‘Nil bastardi carborundum,’ muttered Vickie.

  Another man soon moved into the space left by Paul’s father — nature abhors an empty bed — and stayed for three months, before moving on to a less child-encumbered woman; leaving Vickie pregnant.

  And thus Ruth had found her.

  Sales of Mary Fisher’s books were good in Bradwell Park. The women bought them, while the men bought comics such as The Grinning Skull and Monster Man and all felt temporarily better. Video machines were popular, and sex-and-violence films shown as family entertainment within the home, in a way inconceivable in Eden Grove.

  ‘Why can I never find true love?’ Vickie asked Ruth, while Ruth swept through her house, sweeping up orange peel, disposing of old clothes, washing curtains which had never been washed, finding bedspreads and cot covers which had never been used, getting rid of grease and despondency, which so often go together.

  ‘Because you’re always pregnant,’ said Ruth to Vickie.

  But there you are! Some women are born to pregnancy, in spite of pill, coil, cap or God’s calendar. And why should a man bother to thwart a fecund woman, when pregnancy seems to be what she wants, and the State provides? Someone to love, something to do — it’s all any of us want.

  Ruth and Vickie would laugh about it, as they sat in front of the gas fire on winter’s nights. Damp nappies hung sensibly around — there was no money for a dryer, but would be soon, out of Ruth’s contribution to the rent. What a life! Vickie had sometimes vaguely hoped that either Martha or Paul would be out of nappies before the new baby was born, but did little to realise the hope. Well, what can you do about infant kidneys, toddlers’ bladders? They develop in their own time and down the clinic they say toilet training is useless, and even traumatic for the child. And the cold! Ruth sometimes had to wear three pairs of Paul’s father’s socks — he had left all his clothes behind in his attempt to save Vickie’s feelings. He’d lately been sighted, wheeling a pram out shopping on a Saturday afternoon.

  Sister explained it.

  ‘There are some men, my dear, who love the whole process of pregnancy, birth, and new babies, and lose interest as the child grows older. Some women are like that too. Why should such a nature be the prerogative of women? You can’t have it all ways!’

  Vickie had lived in a state of discontent and general surprise that saucepans should be so thin, beds so broken, debts so worrying, and the children not just prone to sore throats and chilblains, but so obstreperous. It was not what she had meant at all. This was not motherhood, as she had dreamed of it, but she had a valiant nature and kept trying. Ruth, by living in the back room, paid for Nutella and Vegemite to spread on the children’s bread, and Nestlés Condensed Milk to put in her coffee, not to mention twenty Marlboro a day and the bus fares to the clinic to receive the emotional counselling and contraceptive advice that might prevent the birth of the child after next — but that child, the fourth, might be a genius, might be the perfect child to which Vickie might be the perfect mother! (Morning sickness had already disappointed her in the third.) Had Ruth thought of that? asked Vickie, half-laughing, half-crying. Wasn’t contraception as wicked as abortion? It certainly felt so, to her. And what did Vickie have to go by in her life but feelings?

  ‘Yes, I had thought of that,’ said Ruth. ‘The possible loss of a genius. But it’s rather like winning the Irish Sweepstake, isn’t it? Simply not likely.’

  There was, Ruth noticed, working in the Catholic Mission opposite the Social Security offices, and offering a free crèche service and refreshments to young mothers, a certain Father Ferguson. When Vickie stopped for a cup of tea, a chat, and a general sit down, it would be Father Ferguson who chatted. Vickie loved him. Father Ferguson said that Vickie was very wise and a daughter of God, and that the clinic, who kept recommending terminations and sterilisations, was very wrong, and indeed wicked. Women’s happiness and fulfilment lay in increasing the flow of souls to God. Father Ferguson came calling on Vickie one day and Ruth asked him in. Vickie was out.

  He looked around the neat and clean, though sparsely furnished room and said, ‘There’s a great difference here. I suppose that’s your doing?’

  ‘It is,’ said Ruth.

  ‘I’m in need of a housekeeper,’ he said.

  ‘So is Vickie,’ observed Ruth.

  ‘Vickie can manage,’ he said. ‘She only has the children to think about. And at least I’d pay you.’

  Ruth said she’d bear it in mind.

