Fifty-Minute Hour (27 page)

I can hear their breathing slowing, as they begin to sleep, at last. I doze as well, fitfully, dream of John-Paul's pineal gland which is coated in gold leaf; and then about his navel, which is smooth and very deep, so I can thrust right down inside it, like a finger in a glove.

‘Wake up,' I say. ‘It's morning.' I haven't checked my watch, but I'm good at judging shades of dark, and the thick serge blackout of the night, tacked up behind my window-bars, has been taken down, replaced with flimsy grey. It's Sunday proper now – still silent, still deserted. The day should be all glossy like a colour supplement, full of pictures, promises – cars and boats, food and wine, good friends, good fun, good taste. Children should be scampering off to funfairs, fathers cleaning cars or building shelves, mothers making treacle tarts, lovers sipping orange juice from each other's cunts or navels.

‘Breakfast time,' I tell the dogs, though there isn't any orange juice, only pig and water. They're on their feet immediately, once they hear my voice. I struggle up myself, go and fetch the knife. I didn't bother washing it and it's smeared with dried-on blood. Paul is mounting John again. I wait until he's finished, then dawdle over, plunge it in his chest. He dies as quietly as he fucks – no gasps, no fuss, no anguished howls or panting. The female's less courageous – shudders, whimpers, tries to fight the knife, but soon she's quiet as well. I lug the two great bodies to the corner, lay them on the sawdust (which I hope will absorb the blood), cover them with blankets and my coat.

I'm tired. I'm very tired now, but I have to kill the paintings next, kill all John-Paul's things. I clean the knife, spear it through a canvas, watch it groan and writhe. I think that was a Mary. The next one is a black girl, very dark and wild. I ease the knife in slowly, aiming for her heart; continue slowly round the room, working anticlockwise and slashing each in turn. My arm is really aching and there's blood all down my dress – dark and sticky blood which smells of oil paint. He's got too many patients, far too many fans, scores of faithful Marys, swarms of mistresses. Every one must go, though – all the black girls and the groupies, all his wives and ex-wives, all the unborn babies, all the growing gangling children – everyone but me.

My room is full of bodies. I killed the puppies, too, the ones they hadn't had yet; couldn't cope with more dogs. The smell is really terrible, blood as well as faeces. At last, I lay the knife down. My hand feels limp and useless, dangling from my side now, with nothing more to do. I fumble for a cigarette, remember I've no lighter; keep it in my mouth, unlit, as I go to fill the kettle. I don't want tea; just need to wash the blood off.

I'm not feeling any better. I imagined I'd revive once I'd disposed of all my rivals, but nothing's really changed. I hobble to the mirror, examine my reflection. My eyes are only sockets, and I should have washed my hair. ‘Fantastic hair,' Seton said. ‘It reaches almost to your bum.' I glance around for Seton, know I had him close once. Perhaps I killed him, too. There's a body in the corner, bleeding under blankets, which could be his, judging by its size. I wash my hair every day – when I'm feeling well, that is. Seton said it paid; said he liked its glossy sheen, its smell of lime conditioner. It looks awful now, unkempt and limp and tangled; smells of dog, not limes. I tilt my head, so it's hanging down in one greasy yard-long cascade, hold it very steady with my left hand, while I use the right to reach out for the knife. Two hacks and it's off. It slithers to the carpet with all the other corpses, coils across a painting – dark on dark.

I limp back to the mirror. Yes, a real improvement. It's very short and ragged, makes me fit my name. I know I'll find John-Paul now. He only went away because he was hoping for a boy-child, praying for a son, and I turned out a freak, a female.

‘I'm better now,' I tell him, as I sit down by the phone, relieved and almost happy as I wait for him to ring and say he loves me.

Mary sat back in the carriage, smiling at the young girl sitting opposite (and the chubby baby dribbling on her lap); beaming at the old man in the corner, who looked a babe himself with his woolly pompommed hat and missing teeth. She could feel smiles popping out of her, as if she'd swallowed a whole cartonful and they were escaping through her mouth, settling on her coat lapels like pink enamelled brooches. Smiles seemed only natural when she was en route to John-Paul's. It wasn't even Friday, but boring washday Monday, yet there she was in her best Windsmoor navy suit, with a package of still-warm mince pies she'd made specially for the Doctor, stowed into her bag – a tiny humble offering to thank him for the privilege of a second session every week, which he himself had suggested.

