by Ajay Close
As I moved through adolescence I became increasingly allergic to showbusiness. The shrieking camp, the promiscuous endearments, the personality cults, and the phrase that cropped up in every magazine interview, every drunken heart-to-heart. One day they’re going to find me out. What did it mean: one day they’ll realise I’m no good as an actor? Surely the ability to conceal their professional shortcomings was acting. Or was the ‘me’ at issue their very self – one day they’ll realise there is no me, it’s all acting? Either way, it seemed like a boast. Some of them (never Lilias) babbled of neurosis and self-doubt, but they all agreed it was much finer to be a performer. To run the gamut of emotions in perpetual catharsis, not helplessly as others did, but for art. To be at once exemplarily human, and hardly human at all.
Lilias and her actress friends were always falling in love. With their leading men, as often as not. Though falling isn’t quite the verb. Taking a running jump at love. Hurling themselves over the cliff of love. Telling everyone they spoke to, including themselves, this was it: the head-over-heels, out-of-control, once-in-a-lifetime Real Thing. I read enough novels to know what they meant. I’d seen love depicted on screen (by actors), and I witnessed it at second-hand, between Lilias and a succession of minor soap stars and provincial matinee idols. Three weeks of burning intensity, a blizzard of talk, electricity that lifted the hairs on my neck across a room, the moans and cries lasting almost until dawn. And then the day-long silences, the visceral revulsion.
By thirteen, I was an expert in love’s shamanic chemicals, its inevitable progress from trance to disillusion. By fourteen, I knew that loving someone didn’t mean they loved you in return. Love was a kind of applause, an effusion generated by narcissistic display. In the days when I still went to the theatre I’d come across actors who took the curtain call with arms at full stretch, applauding the audience whose receptive genius had brought forth their performance. One thing I’ll say for Lilias, she never went in for that sort of cant. In love, as in life, some were born to do the clapping, and others to be clapped.
These were the thoughts I had too much time to dwell on now I was living at Margo’s farm.
The hospital canteen smelled of battered haddock and a greasily spicy something the whiteboard menu identified as ‘Sausage Surprise’. A queue of porters batted grinning insults across the servery at the woman with the ladle and the dermatitis gloves. Lilias would be in with the consultant by now, saying she had an audition at four and how strange it was to be sitting here without the cameras. The last time she’d seen the inside of a hospital she’d been playing the neurosurgeon’s mother in Casualty – just a cameo, but pivotal to the story. Oh, he’d seen that one? How funny. She’d always assumed men like him would avoid medical dramas like the plague. Of course, he couldn’t be expected to recognise her. She’d spent an hour in Make-Up, being aged for the part…
I checked my watch. I didn’t like to think of her coming out of the consultant’s office with no one to meet her. Another ten minutes and I’d go up to Oncology. The door from the lobby swung open and there she was, walking towards me, cheeks flushed, coat buttoned. In the anxiety of the moment I gave it no thought.
‘Shall I get you a cup of tea?’
She sat down, glancing over her shoulder towards the servery. ‘No thank you, darling.’
I looked her over. She seemed keyed-up but not, as far as I could tell, distressed.
‘Well?’ I said.
She unbuttoned her coat and I saw she was wearing a turtleneck jumper. I had expected Jaeger and pearls, or Boho Theatrical Dame.
I tried again. ‘What did he say?’
‘They should get away with just snipping it out.’
‘A lumpectomy?’ I knew she hated the jargon, but I needed to be clear. ‘With the option of calling you back once they have the histology results?’
‘He has a feeling I’ll be lucky.’
I wondered how this translated into medical language. ‘Will you have to have radiotherapy?’
‘Oh no, darling, nothing like that.’
‘Tamoxifen?’
She looked vague for a moment. ‘I might have to take some drugs, but really it’s good news.’
There was a sensation in my chest, as if a block of concrete had started to crumble. I thought I might laugh, or burst into tears.
‘Thank God,’ I croaked.
She said nothing.
I realised a part of me had her dead and buried, but she was going to live! Then I was on my knees with my arms around her. I felt her pull back from the surface of her skin to somewhere unreachable inside her, but I held on, my face pressed to that precious breast, wanting her to know how frightened I’d been, how glad I was, hoping the moment would come right.
