Incredible Bodies Read online

  For Abigail, Grace and Eve

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Three

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part Four

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Morris Gutman was woken from a series of astonishing dreams by the unharmonious yelp of his neighbour’s car alarm. It was 5.30 a.m. His wife, E, rolled over, relieving him of half the bed clothes.

  ‘It’s that bloody Land Rover again,’ she whispered.

  The air invading Morris’s pyjamas was damp, and, he felt, inhumanly chilly. He retrieved the blanket and in doing so caught a gust of E. She smelt as hot and fragrant as a haystack. Their neighbour’s car alarm, he suspected, had been designed not only to scare off intruders, but to aurally disable them. It was treating their double glazing with disdain. He put his fingers in his ears. Better, but would it really be possible to sleep in that position, he wondered. Would it be safe? What if he rolled over? Might he pierce an eardrum?

  When the alarm finished, Morris experienced a moment of joy so intense it brought tears to his sleep-crusted eyes. Oh, thank God for that, he thought. He closed his eyes and fell back asleep.

  Ten minutes later there was a sudden and appalling scream from the next room, a blast of raw noise of the kind you might normally associate with shrapnel wounds or industrial injury. It was Molly, their daughter. Morris sat straight up: his heart was clattering around inside him, he didn’t recognise the bedroom, his eyes felt useless and he was gripped by despair. E touched his arm.

  ‘Just leave her,’ she said. ‘It’s just a dream.’

  That was right of course, a dream.

  He lay down again and realised disconsolately that he needed to pee. Perhaps if he stopped thinking about it … No, he definitely needed to go. He crept across the landing. He paused at Molly’s door and listened for her breath cutting back and forth like a tiny hacksaw. Once finished, he pondered over whether to flush. Oh well. He flushed. The roar seemed Niagaran; he was certain Molly would wake up. As the tank refilled with a hiss, he stood in pained anticipation. His toes ached with cold, he could hear gusts of rain on the window; downstairs the fridge was humming.

  Joy! He tiptoed back past Molly’s door. (There was a blue gorilla holding a ‘Molly’ sign. There were stickers.) He lay down again feeling supremely happy. His newly lightened bladder floated righteously inside his abdomen like a lily on a pond. He checked the alarm clock: 5.50 a.m. Another hour, God willing.

  He closed his eyes. E snuffled. He thought he heard something else too. A whimper?

  No.

  Yes.

  Yes, definitely a whimper. Another. Then there was a noise of nasal complaint, followed by a strangulated scream which might in other circumstances have presaged the fall of some mighty oak. Molly was awake for good.

  Cursing, Morris Gutman fumbled for his slippers and stomped from the room. Molly was sitting upright, crying. Her open mouth, a small black square cut into the felty greyness of the unlit room, seemed to Morris like the entrance to a secret world of pain and calamity.

  ‘Mol, Mol,’ he cooed against the outrageous din. ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

  ‘Maa, Maa, Maa, Maa,’ she cried, ‘MaaMaa.’

  It was like the plaint of a wounded mastodon, like the moan of some strange and vitriolic football crowd.

  ‘No need for that,’ he said, more in hope than in expectation. ‘No need for all that, is there? It’s just a dream, a dream.’

  Morris worried as he always did that she would wake the neighbours and that they would start, as they had once or twice before, banging on the walls. That would be more than he could bear.

  ‘Shush,’ he said, ‘Shush.’ Then finally, ‘I’ll give you a treat, a treat.’

  She stopped crying.

  ‘Treat, treat, treat, treat,’ she sang.

  Morris dashed into his study and retrieved a Jammy Dodger from the secret stash unknown even to E. As he gave it to Molly and she lapsed into a contented, crumby silence he experienced a momentary but familiar feeling of failure.

  Five minutes later, after an interlude of snorts and tear-wiping, he curled up beside his daughter on the little bed and covered them both with her novelty duvet. She smelt of raspberry jam and sour milk. She was mumbling to herself a word that sounded like ‘falafel’. Half asleep, Morris’s mind veered, as it always did, towards work. He remembered with dismay the classes he had scheduled that day. In the morning ‘Aspects of the Ode’, followed by ‘Misogyny and the Novel’. Then in the afternoon, what was it again? He was sure something particularly bad. Oh, Christ, yes, ‘The History of Critique’ – two MA seminars in a row.

  Morris held a ten-month post in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Coketown. He had been hired at the lowest legal salary to replace two professors: one was drying out and the other was touring China on a fat British Academy grant. The advertisement had sought someone with a strong interest in the history of punctuation, queer theory and ideologikritik with secondary strengths in diasporic literature, Chaucer and the age of Spenser. The way to get such jobs, Morris had discovered, was to maintain a façade of scholarly endeavour while strongly hinting at one’s willingness to cheerfully accept untold amounts of work. There was a certain element of skill involved in this process of placating the consciences of the interviewing panel, who always liked to believe that by offloading their own work they were assisting a young person on to the path of scholarship and wisdom. It was a skill, yes, and one that Morris had, in the five years since he had received his Ph.D., honed, sharpened, even perhaps perfected. But he knew very well that his time was now running out. As in the case of the unmarried debutante (he thought, for example, of Dorothy Portugal in Arthur Alderley’s criminally neglected The Hour of Lead), there came a time in the career of an academic when ‘undrunk the milk of youth curdled in its pot’. After six or seven years the trick would be impossible to pull off. It would be obvious to any panel, however unethical, that his career was going nowhere and that, instead of assisting a young man of promise, they would be merely encouraging someone who probably should not be encouraged any longer.

