Dark Dance (24 page)

‘All right.’ Rachaela went from the woman and found a chair at the end of the line.

About thirty in front of her. Surely some of them were together. It was ten to seven now.

The frog princess was the nearest to the yellow door. Presumably when one went in, they all moved up a chair, into the heat of the previous sitter, intimately. We are all women. We are bound to protect ourselves. The cap and the pill, the scrape of the spatula taking our smear, to save us from semen and from cancer. We are the responsible ones.

But there were children with the women here and there, subdued children eating chips or drawing on pieces of paper on the floor.

Fourteen-year-olds with kids and thick mascara, slim with strange fat faces that had not lived, but had overseen, screaming and crying, the birth of offspring from the trunk below.

Certainly, none of them looked afraid. They were all quite comfortable in their evening club, the Family Planning Clinic.

I’m afraid I haven’t planned. Heavy with child I come to ask for an extraction.

Would this one listen?

Was it to be the man from behind the yellow door? She had hoped it would be a woman on this visit. A woman’s touch would be less horrible, perhaps.

But these were all women. Look at them.

The needles of that one clocking like Madame Defarge, her soiled yellow hair piled up on her head and red lipstick like a gaping wound. And there one writing, probably a letter, holding the paper sideways and chewing her nails.

The hall smelled of women, too. Cheap scent and costlier scent like fly spray, sticky underarm deodorant, hair lacquer, babies and washing-up hands.

Rachaela felt sick. If that happened, where was the lavatory? There must be one. She should have asked.

She could feel
it,
pressing against her belly from beneath, like solid indigestion.

Try not to think of it. She took slow breaths of the nauseating air.

A girl in a purple suit began to talk to her friend beside her.

‘I don’t like this waiting. Gets on me nerves.’

Teah.’

Yes
, thought Rachaela.

‘Don’t know what he’ll say this time. I reckon he fancies me.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Well why not?’

‘It’s more’n his job’s worth.’

The purple girl toyed with a packet of cigarettes beneath the ‘No Smoking’ sign, playing with them like a toy. If she could not consume them at least she could hold them.

‘He keeps on, give it up. I’ve tried ain’t I? I started with all that worry.’

‘Yeah.’

‘All them counsellors and psychiatrics. Was I sure? ‘Cause I’m bleeding sure. Can’t have another kid can I? Can’t afford it and he’ll leave me.’

‘Oh Lyn.’

‘Well he would have. We was in a fix as it was. An’ I took the bloody pill. I did. Regular. And then I goes up the shute. That would have been number three.’

‘Lyn, you always go on.’

‘It’s this place. It reminds me. All them psychiatrics at the hospital. I had to see four of them. Like a bloody judge and jury, trying to persuade me to have it. I can’t have it. I’ve got two already.’

Rachaela listened, her eyes on the wooden floor. To one who had travelled before her.

‘Well, you got rid of it, Lyn,’ said the unfriendly friend.

‘It was a struggle. And then the way they treat you. And the pain. Christ, I thought it would be all right. I’ve never been right since. You know I ain’t. I couldn’t bear him near me after.’

That was psychological. They told you it was.’

‘No it weren’t. They done something to me, the clumsy buggers. They treat you like shit when you go in for it.’

The yellow door opened and a slim, fat-faced young girl came out, looking satisfied.

The god emerged again and went to the desk. He gave instructions and vanished once more.

‘Miss Garland,’ sang out the woman in lilac, and the frog princess, sucking her sweet without fear, went forward and inside the door.

The Defarge woman dropped a stitch and cursed.

‘I’m going outside for a fag,’ said the purple girl. She got up and left the hall.

A new picture. Probes for the body and others probing at the mind. The team of psychiatrists, trying to delve the reasons of the would-be terminator. Would it be enough to be afraid? No. The dream she had had, lying on the beach and the sea coming in, split open and fire running out of her guts, that would not be enough.

Of course, they would not make it simple. It must not be easy. She bore a life. She could not merely flush her body like a toilet bowl.

The girl next up from Lyn’s friend was discussing food. ‘A nice cut of steak and fry it up with onions. I could give him that every night. It’s no good me saying, Tony, it’s bad for you. You’ll get a heart attack. And try giving him salad. Chips with everything. Our ceiling’s black from frying chips. Running with grease. He makes me sick.’

