Home alone

I am at home, alone. No one knows that I am here. I have told everyone that I have gone. And I will go, but not yet, not this week. For, this week, I am working on my book, the book that I have been writing for over a year, the book with three abandoned first chapters. I am not sure why I am doing this, why I persist with this; sometimes I suffer horrid panic attacks in which I doubt my ability to ever finish, in fact that worry simmers away constantly, preventing me from ever feeling completely relaxed.

Anyway, today is the first day of my self-enforced solitude. I got up at 4:30 am drove Nick and Toby to the airport, drove back and have not left the house since.

While I’m working, here’s a short story that I wrote sometime ago:


Genetic Engineering

“I’ll get rid of that,” said Veronica, scooping up the used condom seconds after Paul dropped it to the floor. “I don’t want ants in here.”

Of course, ants don’t appear that quickly in temperate England. In fact the English ant seldom leaves its nest during the winter, but Veronica was used to sex in hotter countries where the ants don’t hibernate, and a condom full of ants is a vision that had stuck with her.

However, as it was, Paul had fallen into a post-coital stupor and was unaware of Veronica’s activity; the excuse was unnecessary. He had flopped back onto the pillow, contented. He had a loving wife at home and Veronica in bed. She was amazing – she was very supple and had obviously picked up some exotic tricks whilst in the Orient. Re-training as a plumber was paying off in so many ways. No one other than Catherine had shown any interest in him while he worked for meagre pay as a research assistant in a university laboratory, documenting moribund mice, inspecting them for signs of alopecia. (Although, of late, Catherine’s interest had been muted, her demands dictated not by the urges of lust but by a thermometer and an ovulation chart.) But, now, as a plumber, not only was his bank account buoyant, he was suddenly irresistible to women, all of them clamouring for him to plunge his plumber’s rod down their drains, and now even Veronica, the unrequited love, glamorous and unattainable, from his years at university, had fallen under his allure as a plumber.

Opening the cupboard above the bathroom sink, Veronica took out the turkey baster that she had bought earlier that day in Cooks' Haven and kissed it. She did not leave things to chance. She always got what she wanted. The maxim by which she lived her life was: “If I want it enough, I will get it”. And what she wanted now was a sample of Paul’s DNA in the form of spermatozoa. This was the most ambitious project that she had yet to undertake. She had tested her life philosophy out on small things. While at university, she had made mad David become her boyfriend. He had not been mad then; the madness came later – she might have been the catalyst, but nothing more, she had perhaps unleashed his genetic predisposition to be a lunatic, perhaps triggered the gene, but that was all. It was genetically predetermined that David would become mad. His father was hardly sane, a convert to Catholicism, who rushed round the house clutching a plaster image of saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, kissing it and weeping. And then there was his brother who wore a flat cap and claimed to be a working class throwback from an earlier generation, before his family started sending their offspring to university to be formed into lawyers and stockbrokers. Madness coursed through David’s circulatory system, infecting the major arteries and seeping through the most minor capillaries. He was a gifted musician, and in Veronica’s experience “gifted” was always a euphemism, meaning extremely naughty in children, and in adults, extremely disconnected from reality. And yet, she could not resist the appeal of a “gifted” boyfriend.

The first sign of David’s madness came one evening ten years ago, during their third year at the university, when he sat down on the corner of Beaumont Street and St Giles, and, leaning against the wall of the Ashmolean museum, began to cry. He said he was just so incredibly sad because he would never again be so happy. Veronica could not understand it. He was a cellist, not a soothsayer. He could not possibly know how happy he was destined to be in the future. It was on this evening that Paul first came to her attention.

