Human Croquet (25 page)

The baby is the only person that Debbie thinks is still itself (perhaps because it has so little self) although she still communicates with the rest of us robotic doubles in much the same way as she’s always done.

Debbie is now on an elephantine dose of tranquillizers which have no noticeable effect, certainly not on the strange, obsessive behaviour that she’s in the grip of – the hand-washing, the wiping of door handles and taps, the hysteria if a vase is moved so much as an inch. Perhaps these are the rituals that ward off the madness rather than the symptoms of it. ‘She should see a bloody psychiatrist,’ Vinny says crossly, loudly, to Gordon. ‘A trick-cyclist?’ Debbie shrieks. ‘Not bleeding likely!’

After a great deal of rummaging in the further corners of her brain, Eunice has come up (after a great deal of
click-clicking
) with her own diagnosis, ‘Capgras’s Syndrome.’ (‘Gey queer’ is Mrs Baxter’s diagnosis.)

‘Capgras’s Syndrome?’

‘Where you believe that close family members have, in fact, been replaced by robots or replicas.’

‘Gosh.’ (Well, what else can you say?)

‘Scientists believe (a contradiction in terms, surely?) that it’s a condition related to the well-known phenomenon of
déjà vu.’

(Now
that’s
interesting.) ‘It’s to do with our sense of recognition and familiarity.’ But then, what isn’t?

‘The first known case was cited in 1923 – a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman complained that her family had been replaced by identical doubles. After a while she began to complain that the same thing had happened to her friends and then her neighbours and then eventually everyone. In the end she thought her own double was following her everywhere.’ (A-ha!)

Eunice rather spoils the scientific effect by dragging hard on a Senior Service, she has recently set foot on the primrose path (fittingly), where will it end? In sex and death I suppose.

What if these things are real though? What if, say, I really do have a double? Mrs Baxter, for instance, reports seeing me buying shampoo in Boots yesterday when I know for a certain fact I was in the middle of a double English lesson and, to be more precise (‘about half-past-ten, maybe, dear?’), somewhere between

‘On another planet are you, Isobel?’ Debbie asks sharply.

‘Sorry,’ I say absently. Debbie is still rattling off a list of names – ‘Mandy, Crystal, Kirsty, Patty – oh God, I don’t know, you have a go,’ she says wearily. The baby (mute for once) gazes at me as if I am indeed a complete stranger, perhaps Capgras’s Syndrome is infectious. I look deep into its vague eyes, cloudy with doubt, a little red-gold floss of hair has appeared on the top of its head.

‘Fontanelle,’ Debbie says. I’ve never heard that name before. ‘It’s not a name, silly,’ Debbie says, smug in her knowledge of neo-natal anatomy, ‘it’s the name of that soft spot on the skull [beneath the red-gold floss] where the bones of the skull haven’t closed up yet.’ I think of boiled eggs with the tops scooped off.

‘I suppose you have to be careful not to drop it on that bit then?’

‘You have to be careful not to drop it, period,’ Debbie says sternly.

I don’t know – I can’t imagine what to call it. Perdita perhaps.

‘In my car,’ he says, waving his car keys in front of my face as if to prove it isn’t a sedan chair or a donkey-cart that he’s trying to inveigle me into.

‘Your car?’ I must stop repeating everything he says.

‘My dad’s just bought it,’ he says in an inappropriately miserable way.

‘Bought it?’

‘I’ve been thinking of dropping out of medicine,’ he says, opening the car door for me, ‘the car’s a bribe to keep me at Guy’s.’

A pretty good bribe in my books. I’d stay at medical school if somebody bought me a car. Not that I’d ever get
in
to medical school. (‘Do they have science or reason or logic’, Miss Thompsett asks sarcastically, ‘where you come from, Isobel?’ Where would that be? Illogical Illyria, the planet of unreason.)

‘And might you? Drop out?’

Malcolm sighs and starts the car engine. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to – you know, just take off and disappear?’ Why does everyone except Debbie want to disappear? Perhaps we should encourage Gordon to take up magic again – practise the vanishing trick on Debbie, or better still saw her in half.

‘Everyone seems to have my life mapped out for me,’ Malcolm says while I root around in the glove compartment for something to eat. Not even a mis-shapen mint. ‘Do you want to go home?’ he asks as we stop at a set of traffic lights.

‘Not really,’ I answer vaguely, in case he has something better to offer (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

‘You could come to the hospital with me, I’m going to visit my mother.’

‘That would be lovely.’ As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m with Malcolm we could go and visit a morgue, or a crypt, or the pits of hell.

