading somewhere that official documents must be in blue or black ink, or they are null and void.
‘Do you mind green?’ I asked him, giving him a chance to realise his mistake, my small betrayal. But he didn’t even notice.
‘Any colour you like, Hazel,’ he said in that voice of bedside comfort which only last night, beneath my sheets, had Song-of-Solomoned my breasts, my thighs, my belly a field of wheat set about with lilies. A voice that had sighed and groaned in greed and gratitude as he stormed the ramparts and collapsed the sky. My husband, by contrast, was more controlled – more efficient, I suppose. He never made any noise, except for his funny tune, and sometimes afterwards, when he’d ask if I wanted a Handy Andy.
He’d rather I had volunteered for treatment myself, Dr Stern was saying, but in the end a Compulsory Section would make me feel more secure.
‘For you own good, Hazel.’
He had avoided meeting my eyes, but now he looked straight into them with a look that made me gasp. It was just the look he had – intense, dark and powerful – when we were making love. It seemed to reach directly from his soul to mine. I would do anything he wanted; of course I would. I finally dragged my eyes from his down to the piece of paper in front of me.
‘Does it mean we can’t go to bed together any more?’ I asked him as I signed.
I tried to ask in a matter-of-fact way, but it came out messily garotted with emotion. When I looked up again I caught him with raised eyebrows, exchanging glances with the nurse. She sniggered unprofessionally, loading a hypodermic from a small blue bottle. When it was full she sent a little squirt of liquid into the air which descended in a mist of droplets.
‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Stevenson,’ he said.
I was shocked to see a smile tweaking at his mouth. The nurse giggled again, as though there were some kind of joke. She was slim and dark, with cushiony-looking tits. Her nametag, strategically placed on the nipple area of her right breast, revealed an appropriate Christian name: Hope. Hope Westcott. The elastic belt of her uniform accentuated her trim little nurse’s waist. It would have been ridiculous to kid oneself that Ishmael hadn’t noticed this.
He said, ‘But we’ll have you back to your normal self in no time. I’ll send someone to fetch your things from your hotel.’
‘Just a little prick, love,’ said Hope, and stuck a needle in my vein. She was much younger than I was, perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five.
Later she showed me my bedroom, a small cubicle with two narrow beds, a washbasin and a mirror. The toilet (in white – a hygienic design with a button flush) was down the corridor. A woman was crying in the room next to mine.
‘That’s Monica Fletcher,’ said the nurse. ‘She’s probably been watching the news. Here’s your pillow-slip, love. You’ll be sharing with another girl. Her name’s Peggy but your mother calls her the Ossature. From the Latin os, meaning bone, apparently. She’s ever so quiet, but she’s a bit of a vomiter so give the basin a good wipe every time.’
In the distance, the sound of an ambulance.
The nurse asked me if I needed anything so I said no, just leave Dr Stern alone, OK? She got my drift. When she’d gone I sat on the bed. The window overlooked the garden, and I stared out. Perhaps I should have been surprised by what I saw, but I wasn’t. Nothing could surprise me much, now. Not with my father’s face appearing in a calendar, and Billy gone to live with Greg, and Dr Stern finished with me and shagging some Welshwoman. You see the world one way, don’t you, all your life, and then when something comes along to turn the whole thing upside-down your vision goes wonky and you start to see things, and recognise them for what they are. Or at least I did.
The thing I saw was Ma’s greenhouse.
Its sharp outline was unmistakable. A huge cathedral-like dome, its glass like brittle transparent hide over a carcass of iron, shooting thin spears of light into the morning mist. From nowhere, the thought came to me that this was surely the pride of Gridiron. Through the glass panes I could see bright colours. Flowers. Trees. Things moving. This apparition, this building, this construction, so starkly before me now yet so well camouflaged before, defied logic. Its presence told lies, made wild promises, beckoned and jeered and sang.
Suddenly I felt powerful and fearless and born again. And I also realised that if I wanted to I could probably fly.
I stood up, spread the enormous coarse-feathered wings that had sprouted from my shoulders, and fell hard into a profound blackness.
When I woke up, my sister was sitting on the bed waving a huge Venn diagram at me. I felt very sick.
‘I’ve put two and two together,’ Linda said, glowing with pride at her own intelligence. She’d always been that way about her brain, like it was some prize pumpkin she’d grown.
‘So you’d better tell me everything, and no pissing about.’
So I did. The invisibility, the GR218 experiment that went wrong, my hunch that Ruby was pregnant, the decision to expose Gregory. The affair with Dr Stern. (She raised her eyebrows when I told her about the sort of sex I reckoned I’d had.) His betrayal. The vision of the greenhouse. Every now and then she groaned or gasped or muttered ‘Idiot’.
When I got to the bit about what I was doing as an inmate in Manxheath she stiffened.
‘Did you sign anything?’
‘Yes, but it was in green, so it was null and void,’ I said, but I didn’t feel too sure of myself.
‘Jesus, Hazel, how did you get to be such a moron?’ she hurled at me as she scrabbled in her bag for cigarettes.
Her eyes were doing that strange thing the
y do when she’s in a rage; going a dark colour and sinking dangerously deep into her head.
‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away about all this?’
‘Well, I thought you might overreact.’
‘Overreact?’ she shrieked, dropping her carton of Rothmans and grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me with vicious gusto.
When she let me go, she retrieved her fags from under the bed, lit one and inhaled deeply.
‘No smoking allowed in the bedrooms,’ I said, pointing to the sign.
‘Get fucked,’ she said.
I said, ‘You see, I thought Dr Stern was on my side. It seemed like such a nifty plan.’
‘Yes, well, one person’s nifty plan is another’s catastrophic suicide attempt,’ she muttered.
She showed me her diagram, which didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.
‘I see you have the same suspicion that Ruby’s pregnant,’ I said.
‘Suspicion? It’s a fact. I saw her in Bulger’s.’
I felt the blood drain from my face, and the watery taste that is a prelude to vomiting rise in my mouth.
‘How can you be sure she was pregnant?’ I noticed I was shaking. ‘She’s pretty fat. It would be impossible to tell.’ This had been my one hope.
‘She was in the nude,’ said Linda.
‘What, walking round Bulger’s?’
I could picture the scene perfectly. Ruby waltzing brazenly through soft furnishings waving her cheque book, tits all over the place and the fruits of my husband’s adultery bulging from her belly.
‘No, in a changing room cubicle, idiot. Buying maternity undergarments and looking very pleased with herself.’
I went to the basin and threw up what looked like coffee and biscuits. Then chili con carne, then cup-a-soup, then pasta followed by dry retching. At least my roommate wouldn’t mind. Linda turned her head away and held her nose.
‘Jesus, Hazel,’ she groaned nasally.
‘Where does Carmichael fit in?’ I asked when I’d cleaned myself up with an Institute flannel.