Maddy Redmayne 

Extract from Toxic

We’ve converted a shed at the end of the garden into a studio for me. It’s one of those pods, a space-age thing, designed so you can work from home. Privacy from the wife and kids, the salesman had said, winking at my husband.

We bought the house because we needed more space, or at least, that’s what Harry had said as he set the filters on Rightmove for a place with four bedrooms and a garden.

Four bedrooms? That’s two bedrooms each.

It’ll give us space to grow.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

A semi-detached in Zone 2 with easy access to a station and off-street parking.

The bank had been willing to lend us an extortionate amount. More zeros than I could’ve imagined. All we had to do was type Harry’s salary into a little calculator on the website and we were good to go. They didn’t even ask what I was contributing, as if I didn’t really matter, as if I had simply been absorbed by my husband’s good fortune and now hid behind his title. It was a good job really; I wasn’t contributing anything – had never contributed anything. I had just accepted, a month in, when Harry had complained about the strange smell in the stairwell of my apartment block and I had dragged an old suitcase over to his flat, that this is how it would work.

My very own artist in residence, he had said, his arm looped round my waist like a gold chain.

Harry is the type of man who never checks the bill at expensive restaurants and finds it mortifying when I drag the waiter over because they’ve charged us for an extra slice of lemon tart. Sometimes, I see him, while we are watching telly or waiting for the tube, almost absent-mindedly checking his banking app, soothed by the figures on the screen. I hadn’t been with Harry long before I too felt myself easing into this state of acceptance. How quickly I had gone from worrying about money to ordering bottled water in restaurants.

I was (am?) left-wing. It’s almost mandatory given that I am the creative type. Almost as if, at the entrance to the gallery, they will check your voting record. Harry finds my membership of the Labour party amusing, a little personality quirk he has decided to interpret as endearing.

But you can’t really sit there and tell me that bunch of Trotskyites are going to do anything other than butt-fuck the country into bankruptcy? Labour’s position on taxes is, in itself, absurd.

Harry doesn’t seem to understand that if you don’t make any money, taxes are a nice idea. Steal from the rich to feed the poor. He laughs at the fact my first crush was the communist fox from Disney’s Robin Hood.

It is not that he is unkind. He gives coffee to the homeless people we pass in town, the bundled up faces you can almost trip over. Coffee, but never money. He thinks they will use the money to buy drugs. I give them nothing, not wanting to patronise them.

My friends from art school always found it strange that I had ended up so financially stable, as if this, in some bizarre way meant that I had failed at being an artist. At the end of the night, sat in some converted warehouse in East London, they’d ask, almost conspiratorially, how I could be with ‘someone like Harry’.

What do you mean?

He’s a banker!

They spat the word out like it was a swear-word, which I suppose in the wake of the financial crash it was. 

He just works at a bank, it’s different. He’s sensitive – he listens to Leonard Cohen when he’s down. 

 I don’t see them much anymore, the art crew. I couldn’t be bothered to keep going to the parties in abandoned hospitals; I’ve had enough conversations about Infinite Jest for a lifetime.

The closest Harry’s friends ever get to talking about art is when they try to pin down Banksy, a subject that seems to have never-ending appeal. The modern conspiracy theory – my generation’s man on the moon. I’d never thought it was that important who was holding the spray can, but they seem to think that if Banksy turns out to be a typical middle-class white bloke who buys artichokes from Waitrose (i.e. one of them), then the graffiti becomes meaningless.

I always get sat with the women. I can’t tell if this is because they think I’m incapable of holding a conversation with the menfolk, or whether I can’t be trusted not to run off with their husbands there and then, the myth of the sexually promiscuous artist ever-pervading. These women are anthropologists who specialise in courtship and mating rituals.

Poor Samantha. Charles is a bit of a shit making her wait so long for the bloody diamond.

He got her a blood diamond?

They look at me blankly.

I’m not made for the office, and thankfully Harry seems to enjoy having a wife who does something other than law or banking, as if, by osmosis, being with me he can become something other than boring.

And here I am, sat in the pod on a Tuesday morning in dungarees looking like a parody of myself. I slap a lump of clay down onto the desk enjoying the sound it makes as it hits the wood. I like this bit, the beginning, when I don’t know what it’ll be yet.

I feel the clay in between my fingers. It’s too dry; I add water. It resists me as it always does. I press harder, pull further. It begins to answer to my touch, rounding more and more. Muscle memory kicks in. I forget about everything they ever taught me in art school.

