by Lucy Ellmann
She ate Nicky’s BONES and Nicky’s BLOOD (passata) and Nicky’s DANDRUFF (Parmesan), then went to bed in her denuded room and nudely SLEPT, alone in the world – but bolstered by carbohydrates.
Back to Normal
Jen turned up for work the next morning as if nothing had happened! Roger was THRILLED, Francine less so. Francine thought she’d seen the LAST of Jen, Francine thought she’d WON. But Francine had to eat HUMBLE PIE (Jen made it for her out of some old coelacanth she had in the fridge – it tasted DISGUSTING).
Roger took Jen out to lunch in his Jag! Jen felt relaxed with him at last, for the FIRST TIME, and not just because of that upholstery. There were no SECRETS between them any more. Also, she had a new magnanimous approach to things since her epiphany. As they drove along she told Woger she had discovered the meaning of life. He told her about his WIFE.
According to Roger, he WAS the Hero of the Hour, for putting up with Francine all these years, never a leisure moment, never a day without DUTY. It was because of her freak-out on the plane that he had had to take this job in a rural backwater where no one knew who they were, so as to protect Francine from cops, shrinks, HER mother, HIS mother, and various busybodies.
‘The trouble is, she thinks she looks like her mother, and she can’t BEAR to look like her mother! So it’s just one beauty treatment after another, a bit of plastic surgery here, eyelash-tinting there. This is why I have no money! It all goes on colonically irrigating my wife!’
He’d had to buy OUT for the boob job, the face-lift and the liposuction, but was able to do her collagen and Botox injections himself at the surgery. Francine’s lunacies were mostly brought on by Botox botch-ups and collagen catastrophes.
‘If I OVERDO the lips, or UNDERDO the forehead, she rampages around setting fire to things!’ he told Jen. He and Francine were forever battling about the exact amount of beauty she REQUIRED.
Now he apologised for everything, for the way Francine had wrecked the wedding, and the wedding dress, and besmirched Jen’s jacuzzi (JEN brought this up). He apologised for being MARRIED to Francine, for having KIDS with Francine, and for slightly misleading Jen about Francine’s precise role in the household. In fact, it was all FRANCINE FRANCINE FRANCINE, until he also apologised for having a small PIMPLE below his left eye (only temporary). Roger wasn’t quite in ROCHESTER’S league – he wasn’t BLIND or ruined, his wife wasn’t DEAD, and there was no big DOG accompanying him everywhere (unless you count that Jag), but there was just about enough pathos about the guy to mollify JEN. Enough of zis talk, she was thinking, take off your clothes!
They went to an idyllic country PUB (at last), as in doctor–nurse books! Roses, thatched roof, and TROUT in a stream or an ascending SERIES of streams, into which the fish were divided according to size, all waiting dutifully to be EATEN. But Jen and Roger didn’t eat them. Too many BONES – Jen had eaten enough bones the night before, and neither of them was in the mood to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre that day.
FAT FIANCÉE SAVED BY HEIMLICH
MANOEUVRE – ONLY TO DROWN
LATER IN TROUT STREAM
Instead, they sat by the fire and ate steak-and-ale pie and drank Guinness. It would have been DREAMY if Roger could only have shut up about FRANCINE!
‘As long as I make sure she has no access to knives, scissors, razors, guns, machetes, matches, poisons, and large hunks of wood, she’s really quite manageable,’ Roger explained to Jen. ‘And, on the plus side, she’s a great receptionist, and that saves me money!’ (He’d been planning to stop JEN’S salary too after they got married!)
‘All she ever does is tell people to go to hell,’ Jen reminded him.
‘Yeah, that’s right. She’s GREAT at it!’
A little later, Jen surfaced from deep inside her second bowl of rhubarb-and-ginger crumble to ask, ‘But what do you expect us to do NOW, live in HARMONY sharing the HOUSEWORK?’
‘Oh no, of course not!’ said Roger (though he HAD expected that). ‘I was planning to move Francine down to the basement as soon as you move upstairs. She’s always been keen on that jacuzzi –’
Roger just wanted things back to normal, with Jen catheterising people on command and letting him tie her up whenever he felt like it.
