Mad Cows (10 page)

‘If he were
black
,' Rosy adjudicated with a shrug, ‘or even taupe . . . I could get him heaps of work then. Or handicapped in some way.
Beautifully
handicapped, or course. You know. The Benetton thing . . . But blue-eyed, blond-haired babies? Puh-lease. I get three hundred of
those
every week.'

Too late for a quick application for Instant Tan or a leg amputation, Gillian inhaled slowly. ‘The point is, one is a month behind in one's rent and about to be evicted.'

‘Well . . .' Rosy scrutinized Jack for the last time. ‘He
could
work,' she hypothesized, ‘if he had a bit more colour.' So saying, she pinched Jack's cheek, hard. His face crumpled at the short sharp shock of pain.

Gillian caught Rosy's hand in mid air and counted the fingers aloud, ‘1, 2, 3, 4 . . .'

‘What are you doing?'

‘Just checking you've evolved. You see, we don't treat children like that in this century.' Then, in a spurt of what observers took to be maternal rage, she slapped Rosy's face.

Pressing Jack to her wonderbra, Gillian pushed past the picture postcard, rose-lipped Botticelli babies and the floral flotilla of their mothers' frocks, out on to Hackney Road. She'd reached the Old Street roundabout before she realized, with a jolt of horror, that she was humming a little song for him. She stopped abruptly, eyes darting in a self-conscious search for witnesses.

Jack's newly rouged face lit up. ‘Don't try to wheedle yourself into my affections,' Gillian said, pausing to study her tube map. ‘I know you only do that when I'm around 'cause of
food
,' she told him brusquely, plugging a bottle of milk into his maw. ‘You're like a film crew when the catering van appears.'

Still, she secretly liked the intense way he studied her. No matter how curt she was with him, he looked at her as though he was going to write her biography.
Even
in the mornings, when she had alcohol-sodden breath and bags under the eyes, there it was – that look of utter adoration. She liked that in a male.

Back at their dismal little basement flat in Clapham, Gillian packed Jack's baby essentials, called a mini-cab on an account she didn't intend to pay and directed it to the Savoy.

Waiting at the reception desk, she thought about her plight. No address, no friends, no funds, no training, no job, no prospects, a wailing curtain-climber for company and another grey pubic hair. She scrunched up the audition card for Rosy Futures. The trouble with the future was that it just wasn't what it used to be.

‘A suite with a river view,' she pronounced in an upperclass accent sharp enough to draw blood if you were shaving your armpits with it. She'd rung ahead – hotels are suspicious of what they call walk-in's. ‘Redecorating' was her explanation for such spontaneity; a house full of hirsute workers with builders' bums. Luckily it was raining when she arrived. She used this as an excuse to get out of handing over a credit card for an imprint; her purse, she lied, was in her suitcase which had already disappeared upstairs with the porter.

‘I'll change the baby and have a hot bath first.' She also knew to inform rather than to ask permission; to palm around a lot of tenners; and to be constantly
extravagant
. ‘And a bottle of Krug immediately.'

It might be lonely at the top, Gillian pondered in the sumptuous art-nouveau elevator, but by God – the shopping was better.

9

Anything You Say Will Be Distorted Beyond Belief And Used Against You

MADDY COULD HAVE
been getting ready for a débutante ball, there was such excitement over the preparations for her court appearance. Mamma Joy and Chanel had been hauling her in and out of a Barbie-doll selection of their clothes since 6 a.m. Descending on Maddy's chassis, like a pit-stop crew in a Grand Prix, they shaved and waxed and tweezed and creamed. When the cells were opened at six-thirty, Mamma Joy had collected Stella, the ‘Hair Hostess' of Block 3B. It wasn't that she had any training, but scissors were her speciality; she'd once kebabed her boyfriend on a pair of garden shears.

The women talked as they worked, instructing Maddy on court procedure. It was all about body language. Now when it comes to body language, the
English
are not particularly fluent. In Maddy's experience a sign of sexual euphoria in an Englishman was abandonment of his socks in bed. Suspending her disbelief, she allowed her friends to teach her how to sit virginally: knees together, hands cupped in her lap; with demure, downcast, Princess Di eyes. All things considered, the girls thought it better not to do the ‘silly-me-I-forgot-to-wear-knickers' leg cross to the judge. Well, not unless things got
really
desperate.