“There’s a veritable cornucopia of kebab vans down here,” said Paul, speaking through clenched teeth. “May as well get something to eat while we’re just standing here…” He looked at her, and she urged David to get up, while wondering if Paul was pulling out this fancily expressed observation to detract attention from the weeping David, to give them something else to focus on. Paul was the type of person who never looked if he passed a traffic accident, unlike her; she always stared and then would spend months feeling sick whenever the picture of mangled limbs floated back through her mind. She had seen a man get run over by a bus once as she left the Cornmarket branch of Midland Bank. After that, all her banking transactions were accompanied by a vision of the man’s contorted leg, the bone protruding from the flesh. She found writing cheques most distasteful for a while. She began to worry that her ability to shop was atrophying, but then the bank issued her with a credit card, untainted by memories, and she quickly regained full shopping activity.

After chewing on the slivers of mutton wrapped in an envelope of unleavened bread, Veronica and mad David had gone back to Paul’s rooms. The dilapidated wardrobe door hung open, and Victoria noted five white shirts and two pairs of black jeans hanging from the rail. The shirts were left over from his school days, good white cotton; plenty of wear in them yet. Veronica knew then that Paul had been one of those kids you bump into in Marks and Spencer on a Saturday, wearing their school uniform. It must be quite liberating not to care at all what other people think of you: so self-assured as to not need the approval of others. She would have loved to wear a uniform. She would have fitted in well to Chairman Mao’s China, but she did not dare break with social convention in England and start wearing nothing but a blue boiler suit, the risk of being thought peculiar was too great, but she envied Paul his uniform of black jeans and white shirts. In summer, Paul wore the sleeves of the shirts rolled up, which exposed his arms, pallid, but not spindly; he had built up the muscles lifting coffee jars full of pennies. In winter, he pulled a grey and black polyester jumper over the white shirts. Veronica never saw his underpants while at university, but she imagined them to be much like the regulation black gym knickers she had worn to school, only perhaps with a Y-front.

Catherine has certainly added colour to his wardrobe, thought Veronica, pushing the blue plumbing overalls off the toilet lid and sitting down. She squeezed the bulb of the turkey baster and slipped the long thin end into the condom. As she gently released the pressure, she watched Paul’s sperm swarming up the tube and wondered if Paul still had the hot water bottle, the slippers, and the dressing gown, inherited on the death of his granddad, that he had worn in college.

One day while drinking instant coffee, no milk or sugar, very frugal, in Paul’s rooms, mad David had limped into the bedroom to sob. He was inconsolably saddened by the possibility that Veronica might not be perceiving that beautiful early summer’s day in the truly splendid way that it was overwhelming his senses (The terms in which he studied philosophy modules always saw an upturn in the incidence of his public weeping activities). However, this time, his distress was quick to evaporate, and he emerged from the bedroom five minutes later, wearing a chequered dressing gown and a pair of carpet slippers, clutching a hot water bottle in a crocheted cover to his chest.

“It’s bloody cold here. You can laugh, but I’m not freezing like you lot,” said Paul, taking the hot water bottle from mad David and filling it from the kettle. This was the most riled Veronica ever saw Paul during their time at the university. Perhaps, he knew that no girl would put up with a boyfriend wearing an old man’s felt dressing gown.

Veronica spread her legs apart, inserted the turkey baster, and vigorously pumped the bulb. She slid down to the bathroom floor and lay on her back on the cold tiles, with her legs in the air for five minutes, as Paul’s sperm, bullets of top-of-the-range DNA encoded for extreme logic and stolid sanity, surged up her fallopian tubes, searching for one of her eggs packed with her DNA of a dubious quality, with a heavy loading towards the genes responsible for overemotional tendencies. As she lay, she noticed mould colonizing the rim of the bathtub.

The sanity of her own family was questionable which was why it was imperative to seek out the DNA of the most stable person she knew for breeding purposes. She wanted to give her child the gift of sanity. Her mother had suffered a manic episode; she claimed she had a headache so bad that it had made her rip all her clothes off. She was taken to hospital, and could recognise no one for two days; none of the tests revealed anything physically wrong with her. The doctors dismissed it as an isolated incident until a few months later it happened again, but this time the amnesia had lasted longer. And then there was her sister’s bout of insanity, the hushed up failed suicide, the drinking to excess.