  Molly rolled over sharply and kicked him in the groin. Morris, swallowing a shriek, felt the tingling numbness volley from his stomach to his knees and then back again. She turned back over and whistled briefly like a pressure cooker. Morris reclosed his eyes.

  He needed a permanent job. Without one, he wondered, what did the future hold? He would be on the shelf, scrambling each semester for hourly work: proof-reading for Japanese postgrads, Continuing Education – the children of Osaka, the housewives of Alderley Edge. He would be the academic equivalent of hired help. Oh yes, he knew the type too well. There were one or two at every insti
tution he had been to – harried and badly shaven men, their briefcases bristling with dog-eared anthologies and unmarked essays, their bitterness concealed behind thick hedges of outdated literary chit-chat. It was, all in all, a desperate scene. That was why Friday’s interview was so important for Morris. A permanent post on offer and he was the inside candidate. The inside man. Even though he had been there less than a year. That was how Declan ‘The Mad’ Monk, Hubert Professor of Anglo-Irish literature had referred to him last week when they had passed in the corridor.

  ‘Oh Morris,’ he had called, without breaking stride. ‘We’re asking for twenty-minute presentations next week. There’ll be a letter. Good shortlist I hear, but you’re the inside man!’

  He had winked and given the thumbs up. Morris never knew how to read the casualness of the Mad Monk – was it a sign of intimacy or disdain? Certainly the Mad Monk was like that with everyone, Morris knew. He wore a fisherman’s sweater and jeans and was perpetually ruddy; informality was his thing. But as a temporary employee, Morris was unnaturally sensitive to signs from above. He knew how these things worked; he had seen others nip in ahead of him too many times before. It was the small things that counted – the pithy interjections in a departmental meeting, the right riposte over coffee and KitKats, the knowing reference to the latest TLS. Oh God, God, God, Morris wondered vehemently, would things ever fall his way? He had tried so hard this time. He had even taken up smoking in the face of E’s vehement protests, so as to be able to stand shivering outside the south entrance with the department’s sickly gang of nicotine addicts: Roy Forecastle, Nigel Qwerty, Pedma Roshi. Not big players any of them, but all senior lecturers who might perhaps bend an ear. He had paid a price of course – two chest infections and his teeth were turning yellow. E didn’t like that one bit, but it would all be worth it if only … if only … But now he had the presentation to consider. That had come out of the blue. All he had to hand was his old stuff on Alderley – ‘Alderley in America’, ‘Alderley and Phrenology’. What did they expect? Over the last five years he had taught twenty-eight different courses at four separate institutions. They had ranged in content from Beowulf to Police Academy II. He had had no time to read or write or research. He had no sense of what his interests were; he had no interests left, not really. Oh, occasionally he caught a glimpse of an idea, something which might make an article or conference paper; once or twice he snatched an afternoon in the library, but it never went anywhere. During the year he was too exhausted, and the summers he seemed to spend mainly at the hospital: his father’s cancer, E’s complex pregnancy, Molly’s ever-evolving allergies.

  That was one reason he needed this job, to give his brain a chance to breathe. Perhaps he could tart up the phrenology essay. Wasn’t the body still big? Of course he would be the only person in the room ever to have read Alderley. He may indeed have been the only person north of Birmingham ever to have read Alderley – not of course counting the bastard Conrad Underseel at Bangor. That was always a disadvantage, but it was too late to be helped. If he actually got a job he could branch out, Kipling perhaps. Then there was the panel to consider, of course. Declan was OK, but then there was the Dean, ‘Crocodile’ McWurter – even professors were frightened of him. Darian Cavendish (The Catholic Sensibility of Coventry Patmore, Oxford, 1972), was just weird. There would be someone from Middle Eastern Studies – another loose cannon – and most troubling of all, Zoe Cable, the new research fellow.

  Zoe Cable was younger than Morris and already had a book and some monster grant under her belt. But it wasn’t that, or it wasn’t only that, which bothered him. There was something else, much more disturbing: on the brief occasions Morris had met and talked to Zoe, she had seemed to be genuinely happy. He had never encountered that in an academic before and it bothered him a lot; indeed, it threw everything he had learnt into question. Academics were not happy. Not English academics with no travel funds and lecture rooms packed with truculent and underachieving students. Granted, they were occasionally smug if they had put one over on a colleague, or gleeful when they were first hired, or uproarious if they were drunk, but no one was ever happy, never really happy. He had the troubling sense that Zoe Cable was playing by different rules. He had heard her refer to the Crocodile as a sweetie; he had heard her bandy sexual innuendos with Mabel in the office. This was not normal, this was not right. It was clear that Zoe Cable knew something he didn’t. She made him feel stupid, and for Morris, as for any academic on a temporary contract, that was definitely the worst feeling in the world.