  He was a lean, lithe, ascetic man, a natural celibate. He waded through a sea of rampant female flesh, of bosoms and bellies and underarm smells and never turned back or looked to shore. His ears were finely tuned to the music of the spheres, and daily assaulted by the seagull shrieks, the laughter and hysteria of womanhood, yet he never blocked them.

  Ruth left Vickie’s house one Thursday morning, when the frost was thick on the ground, to keep a final appointment with Mr Firth, her dentist. She went to him using the name of Georgiana Tilling. The journey took two and a half hours. One of the features of the western suburbs is its lack of public transport, and the high cost of what small service there is. Ruth was obliged to walk half a mile uphill to the nearest bus-stop, travel a mile and a half by bus to the nearest station, and, once on the train, change twice before reaching her destination, which was in that central part of the city where the wealthiest and most successful doctors and dentists had their rooms.

  Little tropical fish swam in Mr Firth’s surgery, and moving patterns played upon the wall in front of his patient’s eyes. He used acupuncture and hypnotism to alleviate dental pains. Mr Firth was lantern-jawed, benign, and in his caring prime.

  Ruth lay reclined in his new chair and found it was not quite long enough for comfort. Mr Firth examined Ruth’s mouth.

  ‘This is excellent, Miss Tilling,’ he said. ‘You have a remarkable healing capacity: a real gift for recuperation. Your jaw will now stand a good three-inch trim; one inch is usually the most that is contemplated, but new developments in laser technology and micro-surgery make many things possible that have hitherto not been so. You will be making facial history! Of course, to this end, we have had to extract three times as many teeth as we usually do to reduce the dental arch proportionately. I think it has hurt me more than it hurt you — to extract such healthy, powerful, stubborn teeth in the interest of appearance rather than health is not what a dentist likes to do. However, the world moves on, whether we like it or not. I hope you will agree with me that acupuncture is a wonderfully safe and effective means of pain control.’

  ‘Igh hag no effeg on me ath all,’ said Ruth, and after she had spat a little into the swirling mauve water in the steel basin, ‘as you know perfectly well.’

  Mr Firth allowed himself a few more remarks about the antisocial nature of cosmetic surgery inasmuch as it took up the time and skill of highly trained practitioners and on the vanity and frivolity of those women who sought it, then called in his long-legged, blonde receptionist to take Ruth’s money. Ruth paid Mr Firth $1,761, which included $11 to the glowing little hygienist who had done the final smoothing down of the sharp stumps and the fitting of the temporary crowns. Ruth told Mr Firth she would have her stumps permanently crowned elsewhere.

  ‘Do as you think fit,’ he said. ‘I can’t stop you. But you won’t get anyone to do it honestly. They’ll take your money and give you pearly little teeth which won’t match your character and will look ridiculous.’

  ‘Then I shall change my character to fit the teeth,’ said Ruth. ‘Good day!’

  Ruth then went to keep her appointment with Mr Roche, the leading surgeon in the city. His speciality was remodelling noses. He had started as a gynaecologist but had found the burden of responsibility — the giving and taking away of life itself — too onerous. Cosmetic surgery, by comparison, was simple and gratifying.

  Or so he had thought. But Ruth had arrived with wide-ranging, complex and even hazardous cosmetic requirements. He therefore turned to his protégé, Mr Carl Ghengis, for help. Both men were present when Ruth was shown into the consulting room.

  Mr Ghengis was in his late forties, a decade younger than Mr Roche, but a high flyer. He had started life as a garage mechanic; had his appendix removed in his mid-twenties, realised that the human body was no more than a machine, and moved into medicine, beginning his career with false certificates from a non-existent university, and proving so brilliant a doctor that this initial shortcoming, even upon revelation by a spiteful nurse, had been overlooked.

  He had worked for some years as Mr Roche’s assistant, then moved on to California, when the boom in genetic engineering began. He still from time to time visited Mr Roche and took on those few patients whose troubles baffled, worried or frightened his mentor, and who had reasonable financial means. Reasonable, to those used to dealing with multimillionaires means a great deal of wealth indeed. Mr Carl Ghengis was dashing, silky of skin and manner, eager-looking and of slim build. He had soft and gentle eyes and a vaguely dusky complexion. His father was an American, his mother a Goan. He moved like a young man, almost on tiptoe, as if for ever poised for flight. His fingers were pale and long and strong, and flattened at the end, as is a scalpel.

