by Fay Weldon
37
How Miss Swanson Saved Tyler’s Life...
...and before he was even born.
The trouble with these small Jobcentres was that everyone knew everyone. Not only was Tyler’s personal life on computer, but Miss Swanson, another St Rumbold’s inhabitant, knew him and his associates by sight and reputation.
As it happened, Miss Swanson had no intention of sanctioning Tyler. She did what she could to protect him from the ravages of the State; she had, if not exactly erotic feelings towards him, at least maternal ones. She knew well enough that Tyler was the She Devil’s grandson. La Swanson had worked for twenty years at Radstock and Shears, property developers. She had started work on the same day as Tyler’s mother Nicci Patchett, and stayed at the same salary level until eventually being made redundant two years ago. Nicci, on the contrary, already a mother of two, had become PA to the managing director within the week, and left within the year having not returned to work after maternity leave. Miss Swanson knew Tyler’s mother well and did not like her. Nicci was smart, practical, wore almost transparent white blouses and tight black skirts, went clickety-clack with high heels about the office, talked about herself non-stop, had had a gastric band and an ongoing relationship with the married CEO.
Miss Swanson encountered her on ciggie breaks when Nicci would squeeze spots and pluck hairs in the office Ladies’ Room, while Miss Swanson – more the party girl in those days than the career woman – shaved her legs or put in curlers. Nicci would talk obsessively and at length about what an evil mother she had, so evil indeed that Nicci’s therapist had described her as ‘a typical narcissistic, deserting mother’, the worst kind of mother anyone could have. Nicci had long ago broken off all relations with her mother Ruth and prevented her little girl twins, then aged nine, Madison and Mason, from having anything to do with the monstrosity that had begot their mother. Evil by name and evil by nature: She Devil.
It was Elaine Swanson who had held Nicci’s head over the washbasin in the ladies’ loo twenty-three years or so ago when Nicci was morning-sick with Tyler, her marriage to her third husband already breaking up. The third husband was the famous Gabriel Finch, the plumber-filmstar (or so Nicci described him, though Elaine Swanson had never heard of him); it seemed he had been plumbing a film producer’s wife’s house when a string of lucky coincidences had promoted him from Bronze God male stripper to action-hero actor. Nor was her conversation with Nicci that day the kind one forgot.
‘If this bloody baby wasn’t a girl,’ Nicci had said, in between retches, ‘I’d fucking abort. I couldn’t stand a boy, greedy like his father, great clumsy oaf, hitting and bashing and chewing one’s nipples.’
‘But you can’t be sure it’s a girl. Isn’t it too early to tell?’ asked Elaine, tentatively. Nicci seemed so sure of herself.
‘It’s a girl all right. I saw it for myself on the scan. They won’t tell you, of course, until it’s too late. And one only gets sick with a girl. And I’ve had two, I should know.’
Elaine Swanson, feeling sorry for the innocent unborn child, shocked by Nicci’s apparent lack of maternal feeling, didn’t say what she knew to be true, that at three months no gender diagnosis was certain.
Thus it was that through Miss Swanson’s intervention, or lack of it, Nicci’s baby was allowed to come to term, and emerged from the womb a boy. When Tyler Finch Patchett turned up in her life again, Miss Swanson, who had long since parted company with Nicci, felt Tyler owed her his life itself, and when he turned up at the Jobcentre Plus had resolved to do everything she could for him. He could, she thought, do with a little chiding, and so she chided. He really should get away from Hermione. What he needed, like so many young men, was a good girlfriend to turn his life around.
38
No Place Like Home...
...if only one could get out of it.
Sylvan Lodge was a misnomer for Tyler’s home, a splendid but thin-walled four-bedroomed new-build on the Endor Grove estate to the west of St Rumbold’s. Here he lived with his mother Nicci and his twin sisters Madison and Mason, with their gender-neutral names. They had moved in a month ago. It was shaming to live with a mother at his age. But Tyler could not afford to leave, and seeing no prospect of anything but a minimum wage job, supposed himself to be stranded there for life. It was a good thing he had been born a cheery fellow or he might have been quite depressed. The twins were in their thirties and could afford to go but seemed to feel no impulse to leave home, and looked blankly at the family therapist Matilda Eavens when she kept suggesting it. They were good at blank looks.
