Pumping Up Napoleon (2 page)

His flight came in just before midnight and he was able to slip through customs while the demonstrators were singing
Auld Lang Syne
. On seeing Marjorie he dropped his attaché case, rushed forward and embraced her.

‘Oh, Napoleon,' said Marjorie, ‘I'm so glad you came back.'

He looked splendid. He turned his head to show off his restored profile and removed his gloves so she could admire his new fingers. She took his hand and examined it.

‘Why, that's wonderful,' said Marjorie. ‘I'm so happy for you.'

At the end of the long drive down the M4 she was supposed to drop him at his lodgings. But the street outside was filled with animal rights activists combining a sit-in demonstration with a New Year's Eve party. There was nothing else for it. Marjorie took him back to her place.

She intended to give him her bed and make up one for herself on the sofa, but he shook his head, indicating in mime that he had no need of sleep. He spent the night reading from her store of books. In the morning the floor was strewn with them. He made her a pot of fresh coffee and sat on the edge of the bed while she drank it.

In January the protestors turned their attention to the laboratories. A couple of car bombs later and the government began to wonder if Napoleon was worth the trouble.

One by one, research facilities all over the world were intimidated into halting their efforts to keep Napoleon and his kind intact. It was time to let nature take its course. The University wasn't pleased. He still had a year and a half of his contract to run. There were complaints that he was starting to take too much sick leave. ‘He is technically still dead,' Marjorie defended him from her corner of the staff room.

The Head of School noted her special rapport with the Emperor and she was asked to make sure that he stayed as fit as possible. Part of her was pleased to have the chance to spend more time with him; part of her was alarmed at the responsibility.

She marshalled him to the gym and attempted to keep him in shape. But without artificial regeneration he was, by early summer, decaying visibly. The new parts of him were wearing out quicker than the bits preserved by the embalming process. Marjorie decided he would have to give up the weights when two of his fingertips remained attached to the apparatus.

The doctor said that stress was accelerating Napoleon's decline so Marjorie took him to yoga classes. He learned to pretend to breathe in and out. He learned to go ‘Hah!' and claw the air like a cat. It seemed to relax him: when the instructor said he had ‘a tree' growing inside him Napoleon did not argue – he yawned. Marjorie saw his mouth open wider and wider, while his perfect teeth remained closed. When his jaw was open to its widest extent she held her own breath, afraid that his dentures would fall out and clatter to the floor.

By June he had lost the will to maintain bodily and mental integrity. He flopped in her office, wearing baggy shorts and displaying the lividity of his flesh. She had so wanted to be able to go on believing in him.

At the end of term he moved in with her; he needed someone to look after him. And so, in the evenings, when she should have been writing her paper on regicide, she allowed him to lie with his head in her lap. Lying down, he didn't seem as short. With the blinds lowered his skin didn't look so grey. His body cavities were as clean and odour-free as they had been for two hundred years. But his new nose was beginning to decay and even the students had started to complain about the smell it caused in the classroom.

He passed her a piece of paper on which he had written, ‘I miss the passion, Marjorie. The rage of desire I can no longer feel.'

She stroked what remained of his hair. She knew exactly what he meant.

My Cousin's Breasts

My cousin Carole's breasts are huge. They sprouted when she was eleven and by the time she was fifteen they were really starting to get in the way. Carole blamed them for everything that went wrong in her life: she wanted to be a newsreader but the careers officer sniffed and said she
might
have a chance as a weather girl; she wanted to be a dancer, but her outsize boobies unbalanced the
corps de ballet
. Unlike me, she didn't have the washboard look, which is what it takes to look good in a tutu. ‘It's all right for you, Natalie No-Tits,' said Carole. ‘At least boys don't recognise you by looking at the front of your blouse.'

She was right, but then, they didn't seem to recognise me at all. What's the point of being able to pirouette if nobody asks you to dance?

We were close when we were younger, my cousin Carole and I; our mothers are sisters. We bobbed side by side in their wombs; we shared a midwife and delivery room at the local hospital; we were practically twins.

Carole was born just a few minutes before me, but in our early years on the outside, she didn't develop as fast as I did.

‘Carole was the first to smile,' said my aunt.

‘Ah, but my Natalie was the first to speak real words,' said my mother.

‘Carole was the first to crawl.'

‘Yes, your Carole was so good at crawling she didn't bother to walk until she was two. My Natalie had to keep stepping over her.' It was true. I was always ahead.

Carole had a lovely nature though. We all agreed on that. My mother said we should call her Treacle because she was thick, slow moving and really very sweet. But we never called her this to her face, or so my aunt could hear. Nobody wanted to hurt Carole's feelings. And nobody wanted to upset my aunt.

My mother and my aunt were devoted – to each other and to saying what was on their minds. This sometimes led to rows. But, as my mother reasoned, at least with Aunt Susan you could always rely on getting the truth. When she said she didn't want a second cup of tea she wasn't being polite, she meant it. When she said a dress made you look flat chested and anyway you didn't have the legs for short skirts, she wasn't being unkind, she was being honest.

Carole didn't have much to say about anything. She let me decide what games we'd play. Sometimes it was hard always having to be the one with the ideas. It was a big responsibility and it got me into big trouble at times, like the afternoon when we played hostage, and I forgot to untie Carole from the apple tree by teatime. She was crying and my aunt shouted at me, calling me a bully and a terrorist. My mother looked serious and sent me up to my room. But when I got a chance I told Carole I was sorry and in the end her mum made her buy me an ice-lolly to show that there were ‘no hard feelings'.

So, yes, we were close – until Carole changed.

