The Crack

Emma Tennant

1 Love at the Playboy

2 Baba Goes for a Ride

3 Joining the Ladies

4 Women and Children First

5 Hampstead Disturb'd, Little Venice Preserv'd

6 Baba Goes to Church

7 An Angry Wife Invades the Temple of Women and Sends Baba Flying

8 Baba Goes into the Common Market

9 Thirsk Shows Doubt, but Leads His Children into Safety

10 Another Unfortunate Love Affair for Baba

11 The Fate of Ballooning Liberals

12 Waters Sees his Reflection

13 Baba Fights her Way back to the Playboy – Just in Time

14 The Answer to a Magnate's Prayers

15 Baba Sings for the Last Time

16 Baba Rolls from Heaven to Hell, and Meets the Great Brain

17 How the Women were Overcome and the Work Force Lost

18 Baba Melts in the Heat of Revolutionary Ardour

19 A Sailor to the Rescue

20 Baba Visits Harrods and Takes an Open-Air Dip

21 Over the Crack and Far Away

A Note on the Author

A big funfair was in full swing in Hyde Park. Volleys of shots from the rifle range echoed down Park Lane and the screams from the Big Dipper made the patients in St George's Hospital restless.

Simon Mangrove rose from his sunken bath in the penthouse suite of the Hilton Hotel and strode over to the window to look out. A huge Catherine Wheel, each spoke carrying its little box-load of passengers, threw orange and green reflections against the plate glass – and for a moment his face, the image already distorted by the curve of the window, looked back at him with the crude colours of a medieval devil. Somewhere far below the dodgems crashed and reversed with a grating, metallic sound.

Simon Mangrove's watch announced that it was seven thirty. He pulled off his bathrobe and changed with care into a vicuna suit and a Turnbull & Asser shirt made up for him from specially woven Moroccan cotton. He had decided this evening, his last night before flying back to the States, to visit the Playboy and make a night of it. His wife Rene – the third – would be waiting in New York full of reproaches and he might as well enjoy himself while he could. Why didn't you call me? Where were you last weekend? He could hear her voice, once so soft and tentative, assume its nagging, whining note. Idly, as he combed his glossy hair and stood back in front of the mirror, Simon Mangrove decided on another divorce.

Park Lane was full of curious people who were examining the funfair from outside and hadn't quite made up their minds to go in yet. Mangrove glanced at the crowd with an amused air: it seemed strange that grown men and women should obtain pleasure from such childish pursuits. Still, it was the Las Vegas of the poor, he supposed. The very thought of spinning
through the air in a smelly little wagon made him feel sick. And the smell of the crowd! They were behaving just like a bunch of children, too, those who were inside the funfair, waving the bright sweet candyfloss like emblems of permanent immaturity. Mangrove quickened his step and arrived under the illuminated bunny of the Playboy Club.

As he reached the step, a deafening sound – it was like the outsize rattles of a legion of giant babies – broke out in the street behind him. There was laughter from the crowd, and a derisive cheer. Four big black cars had drawn up outside the entrance to the funfair and men, bearded and in black gowns, were stepping from the cars and waving the rattles as they went in. Mangrove wondered if they were Arabs. Was this a Trade Fair of some description? He glanced up at the banner over the admission gate and then smiled to himself again.

INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS

The lettering was amateurishly done, as if a child had daubed on the paint. One of the gowned men turned and gave a mock salute to the crowd. More laughter. One of my countrymen, Mangrove thought bitterly. An American. And now the English were getting just as bad.

The weird, caftaned shapes disappeared into the funfair and Mangrove slid through the portals of the Playboy, relieved to see the friendly receptionist and his own image on the closed-circuit TV screen. Here all was as he wanted it – a couple of dry martinis smooth as polished glass, a tasselled menu which offered tonight a swordfish steak with Samoa sauce. He ordered it, leaning back on the banquette to enjoy the tinkling music from the piano.

And here was Baba. Her tail waggled as she brought him his second drink and slid on to the banquette beside him. Baba's father was a clergyman – or so she said – and Mangrove liked to imagine an austere English vicarage with an exotic flower like Baba growing amongst the dull weeds of matins and vespers and collections for the poor. He gave her an affectionate pat and sipped at his drink.

‘Baba, will you marry me?' He was almost surprised himself
to hear the words come out. But, after all, why not? Baba was friendly and gentle, and obviously very much impressed by Mangrove.

‘Marry you?' Baba giggled. ‘I thought you were married already, Simon.'

Mangrove burst out laughing. ‘What age are you living in, sweetie?' Then he assumed a more serious expression. ‘That's what I like about the English, Baba. So old-fashioned. No' – as Baba pouted – ‘I really mean this. Rene – that's my wife – and me, we haven't been getting along for months now. I shan't even see her when I arrive in New York. Promise!'

He really did mean it too, he thought with a surge of confidence. A new life with Baba – that was the thing.

‘Would we live in America?' Baba asked.

But at that point the piano stopped playing and a soft pink light diffused the bar. As the floorshow started up, a waiter arrived with Mangrove's swordfish steak, and Baba, with a little hushed scream, wriggled out of the banquette.

‘I'm in the show tonight,' she gasped. ‘And I'm late.'

