Flying Under Bridges (22 page)

‘Be
careful, darling. I love you.’

‘I love
you too,’ he said.

When
Eve got home, John and Adam were still enmeshed in their work. She couldn’t get
on with the meal so she went upstairs to sort out her handbag. That was when
Eve found the speculum again. She sat on the bed and held the plastic
examination device. She thought about the duck with its eggs and its inner life
laid bare on her son’s lap. She thought about her own insides and how little
she knew about them. She thought about how faulty they clearly were and that
maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a look. Adam looked at his penis but then that
was on the outside.

Adam
was still busy so she lay on the bed and thought, I might as well try.

It wasn’t
as easy as she had imagined. Eve was a bit nervous and perhaps a bit
light-headed from all the coffee at Inge’s. She removed her skirt, her tights
and her pants and lay down with her blouse on. She had just got the thing …
in
when the doorbell went and possibly that made her panic a bit because then
she couldn’t get the wretched thing out. The doorbell kept ringing and she kept
thinking Adam would get it but then she realised he must have gone out. Eve
thought it must be important so she managed to get to her feet and look out of
the bedroom window. It was Simon the postman and Eve could see he’d got her
socket set — the free one she had been waiting for with the book on car
maintenance. She didn’t want him to take it back to the post office so she left
the stuck speculum where it was, pulled on her skirt and had to sort of hobble
to the stairs.

It was
hell getting down. The thing seemed to squeeze in more firmly with every tread
and then Eve had to sign the delivery paper and the postman said there was
money to pay. Eve said there wasn’t as it was a free gift and she wasn’t going
to pay anything. Eve knew Simon to be very particular but never more so than
that day with a speculum shoved up her nether parts. She would have paid him
the wretched twelve pence if for a moment she had thought she could walk to her
purse. It was quite possible that Eve’s whole body was in rejection when she
finally got back upstairs. Her back had hardly touched the bed when the
wretched thing shot out between her legs, across the room and decapitated one
of Adam’s avocado plants on the windowsill.

The
whole thing had made her feel most peculiar. She had completely forgotten to
look with a mirror when the thing was in place and now it had done serious
vegetable damage. She washed the speculum in TCP and put it in the Oxfam box in
the garage. Then Eve stuck the avocado stem back together with sellotape but it
still looked very droopy. She sat on the edge of the bed looking at Adam’s
depressed plant and thought that there had to be an easier way to be a
feminist.

Chapter
Thirteen

16
January

Holloway
Prison for Women

London

My dear Inge,

Stuffed

And of every living thing of all flesh,

you shall bring two of every sort into the ark…

(GENESIS
6.19)

Miss March, the
ever-attentive barrister, is worried. ‘You won’t be wearing the trainers?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The
trainers you have on now,’ she says, pointing to my feet. ‘I’m afraid you can’t
wear them to court. Of course we will discuss the outfit but do start to think
about it. It makes a huge difference you know. If the jury see anything
masculine in your dress or posture or speech… well, it’s taken as defiance
and that won’t help. That won’t help at all. I must emphasise that it is a very
unfeminine offence that we’re dealing with,’ she says, as if there were a range
of offences in a catalogue that I might have been better off choosing. ‘It’s
unfeminine because it involves aggressive behaviour.’

‘Members
of the jury, how do you find?’ says the learned judge.

‘Guilty,
my Lord.’

‘On
what grounds?’

‘Footwear
alone, my Lord.’

Fact
—
Dr Walker, a woman surgeon serving in the American Civil War,
was arrested and imprisoned for wearing men’s clothing. She had won a bronze
star for her wartime services but this did not stop the horror of her adoption
of what she called ‘rational dress’. This involved her wearing a top hat, frock
coat and cravat, which I don’t think is entirely rational for war but then it
probably beats hell out of a corset and large hooped skirt. The fact of her
being a woman was only discovered after she was wounded and captured by the
Confederates. They discovered her true sex and let her go. She was in and out
of prison after that for popping on trousers until she founded a women’s commune
on a farm near Oswego. It was women only and they all had to swear to wear men’s
clothing and be celibate. They had their own judges and police system, and
bicycles and horses were available for recreation, although no one was
permitted to ride side-saddle. Before her death, Dr Walker finally received a
special dispensation from Congress granting her the right to wear men’s
clothes. She wasn’t entirely noble. As well as her fight for sartorial freedom,
she also insisted on having her photograph taken in a makeshift coffin with a
stuffed hummingbird. Just when you think you’ve found a hero they turn out to
be as flawed as the rest of us.

Mother
came to stay in July. Adam had been to the printers with John. When they came
back I was drinking a small sherry in my kitchen. I’d been over to see you and
I couldn’t get started after that. Tom and Shirley were coming for dinner,
Shirley had her big news and William was dropping off Mother from the hospital.
I started to feel cross. I was sick of cooking. Why couldn’t Adam cook for his
children? I tried to remember when was the last time Adam had made me coffee or
changed the sheets or…

John
helped Adam set up Mother’s bed in the dining room. I couldn’t watch. I had to
do something. There was so much going on in my head. I was worried about Tom,
dreading Mother moving in and one of you had told me Patrick thought he was gay
and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I had
that feeling again of being trapped in my house. I thought I would burst with
restlessness. As I went through the hall, Claudette… that’s the cat. I’m
sorry if some of this seems so mundane. I’m sure that’s what the shrink thinks.
The thing is it may be the detail of my life but the deed is in the detail,
that’s what he doesn’t understand. Anyway, Claudette chose the moment of my
getting up to launch herself at me from behind. She scratched and spat for a
while and then slunk off. I wondered if Tom could do something with her.

