Here, at least, I’m still in control but so confused. All this repulsive, shameful emotion. How could You let this happen to me? The rules have always been quite clear. You decreed that all angels, fallen and otherwise, would be sterile, since they couldn’t be expected to be celibate, and a world populated by demi-angels would lead to even more chaos. I admit I might have got carried away recently and said I wanted to be a human being, but how could You take me so literally? It’s not like You at all. But You’re not there any more, are you? Gone, with Your capital letters and structured universe and rules that I was made to break. I’m on my own now.
If I am the father, what kind of child will Jenny have? A wunderkind, an enfant terrible, a little monster? And if it is David’s baby, it’ll just be a pudding of a one-lifer. Why should I look after the little bastard?
Jenny arrives home in a taxi, laden with parcels. I come out of my office and glare down at her from the landing. ‘If you ever bully me in public like that again I’m walking out. It might be the best thing, anyway, if you don’t want this baby.’
‘And where would you go?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Oh, but it is. I’m going to read to you from the transcript of your contract –’
‘Not that again!’
‘Yes, that boring old contract you can never be bothered to read or think about, although it’s given you everything women want. Are supposed to want. Why do you look so damned unhappy?’
‘Aren’t I allowed to be unhappy? Isn’t it in my fucking contract?’
‘Just sit down and listen. The language is rather archaic. We did think of commissioning translations. If the Bible can be dragged into twentieth-century English, why not our metaphysical covenants?’
‘If it’s metaphysical, why should it bind me physically?’
‘Why, Jenny, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you use a five-syllable word.’
‘Don’t you patronize me. I’m not an illiterate fifteen-year-old any more.’
‘No, indeed. You’re a pregnant octogenarian, a far more formidable proposition. Ah, yes, here we are. Now then. “London, on the twelfth of October nineteen hundred and twenty-two. This scroll, being the receipt for the gift of body (Grade 1a) and soul (Grade 3d) from Jenny Manette (née Mankowitz) to Leopold M. Bishop, Agent Number 2003 (alias the Great Pantoffsky, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, Lord of Misrule, Lord of the Flies, Destroyer, etc.) Consummatum est” – I’ll skip the Latin – “on these conditions following: First, that the aforesaid Jenny Mankowitz may preserve in perpetuity the form, shape, body, face, organs, etc., which she possesses on this night. Secondly, that the aforesaid Jenny Mankowitz shall only be permitted to love the said Agent known as Mephistopheles and no other man, spirit, child or woman whomsoever. Thirdly, that Jenny Mankowitz shall renounce her soi-disant career as an artiste (Grade 4c). Fourthly, in return for this solemn deed of gift of body and soul, the Agent known as Mephistopheles shall cherish, maintain, aid said Jenny Mankowitz and be bound to her until the end of time, within the limits of his inhumanity –”’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Pretty much what I choose to make it mean, like most contracts. Then there’s a bit of Greek, I won’t bore you with that. Ah, yes, this is what I was looking for. “I, Jenny Mankowitz, do sign this deed of gift with mine own blood; and furthermore grant unto the Agent known as Mephistopheles that when the short lease mankind holds on time expires, the articles above-written inviolate, full power to fetch or carry the said Jenny Mankowitz, body and soul, flesh, blood, or goods, into his habitation wheresoever.” Conclusive, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Is that all? Is that the contract you’ve tried to scare me with all these years? I’ve already broken it if you really want to know. I did love George and David, and I’ll love this child, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. And who cares what happens at the end of time anyway?’
‘You still don’t understand.’
But neither do I. What is happening? What will Jenny give birth to?
A Child Is Given
Click. The metal nose of the camera sniffs my belly, swallows a slice of me and regurgitates it slowly on to three miniature television screens beside me, unpeeling the image from left to right. Inside a grainy black-and-white cavern is a creature with a huge head. Click. I see its other profile, then its back and front. On another screen variations on the same images unfold, mysteriously green, more than ever like a creature from another planet. My planet. I cough and the monochrome cave ripples.
