The Life and Loves of a She Devil (18 page)

Guilt, in fact, speaks into Mary Fisher’s ears: she mistakes the voice for that of the villagers but she is wrong. What she hears is herself talking to herself.

And sometimes Andy and Nicola say things which indicate that they, too, think badly of her.

‘If you can’t say anything pleasant,’ she says, ‘don’t say anything at all.’ But Andy and Nicola take no notice. They always do the opposite of what Mary Fisher wants. They don’t like her. She does not like them. But they have lost their mother and their father and there is nowhere else for them to go, and they are Bobbo’s flesh and blood, and Mary Fisher loves Bobbo, or thinks she does, with so much spirit and in such concentrated essence it doesn’t matter much whether he’s there in the flesh or not.

Well, sometimes Mary Fisher thinks that. Only at night, going to sleep, or in the morning, waking, when the itch of unsatisfied flesh — not quite a pain, not quite unendurable, simply uncurable — makes itself known, does she think, yes, the only thing that matters is Bobbo’s presence with her, here and now. Perhaps what she feels is lust, not love?

Garcia is triumphant. He is in love, or lust, and not with Mary Fisher. He has made the object of his love, or lust, one of the village girls, pregnant, and has brought her home to the High Tower to live. Someone, probably Garcia’s love, has been stealing Mary Fisher’s jewellery. All her lovely pieces, mementoes of delicate passion, relics of fine acts of sexual discrimination, pre-Bobbo, have vanished. The girl, Joan, walks insolently about the High Tower, with her belly swelling, snickering in corners with Nicola, making Mary Fisher feel inferior, hardly a woman at all, because she never had a baby, and now, she realises, never will.

Once Mary Fisher thought she was blessed in her childlessness, spared the degradation, the ordinariness, the pointlessness of motherhood: no more. She needs something, anything.

Her flesh and her soul call out to Bobbo. She can write to him once a month, and he to her, likewise. She writes about love, with the practised skill at her command, and he writes back strange halting letters about the weather or the prison food, and expressing anxiety about the dog Harness, and the cat Mercy, and the children’s welfare.

Mary Fisher tries to get Bobbo’s parents to look after Nicola and Andy, but Angus and Brenda cannot, and will not. They live in hotels, they explain, not homes. They cannot take pets or children into their lives. Once was enough with Bobbo, and look how he turned out! Besides, they lay Bobbo’s downfall at Mary Fisher’s door, and have no desire to do her a good turn.

But they do come to visit occasionally, and Mary Fisher is glad of the company. What she has come to!

‘Such a wonderful place for children!’ says Brenda. She is dressed in mauves and greens, and is less silky and more gauzy than usual, as if to underline her impracticality, her fly-away nature. ‘All this space! A crime not to fill it! And Nicola and Andy are so happy here. They look very well, considering.’

Considering, she means, their misfortunes, brought upon them by Mary Fisher. She, Brenda, brings the children bubble gum, which blows up and bursts pinkly over noses and cheeks and in hair, and when finally chewed to non-elastic is stuck under the ridges of tables and beds, for strangers to come across unexpectedly.

‘Poor little mites,’ says Brenda, looking up at her great hulking pair of grandchildren. They accept the bubble gum partly in recognition of her kindness, partly to annoy Mary Fisher and partly because, although on the brink of maturity, they long to stay children. They have a memory of paradise, a golden age, at 19 Nightbird Drive. It makes them sulky and morose. Neither is doing well at school.

Nicola bursts a bubble-gum balloon in a Doberman’s ear, and the great beast snaps at her nose and she has to have sixteen stitches to join the torn flesh and seal the grated bone. Nicola cries for her lost mother for the first and last time.

Mary Fisher sees Andy looking at her, sometimes, with lustful and predatory eyes. He is much too young to look like that at anyone, let alone the woman his father loves, but what can she do? She’d send them both to boarding school, but she knows they’d just come back, as her mother used to from the nursing homes. They say that’s what they’ll do, and she believes them. Bobbo does not want them to visit him in prison.

‘Let them forget me,’ he says.

Mary Fisher fears what he means is let him forget them.

Old Mrs Fisher is bedridden and incontinent and on huge doses of Valium. Occasionally she starts up and says, ‘What have I come to? A nest of criminals! She’s the one who ought to be in jail!’ and Mary Fisher is so low she cries, and feels that in all the world she has no one, no one.

‘What about us?’ ask Andy and Nicola, following Mary Fisher with their eyes wherever she goes. Sometimes she feels she’s living in a horror movie.

Mary Fisher begs Angus and Brenda at least to take Harness the dog, for Bobbo’s sake, but they won’t.

‘Best thing to do is to get the poor beast put down,’ says Angus. ‘A dog’s no good without its master; like that, they were.’ And he uses his fingers to show the intertwining of man and dog.

But Mary Fisher can’t have the dog put down. Once she could, now she can’t. She knows too much: she knows what Harness would feel. I could murder a dozen dogs with impunity, if it was in my interests. I started with the guinea pig, and now look! I am a she devil. I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t the second coming, this time in female form; what the world has been waiting for. Perhaps as Jesus did in his day for men, so I do now, for women. He offered the stony path to heaven: I offer the motorway to hell. I bring suffering and self-knowledge (the two go together) for others and salvation for myself. Each woman for herself, I cry. If I’m nailed to the cross of my own convenience I’ll put up with it. I just want my own way, and by Satan I’ll have it.

She devils have many names, and an infinite capacity for interfering in other people’s lives.