  It was not yet 6 a.m. but he was already horribly wide awake. His head was dense with unpleasantness and his stomach felt like a grease-clogged drain. How would he survive the day? Without waking up, Molly rolled over again, kicked him in the stomach and stuck her fist into his mouth. Her hand tasted soft and salty. He opened his eyes and there she was, her face big and blurry pushed right up against his. He reached under her pyjama top and felt the vertebrae of her back like a row of pebbles under the skin. Her hair smelt musty and rancorous; it hadn’t been washed for weeks. She had a small rosette of eczema on her chin.

  Before her arrival, Morris had not expected to love her in the way he did. He had expected pride and pleasure and sentiment of various kinds, but not yearning or desire, not this craving to smell and touch. He wondered sometimes whether he should be ashamed of it, whether he had stepped over some line. Morris gently bit her forearm; it was soft and damp as unrisen dough. She pushed him off.

  ‘Move along,’ she shouted drowsily. ‘Go to Rotherham.’

  E was in the bathroom, groaning. That was something they shared. They had run out of dried prunes two days ago and now look (or listen) where they were. His turn would come, no doubt after coffee. Such things creep up on you, he thought: constipation, nasal hair, tooth decay. He hadn’t danced for years, not that he was ever any good at it, but it was the principle he was thinking of.

  He dressed Molly in slippers and a robe and carried her downstairs. Several slugs were stuck to the outside of the kitchen window like slick globs of chewing gum. The perpetual dampness of Coketown formed an ideal climate for gastropods. Birds found it hard to survive the pollution, but their garden in particular seemed to serve as a Club Med for snails and other molluscs. Molly could gather them by the bucket load.

  ‘Toast or cereal?’ he asked.

  ‘Egg.’

  ‘Egg what?’

  ‘Egg now.’

  As he boiled the water, the kitchen fogged up like a sauna. Molly was running around pretending to be a goat. Morris felt suddenly drawn out and wretched. His eyes ached from behind, and his insides felt as though they had recently been sandpapered. The thought of Declan Monk popped into his head for no reason. He wanted to cry. Molly collided with a chair, spilled her cup of milk across the floor and started howling.

  ‘Oh for Godsake, Molly.’

  Morris picked her up too abruptly and dropped her into the booster seat. As he mopped the floor, the howling became louder and more deliberate. Morris felt anger, red and hollow, ballooning inside him. For a second he didn’t care about anything at all.

  ‘Will you please BE QUIET!’

  The roar of his voice filled and sharpened the room like a flashbulb. There was a blissful second of silent backwash before Molly’s face turned red, her mouth reopened and the scream whirred and wowed above them like an air-raid warning.

  E arrived, shot a glance at Morris and picked Molly up for a cuddle. Her face paled from plum to peach.

  Morris sat down in the corner and began to read the South Coketown Advertiser.

  ‘They’re putting double yellow lines on Oswald Road,’ he said. ‘There’s been another cock-up at the Coketown Royal Infirmary.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Corpse in the laundry. They’re reviewing procedures.’ He read a little more. ‘It’s a cost benefit sort of thing apparently.’

  ‘It usually is.’ She was feeding Molly half a satsuma.

 
He paused. ‘Are you implying something by that?’

  ‘Implying?’

  ‘By that remark. It just seems to me that that remark is freighted with implications. Of various kinds.’ Now he was reading the small ads.

  ‘Does your mother still want a bread maker? There’s one in here for twenty pounds, need a quick sale.’

  ‘No, that was just a phase. You know how she is with labour-saving devices.’

  ‘She has the roving eye.’

  ‘Now it’s high-pressure washers.’

  ‘That follows.’

  ‘I wasn’t implying anything. There was no implication at all. I can’t imagine what you are thinking of.’

  ‘More satsuma,’ demanded Molly. She seemed to be developing a nasty eye infection.

  ‘Are you worried about Friday?’

  Morris put down the paper.

  ‘Now there’s a presentation,’ he said. ‘Did I mention that?’

  ‘That’s late in the day, isn’t it? Don’t they have rules?’

  ‘What can I do? I’m powerless. My hands are tied.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Alderley?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘America or phrenology?’

  ‘Phrenology I think.’

  ‘It’s worked before.’

  ‘The Eccles Institute, yes. But it was my enthusiasm for marking that really swung it there.’

  ‘That was the feedback you got?’

  ‘That was it. This time it’s the panel which concerns me most.’

  ‘But you know them. You’re the inside candidate.’

  ‘The inside man. Yes, but that’s it – I lack the element of surprise, of mystery. I’m an open book. What you see is what you get.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘No, it’s not good. It’s bad. Panels don’t want certainty. They don’t want knowledge. They want hope, possibility. They want someone to mirror their desires, however perverse and varied they may be.’

  ‘And do their marking for them.’

  ‘That too. But don’t you see? The perfect candidate, should he or she exist, will be contentless. Just a shiny, fractured surface with no depth – glints and flashes, pure expectation.’