I wonder what the nurse feels when the camera shows some deformity. She’s smiling. Would she still smile if my baby had two heads? Eagerly I stare at the third screen. There it is again, already leading its own life down there in the maternal cave, wriggling, squirming, sucking its thumb. In delight and astonishment I stare at this vision of someone I’ve never met but am destined to love – because convention demands it and because now, suddenly, I do.
The image fades, and I’m reluctant to leave this room where the future has waved at me so hopefully. But I have to go, there are dozens of Madonnas waiting to see their little cave-dwelling Messiahs. No Josephs. I’m aware that this adventure I’m embarking on is for women and children only. Men, who have always been the most important people in my life, are about to be upstaged. Even you.
I’ve prepared a wonderful room for the baby next to our bedroom, and I shop exuberantly for it. Katrina comes shopping with me. She and Toby are having a difficult time, she confides in me over lunch – well, coffee and salad; Katrina never actually eats. Pregnancy makes me hungry, so I stuff myself with seafood pie and cheesecake. She looks annoyingly slender but rather haggard. Older, definitely.
‘Some investments have gone wrong, and we’ll have to sell the house. Leo’s usually so good about money. He advised us, so we thought it would be all right.’
‘He’s brilliant with money. I can’t think what went wrong. You must be furious with him.’
‘Oh no. He’s such a wonderful friend. He’s been an angel. I’m sure it’s not his fault. You’re so lucky, Jenny, to have a man who’s reliable. I don’t think I could have got through the last few months without Leo’s advice. Toby’s drinking, snorting and swallowing everything under the sun – he always did coke, but that was under control. Now he’s a real mess. He can’t get gigs because he’s unreliable and he loses his temper with our kids, and he’s threatened suicide a couple of times.’ Katrina is crying.
‘That’s horrible! Katrina, I’m sure we can lend you some money.’
‘Leo has already lent us thousands, and we can’t repay it, I don’t want to borrow any more.’
‘Well, let’s at least go and buy some presents for your kids.’
As my body gets heavier, the days slow down. I lumber through them, feeling increasingly important the more space I take up. You and I spend less time together, and we’ve both become secretive. After all these decades I have only fragments of knowledge about you. We’re like two moles tunnelling down parallel memories and hopes, taking it on trust that some day our tunnels will join. This baby is, I suppose, the end of our long experiment in emotional engineering.
I catch you gazing intently at my bump, your dark-blue eyes so piercing that I clutch my belly protectively. ‘I’m going to have it. You can’t stop me. And you can’t make me miscarry, however much you’d like to.’
‘What an outrageous accusation.’
I don’t want to fight you. I only want to infect you with my own excitement. ‘I bought some more things for the baby’s room today. Do you want to come and see?’
‘No, I’ll leave it all up to you.’
‘Don’t you have any feelings at all for this baby?’
‘Why should I? It’s not mine. I can’t see it or hear it, I’ve only your word that it exists. All I know is that I’ve lost you. A few months ago we were happy, but now you’re changing. Why should I be pleased about that? I loved you as you were.’<
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Sometimes I feel sorry for you. I know you feel left out, but I can’t control the rhythms of my immense new body. Inside my richly coloured smocks I feel like a galleon, swaying and burgeoning into the wind. I lie for hours in the garden in the cool grass, resting my melon breasts and pumpkin belly, making silent contact with this new life inside me. I try to identify its heartbeats, wriggly legs, greedy hands, hiccups and itches. I shiver with passionate need to touch and hug this unborn creature.
Although we still share a bedroom, you and I seem to occupy different universes now. I’d like to compare notes with other women, but none of my friends happens to be pregnant.
‘Can’t remember,’ Katrina says vaguely when I ask her.
‘But you’ve been pregnant three times.’
‘Seven, if you count abortions and miscarriages. I know, but it was a while ago and you forget. If you remembered you’d never let yourself in for it again.’
I feel inadequate, as if this natural process is the one thing in my unnatural life that defeats me. I don’t know what labour pain feels like or how I’ll feel when my waters burst. I imagine my baby, exasperated by its mother’s incompetence, pacing up and down my placenta clutching a pin as it gets ready to break the waters itself.
