The Life and Loves of a She Devil (22 page)

Well, so much I’ve taught him. I wish the priest well and Mary Fisher bad. Garcia removes his eye from the keyhole: my vision of the scene is lost. All I know is that if she will with Garcia she will with him, and if he will with me, he will with her, and why not, except I grudge Mary Fisher even ten minutes’ happiness. That’s all he’ll give her.

But I like to tease Mary Fisher too, to lob a little star of hope in front of her, in order to snatch it away. Why not? I remember making mushroom soup, and hoping for Bobbo’s smile, and chicken vol-au-vents, in the hope of his approval, and chocolate mousse so that he would leave her and return to me. And he didn’t. Let her take what’s coming to her and put up with it. She has no option, anyway.

In the meantime, I have seen an insurance man pecking around the Rectory: the same one who came to the fire at Nightbird Drive, to pick over the ashes. It is unlikely that he will recognise me as the same soft, distraught, poisoned, lumbering woman who watched her home go up in flames: now I am lean and tough and swift. All the same prudence indicates that I should leave. Vultures have sharp eyes.

The fact remains there is still another stone to lose. In flipping the coin of Father Ferguson’s life, changing him from ascetic to hedonist, I had to pay a price. It’s men who make women fat, that’s obvious.

I must go where men don’t go. I don’t like it here anymore, anyway. Father Ferguson has sold out to the developers, of course: he is the darling of his bosses. Demolition men turn up from time to time to measure the house, as undertakers measure corpses for their coffins. I saw the house through its dying days, that’s all, having brought about its death. It doesn’t matter much. I dismissed its soul when I dismissed its ghosts.

R
UTH JOINED A COMMUNE
of separatist feminists. These women had no truck with the male world; they accepted her readily as one of themselves. She called herself Millie Mason. Like them, she wore jeans, T-shirt, boots and a duffle jacket: they did not ask for her credentials. She was female and had suffered for it, and that was enough. Her new companions did not eat animal meat or dairy products and found sexual satisfaction with each other. They had no desire to be attractive to men, although many clearly were. The Wimmin, as they called themselves, lived just outside the city, in a cluster of caravans around an old farmhouse. They worked a four-acre field, growing pulses, grain, comfrey and yarrow, which they harvested, treated and sold in health food shops throughout the land. They had daughters but no sons: the latter they disposed of in ways which to the outside world would seem sinister, but to them perfectly reasonable.

Ruth was strong, competent, and without those affectations commonly called feminine. She did what she could to help the Wimmin but was glad her stay was temporary. She did not want to live in their world permanently. It lacked a glitter at the edges: it was denim-coloured and serviceable: sodden by the muddy flood of purgatory wastes, not flickering and dangerous with hell-fire.

But the living was hard and the diet fibrous, and low in fat, and her jeans felt looser every week that passed, as she tilled and hoed and dug. There were no scales on which she could weigh herself, and she could not easily find a mirror.

‘It doesn’t matter what you look like,’ they’d say. ‘What matters is what you feel like.’

But she knew they were wrong. She wished to live in the giddy mainstream of the world, not tucked away in this muddy corner of integrity. But she did not say so. She might have found herself homeless. The Wimmin did not take easily to those who disagreed with them: they made them honorary un-women.

When Ruth could find almost no difference between her waist and her hips she telephoned Mr Roche from a call box. There was no telephone on the commune: such instruments were controlling; a feature of a male technology. Besides the women had no need to communicate with the outside world.

‘You’ve lost
three
stone?’

‘Possibly more.’

He made an appointment with Ruth to see Mr Ghengis the following week. The latter would fly over specially, he said, all the way from Los Angeles.

‘You’re an interesting case,’ said Mr Roche.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Such a challenge!’

‘I wish to look what I want to look like, not what he wants me to look like,’ she warned.

There was a short silence.

‘That may be very expensive,’ said Mr Roche, eventually.

Ruth transferred her money in Switzerland to a Los Angeles bank: the transaction went through smoothly enough.

She went to a bookshop and bought a copy of
The Pearly Gates of Love.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

‘Very badly,’ said the manageress, ‘load of religious twaddle!’ and she called out to an assistant, ‘Alice, move the Fisher books off the shelves. Remember, shelf space is profit space!’