He
stuffs animals. Not all the time but too often for most. Well, you’ve seen
them. They’re all over the house. The otter at the front door, a rather
sinister fox in the guest loo, an eagle with a gleam in his eye resting on the
television in the sitting room, three field mice cavorting on the landing and
unnamed birds swooping on every windowsill.

Definition
—
Taxidermy: the lifelike representation of animals, especially
birds and mammals, by the use of their prepared skins and various supporting
structures.

I did
wonder if he could do something with Claudette but I suspected the creatures
were supposed to be dead first. Claudette made me think of Tom. I was thinking
about Patrick and now I thought about my own son. Not that I thought Tom was
gay. I mean, I wouldn’t have minded. I wouldn’t have minded any kind of passion
for my boy. Oh, he’s wonderful with animals and nature and the world but
nothing just for himself. I don’t remember him ever having a girlfriend. I don’t
remember him ever having anybody. I told the psychiatrist that I quite wanted
Tom to have Stendhal Syndrome. I asked him if he knew that one but Big Nose
shook his head. I knew he’d look it up as soon as I left. Fancy having time to
be a psychiatrist and not knowing all the syndromes. I told him about it.

‘I read
about it in the paper. There was this very nice young man from Oxford, second
year I think, who went on holiday to Florence. Anyway he was forcibly admitted
to the psychiatric wing of some hospital because of Stendhal Syndrome.
Apparently he doesn’t speak much any more but does marvellously detailed
drawings of the genitalia of other patients.’

Fact
—
Stendhal Syndrome is very rare but is a recognised psychiatric
condition. Named after a French novelist who had a very extreme reaction to the
church of Santa Croce. In recent years a number of visitors to great centres of
art like Florence have had unexpectedly intense emotional reactions to certain
masterpieces when seeing them for the first time. The sufferer becomes ‘emotionally
disorientated’ after viewing a moving piece of art. The effect can be so profound
that the visitor loses the power of speech and several people have been found
wandering about Florence and Rome completely incoherent and unable to look
after themselves.

Apparently
he was struck down in the Uffizi Gallery in front of Giotto’s
Madonna in
Glory,
which I looked up. It’s Mary and the baby. Nice picture. She looks
like a mum. The young man was taken to hospital after he was spotted crawling
in the undergrowth of the Bóboli Gardens with a pizza on his head. Since then
he hasn’t spoken at all.’

‘At
all?’ says the shrink.

‘Well,
except to ask for more pepperoni,’ I say.

‘Pepperoni?’

‘No,
sorry. I made that bit up. The pizza, you see? It’s quite taken him over. All
he does all day is draw what the paper called ‘pornographic’ sketches. Mainly
giant penises, I think. Do you know what’s funny?’ Big Nose shook his head.
Nothing it seems is funny. ‘There have been no Italians among the Stendhal
Syndrome patients, but then the Italians aren’t too big on repressed emotion,
are they?’ I stopped and knew I was being stared at.

‘Eve,
why do you keep all this stuff in your head?’ he asks.

‘Because
it’s true. It’s a fact. It’s extraordinary. It’s out there in the world and…’

‘And?’

‘And I’m
not.

Charity
Begins at Home

And a
leper came to Jesus beseeching him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will you
can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him,
and said to him,

‘I
will; be clean.’

(MARK
1:40—42)

I was bleeding again and I
had to sort myself out all the time. William, Adam and John were installing
Mother in the dining room when I came downstairs. They got her into bed and
then disappeared for a beer in the kitchen. Mother sat up and began the routine
that from then on never wavered.

‘Who
ha, who ha!’ came the call, whether she wanted tea, a biscuit or the loo. She
had become a small child again. Now she paid me back for every sacrifice she
had ever made for me. Claudette lay ready for attack in the hall. I dodged past
her and into Mother’s den. My mother. She was so helpless, this woman whose
life had been one long opera of her own devising. I didn’t understand what had
happened. My father, my gentle, kind father.

I wiped
and fed her, cleaned and changed her. I don’t think anyone should wipe their
mother’s bottom. ‘Who ha!’ she called, and banged things to get my attention.
She was my grown-up child. Once she was sorted I sat with her till she fell
asleep. I was going to have sparkling dinner parties in the dining room once the
kids had grown up. Now it smelt of death. My own death. The wallpaper was
yellow and I couldn’t remember if it had always been yellow or if it had gone
yellow. It didn’t look like my sort of colour at all. I could feel my chest
tightening. I couldn’t look down because my feet weren’t my own and now I
seemed to be in someone else’s house. I don’t know how it had happened but I
was in the wrong body in the wrong house. I started sweating and tried to
think about something else.

Rabbit
stew. Salad and rabbit stew. Tom could have salad and the rest of us would have
stew. Adam loves rabbit. Adam loves rabbit… I sat reading the paper till I
was sure Mother had gone off.

The
Guardian
front page had a story about some of the Romanian refugees. They had been
to Glasgow and back though some administration error. Families travelling
through the night to places where no one wanted them. They were angry and there
had been some trouble. Now the opposition was calling for detention camps for
all incomers whatever their status. I suddenly decided I couldn’t just sit any
longer. So I got up, put away my cleaning things and… sat down again. I could
feel blood trickling from me. Another pair of pants ruined.