Not his body. That stayed standing facing the blank wall of the cul-de-sac.
But his head cranked around on its slender axis, disregarding reason and anatomy. Burgess choked as his gullet twisted on itself like a flesh rope, his vertebrae screwed to powder, his cartilage to fibre mush. His eyes bled, his ears popped, and he died, looking at that sunless, unbegotten face.
'I told you to look at me,' said Hell, and went its bitter way, leaving him standing there, a fine paradox for the democrats to find when they came, bustling with words, into the Palace of Westminster.
JACQUELINE ESS: HER WILL AND TESTEMENT
MY GOD, SHE thought, this can't be living. Day in, day out: the boredom, the drudgery, the frustration.
My Christ, she prayed, let me out, set me free, crucify me if you must, but put me out of my misery
In lieu of his euthanasian benediction, she took a blade from Ben's razor, one dull day in late March, locked herself in the bathroom, and slit her wrists.
Through the throbbing in her ears, she faintly heard Ben outside the bathroom door.
'Are you in there, darling?'
'Go away,' she thought she said.
'I'm back early, sweetheart. The traffic was light.'
'Please go away.'
The effort of trying to speak slid her off the toilet seat and on to the white-tiled floor, where pools of her blood were already cooling.
'Darling?'
'Go.'
'Darling.'
'Away.'
'Are you all right?'
Now he was rattling at the door, the rat. Didn't he realize she couldn't open it, wouldn't open it?
'Answer me, Jackie.'
She groaned. She couldn't stop herself. The pain wasn't as terrible as she'd expected, but there was an ugly feeling, as though she'd been kicked in the head. Still, he couldn't catch her in time, not now. Not even if he broke the door down.
He broke the door down.
She looked up at him through an air grown so thick with death you could have sliced it.
'Too late,' she thought she said.
But it wasn't.
My God, she thought, this can't be suicide. I haven't died. The doctor Ben had hired for her was too perfectly benign. Only the best, he'd promised, only the very best for my Jackie.
'It's nothing,' the doctor reassured her, 'that we can't put right with a little tinkering.'
Why doesn't he just come out with it? she thought. He doesn't give a damn. He doesn't know what it's like.
'I deal with a lot of these women's problems,' he confided, fairly oozing a practiced compassion. 'It's got to epidemic proportions among a certain age-bracket.'
She was barely thirty. What was he telling her? That she was prematurely menopausal?
'Depression, partial or total withdrawal, neuroses of every shape and size. You're not alone, believe me.'
Oh yes I am, she thought. I'm here in my head, on my own, and you can't know what it's like.
'We'll have you right in two shakes of a lamb's tail.' I'm a lamb, am I? Does he think I'm a lamb?
Musing, he glanced up at his framed qualifications, then at his manicured nails, then at the pens on his desk and notepad. But he didn't look at Jacqueline. Anywhere but at Jacqueline.
'I know,' he was saying now, 'what you've been through, and it's been traumatic. Women have certain needs. If they go unanswered —'
What would he know about women's needs?
You're not a woman, she thought.
'What?' he said.
Had she spoken? She shook her head: denying speech. He went on; finding his rhythm once more: 'I'm not going to put you through interminable therapy-sessions. You don't want that, do you? You want a little reassurance, and you want something to help you sleep at nights.'
He was irritating her badly now. His condescension was so profound it had no bottom. All-knowing, all- seeing Father; that was his performance. As if he were blessed with some miraculous insight into the nature of a woman's soul.
'Of course, I've tried therapy courses with patients in the past. But between you and me —'
He lightly patted her hand. Father's palm on the back of her hand. She was supposed to be flattered, reassured, maybe even seduced.
'— between you and me it's so much talk. Endless talk. Frankly, what good does it do? We've all got problems. You can't talk them away, can you?'
You're not a woman. You don't look like a woman, you don't feel like a woman —
'Did you say something?'
She shook her head.
'I thought you said something. Please feel free to be honest with me.'
She didn't reply, and he seemed to tire of pretending intimacy. He stood up and went to the window.
'I think the best thing for you —'
He stood against the light: darkening the room, obscuring the view of the cherry trees on the lawn through the window. She stared at his wide shoulders, at his narrow hips. A fine figure of a man, as Ben would have called him. No child-bearer he. Made to remake the world, a body like that. If not the world, remaking minds would have to do.
'I think the best thing for you —'
What did he know, with his hips, with his shoulders? He was too much a man to understand anything of her.
'I think the best thing for you would be a course of sedatives —'
Now her eyes were on his waist.
'— and a holiday.'
Her mind had focused now on the body beneath the veneer of his clothes. The muscle, bone and blood beneath the elastic skin. She pictured it from all sides, sizing it up, judging its powers of resistance, then closing on it. She thought: Be a woman.
Simply, as she thought that preposterous idea, it began to take shape. Not a fairy-tale transformation, unfortunately, his flesh resisted such magic. She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin burst and his sternum flew apart.
His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its centre; unbalanced, he toppled over on to his desk and from there stared up at her, his face yellow with shock. He licked his lips, over and over again, to find some wetness to talk with. His mouth was dry: his words were still-born. It was from between his legs that all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood; the thud of his bowel on the carpet.
