Egg Dancing by Liz Jensen

Author:Liz Jensen [Liz Jensen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-11-11T13:00:00+00:00

The next day I woke at six, and reached out for Ishmael beside me in the bed. I reckoned I could still feel his flesh on mine, but he wasn’t there. My heart hurt. The vitamins he’d given me the other night were next to the bed, in a plastic container. He’d been right to prescribe them: looking in the mirror, I noticed how careworn my face looked. I reckoned that my whole system could probably do with a boost, now that I had something to live for. So when I finally got the lid off, I took five.

Love was a violent, heavy animal. A bull that crashed into me head-on, impaled me on its horn, tossed me in the sky. When I landed, I had bruises on my soul. I planned to deck Ishmael in jewels, like a king. I would. Like a king.

‘Just done a wee-wee,’ said Billy, waking up and removing his sodden nappy.

Staring closer in the mirror, I realised I owed it to myself to get my act together. Today I would spend some time and some money on it. I wanted to be a new woman.

I watched Billy eating cornflakes at breakfast, and cooed over him, ridden with guilt. But he seemed older, and less interested in baby talk. Leaving home seemed to have coincided with a development spurt. Or caused one.

‘Gwanny,’ he said. ‘Wanna see Gwanny.’

‘You will, darling,’ I promised. ‘After the crèche.’

‘Take me there, Mummy,’ he said, his face squashed into a bright little smile. For a brief instant there was something of Greg about his eyes, and I recoiled.

‘Off we go then,’ I said, wiping his face. ‘Mummy will come to fetch you later.’

‘And Gwanny?’ he asked. (Bugger ‘Gwanny’. What does he see in her?)

‘And Granny, if you like.’

‘Good,’ said Billy, getting down from the table and into his buggy. ‘I love my Gwanny.’

Those pills; was it them that made my heart soar like Concorde in the face of such depressing news?

It was early, and I was the only customer in the Hopeworth’s Soins Intensifs Beauty Clinic. Three white-coated beauticians stood behind me in a semi-circle and we gazed into the mirror together.

‘Trust me,’ said the man. His name was Bobby. ‘I’m an artist.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘I’m Sherine and this is Mabs,’ said Sherine. ‘I’ll get you a coffee.’

‘Transform me,’ I told them, feeling the potent rectangle of Gregory’s credit card in the pocket of my ski-pants. Mabs went and got some thin rubber gloves. The beauticians turned out to be quite a trio.

First Bobby waxed my legs and depilated my bikini line while Sherine and Mabs massaged my body with coconut oil.

‘Milk and Hermesetas?’ asked Sherine.

‘Or are you artificially sweet enough already?’ joked Bobby.

Then the three of them put me in a tub to steam and went off for a cigarette.

Twenty minutes later, when I was itching and tingling all over, they threw me in a pool of freezing water. When they’d pulled me out, Sherine covered me in something called Galilee Mud.

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