In fact, the madness had been lurking in her sister since childhood. At nine years old, Valerie had shoved the buttons from her dolly’s dress up her nose. In a three-year old, this sort of behaviour could be excused as ignorance, but in a nine-year old it was either madness or an elaborate attention-seeking ploy. Valerie, far from being punished for her stupidity, had been given three chocolate cream eggs by their father as a reward for being a “good girl” in the hospital.

“Don’t touch those, they’re for Valerie,” shouted her father when Veronica had opened the refrigerator and picked up one of the chocolate eggs. But even then at eleven-years old Veronica knew that if she wanted something then she would find a way of getting it.

So, each morning during the run up to Easter when the shops were full of Cadbury’s cream eggs, on her way to school, wearing one of her brother Jim’s old black overcoats smooth and shiny at the cuffs and elbows, Veronica would get off the bus at the stop on Commercial Road, a shabby road with body piercing parlours, charity shops, and kiosks selling fish-and-chip, a hang out for tattooed youths in vests. She would go into the newsagents and browse the newspaper headlines, glean the latest celebrity gossip, and then, on her way out as she swept past the confectionary shelf, she would secrete a packet of cream eggs up the sleeve of Jim’s old overcoat, and then, easing her hand into the coat pocket she would let the cream eggs fall, and there they would stay all morning until second period German. When bored and baffled by the intricacies of German grammar, her mind, instead of focusing on the declension of adjectives, would become occupied by fantasies of biting into those cream eggs, firm and brown on the outside, sweet, smooth and creamy inside; her mouth would flood with saliva. She would run her tongue along the backs of her teeth, almost tasting the rich milk chocolate. The lesson was irrelevant. She would put on the coat, raise her arm, and ask to be excused.

As she ran to the toilet block behind the main classrooms, her fingers would agitate the foil wrapping of the eggs. Sitting on the cold wooden toilet seat, her feet up against the door, she would peel the remainder of the foil off the eggs, and eat them, all of them, and then, obeying the command: “Now wash your hands”, printed in red across the corner of every sheet of the crackly, almost transparent, school-issue toilet paper that doubled as tracing paper, she would thump the tap, a cold water tap (hot water was not allowed for fear that the children might burn themselves). She would hold her hands under the trickle of water until it stopped. She never thumped twice. She knew that eating in the toilet was unhygienic, but it was the only privacy that she had. At home she shared a room with Valerie.

After five minutes, Veronica slowly got up from the bathroom floor. She hid the turkey baster behind a bottle of Flash floor cleaner at the back of the cupboard, thinking it only prudent to hang on to it at least until she knew the outcome of her experiment, it had cost nearly five pounds. As Veronica climbed back into bed, Paul stirred.

“I’ve got to be going... a customer with a broken macerator,” he said, pulling on his trousers. Veronica knew he was going home to Catherine, barren Catherine. She had had her chance of long-term happiness with Paul long ago, shortly after David’s cadenza of madness, in which he had wandered naked down the Banbury road, convinced that he was a chicken, smearing toothpaste over his body – a purification ritual the doctor had later said. The police apprehended him, and he was detained in the psychiatric ward of the John Radcliff hospital as an emergency case for seventy-two hours under section 4 of the Mental Health Act, and then, when still insane after three days, he was detained for a further twenty-eight days under section 2 and then, when still mad and delusional after many rigorous psychiatric assessments, he was detained for a further six months under section 3 for treatment.

Paul had asked Veronica repeatedly to go out with him, but he was so wooden, not at all spontaneous, every move, every utterance was carefully considered, and back then she wanted excitement, unpredictable excitement. She pursued a career as a swimwear model, moving around the world, following the jobs, and not staying anywhere long enough to form deep relationships.

But back in England after ten years away, the first dimples of cellulite forming on her thighs, she had heard through an old friend from the university that Paul had re-trained as a plumber. It was then that she decided to go ahead and get a combination boiler installed an idea she had been toying with for several months. Very economical on space and money all her acquaintances had said (but, she later noted, they had kept quiet about the disappointing lack of reliability of the combination boiler). She rang up Paul immediately and made the arrangements.

