Flying Under Bridges (6 page)

Sorry,
I got distracted. They like to keep us busy in here. I’ve been for another ‘session’.
Big Nose, the psychiatrist, and I have been discussing the ‘reasons for my
crime’. Apparently, he says, it is good that I’ve never done it before. I can’t
think why. I mean, I never had the chance before. The barrister says that it is
good that I am ‘intelligent, articulate and personable’. Middle class seems
good too, although she doesn’t say so. I think that comes as a given under ‘articulate’.
The psychiatrist is rather more cheerful today. Rather more confident that we
can find an excusing mental condition for my aberrant behaviour. I imagine it
would be nice to render me harmless with some pathological excuse.

The
Temptation of the Sunday Supplements

Thou has set our inequities before thee, our

secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

(PSALMS
90.8)

I have made the barrister,
Miss March, less confident.

‘Before
that.., day…’ We both know which day she means. I nod conspiratorially as she
lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Had you ever done anything which you, yourself,
might consider to be… wicked?’

I lean
forward to match her and lower my voice. ‘Well…’ She can hardly bear the
suspense. Sits tapping her mobile phone on the desk.

‘Yes,’
I finally say. The pause has been worthwhile. She almost drops the phone. I’m
being mean and it’s not right. It’s only that everyone is watching me all the
time. I wish they would get it all over with. I am quite happy to say I did it
but it seems that won’t do.

‘I see,’
she says, with a rough clearing of her throat. She is faced with a serially bad
person. ‘And what was the nature of these offences?’

‘Oh, I
didn’t say they were offences. Just a bit wicked. That’s what you said — something
wicked.’ She clears her throat again. It makes me almost maternal.

‘Would
you like a fruit gum?’ She shakes her head so I pick up my tapestry and begin
sewing. I think I seem calm but I’m not really. I have terrible flashes of
feeling quite sick. I don’t know how things got to here. It’s not where I
belong. It’s not how things should have turned out and I have been wicked
before. Not big things. Just stupid things because everything was always the
same. Because nothing ever changed.

I was
born in
1955.
I was a teenager in the sixties, I was heading for grown
up in the seventies. Everything was supposed to have changed since my mother
had me. Since she regretted everything about her life and me. I went to school
with a lot of girls with plans. We all had plans and then when I had my children
I met my friends again. I met them in the same playground where my mother had
waited. I met them waiting for their children. Regretting. You see, nothing
had changed. It was all talk. But I didn’t regret. Not till the very end.

The
lawyer starts tapping again. Maybe she thought we were getting somewhere. ‘What
sort of wicked things?’

‘Oh
nothing, just daft really. I started sending off for ads. You know, from the
newspapers, Sunday magazines, that sort of thing. There’s quite a lot in the
Sunday
Telegraph.
Well, I had started reading all the papers and then I noticed
all these ads —shoes for the wider fitting, stair-lifts for the terraced home,
trousers with elasticised waists in non-crease man-made fibres, holidays for
the elderly-but-active sun-seeker, nylon sofa covers and snuggle bags for wet
dogs in the back of saloon cars. The first one happened because I was cross
about the charity shop. I filled in Betty Hoddle’s name and address on a coupon
for incontinence pants in a range of autumn colours and sent it off. After
that I started sending all sorts of things to people in the town. Plastic drain
cover brochures, sonic pest repellents, anything really, although I did try to
match the item to the person I was sending it to.’

‘And
what was their reaction?’

‘Well,
I’ve no idea. I mean, no one knew it was me. It seemed rather harmless in the
great scheme of things. I suppose it was irresponsible but it’s not like I took
to drink or anything.’

‘Had
you been drinking at the time of the… incident?’

‘No. Not
at all.’

‘That’s
good.’

‘Yes.’

Everyone
is very pleased that I hadn’t been drinking. That would have made the killing
very unladylike, which would have been even worse. A man killing someone while
he was drunk might have used it as a defence, but for a woman it painted her as
even more satanic. That’s what the girls on my wing tell me. They’re really
very nice for criminals. I had not been drinking, but the fact is I have been
wicked. It is a bad thing. It fuzzes the lines between whether the jury will
vote for me or not. I have been naughty. Miss March has been clear with me.

‘But
you had been violent before.

‘I don’t
think so.’

Miss
March looks at her notes. ‘I have here that one evening in your parents’ house
you knocked your sister out with a blow to the head.’

‘I can
explain. She wanted me to. You see—’

‘The
fact remains, Mrs Marshall, that the world is divided into two types of female
defendant — those who merit compassion and those who don’t. It is very important
that we get the jury on your side. These incidents will not help. Now would you
say that you were good at your job?’

‘I didn’t
have a job. I was a housewife.’

‘Yes,
but were you good at it? You understand the probation officers will go and see
what sort of house you maintained.’

‘I
maintained?’

‘Yes.
How your family will or will not cope without you has an important bearing on
the final judgment or the sentence you might expect.’

Quick,
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, you must return me to the bosom of my family
or they may burst with germs. I try to think about my house. It seems very far
away. Was I good at running it? Did I maintain a nice home? We never ran out of
toilet paper and I put blue air-fresheners down all the drains. Would that save
me staying in jail? Did anyone value it? Certainly not Adam or Shirley. Neither
one of them would have seen running the house as ‘a complex task requiring high
levels of management skills’. If Adam had done it things would have been
different. The house would have been filled with little plaques for Employee of
the Month with his name all over them.

Fact
—
the Stoics believed that disciples, who were often from very
wealthy families, needed to do menial work before they learnt anything. They
taught that until a person had learnt to bear physical hardships and the social
embarrassment of doing a slave’s labours, they couldn’t acquire wisdom. I must
be very ready for learning.

