Egg Dancing Read Online Free Page A

January he came back excited and flushed. I’ve seen mountaineers on TV with the same look when they’ve planted a flag at the summit of something. I couldn’t help wondering if it was to do with Dr Ruby Gonzalez, but it turned out to be something else.
         It’s not enough to be talented, Gregory was telling me, not for the first time, but with an extra gleam in his eyes like he was building up to something. He makes Airfix models, and it was that Airfix look, the one when you’re putting the last piece in place – usually the pilot’s seat or the tail-lights. You have to be brilliant to get anywhere worth going in gynaecology these days; brilliant or lucky. That was it. Gregory thought he was about to get lucky. Some very promising tests had just come through, he said; a sort of breakthrough he and ‘a colleague’ had made. I wouldn’t understand the detail of it. He was talking about the drug he’d invented. He’d been tinkering with it for years, and he still didn’t have any concrete results, but he’d always had faith in it, ever since he started working on it way back when we were first married. (The Airfix stuff, I reckon, was a way of coping with the long-term nature of his research. You get a quick result with a model glider.) ‘Genetic Choice’, it was called. The tabloids called it the ‘Perfect Baby drug’. Reverend Carmichael of Channel Praise called it ‘the Devil’s work’. He’d been lobbying against it, intermittently, ever since news of Greg’s work first emerged in the scientific press. Gregory got so irate at one of the Reverend Carmichael’s smear campaigns that he had the TV in his clinic waiting-room fixed so that Channel Praise became a jumble of dancing lines, with fuzzy, indecipherable sound. If women want to listen to that maniac, Gregory said, they have no business coming to my clinic. Anyway, he was saying, Genetic Choice still didn’t actually work. Yet. But he’d had a small, important breakthrough.
         ‘Some tests have come up positive,’ is all he would say about it.
         I was glad for him about the breakthrough. But I felt uncomfortable as well; always had. To be frank, the whole enterprise gave me a slightly odd feeling – a bit like the excreta-monitoring thing. But I’d tried to be supportive, in the way I was about all the aerodynamics cluttering the loft. There was still a lot of lab and rat work to do, and then the clinical trials. They’d take years, and then there’d be all the battles with the licensing authority, not to mention the Reverend Vernon Bloody Carmichael’s lot.
         ‘Plus Christ knows what else,’ he added, with that weary breadwinner look on his face.
         So in the meantime he was planning his own trial. He wouldn’t say precisely what, though. The Perfect Baby. What a thought. Not that Billy’s not perfect. Though Gregory said to me once, let’s face it, he’s not showing any signs of great intelligence – he thinks he’s an ambulance.
         ‘We have a normal boy on our hands here, Hazel,’ he said, in a rather wistful way. ‘A perfectly normal, average, ordinary boy.’
         Which goes to show he knows nothing, I thought afterwards.
         A few days later, I could tell that Dr Gonzalez had been working at the clinic again. She and Gregory ‘collaborated’ sometimes, and it always showed on his face afterwards. There was that look about him. Distant. Voluptuous, even. He always said she had a very womanly way of carrying herself. I suppose it was true, though I could only ever see her faults. I’ll admit, though, that she had a certain light in her eyes, which were dark, lovely eyes, the kind men call mysterious, slightly greasy on the lids, but not unpleasantly so. Bedroom eyes. I’d only met her three or four times, over the course of a couple of years. I suppose she was exotic: she was born in Caracas and had spent most of her life in Croydon. Funny, but she’d always looked six