On the first morning of the installation job, Veronica opened the door, wearing a tunic of light silk. The winter sun shining through the window behind her made the costume transparent. Paul found himself staring at the outline of her long, slim legs, her breasts, her nipples. She did not appear to be wearing underwear. All that morning, as Paul tried to stay focused on piping and pressure release valves, Veronica wafted around in her translucent shift, making cups of coffee, bringing through little trays of amuse bouche bites of caviar on toast, balanced on her upturned palm.

Paul, sensing the danger of the high levels of testosterone surging round his body, slipped a brass olive from a compression joint onto his ring finger. Plumbing had made his hands expand; his wedding ring no longer fitted. He hoped that the sight of a “wedding ring” on his finger would dampen Veronica’s interest. Paul loved his wife, and did not want to be charmed into cheating on her.

When Veronica came in with a glass of iced tea, Paul twiddled the brass olive on his finger, a silent cry for help, but as Veronica passed him the glass, the flesh of her hand brushed against his, Paul lost control. He seized her; they kissed and fell to the floor. Among the pipes, cushioned by the polystyrene wrapping from the boiler, they grappled, heaving and sweaty. Paul fought his impulses.

“It’s alright,” whispered Veronica. “I’m on the pill.”

“No...” said Paul, not wanting to call her unclean, but even the cleanest looking people, especially those known to have been indulging in exotic sex abroad, could be incubating sexually transmitted diseases. It was problematic enough for his conscience that he was embarking on an affair, but to give Catherine syphilis, gonorrhea, or whatever the current STD in vogue was would be unforgivable.

“Will this help,” said Veronica, guessing his concern and pulling a condom, out of a drawer above Paul’s head.

“Was this planned?” wondered Paul. “Had she planned to have sex, with him here, amongst the fittings?” The suspicion that Veronica had plotted this seduction was enough to crumble Paul’s last resistance; he meant nothing to her; she meant nothing to him now. The pleasure-seeking demon that he had suppressed for so long burst forth. It was good: meaningless, no strings-attached sex, and it became a feature of Veronica’s boiler and radiator installation -- work would be punctuated by intercourse and a cup of Columbian coffee, or herbal tea, depending on whether or not Veronica was detoxing for an upcoming job. They never spoke beyond the absolute necessary. Paul was charging by the hour.

The completion of the job marked the end of the affair. Paul returned to Catherine, vowing never to be unfaithful again, and Veronica, with her fear of long-term relationships, was glad that Paul was happy to go away without a fuss.

***

Nine months after the unorthodox implementation of the turkey baster, on the seventeenth day of September, Veronica gave birth to a baby boy. She called him Oskar.

She was contented as she watched Oskar grow. Until, one day in February as she spooned puréed carrot into his mouth for the first time, she felt a gnawing cold feeling. It started in the back of her head and worked it’s way down her body, climaxing in a shudder as Oskar pushed the orange mush back out of his mouth with his tongue. As the feeling left her body, it took with it the top layer of her contentment. A few days later, as Oskar laughed and scrunched up the pages of the magazine that she was reading, the sensation returned, and another layer was skimmed off her contentment.

As the days went by these moments of erosion became more frequent, and by the time spring arrived the gnawing was constant. Veronica was being eaten away, nibbled at unrelentingly. The more she loved Oskar, the more persistent the gnawing became. And then, when it had gnawed everything away, every last grain of the topsoil of her contentment, it started leaving deposits, fly tipping doubt, vocal doubt -- it had a voice, a nagging voice.

“You can’t make that child happy,” said the voice of doubt. But Veronica ignored this. She looked across the room to where Oskar was shaking CDs out of their cases, of course he was happy.

“You’re dysfunctional,” shouted the voice, as Veronica mashed up potatoes for Oskar’s dinner.

“Unconventional. Unconventional, not dysfunctional,” Veronica retorted, grinding the masher into the powdery potatoes.