Actually, she was getting on so frightfully well, she'd have thought he might have cut the sessions down instead of doubling them, but he'd told her that although he was very gratified by what he called her ‘symptomatic relief', they had hardly even touched on the underlying problems. She'd lived half her life without
knowing
she had problems – certainly not the serious ones John-Paul had specified – separation anxiety, pre-genital ambivalence, and several others she couldn't quite remember, or hadn't really grasped or understood. (She didn't always like to ask him to explain things. It made her seem so ignorant, and he was so fearfully clever himself, he probably didn't realise she'd panicked at exam time and so failed her GCEs.) Still, if it meant more time lying on his couch, then she was almost pleased to be ‘arrested at the genital stage', or ‘prone to projective identification of a self-undermining kind'.

In fact, it had increased her basic confidence to feel she had such complex layers and depths to her that even a doctor as brilliant as John-Paul required months – no, years – to plumb them. Her once-tame restricted daily round was now totally transformed by a knowledge of her inner life; that seething hotbed of passions and emotions she didn't know she felt. Even her childhood had been a succession of explosive stages, each one with a formal name, and each involving conflict and high drama – the oral stage, when she'd attacked the breast, swallowed everything in sight, even gulping down her mother whole; the anal stage, when she'd held on to her faeces, or refused to use her potty and done her business in a corner like a dog; and finally the genital stage, when she'd poked sticks up her knickers to give herself a thrill, or stuffed cushions between her legs. She couldn't quite imagine doing
any
of those things; felt sure her angry mother (or disapproving ayah) would have intervened in no uncertain terms, but John-Paul had assured her she was merely suppressing all that early rage and turmoil.

And all those other terms he used had added to her feeling of importance. She might not have her A-levels, but she had ego-instincts, libidinal cathexes, something called ‘affects' (with the stress on the first syllable); obsessions, sublimations and repressions. She'd always seen herself as rather boring, a dabbler with a shallow mind, whom even Jonathan dismissed as ‘dumb' when she couldn't understand his prep-school maths. John-Paul thought otherwise, reached deep inside her psyche and pulled out plums – maybe mouldy ones, in some cases, but still with curves and colour, ripe flesh surrounding deep-embedded stones, themselves a promise of new fruit.

James had been a little less delighted about the extra weekly session – in fact, really quite unpleasant, if she was honest with herself, but it was probably less John-Paul than Larry Crawshaw who was making him so crotchety, plus all the other hassles at his work. She'd have to make it up to him, maybe go to Austin Reed and buy him some new shirts (which would prove a boon for her, as well, since she hadn't ironed his old ones in a fortnight). She'd already tried to mollify him by reporting John-Paul's four-week break, which the doctor planned to take from the seventeenth of December to the fourteenth of January, and which would therefore mean a reduction in his bill. Of course she wouldn't dream of saying so, but she'd have gladly paid the bill in full, even paid it twice, if she could only stop him going in the first place. Two more footling weeks and he'd be off to Rome for Christmas and the Congress, leaving her bereft – well, extremely busy with all the cooking and the shopping and the boys home, but still reduced to a mere housewife and a dimwit, instead of a complex
femme fatale
.

She leaned forward to retrieve her
Woman's Journal
which had slipped down off her lap. The baby reached a hand out, grabbed a fistful of her hair, kept tugging really hard. ‘Lovely girl,' she murmured to its mother, while trying to unclasp the tiny fingers.

‘Boy.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry. He's got such pretty curls, I thought … What's his name?'

‘Brian.'

