Puffball. Fay Weldon
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Bella and Ray came round from the back of the house.
‘We knew we’d find you round here,’ said Ray. ‘Bella took a bet on it. They’ll be at it again, she said. I think she’s jealous. What have you found?’
‘Puffballs,’ said Richard.
‘Puffballs!’
‘Puffballs!’
Ray and Bella, animated, ran forward to see.
Liffey saw them all of a sudden with cold eyes, in clear sunlight, and knew that they were grotesque. Bella’s lank hair was tightly pulled back, and her nose was bulbous and her long neck was scrawny and her eyes popped as if the dollmaker had failed to press them properly into the mould. Her tired breasts pushed sadly into her white T-shirt: the skin on her arms was coarse and slack. Ray was white in the bright sunlight, pale and puffy and rheumy. He wore jeans and an open shirt as if he were a young man, but he wasn’t. A pendant hung round his neck and nestled in grey, wiry, unhuman hairs. In the city, running across busy streets, jumping in and out of taxis, opening food from the Take Away, they seemed ordinary enough. Put them against a background of growing green, under a clear sky, and you could see how strange they were.
‘You simply have to take the cottage,’ said Bella, ‘if only to bring us puffballs. Have you any idea how rare they are?’
‘What do you do with them?’ asked Liffey.
‘Eat them,’ said Ray. ‘Slice them, grill them, stuff them: they have a wonderful creamy texture—like just ripe Camembert. We’ll do some tonight under the roast beef.’ ‘I don’t like Camembert,’ was all Liffey could think of to say.
Ray bent and plucked one of the puffballs from its base, fingers gently cupping its globe from beneath, careful not to break the taut, stretched skin. He handed it to Bella and picked a second.
Tucker came along the other side of the stream. Cows followed him: black and white Friesians, full bumping bellies swaying from side to side. A dog brought up the rear. It was a quiet, orderly procession.
‘Oh my God,’ said Bella. ‘Cows!’
‘They won’t hurt you,’ said Liffey.
‘Cows kill four people a year in this country,’ said Bella, who always had a statistic to back up a fear.
‘Afternoon,’ said Tucker, amiably across the stream.
‘We’re not on your land?’ enquired Ray.
‘Not mine,’ said Tucker. ‘That’s no one’s you’re on, that’s waiting for an owner.’
He was splashing through the water towards them. ‘You thinking of taking it? Good piece of land, your side of the stream, better than mine this side.’
He was across. He saw the remaining puffball. He drew back his leg and kicked it, and it burst, as if it had been under amazing tension, into myriad pieces which buzzed through the air like a maddened insect crowd, and then settled on the ground and were still.
‘Him or me,’ thought Liffey. But just at the moment Tucker kicked she felt a pain in her middle, so she knew it was her, and was glad, in her nice way, that Richard was saved. Her tummy: his brain. Well, better kicked to death by a farmer than sliced and cooked under roast beef by Bella and Ray.
‘If you want to spread the spores,’ said Ray to Tucker, ‘that’s the best way.’
‘Disgusting things,’ said Tucker. ‘No use for anything except footballs.’
He told them the name of the estate agent who dealt with the property and left, well pleased with himself. His cows munched solemly on, on the other side of the brook, bulky and soft-eyed.
‘I hate cows,’ said Bella.
‘I rather like them,’ said Ray. ‘Plump and female.’
Bella, who was not so much slim as scrawny, took this as an attack, and rightly so.
They drove back to London with Bella’s mouth set like a trap and Ray’s arm muscles sinewy, so tight was his grasp on the steering wheel. Liffey admired the muscles. Richard, though broad and brave, was a soft man; not fat, but unmuscled. Richard’s hands were white and smooth. Tucker’s, she had noticed, were gnarled, rough and grimy, like the earth. A faint sweet smell of puffball filled the car.
The pain Liffey felt was nothing to do with Tucker’s kicking of the puffball. It was a mid-cycle pain—the kind of pain quite commonly, if inexplicably, felt by women who take the contraceptive pill. It is not an ovulation pain, for such women do not ovulate. But the pain is felt, nevertheless, and at that time.
Liffey, on this particular September day, was twelve days in to her one-hundred-and-seventy-first menstrual cycle. She had reached the menarche rather later than the average girl, at fifteen years and three months.
Liffey’s mother Madge, worried, had taken her to the doctor when she was fourteen-and-a-half. ‘She isn’t menstruating,’ said Madge, bleakly. Madge was often bleak. ‘Why?’ ‘She’s of slight build,’ the doctor said. ‘And by and large, the lighter the girl, the later the period.’
Liffey, at the time, had no desire whatsoever to start menstruating, and took her mother’s desire that she should as punitive. Liffey, unlike her mother, but like most women, had never cared to think too much about what was going on inside her body. She regarded the inner, pounding, pulsating Liffey with distaste, seeing it as something formless and messy and uncontrollable, and being uncontrollable, better unacknowledged. She would rather think about, and identify wholly with, the outer Liffey. Pale and pretty and nice.
It was not even possible to accept, as it were, a bodily status quo, for her body kept changing. Processes quite unknown to her, and indeed for the most part unnoticeable, had gone on inside Liffey since the age of seven when her ovaries had begun to release the first secretions of oestrogen, and as the contours of her body had begun their change from child to woman, so had vulva, clitoris, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, unseen and unconsidered, begun their own path to maturity. The onset of menstruation would occur when her body dictated, and not when the doctor, or Madge, or Liffey felt proper.
Her menstrual cycle, once established, was of a steady, almost relentless twenty-eight-day rhythm, which Liffey assumed to be only her right. Other girls were early, or late, or undecided: trickled and flooded and stopped and started. But as the sun went down every twenty-eight days, from the one-hundred-and-eighty-fourth calendar month of her life, Liffey started to bleed. Being able so certainly to predict this gave her at least the illusion of being in control of her body.
Liffey never enquired of anyone as to why she bled, or what use the bleeding served. She knew vaguely it was to do with having babies, and thought of it, if she thought at all, as all her old internal rubbish being cleared away.
The mechanics of her menstrual cycle were indeed ingenious.
Lunar month by lunar month, since she reached the menarche, Liffey’s pituitary gland had pursued its own cycle: secreting first, for a fourteen-day stretch, the hormones which would stimulate the growth of follicles in Liffey’s ovaries. These follicles, some hundred or so cyst-like nodules, in their turn secreted oestrogen, and would all grow until,