Egg Dancing Read Online Free

to worry about all the other vaginas in my husband’s life. He assured me there was nothing in the least bit sexual about looking up women’s orifices – ‘birth canals’, he called them – all day long. But I wondered sometimes. He had certain preoccupations. All the monitoring he insisted on. Urination, defecation, menstruation: he’d make me register all my bodily excreta in a notebook in the bathroom. I felt like one of the early astronauts from the days when human guinea-pigs were shot into space for the greater glory of mankind. Then there were the pills: pills for conceiving, folic acid pills for maximal maternal health in the peri-conceptual period, blue pills in the morning, red at night. I’d been taking two of each every day for the last three years, and I was rattling with them. I wondered sometimes if other doctors took such methodical care of their wives, or whether it was just those on the obs and gynae side. Habit didn’t make it any easier. I’d pretend to read a magazine when he gave me my monthly check-up. My bare feet in the stirrups, he’d glide the Vaselined speculum in, open it with a screw-turn and peer in to take his swab. By the end, my brain was on the ceiling, flattened and clinging on.
         He delivered babies and did abortions, too. They said he was very talented.
         I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about that word ‘voluptuous’, which was the last one I’d use to describe Gregory’s tight, disinfected looks.
         I went shopping the next morning when I’d dropped Billy off at playgroup. Gridiron is at its most stark in winter, whittled down to the bare essentials of a generic Lego town: red-brick buildings, themed shopping malls, grimy pubs, churches, hospitals, Jaycote’s Park with its ancient sycamore trees, their bark almost black from car exhaust, the Cheeseways Works in the distance. Ma always used to say she liked Gridiron because it ‘wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small’. For what, we never knew. But walking about that morning, it seemed to make some kind of sense. Gridiron is a place to lose yourself in, almost-but-not-quite. A medium-sized pond for medium-sized fish. And a few big ones, like Gregory. He’d always wanted to move to London, but I didn’t. Gridiron is my city. I like to know where I am.
         Walking along the High Street I caught sight of a woman in a mirror outside Boots. She had longish, wispy hair and a thin, quite attractive, raddled-looking face. I recognised her as one of the mums from Billy’s playgroup, Mrs Something-or-other, but it wasn’t until I’d got home and unloaded my shopping that I realised with a shock who it was, and that I’d become invisible even to myself.
         The invisible woman. I’d first sensed it when I was leaving the hospital after seeing my mother. It was then I put a name to it, there in the Pay and Display. When it was nameless I could dismiss it. But now, having just walked straight past my own mirror image without recognising myself, I could no longer afford to ignore it. When I told this to Gregory he just laughed and gave me a look, the look he gave me when I reminded him too much of Ma.
         All winter I was thinking about it, though. ‘Fostering my delusions’, as Gregory would have put it. I tried to keep quiet about them for the sake of peace. Meanwhile Gregory was very preoccupied with the desire to be famous. It was wearing him down, this obsession with renown. Every night he lectured me about his prospects. He’d stand there in the kitchen with his hands deep in his pockets, making himself taller every now and then by standing on the balls of his feet, while I was giving Billy his dinner or cooking. He’d pour himself a whisky, and a gin-and-Slimline for me, and hold forth. He always made me stop at two measures of gin because of my uterus, but more often than not I’d slip myself another, and sometimes I got quite drunk. Then one night in late