Snatching the largest bottle from the shoe-box, she wrested it from its carton, unscrewed the cap and poured the entire contents over her naked breasts. Hardly pausing to think, she grabbed the second bottle, opened that and sloshed it across her stomach. The reek of musk and frangipani filled the room. Why should useless Arabella enjoy this luxurious scent? If the stuff was meant to be magic, let it work its spell on her, not on some idle parasite.
She seized the first of the spray-bottles, aimed it at her head and kept pumping it and pumping, until her hair was drenched with scent. Maybe she wouldn’t lose her crowning glory if the magic actually worked. She picked up the second spray-bottle and squirted the contents down her shoulders and back – a difficult manoeuvre, but essential none the less. If they took the skin and muscle from there to make the substitute breasts, then it, too, needed a miracle, to prevent too deep a scar.
Rivulets of perfume were streaming down her body, trickling on to the floor. The smell was so exotic, she paused a moment, simply to breathe it in. Then all at once she laughed – a peculiar sound, half squawk, half shout of triumph. The sound was truly startling. It was weeks since she had laughed; months since she’d experienced the slightest sense of triumph. So what on earth had happened? Could the scent itself have changed her mood, as that salesgirl had explained, worked on her limbic system – whatever that might be – affected some subtle region of her brain?
She had no idea. All she knew was that a mysterious sort of magic had, in fact, occurred. She did feel vastly better: reanimated, cleansed, ready to face the surgery with new courage and composure. All fear had gone, all racking thoughts and prophecies of doom. More than that – she was now convinced, at a deep instinctive level, that things would be all right. She wouldn’t die. And Philip wouldn’t leave her. Bald and breastless she might be, but somehow he’d put up with it, and somehow she’d survive – survive way beyond her fortieth, to see her children’s children.
Parents
‘I’m sorry, Julie,’ Megan mumbled in embarrassment, ‘but I can’t eat anything with parents.’
‘With what?’ Julie froze, her ladle poised above the serving dish.
Megan cleared her throat. ‘Mothers and fathers.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t follow.’
‘Well, you’ve just told us this is fricassee of lamb, and lambs have parents – you know, ewes and rams.’
‘I don’t think rams are involved these days.’ Fiona gave a vulgar laugh. ‘It’s all artificial insemination, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not the point,’ Megan tried to say. Her voice always seemed to shrivel to a strangulated whisper when the other two ganged up on her. Last night, they’d attacked her taste in clothes; the evening before they’d expressed their amused astonishment that anyone could actually listen to Céline Dion. What she wanted to articulate was that, however the lamb had been conceived, those small brown chunks in the casserole had once been a beloved child.
‘Well, you’ve had meat before,’ Julie countered irritably, ‘and never said a thing. It’s a bit peculiar, isn’t it, suddenly becoming a vegetarian just as I’m dishing up?’
‘I’m sorry, Julie, honestly, but it only dawned on me this afternoon, after I’d read a piece about something called the Life Force. And I’m not quite a vegetarian. This is rather different.’
‘You’re telling me!’ Fiona chortled. ‘I’ve heard people say they won’t eat anything with eyes, but parents is a new one.’
Megan looked nervously at the second dish, which was full of boiled potatoes. Potatoes had eyes – at least before they were peeled. She was suddenly aware of several brown potato-eyes watching her in horror and regret.
‘Actually,’ Julie reflected, scooping up two potatoes and plonking them on Megan’s plate, ‘you could argue that everything has parents. Take these spuds, for instance. They’re grown from seedpotatoes, and surely seed-potatoes are sort of single parents – and extremely fertile ones at that. My father used to grow them and he’d always get a bumper crop from just one or two small tubers.’
‘And what about this,’ Fiona added, thrusting the wooden salad bowl in front of Megan’s nose. ‘Tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber – all grown from seed, as well. So, as far as I can see, my love, it’s starvation rations for you tonight.’
‘That’s OK.’ Megan put her fork down and sat fiddling with her hair. She could fill up on dessert. ‘So how was your meeting?’ she asked Fiona, determined to change the subject.
‘Unspeakable! Bruce hogged the limelight, as usual, so none of us poor lesser mortals could get a word in edgeways.’