Ruth cut the picture of Mary Fisher from the book’s dust-jacket and dropped the book in the trash can. Mary Fisher stared up at the sky, in pretty, delicate profile, as if she had a hotline to God. She looked enchanting, and happy, and little. Ruth searched the bookshops for other novels by Mary Fisher, which might carry a full-length photograph, and was lucky enough to find one.

‘Well!’ said Mr Ghengis, when he looked at the photographs. ‘Wow, even! But that’s a facer!’

‘Why so?’ asked Ruth grimly.

‘The hair’s nothing, the face we can do — these are classic features we’re looking at. The mouth will be tricky, but possible. When your jaw’s trimmed the lipline will fall quite nicely into place. We work from the inside out as much as possible, of course. We can reshape the body quite dramatically — you
have
got thin, haven’t you! How did you do that?’

‘By keeping away from men,’ said Ruth.

‘Not a very popular remedy with most of my patients! They’d rather have large slices cut off them any day — but, my dear, the proportion is going to look odd. This lady is at least six inches shorter than you.’

‘Then you must make tucks in my legs,’ she said. ‘I know it can be done.’

It was a little while before he replied.

‘Three inches from the femur is the most anyone has undertaken. It’s easy enough to remove bone — you simply chop. But muscles, sinews, arteries, tendons all have to be equivalently looped, or shortened. It is not simple and not totally safe.’

‘I will accept the responsibility,’ said Ruth. ‘You give new hearts, new kidneys, new livers and so forth: all I am asking you to do is take unnecessary stuff away.’

‘But in such quantity!’

‘Modern surgical techniques improve year by year. You can use chip technology, micro-surgery, lasers. Can’t you?’

‘A body remains a body,’ said Mr Ghengis, ‘and a body scars if you open it up. You can even get keloid scarring: puckering and wrinkling. A terrible mess! If it happens there is nothing we can do about it. And we can’t take more than three inches from your femur. That is final.’

‘Then take some out of the shin-bone.’

‘It’s never been done.’

‘Then be the first. Or would you prefer to remove some of my vertebrae?’

‘No!’ He sounded panicky.

She smiled complacently. She felt she had won. So did he. He tried one last gambit:

‘The other thing that occurs to the cosmetic surgeon,’ he said, ‘is that though you can change the body you cannot change the person. And little by little — this may sound mystical, but it is our experience — the body reshapes itself to fit the personality.

And the personality of those who have the courage and will to seek cosmetic surgery may be handsome, but isn’t pretty. You are asking to be made pretty: trivial, if you will forgive me.’

He had gone too far. He did not go on.

‘I have an exceptionally adaptable personality,’ Ruth observed. ‘I have tried many ways of fitting myself to my original body, and the world into which I was born, and have failed. I am no revolutionary. Since I cannot change them, I will change myself. I am quite sure I will settle happily enough into my new body.’

‘It will cost you millions of dollars. It is worth it?’

‘I have them. Yes.’

‘It will take years.’

‘I have them.’

‘I can stop you looking old, but you will
be
old.’

‘No. Age is what the observer sees, not what the observed feels.’

He gave up. He agreed to take her into his clinic for, as he put it, extensive renovation. His assistant would be a Dr Black. He would call in other specialists as required. He would be writing to her. In the meantime Ruth should go back to her normal life.

Ruth returned to the commune and rotavated a half-acre plot. She felt the muscles of her strong legs work: she felt the sweat trickle down her powerful shoulders, beneath a man’s denim shirt. She saw a lark ascending higher and higher, a flimsy, delicate thing with a twittering song, into a small patch of blue sky through which the midday sun shone down. But then a lower layer of black clouds swirled in and closed the gap and the day grew suddenly dark and a fork of lightning pierced the sky where lately the lark had been.

Ruth turned up her face to the big pelting drops that began to fall, and the earth turned to mud beneath her rubber-booted feet, and she dragged the heavy machine back to its shed.

