Oh yes I am, she thought. I’m here in my head, on my own, and you can’t know what it’s like.
“We’ll have you right in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” I’m a lamb, am I? Does he think I’m a lamb?
Musing, he glanced up at his framed qualifications, then at his manicured nails, then at the pens on his desk and notepad. But he didn’t look at Jacqueline. Anywhere but at Jacqueline.
“I know,” he was saying now, “what you”ve been through, and it’s been traumatic. Women have certain needs. If they go unanswered —”
What would he know about women”s needs?
You’re not a woman, she thought.
“What?” he said.
Had she spoken? She shook her head: denying speech. He went on; finding his rhythm once more: “I’m not going to put you through interminable therapy-sessions. You don’t want that, do you? You want a little reassurance, and you want something to help you sleep at nights.”
He was irritating her badly now. His condescension was so profound it had no bottom. All-knowing, all-seeing Father; that was his performance. As if he were blessed with some miraculous insight into the nature of a woman’s soul.
“Of course, I’ve tried therapy courses with patients in the past. But between you and me —”
He lightly patted her hand. Father’s palm on the back of her hand. She was supposed to be flattered, reassured, maybe even seduced.
“— between you and me it’s so much talk. Endless talk. Frankly, what good does it do? We’ve all got problems. You can’t talk them away, can you?”
You’re not a woman. You don’t look like a woman, you don’t feel like a woman —
“Did you say something?”
She shook her head.
“I thought you said something. Please feel free to be honest with me.”
She didn’t reply, and he seemed to tire of pretending intimacy. He stood up and went to the window.
“I think the best thing for you —”
He stood against the light: darkening the room, obscuring the view of the cherry trees on the lawn through the window. She stared at his wide shoulders, at his narrow hips. A fine figure of a man, as Ben would have called him. No child-bearer he. Made to remake the world, a body like that. If not the world, remaking minds would have to do.
“I think the best thing for you —”
What did he know, with his hips, with his shoulders? He was too much a man to understand anything of her.
“I think the best thing for you would be a course of sedatives —”
Now her eyes were on his waist.
“— and a holiday.”
Her mind had focused now on the body beneath the veneer of his clothes. The muscle, bone and blood beneath the elastic skin. She pictured it from all sides, sizing it up, judging its powers of resistance, then closing on it. She thought: Be a woman.
Simply, as she thought that preposterous idea, it began to take shape. Not a fairy-tale transformation, unfortunately, his flesh resisted such magic. She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin burst and his sternum flew apart.
His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its centre; unbalanced, he toppled over on to his desk and from there stared up at her, his face yellow with shock. He licked his lips, over and over again, to find some wetness to talk with. His mouth was dry: his words were still-born. It was from between his legs that all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood; the thud of his bowel on the carpet.
She screamed at the absurd monstrosity she had made, and withdrew to the far corner of the room, where she was sick in the pot of the rubber plant.
My God, she thought, this can’t be murder. I didn’t so much as touch him.
What Jacqueline had done that afternoon, she kept to herself. No sense in giving people sleepless nights, thinking about such peculiar talent.
The police were very kind. They produced any number of explanations for the sudden departure of Dr Blandish, though none quite described how his chest had erupted in that extraordinary fashion, making two handsome (if hairy) domes of his pectorals.