Endor Grove was a new estate. There were no trees to be seen. It had concrete and decking for a garden, a glimpse of sea in the far distance and a maze of roads and houses unbroken by shops, schools, clinics or parks in between. (Actually it did have one shop which could afford the ground rent and that was the new Co-op Funeral Parlour.) Sylvan Lodge had been bought with funds provided by the twins’ property-developer father, Billy Didcot. Billy had made Nicci pregnant when she was fifteen, and he was forty-six. This was shortly after Nicci’s stepmother, Mary Fisher, had died and her father Bobbo Patchett had been sent to prison for fraud.
Nicci was at boarding school at the time: Billy Didcot, a bigwig at the council, came to the school to explain to the girls the advantages of a career in local government. Nicci, no beauty but with her mother’s evident gift for seduction, had been responsible for ‘showing him round’. Nicci then insisted against all advice – except her stepmother’s – on going ahead with the pregnancy.
Billy Didcot’s life thereafter had been focused on not letting his wife, or the police for that matter, find out about the twins’ existence. That Nicci had told him she was seventeen and on the pill could be no excuse. One might almost suspect it was intentional on her part and a very sensible career move in the circumstances; as indeed it was. Just as well that property dealing had made Billy very rich. Nicci, Madison and Mason had recently fancied a grand if eco-plywood new house in the Endor Grove estate, Billy Didcot’s latest project, and had moved in. Billy Didcot’s name was kept secret from the twins, and indeed Tyler, although they knew of his existence as the source of all riches. They referred to him as Mr Nobody.
Nicci at least kept her part of the bargain: he would provide, she would not tell. She was set up for life, but she was not happy; and the blame for this, with a little helpful encouragement from Matilda Eavens the therapist, she laid at the door of her real mother Ruth, the abandoning mother, the narcissistic She Devil.
Nicci took it for granted that her jailbird father Bobbo had abused her. He must have, or she wouldn’t be so unhappy. The fact that she couldn’t actually remember anything about it proved that the memory was repressed. And every day Tyler seemed to be growing more and more to look like his father, the wretched Bronze God – but also his grandfather Bobbo when young. It was intolerable. Tyler himself was intolerable. At least the girls took after her side of the family.
39
All You Need Is Hate
Bobbo has a burst of energy.
‘Would I like to see my children “before I go”? Go, nurse? Go where? Bloody stupid you are. I’m not going anywhere. If I’m fucking dying, I’m just going to stay where I am, only dead. And no. Why would I want to see my children? What can you have in mind, little Miss Baneful? Some kind of deathbed reconciliation scene? You sound like Mary Fisher: All You Need Is Love. Well, I didn’t and she didn’t, and love is what she died from, though they called it cancer at the time. She died for love of man – me. Unrequited, I may say. Ha ha. And as good mistresses go, she went. But not far enough. I can sniff her in the air, an ozone smell. Metallic. Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Sanctimonious Cunt?’
‘Please watch your language, Mr Patchett. Yes, I do. They say it’s Mary Fisher still hanging about, and whose fault is that if not yours? It’s her who goes moaning in the wind, practically shrieking in the storm.’
‘I’ll say that for the stupid cow, sh
e was a noisy lover.’ And Bobbo cackled, a horrible noise in a large echoey room, which once housed as great a light as human ingenuity could contrive.
‘Too much information, Mr Patchett,’ said Nurse Samantha, primly.
‘All You Need Is Love,’ sang old Bobbo. ‘Swan song of a generation. Now love is out, and sex is in, and tell a good man by the size of his tool – seen that show on the telly? Let me be your sex object, darling.’
And the terrible thing was, she obliged, just as once Ruth Patchett obliged old Mr Carver the park-keeper, long long ago and far away. Fate has the oddest ways of balancing things out; a single act of infidelity bouncing around like a deflating balloon, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, is acted out again.