When it didn’t, I released her and returned to my chair.
‘It must be an incredible relief,’ I said.
Her eyes stared back at me, hard and bright.
She touched the corner of her mouth. ‘It’ll make filming a lot easier, that’s for sure.’
‘It’ll make living a lot easier,’ I said.
‘Three weeks in Mexico and a fortnight in Boston. I’ve always wanted to see New England in the fall.’
‘It’ll make seeing anything a lot easier,’ I said.
‘It’s all very last minute. Maggie Buckley’s broken her hip. You only have to look at her to see she’s as brittle as a cheese straw. Of course, nothing’s definite yet, but the audition went very well.’
‘So when are you going in?’
She looked at me uncomprehendingly.
‘For the lumpectomy.’
Her lips tightened. ‘Soon.’ She anticipated my next question. ‘I’m not going to tell you when, because I don’t want you there. I know you’re trying to be kind, darling, but it doesn’t help. I have to do this in my own way.’
‘By pretending it’s not happening.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Exactly.’
She looked around the cafeteria, dismissing everyone but five junior doctors playing poker, watched by a table of nurses lunching on Diet Coke and chips. When she turned back to me I could see the subject was closed.
‘It was very good of you to do this, darling, but I don’t want to keep you from your rural idyll.’
‘You’ve done me a favour, giving me an excuse to see Frankie and eat a decent veggie lunch. Margo did me stuffed peppers the other day – stuffed with mince.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said tonelessly.
I took my phone out and found a picture of Margo and Kit in front of the farmhouse. She tilted the screen to see better and laughed the way she might have laughed if I’d pinched her unexpectedly, and hard.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. Her eyes burned into the screen. ‘It’s just… Nothing.’
She lifted her head and gave me a penetrating look.
‘It’s obviously not nothing,’ I said.
Her glance returned to the phone. ‘He looks like someone I used to know.’
‘Who?’
‘Actually, now I’ve had a proper look it’s not such a likeness.’ She found a better shot of the farmhouse. ‘What’s it like inside? Open fires, original features, or wet rooms and laminate floors?’
I shrugged. ‘It feels like a place things could happen.’
‘An unread script, an untrod stage.’
‘I meant I might conceive.’
‘Of course. How’s all that going? You must have had your thingamijig by now.’
I stood up. ‘Do you fancy going out for tea? I think we should celebrate. Smoked salmon sandwiches, cream scones. What d’you say? We could try the hotel up the road.’
She glanced down at her turtleneck. ‘I might have a black coffee, if they do Italian.’
‘You sybarite you.’
She gave me an ironic look. We didn’t go in for affectionate talk. Unless you count ‘darling’, which I did not.
Just then the table of card players exploded into laughte
r. The grinning victor checked his pager. I picked up my bag. Lilias was still seated. With that instinct for tragedy that may have been her greatest gift as an actress, she reached out and lifted the hem of my shirt.
‘Oh, darling.’
Despite all the assurances that laparoscopy was a discreet procedure, the surgeon had botched the job. He had taken three stabs at it: two in my navel, the third in the hitherto-blemishless curve of my belly. It was beginning to heal at last, but the wound was still an out-take from a slasher movie.
‘Your lovely tummy.’
Lilias had never expressed any admiration for my tummy until it was spoiled beyond remedy.
‘It looks worse than it is,’ I said, ‘they stitch it loosely so it knits from the inside.’
‘But what about the outside?’
I arranged my shirt over the gash. To add insult to injury, the surgeon had found nothing. My tubes were clear. No cyst to remove, no blockage to fix, no obvious reason why my womb should still be empty.
‘It looks sore, darling.’
Lilias had not spoken to me like this in thirty years. Not since the summer I caught chicken pox, when she’d risen to the occasion with thermometer and cold compress. The memory of her cooing over me in that mellifluous voice makes me itchy even now.
She let go of the shirt. ‘Sorry, darling, I forgot. You never liked being touched, even as a little girl.’
Had Lilias starved me of a mother’s love, or had I cheated her of a lovable child? There would never be a definitive answer, since neither of us was prepared to accept the role of monster. I could have told her the rarity of her touch made it unbearable, but she would only have dredged up memories of me as a baby, screaming to be taken from her by every passer-by.