Fiona was hardly ‘lesser’, Megan thought – not in any sense of the word. Even a surreptitious glance at her flatmate’s ample figure showed whole slabs and hunks of animal trapped and festering inside her, and bulging out in rolls of surplus flesh. Fiona was an enthusiastic meat-eater – pig for breakfast (sausages and bacon), cows for lunch (beefburgers, lasagne, spaghetti Bolognaise) and hen, or lamb, or even calf for dinner. Yesterday she had actually eaten a tongue sandwich – yes, without the slightest trace of guilt. That sensitive, extraordinary organ, which allowed a cow to moo, munched to a pulp by her own unthinking tongue.
‘I had a shitty day as well,’ Julie put in, heaping her plate with stew. ‘My computer crashed and I lost my entire morning’s work. Rupert went ballistic, of course, so I had to cancel my lunch with Kay and do the sodding thing all over again.’
‘Gosh, how awful,’ Megan said. She was lucky in her own work: no megalomaniac boss or terrifying deadlines. Admittedly, librarians were often seen as dull – and she hadn’t even become one yet; was still a mere assistant, who hoped, one day, to train – but, with a hundred-thousand books as friends, there was constant stimulation. And books were much more merciful than people; didn’t judge, didn’t scoff, didn’t let you down. Yet all of them had distinctive personalities; some passionate, tempestuous, others calmly comforting, a few quirky or rebellious, several downright strange. She also got involved with many of the borrowers, trying to tell their characters by the sort of books they chose – often a source of some surprise. A quiet, kindly-seeming matron would shuffle out with a gruesome tome about the world’s most heinous murderers, or a hunky macho-man, with a nose-stud and tattoos, spend a full hour in the baby-care section, poring over books on bottle-feeding and nappy-rash. She was also intrigued by the sorts of things that people used as bookmarks and left behind in the pages: lottery tickets, shopping lists, love letters, hairpins, bits of string, old shoelaces, and even once (she shuddered at the thought) an uncooked bacon rasher.
‘Hey,’ said Fiona, forking in more lamb. ‘Everyone’s raving about that remake of Cape Fear – the one with Clive Owen as the ex-con. Shall we go this Sunday?’
‘Good idea,’ said Julie. ‘It’s on at the Renoir, so we could have lunch at Lone Star first. Megan, are you free?’
‘Er, no.’ Lone Star was a steakhouse, but it wasn’t only that. There was enough cause for fear in her own life, without sitting through a movie with Fear in its actual title. Besides, Sunday was the day she saw her grandma, although she wouldn’t dream of mentioning it again. When she’d brought it up a week ago, the other two had derided her. Apparently, trekking all the way to Lewisham to visit a confused and elderly widow was desperately uncool. ‘I’m … busy, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re not much fun, you know,’ Fiona observed, removing a piece of gristle from her mouth.
Yes, she did know. They were severely disappointed in her – that was increasingly obvious – just as it was becoming more apparent by the day that it had been a grave mistake on her part ever to have joined this flat-share. The advertisement had sounded so appealing – ‘Friendly, fun-loving third girl required for spacious Fulham flat’ – but, of course, she hadn’t realized then how treacherous the word ‘fun’ was. She had assumed in her naivete that it meant someone bright and cheerful, ready with a laugh or joke, but for Julie and Fiona it was a different thing entirel
y, and involved getting drunk, smoking pot, staying up all hours, watching movies about rape or murder, and devouring things that could see and feel and speak. And ‘spacious’, too, was totally misleading. All the rooms were tiny, and her bedroom in particular was barely more than a cupboard. True, she paid less rent than the others, but it was still extremely inconvenient to have to keep her clothes in a blanket-box underneath the bed. Every time she dressed, it meant pulling out the bed, shaking out the creases.
She shifted her chair back from the table, risking the others’ derision, if not wrath. But she was finding it impossible to sit so close to the casserole dish. She could actually hear the dismembered lamb bleating in distress; its mother howling frantically, its father inconsolable. Fiona, though, had no such qualms, and was biting into glistening lumps of living, breathing animal, while Julie smacked her lips with equal satisfaction.
Thank God she was on a one-month trial and two weeks of that had passed. In another fortnight she’d be free to leave, and the prospect cheered her hugely. Of course she couldn’t afford a place of her own, not in central London, but her grandma had offered her a room for free in Lewisham. And the fantastic thing about her grandma was that she ate nothing but ginger biscuits and blancmange.