I look
at Miss March. She is young. She has made it. I am merely a rung on her case ladder
to success. Why didn’t I become a barrister? I wasn’t stupid at school. Why did
I sit at home for so long feeling the hairs on my chin? Why did it take so long
for me to wonder what I was for? To want to know why I had come?

In my
house I could see out of the kitchen window from my chair at the breakfast bar.
If I had the chair just right I could see out and watch the television at the
same time. Our house is on a new estate. The Much Sought-After Palmer Estate
with its Convenient Shopping Facilities. So convenient, in fact, that I could
see them at the end of the road. From one chair I could take in my entire
horizon — the house, the shops and the TV. There are eight houses on the way
and inside each one sat a housewife, sipping coffee. We didn’t get together
much, any of us. Too much to do. Hypnotised by the fear of lingering odours in
the fridge or unwanted pet hairs on the hall carpet. The estate has moulded
miniature gardens. We were like those little pockets of air in bubble-wrap —
separated into claustrophobic isolation.

I kept
a small mirror on the breakfast bar for my chin work. Almost every day there
seemed to be a new hair that had sprouted. I pulled them out with a very fine
pair of tweezers I kept just for the purpose. I went through a lot of tweezers
before I found the right ones. I got them out of Adam’s Swiss Army knife. I
didn’t tell him, but it is a loss that we discussed for some time. The hairs
are tough and when you pull them out there is a great, fat, white root on them
that was buried in my chin. I hold them up to the light from the window and
examine them. They are sturdy things. Dandelions of the face that will not be
eradicated no matter how often you weed them away. I sometimes wonder if it
wouldn’t be best just to let them have their head, so to speak. Just let them
grow and see what kind of facial growth I could achieve. I quite fancy a
twirling moustache.

‘Aha!’
I would cry with a flourish of handlebar hair. ‘It is time to conquer the
germs, to annihilate the enemies of hygiene.’ I stand with my gun hand ready on
the trigger of a disinfectant spray. ‘You cannot hide from me. I am not alone.
I have a robot army of machines, oceans of water and detergent and an array of
technicians who, with a single phone call, will leap to my aid.’

I rush
to the bathroom ready to destroy. My moustaches flail in the air. I raise the
lid of the toilet and cry, ‘You cannot escape. Incoming at nine o’clock.
Brrrrrr!’ The droning of an attack in full flight departs my lips as I dare to
approach that most sinister of places — under the rim of the toilet bowl. I
spray and death comes.

It’s
just like that. Then, when at last it is time for coffee, I know that I can
rest. My cupboards are neat and orderly. My jellies are ranked in colour
order. I can find a small tin of baked beans with my eyes shut and then… I
start again because I do not want to think.

‘The
housewife who must wait for the success of world revolution for her liberty
might be excused for losing hope.’ Germaine Greer. Bloody Germaine Greer. Hadn’t
she got something better to do than fill people’s heads with rubbish? If I’d
never joined those classes none of this might have happened.

The
barrister leafs through her notes. ‘Your husband says things had started to
slip before.., the incident.’

‘He
does?’

‘Yes.
He says he found… rotting fruit under the radiators…’

Fact
—
the plum is part of the rose family. The plum tree flower has
an enlarged basal portion called the pistil. The pistil is the ovary of the
fruit. The outer part of the ovary ripens into a fleshy, juicy exterior, making
up the edible part, and a hard interior, called the stone or pit. The seed is
enclosed within the stone. According to the earliest writings in which the plum
is mentioned, the species is at least 2,000 years old. Ancient writings connect
early cultivation of these plums with the region around Damascus.

I’ve
been trying to take up smoking while I’m in here but I can’t seem to get the
hang of it. I’ve tried lots of times before. I wondered if I could use those nicotine
patches smokers use to stop, and build up to smoking gradually? It would be
something to do while I sit — smoking. I’m forty-five and never puffed a fag
behind a bicycle shed.

God,
stick to one thing at a time. The news. I know the news is not my business, but
it used to keep me awake at night. All those Kosovan refugees with nowhere to
go. Muslims who hate Christians who hate Muslims… Shirley used to tell me I
should pray. The last time we were in the kitchen alone together she wanted to
hold my hand with her eyes shut.

‘I’m
making it my mission for you to see the way, Mum,’ she said, while I was trying
to get some garibaldis out of the bottom cupboard.

I’m
sorry, I’m drifting. I want to tell you about the day of the lunch because it
matters. We had to wait for Adam’s ‘little friend’, his injured member, to
settle down before we could get in the car to go. He wasn’t at all well.

‘I don’t
think I can drive,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, so we went in my car. I
knew he was badly wounded because he hates me driving. It’s not just me. He
hates anyone else being behind the wheel. Sits sucking in his breath every time
I turn a corner. It makes me nervous so I rather lurched out of the drive.

‘It’s
not my fault,’ I said, feeling defensive at the first suck of his breath. ‘There’s
something funny about the automatic gearbox. I know it’s supposed to change
gears on its own, but not when you’re not expecting it.’

‘Eve,
you must get this car seen to,’ Adam said for the millionth time. And he was
right. I should have. It was another thing I had put off having fixed. I looked
in the mirror to pull out and I could see that I was frowning my supermarket
frown.

‘The
mechanic always treats me as though I am stupid,’ I said, narrowly avoiding
hitting a bus. Adam sucked on his teeth. I didn’t tell him that I had written
off for a book about cars from
Reader’s Digest.
The ad said it explained
everything and you got a free forty-piece socket set. Perhaps I could be less
stupid. We sat silently for a moment.