“You can’t sustain a relationship,” the voice said, taking on a prim edge. Veronica paid no heed. She clattered the dishes loudly, stacked the plates with vigour, and rattled the cutlery in an attempt to drown the shrill tone of the voice.

“You’re going to turn that child mad, just like everyone else you have ever cared about. What kind of role model are you?” the voice bellowed one morning in May as Veronica scrubbed the mould from around the bathroom taps. Veronica could listen to it no more. She pulled off her pink marigolds and, flinging them into the sink, she shouted: “I always get what I want, and if I want this child to be happy then he will be happy.” The voice was silenced, and Veronica began working on a plan to increase Oskar’s odds in the happiness lottery.

The brighter the sun shone, the higher in the sky it climbed, the clearer what she had to do became. On the twenty-first day of June as Oskar pulled himself up on to his feet, clinging onto the coffee table with one hand, the other hand grabbing for a bottle of wine, Veronica was ready to act.

She picked the butchers knife up from the sharpeners. It was traditional to use a razor blade, but although she had suffered many a nasty nick when shaving the knee area with her Venus divine lady shaver, she did not think it quite up to the task, whereas in the butcher’s knife, she had faith. She had watched her local butcher wield one when jointing a pig, cutting out the hindquarter, complete with curly tail, and tossing it to the floor. The knife had gone through meat and bone effortlessly as if slicing jelly.

Veronica had considered many methods, but most had to be ruled out. Pills were too risky, someone might find her before death arrived; she needed something quicker. Hanging she had dismissed on the grounds that a botched hanging might result in a broken neck and an eternity as a paraplegic in a wheelchair. Carbon monoxide poisoning she knew was a popular choice, but then, as she looked out of the window and saw the neighbours’ hemp garments and cloth sanitary towels fluttering in the breeze, she knew that the sound of her car revving and then being left to idle would not be tolerated. The neighbours would be tapping on the window, telling her to think of her greenhouse emissions, rousing her from near-death. Sticking her head in the oven and gassing herself seemed wholly irresponsible. She might be found at night. The people about to discover her would flip a light switch. The house would explode. The search party would be killed. People who kill themselves using this method have serious issues – problems that go beyond just wishing to be dead.

So, the carving knife and a bathtub full of warm water was the result of several days’ thought. The water helps the blood flow. They say it’s quite painless. It’s how the Romans used to kill themselves. This was the one bit of information that she had retained from three years of classical studies at school.

She did not want to soil the bathtub. Besides, a suspicious death in the bathroom could lower the market price of the house, and in her will, she had instructed that the house be sold. She booked into a cheap hotel for the night.

After collecting the knife, she bought a tin of formula milk, a box of baby porridge, a plain postcard and a roll of masking tape. On returning home, she put Oskar down in his cot for his afternoon nap, at his feet she placed the milk and the porridge. She wrote the postcard, taped it to the boiler, and then, closing the door behind her, she left the house.

Two hours later, Paul arrived. He had received a text message from Veronica on his phone: “Plumbing emergency. Come quickly, boiler erratic and sparking. I won’t be in so use the spare key hidden behind the loose brick in the garage to open the door. ” Paul let himself in and made his way to the kitchen where he had mounted the combination boiler eighteen months ago. He had not seen Veronica since. It was for the best, a clean break. No need to upset Catherine. What had happened with Veronica was a mistake, a one off. Catherine was strung out enough with her infertility. News of his infidelity would tip her over the edge. She would be on the next flight to India. Of late she had been obsessed with helping lepers, when he had told her that leprosy was now a curable disease, she had been nearly inconsolable, and it was only the work of raising money for a mission to help the victims of leprosy in India that had brought her back from the brink after the last embryo that had been artificially inserted into her womb had failed to implant and grow into a baby.

As he walked over to the boiler, Paul saw the note: “Dear Paul, The baby in the bedroom is yours. I want you and your wife to take good care of him. I’m sorry.”

The card was signed Veronica. She had put a full stop after her name.