‘Gran,’ she said, putting a hand on the old lady’s bony shoulder, ‘would you mind terribly if I made a jelly this evening instead of blancmange?’
Her grandma’s face creased in consternation. ‘But I always have blancmange, dear, and I don’t like change at my age. In any case, Dr Crawford told me I had to drink more milk. It’s my bones, you see. They’re crumbling. Unless you made a milk jelly – I suppose that would be all right.’
‘But …’ The objection petered out. This afternoon it had suddenly occurred to her that it was deeply immoral to drink milk. Milk belonged to calves and, in depriving them, she was perpetuating the cycle of gross, unthinking cruelty. On the other hand, wasn’t it equally cruel to allow a woman of eighty-six to run the risk of developing osteoporosis? ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, determined to put her grandma first, whatever her pangs of conscience. ‘We’ll have blancmange, as usual. Just let me take my coat off and I’ll get cracking in the kitchen.’
‘Thank you, dear. I bless the day you came.’
Megan allowed herself a smile. She, too, was feeling better – apart from the matter of the milk. And, in a way, she was grateful for the strict regime, the lack of change, the lack of choice. She had long since been aware that she needed regulation in her life, just as she had at work. All the books were catalogued according to some system she hadn’t fully grasped yet, but which meant that everything was in its proper place. And, even though she was new to the job, she would never dream of filing a novel by, say, Catherine Cookson among the Ps to Qs, or – worse – in the cookery or science section. Order was essential, as she had learned early on in life, when her parents died in a car-crash the very day she’d started secondary school. She had been forced to develop strategies for staying in control – all the more essential when she was sent to live with with an elderly aunt who had never had (and never wanted) children. It had taken her a while, of course, to work out ways of keeping safe, but she had gradually succeeded by limiting her crying sessions to exactly seven minutes by the clock, touching every lamp-post on her way to school, never treading on cracks in the pavement, and never, ever getting into a car.
Now, faced with the upheaval of moving out of Fulham (which had deeply angered Julie and Fiona, who were landed with the expense and trouble of advertising again), she felt the same deep longing for a survival plan that would heal the scars and soothe the shock. And it had been a shock – that was not in doubt. All her life she had wanted friends and siblings, craved to live with people her own age, and, once she’d become an adult, the thought of sharing everything – a sitting-room, a kitchen, shampoo and clothes and hand-cream, recipes and even thoughts – seemed totally enchanting. But now it was back to social isolation. Much as she loved her, Gran wasn’t exactly company, since she spent half the day asleep. Still, at least they met at mealtimes, and could comment on the weather (which Gran experienced only secondhand, as she had stopped going out some time ago), or chat about the Old Days, when you washed in water poured from a jug instead of running the taps, and cleaned the knives with silver-polish, and boiled puddings in a cloth. And, as far as she could make out, you were continually answering the door – to the coalman and the knife-grinder, the man who lent you money, the rag-and-bone-man, the baker, with a tray of loaves and buns.
‘Yes, it was threepence for a cottage loaf in them days,’ her grandma said, transferring a spoonful of blancmange to her mouth. ‘This is really nice, dear.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not quite set.’
‘I like it warm and runny. It makes a change from normal.’
‘You just said you hated change.’
‘No, I didn’t. That was someone else.’
Megan shrugged. Her grandma’s memory was fading, like most things in the house: the wallpaper, the carpet, the once-fuchsia-patterned curtains.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d really like – rice pudding! I haven’t had it in an age. They sell it in tins, but I can’t be doing with tin-openers. And, anyway, you don’t get that nice brown skin on top.’
Megan was suddenly transported to her parents’ sunny kitchen; a dish of rice pudding steaming on the table. ‘Give me the skin! Give me the skin!’ she’d cry. And her parents always did, of course. She was the only child, the spoiled child, invariably indulged – until that pile-up on the motorway had wrecked their car and bodies, along with her own life. ‘OK, Gran,’ she said. ‘We’ll have rice tomorrow evening, with lots and lots of brown skin.’