I sighed. ‘Or I could just drive you home.’
‘If you’d rather, darling.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw two women, one about my age, the other much older, presumably her mother, and completely bald. The old woman had managed to fasten her raincoat with an extra button at the top and an extra buttonhole at the bottom. Patiently the daughter rectified this. They didn’t speak to each other, but there was a tenderness in the mother’s submission to the efficiency of her daughter’s fingers. I stared at that pallid, hairless skull and thought how differently the afternoon might have gone.
‘You really have the luck of the devil,’ I said.
Lilias looked at me blankly.
I shook my head. ‘What is it they say: only the good die young?’
She stood up. ‘I think perhaps I will go straight home, darling.’
1972
Heart thudding, Lili surfaces from a dream. The clock at her bedside shows a little after two, but her wakefulness has the sharp-edged quality of morning. She gets up to close the curtains against the moonlight, then changes her mind and unlatches the window. The casement bucks in her grasp, letting in a blast of night. Down below, the collie’s tin bowl rattles across the yard. A loose triangle of tarpaulin flaps crazily over the seed drill. A flickering light in the pig shed catches her eye. Flames, she thinks, the word bringing back a flavour of her dream. She pulls on the flannel dressing gown Mrs S has loaned her while her own is in the wash and goes downstairs, groping her way along the darkened hall into the kitchen, stepping into the nearest pair of wellingtons, grimacing at their clammy touch on her bare legs. The wind fights her as she opens the back door. The dressing gown balloons in a gust of wind. She knots the tasselled cord and crosses the farmyard to the shed.
Not flames but a Tilley lamp. She flicks the electric switch by the door. The fuse must have blown. Jake is pacing up and down, his shadow flaring on the rubble-built wall. He nods towards the corner pen. In the barely diluted darkness she makes out the most heavily pregnant of the sows.
‘I’ve no tobacco.’ He sounds exhausted. ‘Can you wait here till I get back?’
‘From where?’
He gestures in the direction of the road, too tired to explain, too tired to remember his dislike of her.
‘All right,’ she says.
The sow is on her feet, nosing through the straw, shaping it into a nest. Below the swag of belly, twelve swollen teats hang just shy of the floor.
He takes the Land Rover keys out of the pocket of his jeans. ‘Ever delivered a pig before?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘Aye, well, there’s a first time…’ The rest is lost in an enormous yawn.
‘For everything,’ she finishes. ‘Are you all right to drive?’
He rubs his face. ‘I’m only going to Alan’s.’
The sow backs into the furthest corner of the pen, pressing her hindquarters against the wall. Swinging his long legs over the barrier, he stoops to squeeze one of those womanly teats between finger and thumb. A bead of milk appears. He crosses to the darkened end of the shed and returns with a tin tub half-filled with straw.
‘If she farrows, put them in here. Break the cord her end, or they’ll bleed. There’s clips in the box if you need them.’ He misreads the horror on her face for a sentimental objection. ‘If you leave them with her, she’ll lie on them, or eat them.’
He frowns, distracted. She points to the pocket in which he has just replaced the keys.
‘You’ll be fine.’ He recognises his mother’s dressing gown and a sardonic humour stirs in his eyes. ‘A wee rehearsal for you.’
Within minutes of his departure the sow is pawing the ground.
‘Hold on, piggy,’ she murmurs.
But piggy can’t hold on. Something compulsive about her movements suggests the business has begun.
‘He won’t be long.’
The sow’s raisin eye stares back at her.
Lili goes outside. It starts to rain. The wind lashes the dressing gown against her legs. She holds the flannel lapels closed across her chest. Better a soaking than the inexorable event underway in the shed. And yet, not so long ago, she would have made the most of it.
Did I ever tell you about the night I played midwife to a litter of pigs?
Pull the other one!
Brownie’s honour.
And was it disgusting?
No worse than a Saturday at the Blackpool Grand.
Brod phoned late last night. All these weeks she’s been longing to hear his voice, and it was awful. Worse than awful: stilted, unnatural, with long uncomfortable silences. How was she keeping? Did she need any moolah? She told him about Alasdair’s ram turning out to be queer. It was the sort of thing he found funny as a rule, but he was barely listening. Had anyone in Edinburgh been in touch? When she said no, she could feel his relief down the line. He pretended somebody had walked into the room, as if she wouldn’t recognise bad acting. ‘TTFN,’ he said, hanging up.