40
Portions And Parcels Of The Dreadful Past
Mary Fisher indulges in a little self-analysis.
Wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h! There is a certain, not exactly effeteness, a certain girliness about Tyler which I adore. I used to go for big strong men into whose tweedy lapels I could bury my little head – how seductive the masculine smell of pipe smoke used to be – but now I seem to look for more sophisticated, spiritual enticements. Well, they would appeal to me in my current form, wouldn’t they? Let those who are without lust cast the first spell.
My poor Tyler! I am in love with him, exhilarated by him, transfigured by him, but my love being stripped perforce of physicality, I also pity him. I suffer with him, feel for him so. This bodiless love of mine, I notice, is threaded through with pity: the kind one feels for a mewing kitten, a fledgling fallen out of a tree. I never felt like this for Bobbo: I suffered too much; I feared the moment when he would stop loving me, start hating me. The fact that he was married, was stolen property, forbidden, increased rather than diminished the excitement and urgency when we made love. But the source of my pleasure was always masochistic: I loved to suffer, which drew others to me. Bobbo’s love for me was sadistic, the pain he inflicted on his wife intensified the pleasures he had with me – oh, oh, I am such a disembodied miserable wretch!
Because I am so pitiable I must pity Tyler. Momus seems to demand it. For Tyler too is pitiable, caught up by forces he does not understand, born to a mother who did not want him and put him in a crèche when he was two months old, the government of the time assuring everyone that childcare was beneficial to the intellectual and social development of babies. I never had babies myself (I preferred to look after my figure, not some squawking brat), but why have a baby at all if all you’re going to do is just hand it over to someone else to look after? It doesn’t make sense.
And of course his mother Nicci was a devout feminist, and the last I heard of her she was running some anti-Pro-Life organisation – a Woman’s Right to Choose, all that – which is no way to make money. Murder never is really, unless you professionalise it and end up as a soldier. So Nicci toiled long hours being true to herself, making sure other women got rid of their children while leaving her own to look after themselves.
I catch these horrible thoughts as they fly, and whether they come from Tyler, from me, or from the Great God Momus’ determination to turn me into some sort of usefully villainous, if unwilling narrator, I have no idea. Perhaps to see him as the Great God has been my great folly. I can see clearly now. There is no ‘Great’ about him! He has no business up there on Olympus. He’s nothing but a hack: a spewer of corny plots full of slapstick sight-gags or violent denouements, the writer of B-movies no one ever wants to see while they wait for the main attraction. Which is not to say I’m not going to make the High Tower come tumbling to the ground any minute. But that’s different. Kill them all, that’s what I say, starting with smarty-pants bitch Valerie. You see, I am not myself. I really have nothing against Valerie Valeria. Yet.
All that dry rot. I can smell the mushroomy stink getting stronger and stronger as I wooo-h, wooo-h round the High Tower, which is odd, since I am a person without nostrils.
Something is about to happen. Bobbo’s going to die? But I don’t want him to die, I don’t want him turning up anywhere near me, filthy old man. I want to be with Tyler. Oh Tyler my love, love, love, love, stronger any day, any night, than the beastly Momus.
Almighty Momus, praise be thy name, hear my prayer, listen to my supplication. Let Bobbo go. Give me Tyler!
41
The Dream Of Steady Promotion
Or is it a nightmare?
Hermione dropped Tyler off and zoomed away into the dark to a part of her life he preferred, when it came to it, to leave undefined. Tyler was in no position to lay down terms of engagement – me in your bed and only me – and they both knew it. He was beautiful but he was entertainment, not serious business. He wondered what it took to be serious.
To earn regularly, he supposed, and not minimum wage, but money of a steadily increasing nature – the kind a person with a good degree got, which involved a salary not a wage, steady promotion and a path to the top, kicking others below you off the ladder as you climbed. So if you were ruthless enough you ended up as some kind of paunchy executive telling other people what to do. A line manager or something, whatever that was. But there’d always be another line manager on top of you unless you ended up as CEO of a mammoth company. More likely to be line-managed himself – like his sisters, on the other end of a call centre helpline while they were hoping against hope to find some ‘serious’ guy who’d be their meal ticket for life.