She stood just inside the supermarket doors, appalled at the uproar bellowing and yowling from the cabinets and shelves: chicken clucking hysterically, trout and plaice blowing bubbles of distress, crabs and prawns, flushed deep pink from trauma, screeching out in pain. Why had she never noticed it before? And why enter this vile abattoir for a mere packet of pudding rice, when she could get it at the health shop, ten minutes’ walk away?
Once she reached Nature’s Bounty, her heartbeat calmed and her breathing slowed to normal. No gills or scales or fins here; no claws or feet or beaks; no bloody juices, mottled flesh, no carcasses, no skeletons. Only boxes of blithe cereals, bags of good-natured prunes, jars of contented peanut butter, merciful packets of nuts. And there, facing her on the shelf, was the answer to her anguish over calves: soya milk and rice milk, oat milk, almond milk – not one of them produced by penalizing her fellow creatures. With a sense of huge relief, she piled half a dozen cartons into her basket, along with a packet of rice and a bag of organic sugar. She wasn’t exactly sure how to make rice pudding, having never learned to cook, but Grandma had a shelf-ful of tattered cookery books, which she had already used when tackling the blancmange. She, too, was looking forward to the rice, not just as a treat, but as a rich, sweet, creamy memory of her loving, longed-for mother.
She hurried home, entering to the familiar smell of stale pee, mouldering walls and Fox’s Embrocation. She must really give the place a thorough spring-clean: scour the toilet floor, scrub the greenish growths off the damp patches on the wallpaper. As she crossed the dingy hall, she experienced a pang of loss for the clean, bright Fulham flat. Small and cramped it might have been, but never filthy dirty. Neither Julie nor Fiona had ever got in touch. She’d been hoping they might ring, if only to ask her how she was, but presumably they were still smouldering with resentment. And could she really blame them? When it had been her turn to cook, she had invariably made a mess of it, producing plain spaghetti one day (which had prompted cries of ‘Where’s the sauce, for Christ’s sake?’), then trying her hand at salad (damned by Fiona as ‘not a proper meal’– in fact, ‘not enough to keep a measly rabbit alive’), and finally resorting to the chip shop, which was apparently against the rules and so provoked another outburst.
At leas
t Gran was never angry. In fact, Megan could hear her cheerful voice rising from the sitting-room, singing one of the few hymns she knew by heart.
O Jesus, I have promised
To serve thee to the end;
Be thou for ever near me,
My Master and my Friend …
‘Is that you?’ she called, breaking off.
No, it’s Jesus, Megan wished she could reply, just to make her grandma’s day. Gran and Jesus had a very close relationship – one she couldn’t share. Jesus was the tyrant who had snatched her parents in their prime, to live in Heaven with Him, leaving her with a deaf, cantankerous aunt.
‘Did you have a good day?’ Gran asked, as Megan bent over her chair and gave her a welcoming kiss.
‘A rather weird one, actually.’ A small, weasly man had shuffled in, claiming he could only read authors whose names began with M. Although he hadn’t given any reason for this quirk, it was probably another sort of system for keeping things under control. Anyway, as the only person on the desk, she had done her best to help, recommending Iris Murdoch, John Mortimer, Alice Munro and Deborah Moggach. ‘Gran, I may be a while in the kitchen. I’m making your rice pudding.’
‘That’s all right, dear. I’m watching this thing about surgeons cutting off young women’s breasts, to prevent them getting cancer later on.’
Megan glanced down at her own breasts, imagining malignant cells already rampaging around, and even feeling for the mastectomy scars as she removed her coat and scarf. Alarmed, she sought distraction in reading the labels on the milk cartons, trying to decide between the different brands. Finally she opted for the soya, since not only was it calcium-enriched, but also contained the highest percentage of protein, lacking in their usual diet. Next she hunted through the cupboards to find a shallow baking dish, which would give a large amount of skin, before consulting one of the cookery books. ‘Bake in the oven for four hours,’ she read. Four hours, for heaven’s sake! That would take them to ten o’clock, way past her grandma’s bedtime. Perhaps the book was wrong. In fact, she distinctly remembered both Julie and Fiona cooking rice in a saucepan on the hob, in less than twenty minutes. She would do the same, then transfer it to the baking dish just for the last five minutes, in order to form the skin.
The Biggest Female in the World and other stories Page 5