Sugar and Other Stories by A. S. Byatt Page B

BBC’s presenters mingled with the vanishing veils of her uneasy sleep and the half-apprehended creatures of dream and nightmare. Or so Joanna now imagined, having tried out the device herself once and found her mind slipping in and out of what she vaguely felt were Molly’s apprehensions and not her own. Anyway, she had thought Molly’s last visions, if they could be dignified with that name, were functions of that domestic machinery. Molly, it was fair to admit, had insisted that they were not. She had asked for sympathy which Joanna had failed to offer. “I don’t know often,” she had said, trying to characterize these experiences, “if I’m waking or sleeping, I don’t know where I am, either, but I do hear your grandparents, dear, quarrelling dreadfully in thenext room, ever so close, and it’s as though I can’t quite be heard or seen yet, but I might be at any minute, they might turn on me and draw me into it at any minute, and I always tried so hard not to be drawn in …”
    And once, “Oh, Joanna, they are waiting for me — I almost said, lying in wait, but that would be an awful thing to say, about one’s own parents, wouldn’t it? I don’t want you to miss me, dear, when I’m gone, I want you to have a good time and know I was grateful for all you did, even if I’m a cantankerous old bitch a lot of the time. I’ve had my time, and that’s it, and if it wasn’t much of a time, it’s no good crying over spilt milk, is it?”
    And the next day, “I can hear more and more of what they’re saying, in the next room. Just as it always was, nothing changed. Ma feels neglected and Pa feels nagged and put-upon,
just
the same …”
    “Old memories are re-activated in your brain, mother. It’s usual. People remember things in their seventies they haven’t thought of for thirty years.”
    “I know. But I can’t sleep for their wrangling. And I can’t wake up enough to stop hearing it.”
    Bonnie Roote came out of the surgery, clutching a wad of tissues to her face, like a huge peony, the edges of its petals stained with bright pink lipstick and scarlet threads of blood. The attendant told Joannna Mr Kestelman would be ready in a moment. Bonnie Roote sat on the sofa, the side of her lively face swollen and awkward.
    “Was it bad?” said Joanna.
    Bonnie shook her head, indicating no. She mopped at her mouth. She opened her handbag, and held out a card to Joanna. She said, carefully, slurring, “We were destined to meet, dear, that’s the meaning of it. Here is the address — come when you need us, if you need us.”
    The card said, “The Academy of the Return. Thanatology and the study of the Afterlife. Therapeutic groups: spiritual andphysical health alike our concern. We may have the answers to the questions you have always been asking. Try us.”
    Mr Kestelman, taciturn and scientific in his sterile workplace, removed one of Joanna’s teeth, which, he explained, had had a mosaic of tiny cracks and had finally crumbled altogether. Joanna must not, on any account, he said, disturb the blood-clot, which would eventually form the new gum in the gap. Joanna tasted blood, iron and gravy combined, and felt the temporary absence of a huge segment of her head. She nodded with heavy gravity to his instructions, which included going home immediately and lying down, trying to have a sleep, to get over the shock. Munificent in small things, he filled her handbag with paper tissues and little strips of encapsulated painkillers in foil. “You’ll feel queasy when it comes back to life, at first,” he told her. “But don’t worry. It doesn’t last.” He told her not to explore with her tongue and she withdrew its tip guiltily from what felt like a huge soft cabbage of congealing flabby matter, replacing the lost grinder, the shining citadel of the toothpaste advertisements of her childhood. Under lost childish teeth, fringed and rootless, had been the purposeful saw-ridge of the mature, the real