In the absence of chairs, we stand like awkward bookends by Mrs Lovat’s pillow. Her head’s the only part of her visible, a bit like a character from Beckett and her hair looks like a collection of well-used Brillo pads. ‘Hello,’ Malcolm says, bending over and kissing her gently on the cheek. She bats him away with her hand as if he’s a large fly. She seems to have swallowed a couple of the Brillo pads judging by the sound of her – more of a rasping kind of bark than a dulcet dying tone. But then she
is
an ogress, so what do you expect, and, after all, I remind myself, she is
dying.

‘Who’s this?’ she croaks. ‘Come here, come closer, is this Hilary?’ and she grabs my arms with her claw and yanks me nearer with a strength you wouldn’t expect from someone at death’s door.

She doesn’t recognize me at all (‘Well, of course not!’ Mrs Baxter exclaims. ‘You used to be an ugly duckling and now you’re a—’ She hesitates.

‘A beautiful swan,’ I prompt her. But we all know what ugly ducklings grow up into. Ugly ducks.) ‘I thought you said she was pretty?’ Mrs Lovat says accusingly to Malcolm and then sighs and says, ‘I suppose she’ll have to do.’ For what? Some kind of maiden sacrifice to restore Mrs Lovat to health? But no, for she appears to be bequeathing me her son on her death-bed – ‘Take him,’ she says carelessly, from somewhere inside the crisp white sheets of the hospital-bed. ‘Look after him for me, Hilary, someone has to.’

I laugh nervously and begin to explain that I am not Hilary – the cancer has obviously begun to nibble her brain by now – but then it strikes me that I quite like deputizing for Princess Hilary so I close my mouth and instead stare at the shape of Mrs Lovat’s body under the pale-blue hospital counterpane. Perhaps she’ll conjure up a priest from inside the bedclothes and marry us so that when Malcolm finally realizes I am not Hilary it will be too late.

Mrs Lovat seems quite big for someone who’s being eaten up, although if you look closely you can see that there isn’t actually a definite outline of legs. That would be a strange thing, wouldn’t it, if diseases started at the feet and ate their way upward? I suppose the head would get pretty vociferous as time went on.

It seems churlish to upset a dying woman – none the less it
is
a little presumptuous of his mother (if not unnatural) to be handing him over so eagerly to the first person she sees. And although I want him, do I really want to look after him? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round? (The head suddenly floats before my eyes,
Help me
…) My stomach is rumbling embarrassingly loudly but there is nothing to eat, unless you count Mrs Lovat herself, of course.

‘Have you got anything to eat, Malcolm?’

‘There’s an apple in my jacket pocket, I think.’ How intimate a thing it is to place your hand inside someone else’s pocket – and have the bonus of pulling out food as well, a lovely rosy-red apple the kind that in another plot would be smeared with poison. But not this one. ‘Thanks.’

We stop at the fish and chip shop in Tait Street – this is more like it – and eat our pokes of chips parked up on Lover’s Leap, a hill from which no Lover has ever Leapt, certainly not in living memory. In the memory of the dead it may be different, of course.

From Lover’s Leap there is a panoramic view of Glebelands and the surrounding countryside – the great industrial valleys to the west, the wild moors to the south, the pastoral hills and woods to the north. In the daytime the sky is so big here that you can see the curve on the great ball of Earth. In the dark, at our feet Glebelands twinkles like an earthbound constellation.

‘It’s like –’ Malcolm suddenly says, furrowing his handsome brow in the effort to find the right words for something, ‘it’s like you’re just
pretending
to be yourself – and there’s a completely different person inside you that you have to hide.’

‘Really? Not a completely
similar
person dogging your footsteps then?’

He gives me an odd look, ‘No – someone inside that you know people aren’t going to like.’

‘Like a fat person hiding inside a thin one? And anyway, everyone likes you,’ I point out to him, ‘even
Mr Baxter
likes you.’

‘That’s just the outside me,’ he says, staring through the car windscreen. There is nothing (perhaps) between us and the Northern Star. He should count himself lucky that people like his outside person, people don’t like Charles inside or out. He puts an arm round me (exquisite bliss) and says, ‘You’re a good friend, Iz,’ and gives me the last chip.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘best be getting back, I suppose.’ There is to be no kiss then, let alone any Leaping. ‘Right then,’ I say, disguising my disappointment. I am Patience on a monument. How long will I keep my passion silent? Until my tongue is cut out and my silver-scaled sardine tail is turned into awkward, unwieldy legs? Perhaps not quite that far.