BACK TO NORMAL. What an effort that is! Think of all the people in India, China, Finland, Turkey, Brazil and IRAQ, all trying to get BACK TO NORMAL. It’s NORMAL to be trying to get back to normal! Dr Lewis sped along curvy country lanes, Jen by his side, just two more wretches seeking banality.
But when they reached the surgery, Jen marched straight to Francine in her station and SPUN her chair so fast the bottle of nail polish Francine was using at the time fell from her grasp, along with her big greasy old HANDBAG. As Jen had always suspected, Francine’s beauty arsenal was elaborate. Out of the handbag fell:
1 powder compact
1 tube concealer cream
1 jar fake-radiance gel
1 tube haemorrhoid cream
1 pair tweezers
1 old Kleenex
4 tampons
12 Q-Tips
1 watercolour kit
1 pack notelets
1 box confetti (unopened)
1 bag sweeties
1 small bottle Kiehl’s Blue Lotion
mascara
6 shades eyeshadow
1 set earplugs
1 fold-up rainhat
wallet
1 video-rental card
loose change
keys
1 box matches
1 pack ciggies
2 or 3 mirrors (1 broken)
7 years’ bad luck
18 different nail polishes
1 box nail polish removal pads
1 jar aspirin
3 pens
1 gun
Jane Eyre
curling tongs
1 piece souvenir petrified bark
2 old buttons
2 knitting needles
knitting
1 pack playing cards
1 carton Ribena
1 metal nail file
1 photo album, containing before-and-after pictures of various types of plastic surgery
1 jar Vitamin C
4 safety pins
3 unmatched earrings
1 mobile phone
1 KitKat
CD Walkman
CDs
6 lipsticks
1 ancient free sachet camomile tea
3 periwinkle shells
It is most EMBARRASSING to have the contents of one’s handbag exposed to public view. It’s like performing an unexpected BACK-FLIP with no KNICKERS on! Nobody’s quite ready for it. But Francine was too busy trying to regain her equilibrium (no small task) to care. Meanwhile Jen collected Francine’s keys, tweezers, matches, knitting needles, nail file, safety pins (for SAFETY’S sake) and gun from the floor and tucked them into her own handbag. (She WANTED to take the KitKat but didn’t!)
‘I’m confiscating these,’ she bellowed at Francine, but Francine didn’t seem to NOTICE. She went right back to answering the phone in her usual discouraging tone: ‘Why, you scumsucking twerp!’ she yelled. ‘You expect us to do something about your disgusting little AILMENT? Are you mad?’
Things really were back to normal.
Out in the corridor (ninety-eight), Jen waved the nail file at Roger and said sternly, ‘She could do some damage with this.’
‘Yeah, to her cuticles!’ he quirked, but he was quite taken with Jen’s new authoritative air. It stirred in him thoughts of SUBDUING her with yards of FLEX.
They went straight to the bedroom, where Roger commiserated about the mysterious disappearance of the handbags. ‘What do you make of it?’ Jen asked him. But Roger didn’t know WHAT to make of it. Gone was his harem!!
They fucked like never before. No need for flex, only FLEXIBILITY. The veil had been torn from Jen’s eyes! Forget eyes, her CUNT was now the window to her soul, her cunt was her CORE. Jen was open to the WORLD in
some new way. She came as soon as Roger TOUCHED her, and continued to come, to a rhythm all her own that took her over and HIM, making them sway and scream. It filled Jen with LOVE and SORROW, sorrow for the WORLD.
It was DEEP, it was ROUGH, this mating. Jen felt like some kind of MATA HARI, sexually cruel and powerful. She felt like she could take over the world, straddling the GLOBE, as if it were one of those big rubber exercise balls, IMPALING herself on the North Pole as she bounced up and down.
JEN was the new orgasmic woman of the district! SHE deserved the orgasm award. Hers was the coming of the APOCALYPSE! She was all CUNT, the embodiment of female murk, and all she wanted was Roger’s cock in her, day in, day out. Like a big black hole she sucked him in, her astronaut.
Insults to the Body
Jen had always thought of BUGS as a BAD thing. But now she noticed the air wouldn’t be so NICE without the occasional tiny shiny BUG fluttering around in it. Bugs are like SNOW: they give the air volume and meaning! (Their BUZZING’S good too.)