  He took Ruth’s large hands in his, smoothed them and studied them, as a mother might a child’s, then looked up at her. ‘We can change everything but the hands,’ he said. ‘They remain as evidence of our heredity and our past.’

  ‘Then I shall wear gloves,’ said Ruth, impatiently. The possession of much money had made her bold and brisk, and easily irritated.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, for he believed in the power of intimacy, ‘what is it you really want?’

  ‘I want to look up to men,’ she said, better-humoured already, and she laughed her grating, uncomfortable laugh. ‘That’s what I want.’

  You could tighten the vocal chords, he thought, alter the resonance of the voice box and change the laugh. He took nothing for granted. He thought the human body was an imperfect instrument at the best of times, which should be tuned and trimmed until it fitted the soul. Once he himself had had hammer toes; now he had little plastic splints running alongside the bone, keeping them straight, and his toes were sightly by the swimming pool, and more in keeping with his nature. His mother had been poor, he’d worn his elder brother’s shoes: it had done him no good.

  Mr Ghengis and Mr Roche stripped, weighed, photographed and studied Ruth from many angles.

  ‘Better too much than too little!’ joked Mr Ghengis to Mr Roche. ‘Easier to abstract than to add. Do you think she’ll go putrid?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Mr Roche. ‘The gums have healed beautifully. See?’

  They peered into her mouth as if she were a horse and they were trying to guess its age.

  ‘I’d love to have a try at the nose all the same,’ said Mr Roche.

  ‘I’ll fly you out for the nose,’ said Mr Ghengis, kindly.

  ‘You can’t do it here?’ Mr Roche seemed surprised. ‘She’ll have to go abroad?’

  ‘My clinic,’ said Mr Ghengis, ‘in the Californian desert.’

  ‘I could do with a holiday myself,’ said Mr Roche, looking out at the city rain. He returned his attention to the patient. ‘Heart beat’s very slow. Almost out of the normal range.’

  ‘Better too slow than too fast.’

  ‘And a remarkably low blood pressure,’ Mr Roche added.

  ‘All to the good,’ said Mr Ghengis. ‘What isn’t good is the layer of blubber.’

  ‘Can’t you just cut that away too?’ asked Mr Roche.

  ‘Not in too great an area,’ said Mr Ghengis. ‘Better for her to lose the weight now than afterwards, and to do it naturally.’

  ‘How much weight?’ asked Mr Roche.

  Mr Ghengis turned to Ruth, who was pulling on her clothes behind the screen. The screen barely reached shoulder height. ‘When you’ve lost three stone,’ he said, ‘we’ll start.’

  Living with Vickie had been making Ruth fatter day by day. The foods the household could afford to buy were rich in carbohydrate, and the boredom imposed by poverty led the two women to eat constant snacks, and steal scraps from the children’s plates. Sweet coffee and biscuits got them through the long mornings, sweet tea and buns through the dreary afternoons.

  Ruth went home to Vickie and told her that she no longer required the back room.

  ‘But I’m pregnant,’ wailed Vickie, as if this gave her special rights in the world.

  ‘You always will be,’ said Ruth, sadly, packing her few large belongings. The bed here was too short, but whenever had a bed not been so? The bedlinen was thin and sad and, however frequently washed, remained stained with bright splodges where the children had left the tops off felt-tip pens.

  ‘What’s to become of me?’ moaned Vickie, and Martha and Paul hung around Ruth’s large ankles, but she shook them off easily enough. Andy and Nicola had clung with sharper claws. Sometimes Ruth dreamed of her children, and they reached up their little arms to her, but she knew well enough, on waking, that their arms had long outgrown her enfolding.

  ‘If I were you,’ said Ruth, ‘I would sell the unborn baby, in advance, for a large sum, to adoptive parents. And of course Paul and Martha can also be sold. There are many rich people in the world only too anxious to adopt pretty, healthy white children. By so doing you will be giving your children a better start in the world, ensuring them a longer life, more interesting friends, more beautiful sexual partners, and a much more rewarding life in general than if you condemn them to scrape away down here with you, at the bottom of the world’s barrel. Sell them!’