Or you went into the do-goodery world and hoped to end up running UNICEF. More likely end up like his mother fighting her anti-abortion-clinic crusade for pitiful wages. Though she had at least found her meal ticket for life early on. If ever he or his sisters enquired as to who, where, why or how this meal ticket was, the expression on the maternal face, though fleeting, was so savage and cruel all three quickly desisted.
Or there was self-employment. All right if you could end up inventing something like Uber, or a ‘career’ in IT, mending other people’s computers, but you had to have the right kind of mind and he did not want to live a nerdish life.
The careers master at school had congratulated him on his ‘soft skills’. He spoke without mumbling, looked people in the face, didn’t seem shifty, washed and dressed up for special occasions and had his hair cut regularly. It would be better if he wore men’s shorts when the weather was hot rather than borrowing his sisters’. And he should keep away from Hermione Slinger.
Miss Swanson at the Jobcentre Plus had upped the ante a little. While admitting he had ‘soft skills’, her definition of that seemed to be that he could communicate if he had to, seemed not likely to run off instantly with the takings, did not seem to be surly, evasive, or a mad axe murderer. He could tell the time from a pre-digital clock and at least present himself as though he were not on drugs. Camp wasn’t too much of a drawback these days, but it did rather seem sometimes that he was putting it on as an act. And wasn’t that Hermione Slinger she saw hanging about outside on that anti-social vehicle of hers?
The careers tutor at college, female, had told him he needed to ‘bring some substantive expertise to the table’, but when he asked her to translate, had just said ‘Negativity will get you nowhere,’ suggested golden curls did not seem sufficiently businesslike, and called the next student in. The trouble was, Tyler supposed, he had left college with no ‘substantive expertise’.
His mother had said college would be a waste of time, and it was beginning to seem as if she might have been right. Back then it had seemed desperately necessary to Tyler to get to university. Nicci, though, had cut off relations with the missing Mr Romeo Bronze God Finch whom she at least acknowledged had fathered the boy – which left Tyler with no one to sign his student loan form. Nicci refused. Too expensive. Hermione Slinger had offered to forge Nicci’s signature but fortunately Mr ‘Anonymous Benefactor’ had stepped in and paid up front, three whole years at £6,000. Now Tyler wondered if it had been all that fortunate.
42
The She Devil Doesn’t Like To Make Mistakes
This time she thinks she might have made one.
Another afternoon is becoming too much for me. I tell Valerie Valeria that I am going to my room to take a power nap. I leave her to get on with the party preparations, and I remind her we are only inviting women. She must find a way to un-invite Tom Brightlingsea, he of De-Gender Now, awkward though it may be, or I’ll have her guts for garters. Men are men and women are women and that’s a fact of life. Once it was proved for women by the monthly pain in one’s guts, but of course no more for me. I have to remember what it was like, and these days girls can get pills to bring on a false menopause so they can get on with their lives as men. I daresay Valerie has done just that.
The girl took a subsidiary module in Event Management alongside Feminism in Development during her time at Sydney, but now it turns out she has never organised a big party and doesn’t understand what is required, or what can go wrong. However, it is too late now and partly my fault for being so inattentive. I have to acknowledge that it’s thanks to Valerie that parity is no longer seen as a boring side issue in feminist discussion – and since our alliance with Mumsnet was agreed – narrowly, I may say, and I was against it – our overall agenda is changing.
If the IGP is now seen as the one crucial mover and shaker by all those involved with rights for women, then good. But the chorus of approval now seems to include male voices – baritones as well as tenors and counter tenors – and this is not so good. I’m beginning to have niggling doubts about my wisdom in bringing Valerie Valeria on board, and declaring myself her mentor. ‘New blood,’ I’d cried. ‘New blood at all costs! We’re all so old.’ I’d forgotten quite how ignorant the young can be. At the next meeting of the Board it’s perfectly possible that Valerie will be elected a member of the Advisory Committee and if that works out she might even end up one of the trustees.