It was still warm enough to swim in the stream at the bottom of the gorge, a popular place on sunny days. Jen swam NAKED, and tried to convince others to join her! The main reason people LIKE swimming after all is that it’s a chance to get naked, or nearly naked, with other people. Apart from eating, fucking, buying furniture, or seeing the DOCTOR, swimming is one of the few occasions when everybody can mutually acknowledge that the body EXISTS.
But professionally, Jen was in turmoil. Her nursy duties were increasingly in conflict with her new philosophy of life. Most medical practices now seemed to her a hysterical OVER-REACTION to illness, an insult to the body, impatiently interfering in private matters that would probably sort themselves out in their own good time. Jen freely told anyone who’d listen, the biggest secret of the medical world: a lot of ailments, if left alone, go away!
She wanted people to stop KICKING themselves for being ill, stop BLAMING themselves and being blamed by OTHERS (it’s the fear of being REVILED for being sick that keeps women scampering to the doctor all the time!). She no longer enjoyed thumping lung patients on the back to make them cough and cry, nor renewing prescriptions for things that were more EMBARRASSMENTS than diseases. So she took everybody off their HRT and tranquillisers. Thanks to Jen, that rural backwater was getting a lot less tranquil: the joint was JUMPING. One by one, Jen suggested to people that they give up their body-hatred and squeamishness and, unsurprisingly, they LIKED the idea.
Any minute now that REPORTER BITCH would be back, writing a story on the village where naturism was rife and insurrection in the air! No doubt she’d attribute it all to the WATER SUPPLY or something, but it was Jen, JEN, who had changed – and that whole rural backwater had had to change with her!
NAKED NURSE TAKES THE PLUNGE
‘Skinny-dipping’ is not just for the skinny, apparently. A very fat nurse, some might say a woman almost too fat to be a nurse, has begun a campaign to get her patients out of their beds and out of their clothes!
On sunny autumn days the local bathing-hole now churns with a hellish mass of heaving heathen forms who show no sign of shame. The police have been notified.
Jen’s sabotage didn’t end there. Her GLEE SPREE included (HAD to!) the liberation of the CUNT. No more hiding in basements, in euphemisms, in PANTY-HOSE, no more sanitary-napkin CONUNDRUMS and Smear Test nonsense, no more SUBSTITUTES (all her handbags were GONE anyway), the cunt wants to LIVE! When women came to see her now about the curse, the curse of having a CUNT, Jen set to work filling them with PRIDE in their PUSSIES. Most cunt pains and problems stem from self-loathing: women are always convinced they have something wrong with their genitalia, in fact that they have the WRONG GENITALIA. Jen was able to assure them otherwise.
She explained for instance that the vagina isn’t just a passive TUBE at the service of sperm and babies, but a complicated sperm/germ SORTING system (it’s a system!) with BIG PLANS and pleasures, PARADES, fireworks, hunting horns! Nor is the clitoris just a BUTTON for men to press, like calling a LIFT or letting off a nuclear BOMB. It’s large and wishbone-shaped, its legs encircling the vagina. This (along with their other erogenous zones and extensive reproductive capabilities) explains why women like SEX so much. Women like sex much more than MEN!
Men think sex is all about THEM and what THEY want! They’ve had this wrong for THOUSANDS OF YEARS!! They think they’re here to RUN THE SHOW, fix light bulbs, make MONEY, take out the trash. But their only real BIOLOGICAL purpose is to make women happy. THIS is what men were DESIGNED for. NOT to mock, tease, torment, exploit, deprive, baffle, belittle and BETRAY women but to attend, consistently and conscientiously, to FEMALE SEXUAL PLEASURE.
Women can do all that OTHER stuff themselves!
Jen’s views had quite an impact. She explained sex so well to one young couple (who’d been trying to deflower a BELLY BUTTON for months), that the girl immediately became pregnant and needed an abortion! But at least they were now fully aware of the CUNT. Jen was reminding a whole rural backwater it had GENITALS (a revelation for many).
Roger was not always available at this time. He had his Air Ambulance work and the Munchausen’s cases (his miscarriages of justice), and he had even embarked on a little redecorating in the consulting room. The guy had HOBBIES, what can you do? His patient-load, as always, was a perpetual nuisance.
