Flying Under Bridges (17 page)

I
looked blank, so Mrs Batik, who’d started the whole thing, ploughed on. ‘They
harvest natural oestrogen from the urine of pregnant mares. The mares are
fitted with a collection cup, which is attached to the horse who is then
confined to a narrow stall for the whole eleven-month pregnancy. It’s huge
business. There are over eighty thousand mares in US urine farms. And why do
women do it? Hmmm?’

She
seemed to look straight at me. I rummaged through back issues of
Cosmo
in
my mind and made a stab in the dark.

‘Does
it make your skin look younger?’

‘Oh
that, yes, and keeps your eyes moist, improves your husband’s sex life, stops
glaucoma, Alzheimer’s, but at what cost?’

I didn’t
know but I thought it sounded pretty good on the surface.

‘Are we
nearly ready, Theresa, only I’ve got to—’ whispered the ferret woman.

‘Yes,
yes, just waiting for Brian to go out. He’s off to the pub.’

Martha
leant over and whispered to me. ‘Brian’s Theresa’s partner. There’s something
wrong with the boiler and he’s just looking at it.’

We sat
and waited for Brian to be brilliant with boilers followed by being ready to
leave. I should have gone then but I hadn’t finished my wine and there was a
slightly uncomfortable silence that I couldn’t think how to break. We’d done
urine farms and didn’t know each other well enough to move on till Brian had
gone. Martha is younger than me and so were the other women in the group. Not
by much, but I felt out of place. I don’t normally drink but I couldn’t think
of anything else to do. We all had a good sup till finally Brian appeared in
the door.

‘All
sorted,’ he said, looking awkward. ‘Well, you girls have a good time. We chaps’ll
be in the pub!’ He laughed rather heartily. ‘Right. Bye then.’ Brian waved
goodbye and after a moment we all waved back. Then we sat and waited for the
front door to close before my sister began.

‘Right,
well, welcome to the Edenford Women’s Study Group and to what I hope will be a
regular Tuesday gathering. A meeting where we will come together not to change
the world but to reassess our place in it.’ So far so good, I thought. I quite
wanted to reassess my place in the world. Indeed, I wasn’t at all sure that I
even had one. I had never seen Martha at work and it was fascinating to watch
as she flowed on.

‘Right,
how many of you managed to read
The Female Eunuch
and
The Whole Woman
before you came?’ She held up a copy of
The Whole Woman
by Germaine
Greer. I’d read about it in the paper but I hadn’t seen a copy till then. It
wasn’t something Mr Wilton carried in the bookshop. That was where I first
heard about it. ‘Now you won’t need me to tell you that the key to this book is
the castration of women.’

There
was a lot of general nodding so I had some more wine. ‘And we need to examine
that, quite literally. Why are we castrated?’ Before anyone had a chance to
answer, Martha was off. ‘I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that
as women, our genitalia are hidden. How many of us in this room have ever
really examined our sexual organs?’ Despite the large amount of batik and the
small number of brassieres in the room, it wasn’t a question that evoked a big
response.

‘I
think,’ said the little ferret woman, ‘that the problem is with communication.
I mean with men and their language.’

I
nodded because Adam and I often seem to speak a different language, but so too,
it seemed, did the ferret woman. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that everything about
sexual relations with men is put in the language as a sort of poking, isn’t it?
Something that happens
to
us not with us.’

‘Fucking,’
said Mrs Batik.

‘Screwing
and shagging,’ said someone else.

‘What
about rooting?’ said Theresa. What about it? I thought. I’d never even heard of
it.

The
ferret woman was on a roll. ‘I think we need to change our whole attitude to
sex. We need to embrace the penis, not just take it.’ There was a pause after
this. I don’t know whether we were supposed to think about what she said or
just contemplate the very idea of her having sex at all. She seemed such a
little, shy thing.

‘Exactly!’
exclaimed Martha, as if the whole evening were going to plan. ‘Thus
self-examination. For too long the womb has been seen as a source of weakness
and, indeed, wickedness. A source of hysteria, menstrual depression and
unfitness for any sustained enterprise. What we need is womb-pride.’