She had done the favour for Rachaela.

Rachaela rose and walked quickly out of the hall.

Outside the night came thankfully cold, a smell of external houses and open street. The glare of the nauseous streetlights which made the world faceless and colourless.

The purple girl, now in black, stood by the fence smoking greedily. She glanced at Rachaela and away.

It was not possible to ask her questions. In any case, everything was now revealed. A difficult business. A humiliating struggling business. Ending in harsh treatment and pain, and a lingering scar.

She could hear the adjacent streetlight sizzling like a radioactive isotope. The earth was alive with poisons, and surrounded by the threat of outer space. What use was anything.

The abortioned girl stared after Rachaela as she walked out of the gate and back along the street. There was a faint affront on the girl’s face, as if she knew Rachaela had denied herself a similar vileness and suffering, the secrets of the female club.

Over the Beethoven concerto, the door was knocked upon.

Rachaela lay in the chair, listening to the echo.

Why should she go?

It was no one. Some mistake. When she had been here three days a man had trailed up the stairs, let in by another tenant, hammering on her door. ‘Do the Chambers live here?’ She had told him they did not. He was disbelieving and finally she shut the door in his face.

The door was knocked upon again. A muffled woman’s voice. ‘It’s only me. Downstairs, Flat Five.’

Rachaela lifted herself from the chair.

Was this too some part of the Scarabae plot? For yes, there was a plot. Of course there was.

She opened the door. It was the fair, greying woman from below.

‘Sorry to disturb you. An absolutely ridiculous request. You couldn’t let me have a little milk? I’ve been so chilled all day, made myself cup after cup of coffee and tea, and I’ve run out. The milkman delivers tomorrow. I can let you have it back quite quickly.’

Rachaela said, ‘There’s only carton milk.’

‘Oh that’s perfect, if you can spare it.’

Rachaela went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. She took out her three-quarters-f carton.

The woman stood on the grey carpet. ‘How attractive you’ve made it,’ she said, ‘and no clutter. I truly admire that. I’m afraid mine’s a cross between a library and a curiosity shop.’

Rachaela thought of all her books left behind.

The Beethoven played on, oblivious.

‘Can you spare all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, thank you so much. As I say—’

Don’t bother. I’ve another carton,’ Rachaela lied.

‘But I must.’

The woman paused. ‘That’s Number Three isn’t it? I’m a fan of Beethoven. I love his fury. Why shouldn’t the poor thing get angry, going deaf as he did?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d better introduce myself.’ Rachaela only looked at her. Undaunted, apparently, the woman said, ‘Emma Watt. Mrs. Not that that counts any more. My poor old love died two years ago. I sold the house and took the flat. Tried to squeeze myself really small.

We all have our own funny ways of trying to deal with pain.’

And the pain. Christ
...

‘Anyway,’ said Mrs Emma Watt quickly after all, ‘I expect you’re busy. Thanks again for the milk. I’ll pop up and put a bottle outside your door tomorrow.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘But I must.’

She went into the hall and brightly down the stairs with a brave self-sufficient smile, for Rachaela’s benefit.

What would it be like to be Emma Watt, fifty years old, sad and alone and brightly squeezed into her too-small flat?

What would it be like to be the purple girl, frigid from anxiety, and child-bearing behind her?

There was no escape. She was Rachaela, here and now.

In her belly the thing lay, embedded, coiled.

The Pizza Eater took on Rachaela, gave her a red dress and a pale green apron, and asked her to put up her hair. She plaited it, which seemed to satisfy them.

She worked from ten in the morning until six, or from three until eleven-thirty. Some of the late customers were drunk, but normally well-behaved. Often, delayed by the clearing up, she did not leave the premises until midnight. In addition to serving the wood-plastic tables, she cut sandwiches, grilled steaks, scooped out ice-cream, piled pizzas in boxes for a take-away service, and now and then washed up.

She grew accustomed, as she had before, to her feet hurting and burning, to the rudeness and tiplessness of many customers, and the matey chatter of her fellow workers of both sexes. She received lunch or dinner free from the restaurant, but the food did not really appeal to her. Sometimes she managed a rare steak or else ate salad and ice-cream. It saved her efforts at the flat.