FRED, for instance, had a STIFF NECK, which made him tilt his head all the time. He had recently built himself a modernistic house, full of odd angles. It wasn’t clear whether building it had CAUSED the stiff neck, or the already awkward angle of Fred’s head had caused him to build such a HOUSE! He was forever painfully peering out of his weird windows. His WIFE had a sore SHOULDER. Dr Lewis’s solution? Aspirin.
Roger was particularly annoyed with MRS PAMPOLINI at the moment, because she was FAT (he was annoyed with her NAME too: even that seemed fat!). Dr Lewis was convinced that fatness KILLS, that being fat is degenerate, dangerous and disobedient. He was mistaken of course: fat people outlive their doctors every day! But that didn’t matter to Dr Lewis. It’s FASHIONABLE to make people feel like CRAP about being fat – and he was the guy to do it! (Curiously, JEN’s fatness had never bothered him – but she wasn’t a PATIENT.)
Unfortunately, in Mrs Pampolini’s case, there WAS some justification for his disapproval: she was diabetic. The thing was, Mrs Pampolini was always cooking up big FAMILY FEASTS for herself and the other Pampolinis. As a result, she often had to be rushed to hospital in a COMA. Dr Lewis had scolded and scolded her about this. He had even thrown his hands up in the air and slapped them down on his desk, in a peevish way he had of showing displeasure. But STILL she cooked and ate her way into medical emergencies. So he handed the case over to Jen.
Jen visited Mrs Pampolini at home and watched her cook. Jen also had to stay and eat the feasts so that she could advise Mrs Pampolini on which items to avoid. It worked! Mrs Pampolini stopped snacking on the wrong stuff and JEN got to eat:
vitello tonnato alla Milanese
petti di pollo farciti di carciofi
risotto giallo con costolette di maiale
quaglie nel nido
gamberi imperiali in salsa all’abruzzese
agnello arrosto alla moda del rinascimento
coniglio con le cipolle e funghi al funghetto
zampone allo zabaione
seppie ripiene coi piselli (sea sausages!)
involtini di peperoni
vignarola
castagnaccio
castagnole con la ricotta
and once, a whole BOMBA DI PANNA!
Duty is all.
Jen’s new magnanimity even stretched to KIDS. For years Dr Lewis had been dosing AMY, a twelve-year-old epileptic, with some heavy-duty drug she didn’t NEED, manufactured by a company WE CANNOT NAME. Amy was now WASTING AWAY. Dr Lewis said she was a MALINGERER, and she should just eat more. Even when Amy started to HALLUCINATE, he claimed it was nothing to do with the epilepsy drug. But Jen REBELLED and told Amy’s
parents to take her to hospital, where Amy died soon after. Doctors at the hospital attributed the child’s death to the EPILEPSY MEDICATION she’d been on, but STILL Dr Lewis refused to believe this. HIS idea was that Amy’s mother had STARVED her. (Mothers are the worst. They are the lowest of the low.)
‘Be sensible,’ he said to Jen. ‘Which is more likely?’
Jen even took an interest in ROGER’S kids now, and included them sometimes in her activities. She fed them pasta in the shape of all the animals they’d never had as pets (dogs one day, cats, mice, hamsters, turtles or budgies another), and took them skinny-dipping in the stream. They were both most interested to hear what Jen had to say about ANATOMY: Adele proved a keen pupil of the vagina. Sadly for Edward, there was not so much to SAY about the penis.
But in the evenings, when the Lewis family, quite unlike the pampered PAMPOLINIS, was gathering yet again for one of their grim and grimy suppers (or no supper at all), Jen was racing naked through the gorge ALONE! Zinging with LIFE, she gorged on the gorge. The MOON didn’t hold back on her. It was deaf, but only slightly aloof.
She was on her way to the stream one sunny day, wearing a towel so as not to startle anyone, and lugging a basket full of Mrs Pampolini’s spinach-and-ricotta CALZONI and a bottle of wine (to take the chill off after the swim), when she found her path blocked by POLICE TAPE. Furious, Jen called out to two policemen standing near by, ‘Hey, you’re not banning SWIMMING now, are you?’
But they didn’t seem to HEAR her, they were too busy SNIGGERING together about something. It was the kind of giggle NURSES reserve for the frayed and beshitted UNDIES of people who’ve died under BUSES. Now Jen was really alarmed!