What I
needed was not to cook the dinner every day but it seemed like a bad time to
mention it.

‘That’s
what I’m saying,’ said the ferret. ‘I’m not just some hole waiting to be
filled. I’m not just a vacuum. I’m a woman.

‘What
is the worst word anyone can think of?’ asked Mrs Batik.

I quite
liked the question. It reminded me of midnight feasts at school when no one had
been able to stay awake past ten o’clock and it all got a bit silly.

‘Bugger,’
I said.

‘No.
Worse than that,’ admonished Mrs Batik. No one wanted to say, not even the
ferret, so Theresa did.

‘Cunt,’
she proclaimed, and then looked through the door to make sure Brian hadn’t come
back. The word was like a trigger for Martha.

‘Exactly.
You see,’ she said. ‘You’re all shocked. So where does that leave us? We can’t
say the name of a part of the female body but everyone’s quite happy to sit and
watch death and destruction every day on their televisions without doing a
thing about it. Day after day, endless reports of atrocities, nobody gets their
arses off the sofa. One mention of a cunt on the television and everyone would
be writing to Anne Robinson.’

Theresa
chose that moment to draw me into the discussion. ‘Eve, what do you think?’

‘I
think we might change the subject,’ I managed rather weakly.

Martha
nodded. ‘All right. Let’s talk penis size.’

I was
too far from the door to leave and she seemed to be talking straight at me. I
had some more wine while my sister, my little sister in my parent’s sitting
room, went on.

‘Why is
it that men are allowed to be obsessed with the size of their sexual organs
while women are supposed to keep theirs nice and tidy? Men want to swing
through the world like an elephant’s trunk sucking up peanuts, but no woman
wants a twat the size of a horse collar — and I quote here from Germaine.’

‘We
were born the companion of man and became his slave,’ said a woman in white,
who so far had said nothing but had eaten all the twiglets.

‘I
think inside each of us there is a voracious, questing creature waiting to get
out,’ added Theresa, who sounded like she was quoting too.

Martha
kept nodding like one of those toy dogs on the parcel shelf of Ford Fiestas. ‘Now,
I know it’s a tricky area for beginners, but we’re going to plunge right in
with a self-examination class. Probably not something many of you have given
much thought to. A little scary, but trust me. I have been teaching Women’s
Studies in the Far East for many years and they think nothing of it.’

Well, I
thought self-examination was something to do with the Open University and I had
thought about that, so for a moment I was glad I’d come. Anyway it turned out
to be something else entirely. Martha was very matter of fact.

‘You
will all learn the value of this!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘This,’ she
said ‘is a speculum.’ And she produced a thing made of clear plastic with two
handles. A bit like a nutcracker really.

‘Now it’s
very simple,’ she explained. ‘You simply take the speculum and pop one end up
yourself and then open the handles wide and look in with a mirror.’

I felt
quite ill. I think if she’d done a practical demonstration I’d have passed out.
But they were only a pound and I thought I’d better buy one just to show willing.
I’d never felt so foolish or ignorant. The rest of the meeting passed in a bit
of a haze. All I remember is Martha’s final benediction as I rode out of the
door on a wave of cheap wine and horse urine.

‘Remember,
Eve!’ she called after me, ‘liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.’

When I
got home I left the speculum thing in my handbag but I couldn’t stop thinking.
What if I had one of those diseases they’d been talking about? Maybe that was
why I kept bleeding. I didn’t want someone else poking about inside me but
maybe I could have a look. See if there was something wrong. A woman should
know her own body. Look for my ‘voracious, questing creature’. It’s what I was
thinking about when we went to the tennis party.

There
were two things in the paper the morning of the tennis party. One that caught
my eye and one that actually got Adam’s attention. The first was on the front
page and it was about the Romanians. Romanian refugees. The Home Secretary was
looking for towns to volunteer to take some of them.

‘They
could come here,’ I said. ‘Edenford’s got plenty of room.’