The house is in the kind of neighbourhood that would have once been described by Harry’s colleagues as ‘stabby’ but has now been colonised by yuppies. I like it because you can get both kebabs and knitting needles on the high-street, and Harry likes it because amongst his circle he is seen as genuinely brave for venturing beyond Clapham. Plus, as he reminds me, we could never have afforded en suite bathrooms in a neighbourhood with lower crime statistics.

I can’t tell if it is working. The clay is beginning to resemble something, or maybe someone. It’s too early to say if I’ll let the figure live or not. The Greek gods used to create women out of clay, shape them how they wanted and then breathe life into them. The problems began when they started to answer back. Maybe that is how I started – no father – just my mother, some mud she scooped out of the canal and a desire for someone, anyone, to listen.  

As if summoned, my phone pings. It’s her.

Didn’t sleep all night. In agony. Don’t bother calling as am in hospital x

It’s the passive aggressive x that confuses me – does she want me to call?

It’s not that I’m unempathetic, it’s just that I have become accustomed to her pain like how one might stop hearing a car alarm that never ends. I don’t know when it started. Maybe when my father left, as if the shock of being walked out on did something to her. There have been aches and sores and fevers. She is tired. She can’t sleep.

And it’s not that I don’t believe her. I have seen it first-hand, the shakes and shivers. But I have also seen the scans, the whistle-clean arteries, the insistent pump of her heart. Negative test after negative test. She’s failed to be diagnosed.

I look out at the garden. The artificial grass is covered in a thin layer of frost, confirmation that we are well and truly heading into winter. A robin taps its beak repeatedly on the ground, knocking for its breakfast. In the distance I can hear the persistent screech of a siren and wonder if the person being rushed to the hospital looks anything like my mother. I make a bet with myself that they’ll live, knowing that I’ll never be able to lose.

I call her.

You’re in hospital?

Yes.

I wait for her to elaborate but she holds back, knowing the power of silence.

Is it your head?

What?

Your head – is it ok? Have you seen the doctors yet?

It’s not my head. It’s the dizziness. I woke up thinking I was at sea.

I am surprised by the appropriateness of this metaphor. In the background I can hear someone shouting, an echoey sound as though she is calling me from a cathedral.

Oh no. That sounds dreadful.

Yes.

So, have you managed to see a doctor yet?

Yes.

And?

They are going to do an MRI. It might be serious.

I can tell she is proud of herself, offering this up like a child offering up a drawing of a unicorn.

Well, you must let me know the results when you get them.

I know there is something else I should say, but I can’t think what.

Do you want to come and stay with us?

There is a beat of silence, in which I realise what I’ve done.

Oh no, I couldn’t trouble you and darling Harry. You’re so…

So what?

Busy.

Not so busy we can’t have you to stay. We have more than one spare room you know?

I don’t know why I say this, it sounds as though I'm boasting. There is a pause as she considers my offer.

Well, maybe it would be good to have a few days of TLC. But I’ll have to wait and see if they want to do any more tests on me.

Yes, of course. Well, I hope you feel better soon. And do give me a call once you have the results.

After the call, I take the clay figure that could have been something and smash it back into nothing. It is not late, but already the light is leaking away, as though the day has lost confidence in itself. I head back into the house and hit the remote. The telly jumps into life on a cooking show. I wonder if I should warn Harry about the possibility of my mother coming to stay. Instead, I text him to pick up a packet of paracetamol and some vodka on his way home.

***

The seats are heated. This was the first thing Harry showed me when he drove the car back from the garage. Three bars. I feel as though I am the wicked witch of the west, melting into the leather – the punishment I deserve for having an SUV.

We’re listening to a podcast on American politics playing at double speed. Harry says he doesn’t have time to listen to things at their normal pace. I wonder, if the option was available, whether he would choose to live his life speeded up. There are two male voices talking over each other about healthcare. At first, it sounds as though they are arguing, but after a few minutes I realise they are actually both saying the same thing, although they put the emphasis on different words. Apparently, healthcare is a good thing and everyone should have access to it, but hard-working people shouldn’t be taxed to pay for it.

Republicans?

What honey?

Are these guys Republicans?

Harry glances across at me as though I am joking.

They’re Democrats. One of them is an adviser to Biden. 