‘Oh, Brian.' She subsided in her seat, returned to
Woman's Journal
– how to make Christmas decorations from silver foil and pastry-cutters. She hadn't wanted to think of Bryan – not till Friday, anyway, when she'd be forced to see him at the class – again. She'd spent all last Friday's train journey worrying about him, after that quite extraordinary session in the pub. She'd only suggested a drink at all because James was out till late that night, and anyway she'd been skimping on her charities, neglecting her lame ducks, and Bryan was clearly crying out for help. Of course, she'd never realised the poor soul was homosexual, had never really met one in her life before, or known anything much at all about what the media called ‘gays', until she'd started ploughing through her new dictionary of psychology which she'd bought just last weekend. There'd been a whole long article on homosexuality (under D for Deviance, though you weren't meant to call it that), which had helped her understand poor Bryan, explain his eccentricities.

She'd been suspicious at the time, in fact, when they were sitting in the pub and he'd kept ogling other men, whipping round to leer or gawp every time a male passed near their table, especially big and brawny ones, or young lads in skin-tight jeans. And then that whole sad and sorry business with his father. The article had emphasised the very frequent problems gays had with their fathers, especially if those fathers were insecure themselves about their masculinity and felt threatened by a weak effeminate son. Things were obviously extremely bad between Bryan and Skerwin senior. To pretend not to even know his son did seem especially heartless, but if Bryan often cried in public, broke down in pubs or evening-classes, his father probably couldn't handle the shame and sheer embarrassment. She'd been a little thrown herself, with everybody looking and him shouting ‘I don't care' like that (which was presumably an attempt to ‘come out of the closet', to use another phrase she'd learned). James had never cried in the fifteen years she'd known him, not even when his mother died of a combined stroke and heart attack, and they'd found her, cold already, at the bottom of the stairs.

And talking of mothers, Bryan was obviously devoted to his own, could hardly bear to tear himself away from her, either literally or conversationally; had spent a good half of the coffee-break embroidering on her endearing little ways, explaining all her fads and fancies, and always circling back to her, every time she'd tried to change the subject. That, too, was a symptom. According to the article, gays were often hung up on their mothers, stayed close to them emotionally when normal men had married or moved on. And his obsession with illness was also most suspicious, probably springing from a basic fear of AIDS. He'd told her he was frightened she had died, simply because she'd missed a couple of classes, but he was clearly harping on his
own
death, and only disguising it as hers. That was called ‘projection', a term John-Paul had taught her (in another context, actually, but the point was still the same). The poor soul's voice had broken as he stuttered the word ‘death'. Could he be infected, what they called HIV positive, with only months to live?

It really was quite tragic, a man as young as he was, and all that pathetic business about his childhood and no parties. Even walking to the station, he'd brought it up again; how he'd never kept his birthday, never had a party or any treats at all. She'd seen through him straight away. He was angling for an invitation to meet her own three sons, to attend Jon's little junket and indulge his lust for soft-skinned eight-year-olds. Well, that she
couldn't
have; wouldn't dream of letting any child within an arm's length of a deviant, let alone her pure and precious sons.

‘Mama!' screeched the baby, lunging out at her again and pulling not her hair, but her blue Venetian beads. She tried to save her necklace, an expensive one from James, whilst hoping the poor infant wasn't suffering from an identity crisis at quite so young an age. ‘I'm not your Mummy, darling. There's Mummy over there.'

‘I'm
not
his Mum – no fear!' The girl tugged the squirming child back, slapped his sticky hand. ‘Sit still, you little monster!'

The baby's howls rose to fill the carriage, seemed trapped in it, circling round and round. The woolly-hatted pensioner had got out at Surbiton, but two younger men had slammed in shortly afterwards, and were now casting surly glances round their
Daily Telegraphs
. Mary scrutinised them shyly – one tall, with long and powerful legs; the other almost pudgy, but with thick fair hair, a sensuous wide-lipped mouth. She had never really noticed men before, except as rather alien beings who were usually bad-tempered and always in a hurry, and needed lots of other people like wives or maids or secretaries to keep them functioning at all (and even then, were forced to recuperate in golf clubs or join expensive health clubs to help them bear the tension of their lives – lives far more meaningful, momentous, than any poor mere woman's). But she was becoming more aware of men, recently, excitingly; not just their jobs or needs or shirts, but the bodies underneath the shirts, the hands which held the briefcases (which she sometimes wickedly imagined straying down her tautly naked breasts). She had even found herself glancing at the space between their legs – or rather
not
the space …