She came to terms with the computerized till, which often she had to deal with. One afternoon she gave a pound short on the change which had showed up in emerald numerals before her face. The customer did not notice; and by the time she realized, he had gone. On her own at the till, Rachaela removed the extra pound and kept it.

The Pizza Eater was only twenty minutes walk away from the flat.

For the first seven weeks she was meticulously on time. Then, when she was late, it was never more than ten or fifteen minutes, which the other employees frequently bettered, coming in half an hour over the odds due to tube delays or traffic jams.

Rachaela thought of the job as temporary. Something more soothing would present itself. Meanwhile the money was not bad, and forgetting the occasional pound in change proved a useful means of saving. Only once had the customer checked his money and informed her she had short-changed him. Rachaela looked flustered, apologized, and fished the extra note out of the till. ‘That’s all right,’ he said blithely. ‘Anyone can make a misnnetake.’

The other mistake she ignored.

At the time when most women, so a solitary book from the library had informed her, began to experience sickness, Rachaela stopped. She had no symptoms, except that no monthly showing of blood took place. Her waist widened a little, her hips. She took care of that by moving the buttons on her skirts, then buying a larger size. She bought loose T-shirts. So far the red dress, always too large, fitted.

The weather verged through a blustery spring into a rainy May. The trees in the distance of the windows flowered into mop-heads of shining green. The grey and stormy skies made them if anything greener. Chickweed pushed through the pavements. The city was all cracks and crevices wetly fruiting, burgeoning. The weather lied. It was nearly summer.

She did not think about the thing inside her now. She put it out of her mind.

As if to compound her plan, it gave no real evidence that it was there.

Perhaps her greatest defiance, the extravagant music centre she had ordered from the junk mail, arrived when she was out at the restaurant.

Arriving home at half past twelve at night, Rachaela found it in the downstairs hall, another tenant had obviously taken it in.

Rachaela proceeded to lug the boxes upstairs three flights.

On her last journey, as she was passing Number Five, the door opened and Emma Watt looked out.

‘Good heavens, I thought it was the broker’s men! Oh goodness, you shouldn’t be carrying that, let me help you. No I insist.’

And so, aided by Emma Watt, Rachaela carried the last box up to her flat.

‘Do you mean you brought all those up too? And some of them look quite heavy. These firms nowadays, they’re so bad. Couldn’t the man have brought them up? In your condition—oh, I’m sorry,’ said Emma Watt, blushing. ‘That sounds so nosy. I mean you hardly show, but I couldn’t help seeing, you’re so slight—and well, I had three myself, and I’ve seen my daughters through it. I hope you don’t mind that I said anything.’

‘No.’

‘You must be careful,’ said Emma Watt. ‘I’m sure it’s all right this time, but you shouldn’t carry anything heavier than a handbag—that’s what my old love used to say. He used to add that my handbags would make a strong man blench.’

Rachaela, as if by suggestion, felt suddenly weak. She sat on the bed.

‘There you see. You’ve overdone it. Can I make you a cup of tea?’

‘I’m quite all right.’

‘I will any way. Don’t worry, I won’t stop, just a quick cup of tea. Your kitchen’s through here, isn’t it, like mine? You just relax. Put your feet up.’ From the kitchen the sound of water and a surprised, ‘You don’t have a pot—just use the bag then. They’re so convenient, aren’t they.’

Rachaela stared at the boxes. Would she ever have the strength to undo them.

‘What’s in those?’ asked Emma, coming back out. ‘Is it a music centre? Can you put it together yourself? I’m hopeless at anything like that. If you have any trouble try the little man in Horsley Street, the electricals place. He’s splendid. He wired all my lamps for me and fixed my washing machine.’

‘I’ll remember.’

‘Kettle won’t be a moment. Oh you must be so tired. You work late, don’t you. I often hear you come in—please don’t think you disturb me, you’re very quiet, and I’m always up till one or two. Terrible sleeper. I’ve got some pills but they make me feel like a rag in the mornings. And I love the mornings. I get up at seven. Always have. Oh, please don’t think I’m prying, but I’d love to know. When is your baby due?’