A postcard from David: ‘Last summer seems a long time ago and always is a big word after all. So glad to hear the news about the baby you and Leo are expecting. Warmest congratulations.’ I interpret this as a disclaimer of responsibility, not that I ever asked him to claim any. I wonder if it will look like him, pink and blonde and blue-eyed. It’s mine, I remind myself several times a day; fathers are more dispensable than mothers. When mothers leave, as mine did, the damage is irreparable. Whatever this child is like, I’m sticking by it.
The huge boulder of my abdomen makes it difficult to sleep. I wake at dawn and go downstairs to the kitchen to sit in the rocking chair and watch the morning unfold over the gardens. My belly’s aching. I nurse a hot water bottle and a cat comes to the window, attracted by my passivity. Together we sit for hours, purring, immobile, listening to the daily birth pangs of London.
‘So you see, you really do have the body of a woman in her twenties,’ you say at lunchtime with the air of a lawyer pointing out that he hasn’t cheated his client. You seem to have accepted the baby at last. You stand over me as I sit back in my rocking chair, the only piece of furniture that’s still amenable to my bulk, and kiss my forehead, passing your hands over my belly. It’s the gesture you used to make in your conjuring days.
‘Don’t you dare turn my baby into a white rabbit.’
‘Oh, I’ll be kind enough once she’s born.’
‘How do you know it’s a girl?’
‘What do you want to call her?’
‘I’ll decide when I see it. Her. Are you coming to the hospital with me?’
‘Do you want me to?’
‘Of course. Do you think she can hear us talking? I’m frightened, Leo. I went for a walk in Brompton Cemetery yesterday and looked at all the graves of women who died in childbirth.’
‘But you couldn’t! You know that.’
‘Yes, but what if all these laws you count on have been reversed? What if you have fathered this child and my body is just an ordinary body and we’re just a normal couple with delusions? Or perhaps we once had immortality but lost it. Last year you kept saying you wanted to be an ordinary man. Well, maybe you are.’
‘The truth is, Jenny, I don’t really understand either. Maybe those laws really have been turned upside down. I only know what I was told long ago when the world was young. Love and birth and death used to be quite clearly defined, I remember, and I was in no danger from any of them.’
‘I hate laws anyway.’
‘I know you do.’
Our car glides through empty streets to the hospital. London in the bluish pre-dawn haze is indifferent to one more superfluous inhabitant. Inside the hospital I’m whisked into a wheelchair appropriate to my age but not to my excitement, which bubbles and fizzes.
‘Anything you want?’ you whisper to me in the lift.
‘No pain.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Labour is such an unfortunate word,’ the midwife clucks. But it seems accurate enough as I lie in a tiny room, sweating and heaving, surrounded by medical students who chat as if they’re at a party and watch politely as I plunge and writhe into each new contraction. The pain gets worse, and I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t opted for natural childbirth. I sob with pain.
Your hands appear, making that mysterious gesture over me: the rabbit out of the hat; the bun out of the oven. Immediately, instead of a stormy ocean my body contains a choppy bath. I even sleep for a while and wake up to find a hand has reached mine through the tangle of wires and tubes attached to me. Turning to my right I see you, sitting on a chair reading a newspaper.
‘What did you do?’
‘Just a trick I picked up in Babylon. Are you all right now? I thought you’d never stop panting and gasping.’
The thin plastic drip tube on my arm flows hot and cold up and down my bloodstream, like a wasp sting. No, I’m the insect, a butterfly pinned for inspection. Every few hours the shifts change, and I hear myself making small talk with a new group of nurses and students.
‘Blood in the waters.’
I open my eyes, try to sit up, but the tubes won’t let me. So there are complications. Of course, my baby will be disabled: punishment for my hubris. But I’ll love it anyway. What are the doctors and nurses muttering? This must be how a small child feels when adults loom over her. Where are you? It’s so cold in the room without you. But it’s hard to speak.
‘Is my baby alive?’ I ask at last in an angry, tearful voice.
‘Of course it is. Perfectly all right.’ A don’t-be-silly laugh.