‘Play
havoc with the traffic,’ said Adam.

‘I don’t
think they’ve got cars,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they’ve got anything.’

‘No,
no.’ Adam was impatient. ‘They do that window-cleaning thing. You know, stand
in the street and try to clean your car window for money. Plays havoc with the
traffic.’

Adam
sat down at the table with his notebook and pen. He was forever cataloguing his
Shirley Bassey memorabilia. He had been collecting the stuff for thirty years.
We probably had more of it in our house than Dame Shirley did in hers.

The
other story in the paper was actually about Edenford. In the national
newspaper. Adam was thrilled. A young woman had been beaten up at the National
bus depot in the late afternoon.

‘Not
even dark,’ he kept repeating. ‘Not even dark.’ The local radio phoned and
Adam, as a local councillor, had to be interviewed. It was quite exciting.

‘Edenford
has always been a safe place. A family place. This will not be tolerated,’ he
declared. Then Radio 4 was having a slow news day so they called and he
declared it again. By the time we got to the evening I think he actually
believed it.

I don’t
know whether it had all been too exciting but by the time we were getting ready
to go out, Adam was in a great state.

‘Eve,
we need to talk,’ he said. He sat down on the bed. ‘I’ve seen the specialist
and it needs cream.’

‘What
does?’ I asked, trying to decide between a black dress and a blue one. I should
have been paying more attention. I thought Adam was going to cry. Adam was
wearing his nice grey suit that doubles for funerals with the right tie. It’s
easy for men, isn’t it? Women are not expected to be seen in the same dress
twice but it was so long since we’d gone out that I couldn’t remember which
dress was due for an outing.

‘My
injury, my injury! How can you forget about my injury?’

‘I’m
sorry.’ We looked at each other, unsure how to move forward. I had forgotten.
Adam had had an appointment with the penis specialist that afternoon. I had
offered to go with him but we had both pretended not to hear when I said it.

‘Do you
want me to put the cream on for you?’ I asked. He nodded and got up to lock the
bedroom door and draw the curtains. Even with the light on it made it rather
dark and I couldn’t see the injury at all. I put a lot of cream on, all over,
while he lay on his back moaning. I kept thinking how unsexy it all was. Then
we got dressed. The trainers didn’t go with either of the dresses so I had to
dig out another pair of heels. Adam didn’t notice what I wore. He was ready
long before me. I went outside to find Adam hanging campaign balloons and
ribbons on my car aerial. The election wasn’t for months but they flowed in the
wind over the boot of my car.

‘Might
as well arrive with the flag flying,’ he said, and pulled the last piece of
string a bit tighter. Men like fiddling with straps and fixings on cars. I
think it has echoes of pioneers setting off across the plains. There’s a ring
of Scott of the Antarctic about it. Adam was a bit too vigorous. One minute the
decor was flying high and the next the car aerial snapped backwards and trailed
behind us like a much decorated sting on a giant metal bee. The car lurched
across town. The gearbox was dying.

I have
to go to one of my sessions.

The
psychiatrist is beginning to narrow the field in his questions to me.

‘Did
you hate John when you killed him?’ he asks.

‘I
suppose I must have,’ I said.

‘And is
that a common feeling for you? Have you hated many people?’ I thought about it.
Did I really hate anyone?

‘Maybe
Jane Asher.’ It was a joke but I am not to be funny. I am never to be funny
again.

Love,

Eve

Chapter
Eleven

William and Pe Pe’s house
stood on the top of Church Hill Road. It had terrific views of the town and
fields in the distance. It was an amazing place. Keeping up with them was a job
no one in the town would undertake lightly. Pe Pe looked stunning. She had had
her body Moulinexed into yet another black sheath, which clung to her in a
reminder to all of what bodies were supposed to look like. Her make-up was
perfect. A smooth sheen of colour that opened her eyes and pouted her mouth.
Eve looked at her and knew she looked a disaster. A terrible old blue dress and
eye make-up that could have been slapped across her lids by a myopic traffic
warden on duty at the time.