Free Egg Dancing by Liz Jensen

thought it in very poor taste. I’m surprised you had the nerve to try it on. It is the kind of thing that used to happen sometimes in the library when I was Deputy Chief Librarian, usually in the natural history section, of all places. I made a point of disrupting it. Told them they could take their libido outside and do it in the street like dogs. It has to be said you were looking quite dreadful. Thin, but not in an attractive way, and completely washed out. You had ‘poached-egg eyes’.
         Not much news to report this end. In Group we’ve been sitting round en silence absolu half the time. Keith has recovered from that fight you saw him have with Mrs Murphy, who is now on enhanced Largactil. Scrabble is her whole life, and she panics when someone cheats or comes up with a word she doesn’t know. It was ‘Spud-u-like’ that did it. Keith’s a genius.
         Oh yes – Isabella’s so-called phantom pregnancy is all of a sudden progressing rather rapidly, so perhaps you could bring a few maternity supplies with you when you next get an attack of ‘guilty relative syndrome’. I am also short of fresh compost in the greenhouse so please recycle a few household scraps, but don’t bother with eggshells, they take too long to rot down, despite what that ridiculous woman pundit with the frizzy hair and no proper nose says on TV.
         Today is the anniversary of your father’s death, so spare him a thought, silly bugger though he was. I wonder whether that Texaco woman Bernice remembers him. I expect not. I expect the erotic young creature (who is probably pushing fifty, now I think of it), I expect she has moved on to fresher and more available pastures. Thanks to art therapy, I now have a good likeness of her in effigy, but haven’t decided on the most –
         Must go. Collection time. Get your son’s hair cut.
         Yours sincerely,
        Your Ma,
         Moira Sugden
     
    It was an average kind of letter to get from my mother. Recently she’d reverted to writing her letters on paper, which meant I was more likely to read them. There was a time when everything was in black ink on scraps of cardboard in her tall, loopy handwriting. Then there were the sheaves of stained Kleenex, which I assumed had writing on them. For about six months her missives came written on old-fashioned waxed toilet paper of the kind I remembered from the municipal public conveniences of my childhood – paper which Linda used to complain ‘doesn’t so much wipe anything, as move it around’. There was a time when she’d written on what looked like banana leaves. I chucked them straight in the bin. Sometimes, I chose not to read the legible ones anyway. They had a bad effect on me. The one she’d written after I married Gregory left my neck rigid. It felt like rheumatism, but my GP diagnosed rage, known in the trade as anxiety. This morning’s letter I’d opened distractedly, my mind still on the conversation with Gregory. The mild annoyance it stirred in me (‘poached-egg eyes’) seemed an irrelevance after the night I’d just been through. But I had to admit she was right about Billy’s constipation, despite all the Fiba-mash. His hair was also very long; I’d never had the heart to cut his curls. It was slightly uncanny, the way she seemed to have an instinct about him. She’d faxed Gregory at work one time to say Billy was coming down with chickenpox. And three days later he did. When Linda and I were younger, and the three of us were all living at home in the Cheeseways, the house was a cauldron of psychic surveillance. Outright spying, too. One day Ma boasted to me that she’d read my diary systematically over the years. And my letters from boyfriends. A red cloud flew in front of my eyes. Then came the dreams about hitting Ma, but she was made of rubber, or sometimes jelly.
         I threw the letter in the kitchen drawer, on top of a hundred other of her epistles from the State of Absolute