Her breasts hung for a moment over Mangrove's plate as she stooped to kiss him. The waiter deposited a little dollop of Samoa sauce by the side of the inanimate swordfish.

‘I'll be waiting,' Mangrove promised. ‘Shake it for me and me only, Baba.'

Joseph Thirsk, analyst-in-chief of the Regress Centre, boarded the Big Dipper with his crew of a hundred patients. They were all in a state of high excitement, shouting and gripping the sides of the little wagons and screaming in high-pitched voices as the climb to the dizzy summit began. Some of them had regressed beyond childhood and had arrived at the womb; and these Joseph Thirsk kept near him. They sat in coiled, foetal positions and looked out uncomprehendingly at the bright lights of the funfair. Thirsk hoped the shock of the Big Dipper would jolt them into the birth trauma, and watched them carefully in the few sickening moments of suspense before the great swooping fall down the track.

In a booth which bore the legend MEDEA, CLAIRVOYANT AND PALMIST: THE VOICE FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD, a veiled woman shuffled a deck of cards and dusted down the crystal globe. She had a good reputation, and a small queue waited outside for a consultation. But this evening several customers had left irritated and disappointed. Medea had only one message to give to women and men alike. And it wasn't enough.

‘What does it mean, I'm going to cross the water?' one woman asked crossly as she pushed her way out of the booth. ‘That's what they used to say a hundred years ago. And she wouldn't tell me anything else either.'

‘Ask for your money back,' suggested one of the strolling analysts, who was examining the reactions of the people to the various sideshows. ‘You shouldn't let yourself get taken for a ride like that.'

‘I think I will.' The woman glanced at him gratefully. ‘I mean, I could set up myself and tell people that and make a packet out of it. Couldn't I?'

‘You certainly could,' the analyst reassured her, scribbling in his notebook. He wrote: ‘Anal Retentive, Manic symptoms,' and popped it back in his pocket. ‘Go in there now and confront her with her dishonesty,' he went on with an encouraging smile.

The woman elbowed her way through the queue and pushed into the booth. ‘I've got something to tell you –' she began. Then stopped. Medea, no longer veiled, faced her across the narrow counter.

Terrified, the woman shrank back against the faded red plush curtains. Only a whimper escaped from her mouth as Medea spoke.

‘Go. There is little time left to you. Cross the water.'

Medea's eyes were black and her hair so white that the darkness of the booth was illumined on all sides, making a bright circle round the crouching woman.

‘The water is sinking … The bridge is stretched to exhaustion … the dead earth drinks its last.'

With these words, Medea turned and vanished through the curtain at the back. In the vacuum of her non-existence the booth was plunged into sudden night.

The woman screamed and staggered out into the myriad brightly coloured lights of the funfair. She collapsed at the feet of the analyst.

He picked her up, pausing first to jot the stage of her regression in his notebook. ‘Rapid descent to Oral,' he wrote. ‘Occasioned by prediction.' Then, helping to support her with his arm, he led her towards the Big Dipper. A large crowd of people, rounded up by the other strolling analysts, waited there for their turn.

By midnight the shrieks from the funfair were so loud that the visitors to the Playboy Club wandered out on to the steps and stood with amused – expressions as they watched the child-like cavorting in the park. Amongst them were Mangrove and Baba, who had just celebrated their engagement with a bottle of champagne.

‘Darling!' Baba tugged at Mangrove's arm. ‘Let's go in for a moment, shall we? Just for a little whirl?'

‘O.K.'

Baba sounded wifely and possessive already, Mangrove thought with gloom. And the last thing he felt like doing after sipping champagne in the Playboy was being thrown up in the air like a sack of potatoes. He nodded agreement, however, and they crossed into the park.

Several of the analysts looked curiously at Baba – she still had her ears and tail, had slipped on a wrap over her costume – but it was Mangrove who was stopped by one of the tall black-gowned brotherhood and questioned.

‘I don't see why you want to talk to me,' Mangrove said nervously. ‘I'm just a normal kind of person. What's the idea with all this funfair business anyway?'

‘We're studying regression.' The bearded man gave an earnest nod of the head. ‘Up there for instance, in the Big Dipper, multiple births are taking place. You could almost call that extraordinary machine a giant Fertility Drug. Feel like going on it yourself?'

‘No thanks.' Mangrove tried to edge away without the analyst noticing.

‘The rifle range perhaps?'

‘No – no.'

‘Bumper cars?'

‘Bumper cars,' Mangrove repeated with a laugh. ‘I think I might have grown out of them, you know.'

‘Oh do let's go on the bumper cars,' Baba cried. ‘I used to
love
them when I was a kid. Simon?'

This was really too much, Simon thought. It turned out he'd become engaged to a child of five, not a grown woman. And the analyst was looking at her with keen interest now, seeing for the first time the tail that bulged under her coat and the waggling ears on her head.

‘Very well, very well.'

More to escape the man than to gratify Baba's whim, Simon took her arm and led her towards the bumper cars. They climbed into a miniature Bugatti, Baba squealing with delight.

No sooner was Simon behind the wheel than the old excitement of racing came back to him and he was bearing down
aggressively on the other cars, spinning the wheel as he rammed the bonnet into the already dented metal. Baba's ears flopped wildly from side to side as he accelerated at top speed into the centre of the course.