Free The Ted Dreams by Fay Weldon Page B

them off to the Portal Inc lab to ‘check out their brain wirings’ as he put it, but so far as I know they’ve never gone along with that. One of Robbie’s neurobiologist colleagues is working on twinning, researching the effects of mitochondrial insufficiency on the development of the foetus. (That’s me, apparently. Mitochondrially deficient! It figures: when in doubt just blame the mother, ha-ha-ha.) There are degrees of twinness in identical twins. Normally mitochondrial traces continue to work on the fertilised foetuses so that as they grow older differences in appearance and personality become more and more pronounced, but not with Martha and Maude. Robbie suggested a link between my (alleged) mitochondrial insufficiency and my oestrogen over-sufficiency, probably contributing to my menstrual mood swings – but I really didn’t want to know. Enough is enough. I’m a person, not a bundle of hormones and chemicals, and I’m not going to be defined away by my DNA. It’s reductionist. On the other hand, if there could be some link between my mood swings and a dream life which is beginning to oppress me, next time Robbie suggests it maybe I will go and ‘see someone’ at Portal Inc. It can do no harm.
    Oh God, so much is all my fault – my insufficient mitochondria having failed to enable the twins to differentiate as they grew older, and one can only suppose I drove my natural parents to murder and suicide, my father getting fed up and killing my mother. I said earlier that ‘he had changed his mind’ and shot himself, but actually he did fire at me and I was hospitalised but survived: the police had to shoot him. One way and another I think it’s a miracle I’m as sane as I am.
    And the twins had always seemed to me to be over-fond of Cynara, almost taking her part against mine. They admired her style, the sheer extravagance of her manners. They’d even met Robbie before I had. They’d happened to drop by to see Ted in the Gallery: he wasn’t there, but Cynara, as it happened, was – on the very day when Robbie was there, interested in buying a fake Franz Hals for his office foyer. A strange coincidence. Stranger still, come to think about it, that since we were married Robbie had showed so little interest in paintings. The ones we had on our walls had been bought and hung by Ted: and though I had suggested to Robbie that we simply give them back to the gallery and have done with them (I’d always been a little disconcerted by Ted’s interest in fakes) so that Robbie could have his own space on the walls, he’d not taken the suggestion up. Ted’s choice of paintings hung stubbornly on our walls. Married life is like that – all compromise.
    What else had Cynara said? ‘When a man takes Doxies he passes on so much extra SSRI in his cum she ends up so passive, pleased and loving she’ll do anything he asks. The lab keeps them under lock and key.’ And then I thought, it all makes dreadful sense. I so love Robbie, and he seems to love me. Perhaps Cynara isn’t making it all up, isn’t deranged. Supposing the love-fix is true, the sex you have to have to keep the addiction going? Supposing it’s all true. Ted, murdered just in order to get him back from the dead, myself put in as stalking horse. Cynara: ‘ If anyone could get a genuine word from the other side it’d be you.’ That’s what they’re after. Me as the stalking horse. No wonder Cynara was doing so well with the gallery: ‘Good to have the NSA on one’s side.’ Again and again:‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’
    Then, after weeks, the letter from the coroner came and we were free to go ahead with the funeral. Ted’s brother’s Aidan’s mother-in-law from his first marriage came over to help me with the arrangements. I tried to apologise for the nylon sheets and scratchy towels she’d been given last time, but she looked surprised and said she hadn’t even noticed.