I want to ask if we are nearly there, when this agony of numb legs will end, but I don’t want to sound childish. I fiddle with the buttons of my cardigan. It is not that Harry told me to dress nicely, but I have learnt what to wear for these occasions. I remember the first time I met his parents. We were already engaged. They had come up to London, curious about the woman who’d ensnared him. Harry had booked us into a restaurant smack-bang in the middle of town that was decorated like a garden, as though trying to fool its inhabitants we weren’t actually in the city at all. I had been out the night before with friends and arrived in jeans with rips at the knees and a top covered with paint stains. His mother had arrived in a cream linen suit.

I know the rules now. I have brought the requisite bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. I will compliment her pavlova. I will not recoil when the spaniels jump up at me.

We turn off the motorway onto back roads that twist and turn. I think of my mother’s seasickness as I watch the hedgerows tear past us. She is unstable on the land. She feels as though the earth is not certain, may give way beneath her feet. I have seen the articles; I know what we have done to this planet. The mercury creeps up the thermometer, the ice caps melt. What if she is right?

Nearly there. Harry reaches over to give my knee an affectionate squeeze. I realise the podcast has ended. We sit in silence.

His parents are waiting outside as though they have been tracking our journey, as though they have no other purpose than to welcome home the prodigal son. This is why you must never have only one child. It is simple maths – there need to be enough kids to balance out their parents. They look like the figurines from the top of a wedding cake that have been left out in the sun. Tall and short. Man and woman. Husband and wife.

The house is objectively too big. It is the type of thing that might have been converted into a hospital during the war. It’s not as old as you might think, given the mock gothic façade, but in an attempt at authenticity, it is consistently cold, even in summer. I button up my cardigan before opening the door. 

They like to do that thing where we kiss each other on the cheek while we hug, except I’m never sure whether we are supposed to actually kiss or just move our faces close to one another’s. His dad, a red-faced friendly sort of man, gives me a good squeeze while his mother simply pushes her face in my direction with her eyes tightly shut, as if she does not wish to be reminded of what I look like. They both have the same smell as if they really are just one person who has been split in two.

I hand over the ransom of wine and chocolates and immediately regret doing so when his mother informs me that she is on a strictly-no-sugar-diet. She is probably a size six.

We are ushered through the enormous wooden front door and into the drawing room, a room that is entirely yellow – yellow carpets, yellow sofas and yellow curtains, with a great gilt mirror hanging from the wall so we can watch our interactions in real time, almost as if they are happening to some other family.

His mother, call me Linda, has platinum blonde hair and a slim figure. She looks fragile, especially next to her husband, a large man, almost as though she might be whisked off by a strong breeze. She was nearly forty when she gave birth to Harry, the longed-for son, and you can tell that time is catching up with her. Her hands quiver slightly when she leans in to pour the tea.

Xanthe, Harry was telling us all about the lovely painting you’ve been doing.

Sculpting mum.

Oh yes, silly me, that’s what I meant. The lovely sculpting.

They’re really fantastic. Xan, do you have a photo to show them? She’s working on this new series at the moment all about women.

Harry’s dad, call me Giles, perks up at this. 

Women? Sounds yummy. 

I try to figure out how to translate my work into Home Counties.

Yes, it’s a series about the female form – the liminal nature of women’s bodies. I’m using clay to track the transitions they undergo throughout their lives.

That’s nice.

They are like shop-front mannequins with hollow empty smiles. Linda, obviously satisfied that she has appropriately engaged with the guest, turns back to Harry like a sunflower tracking her sun.

And how’s your work going darling? I expect you’ve another promotion to tell us about.

It is strange to feel claustrophobic in such a big house. I cannot imagine a child in this space; the surfaces are cluttered with fragile knick-knacks that probably cost a fortune. No wonder he was sent away at the earliest opportunity.

Boarding school, another thing we disagree on. Middle-class child abuse. Harry calls it character building, but I don’t like the characters it builds. What is the point of having children if you never see them? My childhood was the opposite. Mum left London when I was born and settled in a small town on the canals. We lived in a flat above a shop, just the one bed, like two plants trying to grow in a single pot.

We are ushered through to an oak-panelled dining room that’s so dark I can barely see where I am going. The dining table is too big for our tiny party highlighting the lack of space we take up. Our personalities aren’t enough to compensate and we are left feeling slightly deflated, shouting across to each other to pass the salt.