He has played her like a fool – and why not? She is a bloody fool. He was never going to marry her or get a divorce. He hasn’t given her a second thought since she left Edinburgh. Or he hadn’t until someone made him nervous. Old smoothychops Oliver used to call him. Of course he was a liar: that was part of his charm. It was a game between them: could he get away with it, would she catch him out? But she never dreamed he would tell so many of her friends she’s going to be Mrs Broderick with absolutely no intention of bringing it about.
She remembers the day she went to Glasgow. It was almost six o’clock when she got back. The van was still parked outside the vintners. She waited at the corner. At last he came out.
‘Hel-lo.’
He thought he was free of her. It was all there in his voice: that reflexively flirtatious note, as if she were a pretty stranger. And she was flattered. Bloody fool.
She blurted it out: ‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘Get in.’
The exact words he used are gone. Oh, she remembers ‘devious little slut’ amid the furious torrent, but he went on and on, some of it reasonable, or at least understandable, some of it vicious and, frankly, paranoid. She had planned the whole thing, coming off the pill without telling him
. (That bit was true: the hormones made her fat.) For all he knew, it wasn’t even his. If she thought she was going to trick him into playing happy families with someone else’s brat, she could think again. If she wanted to keep it: fine, go ahead. But she could count him out. She screamed at him to stop the van. He was driving like a madman. He could have killed them both. For the first time she felt sorry for Rosie, being married to someone like that.
In the end she offered to leave Edinburgh and keep a low profile until it was all over, and he calmed down. They drove to the flat and had one last screw to see them through the separation. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. She is tempted to write him a letter: Dear Brod, here’s a tip. Don’t propose to women you don’t intend to marry. It might seem rude to you not to, and of course you like to know we’re all head over heels in love with you, but it’s not terribly kind. Yours no longer, Lili. Or she could deliver the message in person, turn up at the house. How do you do – I’m carrying your husband’s child. Though it might be sweeter just to move back, find herself a muscled stagehand to walk around Edinburgh with his hand on her rump. It wouldn’t take more than a week for Brod to find out.
She won’t do it, of course. Her clothes still fit, just about, but every time she looks in the mirror she’s a pound or two heavier. Breasts, bottom, her thickening waist. She can’t afford to let anyone see her like this. Word would spread like wildfire. Lili’s got fat! And then who’d want to sleep with her? (Which, being honest, is half the secret of swinging a part – that and getting to the end of the audition without stopping to throw up.) Instead she is going to do the sensible thing, like any convent schoolgirl skewered on a first date. Brod will never have to see it, or even know its sex. The adoption people will whisk it away, and Lili will stay at the farm, living on grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs until she fits into her cheongsam again. And then, all bets are off!
By now the borrowed dressing gown is wet through. Reluctantly she returns to the shed. The gorgonzola smell of pig is stronger. The sow lies on her side in the straw, belly rising and falling. The clump of flesh under her tail is raspberry-red, engorged and glistening. She breaks wind, her back legs kick, and something slides out in a slick of amniotic juice. Greyish-pink and boiled-looking, but unmistakeably a pig. Stunned by transition, it lies on the straw, steaming gently. For several seconds it doesn’t move, then a shake of the head expels a light froth from its jaws. The skinny legs splay, trying to stand. It goes down, tries again. At the third attempt it manages a stagger and within moments it is walking, shivery with life, slippery with the mucus gelling on its body, already questing for the nipple. The sow lies facing the wall, oblivious to the drama at her hindquarters. A fat, twisting, purple ribbon stretches from the birth canal to the piglet’s midriff. Gritting her teeth, Lili takes hold of this warm ribbon at the maternal end. When she pulls, it pays out like a never-ending rope: twelve inches, eighteen, twenty-four. Finally it breaks and she scoops the piglet between her hands. It keeps up a guttural squealing until deposited in the tub, where it burrows under the straw, making little quacking sounds to comfort itself. By the time she turns back to the pen, the second of the litter has been born.