In the house the other women congregated, taking off capes and boots, laughing and exhilarated. They touched each other a great deal — to embrace was part of their policy. Ruth almost weakened, almost wanted to belong to them, for the sake of their good cheer. But she could not. She belonged to a different species. And she knew that by nightfall someone would be in tears; in these few muddy, laughing minutes someone would fall in love, someone out of it, and that the best looking would suffer least, and the worst looking most, here as anywhere.

Some ten days later Ruth received a letter from Mr Ghengis’s clinic enumerating the processes she was to undergo and giving approximate prices. Detailed estimates were not practical, since healing processes varied from individual to individual; and, the implication was, surgeons never knew quite what they’d find inside the human body until they got there. The writing paper was of palest, tasteful mauve and the words ‘Hermione Clinic’ embossed in gold, with a broad white flat clinical strip beneath. Ruth was reminded of the cover of one of Mary Fisher’s novels — but given a medical seal of approval. The paper created hope and inspired confidence at the same time. It managed to be both romantic and scientific.

The Hermione Clinic meant to take back Ruth’s jaw three inches, raise and fine the eyebrows, lower the hair line with a skin-graft and lift slack from beneath the skin and the epicanthic fold above the eye. The ears would be pinned back and the lobes diminished, both in thickness and length.

She would fly to Mr Roche to have her nose straightened and trimmed, since he was the ‘best nose surgeon in the world’. (Her nose, Ruth surmised, was his commission.)

As for her body, loose skin from beneath the arms would be tucked, and fat removed from shoulders, back, buttocks, hips and belly. If she insisted on leg shortening, the shoulders would be braced back to keep the arms in better proportion to the rest. Ruth frowned when she read this.

She must allow at least two years for these processes to be completed, and four if she wanted her height diminished. The proposed changes were radical and both body and mind would require time to heal. There would be some discomfort. (Ruth knew well enough that what patients feel before an operation is called by surgeons pain: and what they feel after it, discomfort.)

She could come and go at the clinic as she wanted, but there would be many required periods of bed rest, before and after operations. A more detailed programme would be drawn up shortly after her arrival, after further physical examinations.

The clinic enclosed a breakdown of approximate fees. The sums required would be roughly $110,000 for the face, $300,000 for the body, and $1,000,000 for the legs. Specialists, as she must realise, would have to be flown in from many countries. There might be grants available from research foundations to help with the latter sum, however.

The making of medical history [Mr Ghengis wrote in ink at the bottom of the third page of the letter] is not cheap. We’ll do the legs last, to give medicine a modest chance to catch up with human aspiration. But you’ll be pleased to know there’s a new technique developed for removing lengths of vein, heat-sealing the edges. It’s been tried with excellent results on cats, but not yet on humans.

Ruth read this letter over breakfast, sitting alone at the end of the stained refectory table, legs mottling by the fire. She munched from a bowl of muesli, mixed every morning by whoever was on the breakfast duty roster. This morning it was little red-headed Sue.

‘Muesli all right?’ asked Sue. She had a pretty, cross face and pale straight eyebrows, which met in the middle as if a line bisected not only her face but her nature.

‘Wonderful,’ said Ruth.

‘That’s good,’ said Sue. ‘This week I’m trying to wean us away from dried fruits, and not just sugar. What you’re eating is almost pure oats. It
can
be done, you see. We can learn to enjoy what’s good for us. It’s all a matter of education!’

‘I understand that,’ said Ruth, ‘and who wants milk when this well water is so good!’

‘Anything interesting in that letter?’ asked Sue, spotting sedition in the pale mauve paper, so seductive and yet so clean.

‘It’s from my mother,’ said Ruth. It was the first lie that came to her lips. And, indeed, she remembered her mother long, long ago, writing thank-you letters in the New Year on pale mauve paper, lilac-scented.

Ruth rang the Vesta Rose Agency and was put through to Nurse Hopkins. The agency had its own exchange now, and the young women who manned it — womanned it, as they insisted — were efficient, business-like and polite.

‘My dear, how are you?’

‘My dear, I’ve missed you so, but I’ve been too busy to notice.’

‘Spoken like a man,’ observed Ruth. ‘How’s the little boy?’ She referred to Olga’s autistic son.