R
UTH, HAVING ACHIEVED HER
purpose in the judge’s house, and still having a month or so of dental surgery to undergo, looked for lodgings in Bradwell Park, a place where she felt she could safely achieve anonymity. Many people of odd size, shape and appearance lived here and few bothered to turn their heads as she went by. Bradwell Park was deep in the western suburbs, an extensive, depressed and featureless section of the city. Here the poor lived.

Ruth had $2,563,072.45 on deposit in a Swiss bank, but preferred to live simply and cheaply for the time being. The rich are noticeable, the poor anonymous: a dull grey cloak of invisibility flung over their lives. And Ruth did not want to draw the attention of the police or the fiscal authorities to herself before the time was ripe. And in Bradwell Park, moreover, she was unlikely to meet anyone from Eden Grove who’d say, ‘Why, isn’t it Bobbo’s wife? Fancy seeing you!’

Bradwell Park and Eden Grove, where Ruth had lived in her other life, were both defined as suburbs, but were very different places. In Bradwell Park men and women lived higgledy-piggledy: in Eden Grove they contained themselves in neat, fenced squares. There were more women than men in Bradwell Park, fewer garages for fewer cars, and only one communal swimming pool, so highly chlorinated it could cause temporary blindness. In Bradwell Park lived people who earned less than they would like to earn, and women who were trapped by necessity rather than the complexity of their desires, but who at least had the consolation of knowing that their discontent was not mere restlessness and ingratitude, but justified.

Ruth stood outside the social security office for a time until someone suitable came out: a young woman in her late teens, pregnant, with two small children at her heels, pushing her shopping in their pushchair. She was pretty, pasty-faced and distracted. She waited at the bus-stop: when the bus came Ruth helped her on board with the children, the pushchair and the shopping — while the conductor stood by — and then sat beside her and fell into casual conversation.

The girl’s name was Vickie. Martha was three and Paul was two. No, she had no husband, and had never had one.

‘I’m looking for lodgings,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you know anywhere?’

Vickie didn’t.

‘I suppose there isn’t a corner in your house?’ said Ruth. ‘In exchange for baby-sitting and a little housework? And I could pay a little something towards the rent. No need to tell social security!’

The prospect of extra money and a little help overcame Vickie’s quite justifiable fear that the house she lived in was unsuitable for anyone with any choice in the matter, and presently Ruth was installed in Vickie’s back room, sleeping on a camp bed which broke the first time she lay upon it. The room was generally unused because it was dark, dank and cold, but Ruth brightened it with posters and hung hessian on the walls to keep back the crumbling plaster.

‘How lucky you are to be tall,’ said Vickie. ‘You don’t have to use a stepladder. That’s why I’ve never got round to it: I don’t have one. That, and the cost of the hessian. And I don’t see why I should do, anyway. It’s the landlord’s job.’

Vickie had left school when she was sixteen, found there were no jobs to be had, and gone on the dole. Leisure was minimally less boring than any job which would have been available to her but was perhaps even more enervating. Vickie, as she told Ruth, had suffered from asthma when a child and her lungs were certifiably weak, so the jobs which were open to her contemporaries in Bradwell Park — working in the big laundry and dry-cleaning centres which served large areas of the city — were not open to her. Constant exposure to steam and the vapours of dry-cleaning fluids quickly destroy even the youngest and healthiest lungs, so Vickie was fortunate that her disability had gone on file, and her benefit allowances were not progressively cut in order to prompt her to take such work as was available locally, however disagreeable. Not, in fact, to be choosy.

‘Nil bastardi carborundum,’
said Vickie, laughing bitterly. Or, don’t let the bastards grind you down. She’d picked up the phrase from a passing college lover.

At the age of eighteen Vickie had felt quite sorry for herself and thought that to give her life a purpose and a meaning she should have babies, and set about achieving this ambition. It is always important to have someone to love, as well as something to do. Once she had a baby, the Welfare Department paid her rent; Social Issues gave her vouchers for electricity and food, and if she argued enough War on Want would pay her gas bill and her television rental and keep her washing machine in order. But it was hard work getting round from department to department, encumbered as she was by her two small children. One way and another, she would have enough for the children’s breakfast, but not for their supper, and so forth. In return, the State demanded acknowledgment of the spirit and not — as any Bradwell Park husband would — merely the flesh. Sex in Bradwell Park was regarded as a bargaining ploy, rarely seen as a source of mutual pleasure or spiritual refreshment, and the notion of partnership between man and wife was generally abhorrent to both sexes.

Vickie wriggled and protested and insulted and derided the State, her provider, in much the same way as wives will insult and deride the husbands who provide for them, care for them, love them. Vickie’s second baby, Paul, was born to a father recognisably his, who stayed for six months after the birth, only to go out one evening to buy a packet of cigarettes, never to reappear.

‘Don’t worry,’ Sister at the clinic had said to the weeping Vickie. ‘He hasn’t been run over or swept up by a flying saucer. He’s all right. He’ll turn up in a month or so living with someone just around the corner. It happens all the time around here. It’s the break-up of the social fabric, I’m told.’

‘But he loved me. Surely he’d have told me!’

‘I expect he didn’t want to upset you. And little Paul isn’t the easiest baby and some men just don’t like acting father to a child who isn’t their own. And how
is
little Martha? Did the impetigo go?’

‘It’s back,’ Vickie had complained. ‘It’s all his fault. Little Martha loved him! How could a man treat a little child like that? She’s so upset!’

‘Vickie,’ said Sister sadly, ‘either you have your children inside the system devised by society for the protection of women and children, namely marriage: or you live outside it and put up with the consequences.’

‘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.