Natalie didn’t tell the children anything about the rumour that their father had run off with a beauty queen. She was not that kind of mother. Now me, I used to tell my children everything, because there was no one else to tell and I’m a blabbermouth. This may be part of the reason they’ve taken the children away from me. People think kids ought to be spared the truth: it really upsets them when they’re not. Though I don’t see why the mere fact of their childhood should earn them this special concession. What happens happens; and when the bailiffs come what’s the use of telling the children it’s the ratcatcher? The television goes and the rats stay, and the kids are the first to notice. But that’s another story.
What Natalie did, on the way home from Coombe Barrow School, was to pass me, Sonia, filing home with my three little girls, Teresa, Bess and Edwina. And she actually stopped to give us a lift. Too late for me to lift the curse, of course, but better than nothing.
Young Ben was horrified at his mother’s act of kindness. Young Ben, at twelve, looked like his father, admired his father and made a special effort to be like his father. He had really enjoyed life in the Gambia, where Harrix had operated when he was small. But then his father had packed up and come home rather suddenly: it doesn’t do in some countries to leave too many bills unpaid. Ben had really appreciated swimming pools and servants and the sense of superiority that being white gives a child. (It had just made his mother feel too hot and absurdly pink and sweaty). Alice had been rather more in favour of coming home. Alice was a softie: she’d wept at the sight of flies crawling over babies’ eyes.
‘They’re not like us,’ Ben would say. ‘They don’t feel it. Do shut up, Alice.’ But she hadn’t. Now, back in England, she wept at the thought of battery hens, though she went on eating chicken. What it came down to was that Alice would weep at anything. Some will, some won’t. Ben was right: she was a softie.
Now picture the scene, as I try to, impartially. (Practise looking in, my psychiatrist says, on your own life. Not looking out. See yourself as others see you!) Teresa, Bess and Edwina piled into the back seat next to Ben and Alice, and Sonia eased her pneumatic bulk in next to Natalie. Sonia didn’t eat more than anyone else. Honestly. It was just depression and unhappiness made her blow up. (I know what he’s going to say even before he says it. ‘Blow up?’ my shrink will say. ‘Interesting you should use that word. Perhaps what you’re talking about is not depression after all, not unhappiness, but rage.’ Too bad!) Right or wrong, and be that as it may, Sonia, once an eight-stone stripling, was now a twelve-stone bubble. Now let’s overhear the conversation.
‘This is good of you,’ said Sonia, trying not to sound sarcastic. ‘I suppose the dog is all right with the children?’ Jax, who usually looked steadfastly out of the back of the car, had turned his head to look at the invaders of his territory and was baring his teeth.
‘Perfectly all right,’ said Natalie, her eyes on the road.
‘He’s baring his teeth,’ observed Sonia.
‘That’s only his smile,’ said Natalie, wondering why she had bothered to pick up Sonia. That ‘the underprivileged were always ungrateful’ was one of Harry’s maxims. ‘If you want a kick in the teeth,’ he’d say, ‘go out and help someone.’
‘If that’s his smile,’ said Sonia, ‘I wouldn’t like to see him scowl.’
‘Could I ask you something?’ said Natalie.
‘Ask away.’
‘It’s about social security,’ said Natalie.
‘And what makes you think I know anything about social security?’ demanded Sonia. She wasn’t easy, by any means. Why should she be? ‘Does it show in my clothes, or something? Do I walk like a supplicant? No? Well, don’t apologize. As it just so happens, I do know a thing or two. Why do you want to know? Is it for a fancy-dress party? Are you dressing up, or rather down, as someone on the dole? Second-hand clothes, that’s all you need. You can borrow some of mine if you like.’
‘I just wondered,’ said Natalie, patiently, ‘where the offices were. I can’t seem to find them in the telephone book.’
‘You look under DHSS,’ said Sonia. ‘Department of Health and Social Security. You don’t know much, do you?’
‘Not really, no,’ said Natalie.
‘If you take me first left and then second right, you’ll be in Boxover Estate,’ said Sonia. ‘You can drop us there.’ Natalie had to take Sonia right to her front door, in spite of being so low in petrol. Sonia lived at no. 19 Wendover, Boxover: one of a row of small modern homes, each no different to the last, except that the front garden of no. 19 was perhaps more dilapidated than the others, and strewn with children’s toys.
‘The most boring place on earth,’ said Sonia, unwedging herself from the front seat, ‘but my home! Thanks for the lift. Any time you want to pick my brains, feel free.’
‘Why do people like that always live in such a mess?’ asked Ben on the way home. ‘It doesn’t cost them anything just to tidy it up, does it? But they’d rather live off the rest of us than lift a finger for themselves.’
As his father spoke, so spoke Ben. And you might well think the lad was better off without him; but I don’t know: a father’s a father, no matter what political sentiments he has.
Sonia waved goodbye to the Volvo and went inside her slovenly home, given to her by courtesy of a benign if querulous state.
That is to say, I went inside. Now my shrink is a grave and amiable fellow and on the whole I trust him. I am doing my best to relate me now, idle and childless, to the ‘me’ of then, the one who fed and dressed and lived around, by, with and from Teresa, Bess and Edwina. But such a thing is difficult if only because, apart from anything else, the woman without children is so very different from the woman with. And to practise ‘objectivity’, to third-personalize, which he likes me to do, may well reduce the ego, but it doesn’t half fracture one’s sense of continuing identity, already seriously threatened. I hope he knows what he’s doing. The shrink, incidentally, hates being referred to as a shrink. Why do I wish to diminish him, he asks? Why do I wish to make him cosy and familiar, as if the world were a neat, clean, jokey place, not the fearful nexus of chaos we know it to be? My words, not his. He’s not a ‘fearful nexus of chaos’ man. These things are important, is all he says. That, and ‘continue with the creative writing therapy. It’s worked for others, why not with you?’
Well, I could tell him. I have monsters inside my head, with slavering fangs and blood-red eyes, out of whose mouths devils pour, and I daresay the others he speaks of haven’t. I do my best to keep things light, for his sake. That’s why I go on calling him ‘shrink’ – to diminish the monsters, not him. And as for ‘important’! What does he know about important? He has a proper computer inside his head, lucky man; inside my head are heaps of dead babies over which naked old ladies swarm like maggots, and pits piled with charring bones into which living babies fall and are lost. I don’t tell him about the charnel house, which is our real existence, and of which I have arcane knowledge. He’ll go to heaven or he’ll go to hell, and since he’s probably going to heaven he need never know about the other. Why should I upset him by telling him? I am an arsonist and a murderer, or at any rate a woman-slaughterer: they’ll never let me out of here. I should be grateful that he talks to me so much. He doesn’t have to. Do you know, after all that happened, all my efforts, Teresa, Bess and Edwina went to live with their father? I expect they’re happy. Little girls need their daddy. I hope he’s told them I’m dead, that’s all, so they don’t think I’m callously neglecting my maternal duties. I would practise them were I in a position to do so.
So, where are we? Dinner time!