  ‘But I love them!’ cried Vickie in shock.

  ‘But so would their adoptive parents. Little creatures with big eyes bring out caring instincts in almost anything alive. If a baby crocodile so much as whinnies the entire man-eating tribe turns up to find out what’s the matter. And just think, Vickie, you could have a holiday on the proceeds!’

  ‘But they’d miss me. They’d suffer. What about “the bond”?’

  There was much talk of ‘the bond’ down at the clinic, and a good deal done to foster it. It was less taxing on welfare funds to have mothers looking after their own progeny than leaving the State to do it.

  ‘What about their impetigo?’ asked Ruth. ‘What about their chilblains, their dripping noses?’

  Vickie, taking offence at the notion of impetigo, said that if Ruth were going she’d better go at once, and she’d always eaten more than her share anyway, and done less cleaning than her share, but Vickie had held her tongue about it until now.

  ‘And what about sisterhood?’ demanded Vickie. ‘You’re always saying women should stick together. Now look at you!’

  Ruth shrugged. Vickie followed Ruth to the door.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ she said. ‘You’re immoral, heartless and disgusting! I thank God I’m not like you. You think money equals happiness. It doesn’t. How could I possibly exchange my children, the meaning of my life, for money?’

  Vickie ran after Ruth as she got to the gate.

  ‘Supposing I was to do anything so awful,’ said Vickie, ‘supposing I did want to sell the children, how would I go about it?’

  Ruth, who by now knew the ins and outs of the city, the cunning ways of the multitude which lived on the underside, told her. Then she went to visit Father Ferguson. She knew him to be an abstemious man, and if she was to lose three stone she would need to be in a house where the food was meagre and the living lean.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MARY FISHER HAS VERY little money in the bank, and only the High Tower to her name. Her other houses have been sold to defray Bobbo’s legal expenses. The tax authorities, angry with Bobbo and by proxy with Mary Fisher, have decided she owes them very large sums indeed for tax underpaid in previous years. It is Judge Bissop who ratifies their demands, rejecting Mary Fisher’s astonished appeal. Now she has yet more legal fees to pay. Her royalties for years to come are confiscated. The Gates of Desire is nearly finished. She has hopes of it. She has to have some hope, somewhere. People do.

  Mary Fisher wakes alone, writhing and sobbing in her silken sheets. She wants no one else but Bobbo, and there is no one else to want, in any case. Garcia makes love to Joan the village girl in all the stray corners of the house. Mary Fisher remonstrates.

  ‘I’ll do as I please,’ says Garcia. ‘And who are you to object? There was a time you couldn’t even bother to answer the telephone, you were so hard at it, and didn’t care who knew!’

  Mary Fisher is frightened of Garcia, who knows too much and could always tell, though what and to whom she can scarcely remember. All she knows is that she has to keep him happy.

  She sinks into sloth: the pangs of unsatisfied lust grow less, or perhaps she is just used to them. She eats ravioli out of tins, and bags of boiled sweets, and grows thick around the middle.

  She cannot remember Bobbo’s face, any more than he can remember hers. She remembers love, though, and still writes about it. She finishes The Gates of Desire. Her publishers are pleased. Perhaps she will soon be rich again? Perhaps!

  Mary Fisher tosses and yearns and waits to be filled, and writes about love. Her lies are worse because now she knows they are lies. She remembers her past: she understands what she is.

  Mary Fisher did a wicked thing: she set herself up in a high building on the edge of a high cliff and sent a new light beaming out into the darkness. The light was treacherous; it spoke of clear water and faith and life when in fact there were rocks and dark and storms out there, and even death, and mariners should not be lulled but must be warned. It is not just for myself that I look for vengeance.

  I can, I suppose, in the end, forgive Mary Fisher for many things. It was in the name of love that she did what she did, before I brought her to the understanding of what love is; or indeed, of what it is to be abandoned by a husband, to be condemned to a living death of humiliation, anxiety and woe. I daresay I might have done the same myself, had I stood in her little Size 3 shoes. But I don’t forgive her novels. She devils are allowed to be petulant.