The scene becomes even more surreal and baffling. They spread a green cloth with a hole in the middle over me. Tarpaulin, tent, gardening, I associate wildly as I push, heave and pant, using muscles I can’t even feel. The institutional atmosphere wavers and cracks as their shouted instructions rise to a frenzied pitch, like sports commentators. There’s a tug of war on the other side of the tarpaulin, a gush of liquid, then a threshing creature shoots out from my oceanic depths.
‘Is that fish human?’ I ask.
Your laugh. Opening my eyes, I see your face above the green horizon. Something is passed to you and then to me: a girl, a tiny mauve creature with nebulous eyes, exquisite hands and ivory feet. I hug her, she tangles with my puppet wires as we stare at each other. I don’t need anyone to tell me that my baby is all right. She’s perfect. I pull down the right shoulder of my hospital gown and the vague little face stares past my unappetizing nipple. I think she’s going to reject me, spit out my fraudulent breast. Then the delicate curve of her cheek turns, her pursed mouth blindly finds me and sucks imperceptibly, a slight tautening of my breast. The faces above me glow and then begin to disperse, the performance over.
I lie with my baby in my arms, flesh of my flesh, kissing and licking the tiny hand, which tastes salty. ‘Baby Mankowitz’ is printed on the plastic bracelet on the baby’s wrist. Your long brown hand appears, and the little fingers cling like ivy to the great tree of your thumb. The baby’s unfocused eyes droop, and I yawn in sympathy.
You kiss me, your mouth explores my mouth, which is a bomb site, and then moves to my ear. ‘Well done! I’m just going off to get some supper. What are we going to call her? She can’t be Baby Mankowitz for the rest of her life.’
‘She’s Abigail.’
Now, at last, I feel my age. I give in to an exhaustion so total that it’s sensuous. You reduced the pain, but my eyes, mouth, left arm and abdomen are sore and ravaged. I’m desperate for sleep. The baby’s sucking again, sucking my life. All the years when I’ve swindled death vanish. I long to give in to sleep, yet I’m convinced that as soon as I do I’ll stop breathing and fall into the pit that has always been waiting for me. I�
��m sobbing uncontrollably, and there are people in the room again, taking my baby away from me. Each breath is a painful battle; I can’t speak or tell them how terrified I am. The green uniforms are back, pressing an oxygen mask to my face and asking questions. I’m amused, through my hysteria, because while they’re busy ministering to my body I’m a thousand miles away from it. If I let go for one second my absent mind will slip back into a corpse.
On the other side of the room I can feel Abigail’s tiny heart and will chugging away, needing me, devouring me.
Your face comes near, unshaven, with thick dark eyebrows. ‘No, Jenny, you can’t go.’
‘Just slipping through the hole in reality. Just for a few minutes.’
‘No.’
With an enormous effort I drag myself back into the room. At last I’m alone with Abigail. Under the strange neon-blue light she lies beside my bed in a transparent tank, as if she hasn’t yet evolved from that amniotic shrimp. Oh, but she has. Pressing my nose against the tank I stare at my beautiful daughter, who opens her eyes and gazes back short-sightedly. Now I can sink into the sleep I’ve been longing for – but I feel perversely awake. Every twitch and whimper of Abigail’s alarms me. With my plastic-strung arm I reach out constantly to touch her, greet her, kiss her. She looks so ethereal, as if she’s just visiting our world and wondering whether to stay.
During one of these wisps of sleep I dream I’m holding my daughter, fleeing down steps treacherous with slimy, rotting vegetables, splintery crates, greasy newspapers and buzzing insects. Tighter and tighter I clasp my baby, terrified of dropping her, hurting her, losing her – then I’m awake and face to face with her again. Through the Perspex wall I smile at the waxen little face, reach out and pull her into my bed, where she is so obviously meant to be. She nestles between my dirty gown and the plastic tube, closing her eyes as yellow gleams shoot through the blue hospital light, and I say, incredulously, ‘Hello, Abigail. It’s your first morning.’
Loving Mephistopeles Page 19