Carole's breasts, non-existent until our first year of secondary school, seemed to sprout, not overnight, but one September lunchtime in the playground. We were shivering under a lukewarm sun pretending that the summer wasn't over when her nipples just popped up under her shirt. I checked my own chest. Nothing. Carole saw me looking and glanced down at herself. We didn't say anything; we both put on our jumpers and looked the other way.

That Saturday we went on a group outing to the lingerie department. My aunt bought Carole her first bra; my mother bought me something labelled a ‘skin-tone chemise'. It was a beige vest; we all knew. Carole looked at it, looked at what she was getting, looked at me. A new light dawned in her eyes. It was almost intelligence. She stood up taller. It made her tiny tits stick out.

Everyone thought it mattered to me, but it didn't. Not then. I wasn't in a hurry; the thought of acquiring body hair was too frightening. I'd seen my mother's inexpertly shaven armpits, the winter hairs she let grow on her legs to keep out the cold. They made me shudder.

But six months later Carole required cups. It was hard for me not to be overawed by her lace trims, her adjustable straps. I begged my mother to buy me something relatively bra-shaped, even if I didn't have anything to hide. ‘But it doesn't matter,' said my mother. ‘Don't be in such a hurry to grow up.'

She didn't understand.
I
wasn't in a hurry to grow up; it was Carole. I just didn't want to be left behind. Eventually my mother gave in and bought me something. It was beige, as usual, not much better than a cut-off vest. I was glad to have it, but found it surprisingly chilly to wear. I was cold on my belly and back where the rest of the vest was missing.

Carole showed me the red marks where her bra straps cut into her shoulders. It was a bit like breaking in new shoes, she said: all that rubbing in unaccustomed places.

My mother said, ‘See? See how we women suffer?'

Not long after that I had my first period and found out what she meant. It wasn't just the pain and the mess and the turning white and the headaches. It was the whole business of sanitary towels. My mother wouldn't hear of me using tampons: I was too young. So, in the very moment of becoming a woman, I felt like I was being put back into nappies. In those days ‘pads' were square-edged, thick and about as comfortable as having a brick in your knickers. They had a thin strip of adhesive down the middle. A great innovation, far better than belts and pins, apparently. But they didn't stick where they were put, did they? A good idea, yes, but underdeveloped. The system worked OK as long as you stayed still. As soon as you started walking the pad was on the move too, climbing upwards over your behind to poke out through the waistband of your skirt. Running to the loo was a race against disaster. Better to walk, carefully, with your hands behind your back pressing on the thing to keep it in place. That's why some girls had days off school; they didn't dare go out.

I consoled myself with the thought that at least now I'd catch up with Carole. I started looking at myself sideways in the mirror, pulling my T-shirt tight. Now, I too had nipples. But change was slow. I wasn't swelling as fast as I should. You'd think that sharing a gene pool with Carole would have given us some characteristics in common. Well, by the time we reached the third form it was clear that we were, physically as well as intellectually, quite different. Our academic achievements matched our cup sizes: As for me; Cs for Carole.

Yet Carole was always complaining. ‘My neck aches,' she'd say, ‘and my back. You don't know how lucky you are.' Then we'd go off to our separate lessons. We were in different streams by then: in the same form but not in the same class. I was heading towards the rock of university, Carole was navigating a course between hairdressing college and a degree in marketing.

When I felt bad about the way I looked I tried to be rational. I'd lie in the bath and look at my body as it lay under the water. I wasn't fat: but then I had no curves at all. Straight up and down and far too skinny according to my aunt. But what teenage girl, since the history of teenage girls began, has ever felt happy with her body? ‘At least you know boys like you for who you are and not the way you look,' said Carole.

Daniel Stanton was one year and about a million miles above me. He had gorgeous hair and his eyes were brown. I had always thought about him, but now I began to think about him regularly and with some dedication. Whereas in the past I had found him easy to talk to, now I didn't know what to say when he spoke to me, my best effort in a six-week period being a mean-sounding, ‘What do
you
want, Stanton?'

I usually tried not to think about him when I was in the bathroom (especially not when I was on the loo). But he was always around on the edge of my mind and it was easy enough to conjure his image in the steam above the bath.

The windows were dark and dripping on the inside. I wondered what it would be like to see a face outside the window: its nose, mouth and eyes blurred by the dimpled glass. Our bathroom was on the second floor, but there were such things as ladders and ventilation grilles and tiny spy-cameras.

I took to using bubble bath. One day, not long after, I found my first pubic hairs. I was doomed to be hairy
and
flat chested.

Reason told me I was better off than Carole now and in the long run: boys couldn't see past her tits; teachers treated her as if she couldn't possibly think
and
have bosoms that size (surely there was no blood supply left for her brain); other girls our age avoided her. They didn't want to be compared with Carole and found wanting. It made me sick to see the way boys ogled Carole and then sniggered behind her back. It was pathetic. They all wanted her but they had to make comments, as if they could get over
their
feelings of inadequacy by making
her
seem less worth having. The only boy who didn't act that way was Daniel.

I was avoiding him in person even though he was hardly ever out of my mind. I couldn't breathe when he was around. How would I ever be able to speak to him with no air in my lungs? And then something happened: he had his hair cut – ridiculously short. Younger boys started calling him Big Ears. He went all red, his ears reddest of all. I thought: no. And, just like that, he lost all his power over me.

Turns out I was glad. I really was. I didn't need to care any more whether I saw him or not. I even began to feel sorry for him because he had become so unattractive and unlovable. He was still a genuinely nice person. Just not someone you could imagine kissing. I would never let him touch me now that I knew what he
really
looked like.