Giles is at the head of the table, and stands to carve an enormous bird, deposited in front of him by Linda. I watch as he hacks inexpertly at the beige flesh. A plate is then passed round to me, a reminder that I am the guest, and I’m encouraged to pile on great starchy potatoes and limp green beans. I do so with gusto; having a full mouth is better than making conversation. I pour enough gravy onto the white china so that it begins to pool. There is a small cough from Linda, an intention to say grace, a tradition that I have only ever seen in American movies and which doesn’t seem to fit this aggressively British context.

They close their eyes and everything, like children making themselves invisible.

For what we are about to receive, Amen.

Harry describes his family as Christmas Christians. All the nice bits. Dogs going to heaven and all that. I asked him whether he really thought there was some almighty being in the sky, a bearded white man, that starved children in Africa? He told me there was no need to get all upset about it, we didn't have to christen our kids if I was dead set on raising them as heathens. I can see the appeal, the hymns and mince-pies, but God has never existed for me. Why would God give my mother an illness so well-hidden that none of the rest of us could ever find it?

So, Xanthe –

Giles always stumbles over my name – too foreign.

Did you see that documentary the other day about Picasso? Apparently, he just copied other artists, didn't come up with diddly-squat himself.

Well, all art is imitation to some extent.

Giles fumbles on as if I haven't given an answer.

It's a funny thing, this art stuff – a friend of mine made a fortune in the eighties buying up crap and marketing it as 'post-modern'. Beats me how something can be beyond modern!

It's just a classification – a style that's characterised by being experimental.

Experimental, eh? Rubbish more like. The kind of stuff a kid could produce. You should start selling your stuff as post-modern, you'd make a fortune.

Xanthe doesn't need to worry about selling her work, dear. Soothes Linda, reaching across the enormous table to put a calming hand on her husband's shoulder.

What's that?

Linda, surprised at my tone, glances back to Harry.

Well, I just mean that it's a nice hobby for you isn't it? That lovely shed you put up in the garden – with heating and everything. It keeps you busy, but you don't need to sell the stuff.

It's my job, Linda. I sculpt for a living.

Yes, of course. Silly me. It's just, and I'm sure you'll forgive me for saying this, but you might not have so much time for art when you have children.

Unless it's finger-painting! interjects Giles, raising his glass in a toast to himself.

I don't mean to bring it up dear, I know it hasn't been plain sailing for you two, but I'm sure that'll change soon. The number of women I know who had trouble and then – bam! – they got a bit tipsy on holiday and nine months later had a beautiful little baby to spoil rotten.

Her and Giles grin at each other. I look across at Harry who, I am surprised to see, is joining in. What has he been telling them? I feel as though the heating has suddenly been turned up. I push back my chair, which scrapes noisily against the oak floor.

If you'll excuse me, I just need to go freshen myself up.

The shabby aesthetic has been carried through into the bathroom. There’s a sign hanging on the wall that says: The best way to a man's heart is through his flies! I look at myself in the mirror, raising a hand to check my reflection will obey me. Sometimes, I wonder where I've come from. My mother is tanned, with a wide smile, and dark eyes hidden by a curtain of thick eyelashes. She always likes to say that she must have some Spanish in her, tells me they landed in her town hundreds of years ago as part of the Armada and she is evidence there was love as well as war. I'm pale, a watermarked photograph, not really there at all. If you didn’t know, you’d think I was the one who is sick.

Harry is waiting for me outside the door. I feel nervous as though I have been caught doing something wrong, have drifted out of myself and accidentally set fire to the familial hearth.

Are you ok?

Yes, of course, why?

He regards me as though he is attempting to read a book written in a foreign language. I dare him to confront me with my eyes – go on Harry, ask me what this is all about, tell me I am being unreasonable – but he retreats, gaze flickering back to the floor.

We should get back, dad’s brought out the cheeseboard.

He makes as if to turn back to the dining room, but I put a hand out to stop him.

I meant to tell you before, but my mum’s going to come to stay for a little while.

Your mum?

I got a call – she hasn’t been feeling too well.

He looks warily at me, as though I am a dog who is rumoured to bite.

Isn't she always a bit ill though?

I cannot contradict this.

I think it would be good for her to be with family, just while she gets back on her feet.

He's trapped. He cannot say no while we are in his family home, going through the motions with ma and pa. He seems to know this and gives a brisk nod of the head.

Of course. It’ll be good to see her.

I hug him as though this is what I really wanted. He smells like he did when I met him, some aftershave his mum always buys him for Christmas. I wonder if she sprayed some on him when I walked out the room, like a cheetah reclaiming her territory.

She’ll probably only stay a couple of nights.

I hope for all our sakes that I am telling the truth.