‘Ouch!' Having hacked away at Maddy's red fringe, Stella was now applying a smear of hot wax to her client's top lip. She yanked hard, taking half of Maddy's face with her. ‘Bloody hell!'

‘Sorry, love,' said Stella with cavalier cheer. ‘Bit out of practice. Been in hospital.'

‘Stella had a big run-in with an inmate,' Mamma Joy, buttery with body lotions, elaborated mischievously. ‘She give her turd-degree burns from an underarm wax.'

Maddy recoiled.

‘It's all right,' Stella assured her, hot spatula in hand. ‘I've read the friggin' manual now.'

‘Lordee!' Mamma Joy was bent over Maddy's ear-lobe with a floral ornament. ‘Can't find de hole.'

‘Bet you haven't said
that
for a while,' Chanel cackled, unwinding the cottonwool from between Maddy's painted toe-nails.

‘At least not since chidbirth!' Mamma Joy's raspy laughter expired in the air. Apart from the ever-present
weaving
pulse of reggae, it was so silent all of a sudden, that Maddy could hear her eyebrow being tweezed. Swivelling, she saw that it was Sputnik, wearing a ‘We're Here, We're Queer, We're Going Shopping' T-shirt, with the ubiquitous Stacey hot on her high heels.

After casting the usual aspersions on the toilet training, parentage and genital hygiene of every inhabitant in the cell, Sputnik shoved her face menacingly into Maddy's. ‘Laundry. Fursday. Na neva fronted. And I want yer.'

‘Why?' Maddy stalled, uncoiling her hair from its coronet of plastic rollers. ‘Are you out of Maltesers?'

Sputnik's lips gaped open to reveal a grand piano of teeth. ‘You and me's gettin' moved into a two-person cell. It's all sorted with the guv'ner. The less, the bleedin' merrier, eh?'

Maddy watched the chemise-lifter execute her caricatured saunter out of frame and back to her cell for the 8 a.m. lock-up. Maybe I'm dead, thought Maddy hopefully, and this is Limbo.

‘That lezzo stuff . . . it's like real chic now, you know.' Chanel whooped as Mamma Joy's tiny silver eye-hook finally found passage through Maddy's fleshy lobe. ‘Cindy thingymebob and what's-her-name-Foster.'

Stella signed and indicated the huge hole she'd accidently weeded in the middle of Maddy's eyebrow. ‘You're just gunna have to be brave and Do It, girl.'

‘Oh,
what
? A case of stiff upper hip?' Maddy angrily pencilled in the missing brow acreage. ‘I don't think so.'

‘Listen.' Chanel was taking aim at Maddy's other ear. ‘You know the craft workshop? Well, the last person who turned down Sputnik “fell” into the lathe and made a coffee table of herself.'

Mamma Joy uncapped a deodorant. ‘Takin' on dat woman is like life,' she philosophized. ‘
You don't get out of it alive
.'

Maddy banished their grave and preoccupied expressions with an indifferent laugh. ‘What are you people taking . . .
drowning lessons
? Tomorrow I'll be back with my baby!' The overwhelming relief at the thought of being able to feed again set Maddy's breasts into cappuccino mode. She surveyed herself in the mirror. For all their good intentions, with her half an eyebrow and swollen lip, all she needed was a tattoo to complete the barcoding which read ‘
CRIMINAL
'.

When the screws came for Maddy, her cellmates kissed her goodbye. All the way back to ‘reception', she was serenaded with traditional Holloway songs: ‘If you sprinkle, when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the seatie.' ‘Have a bonk for me, or then again have three . . .'

Things were looking up. Not only was Maddy about to be released, but something spectacularly joyful had already happened. After Jack's birth, it had been easier
to
reunite the Serbs and the Croats than the teeth of her fly. That morning Chanel had lent her size 10 Levis. And, for the first time since the birth, Maddy had
actually zipped up a pair of jeans
.

In the cells beneath the magistrate's court, Maddy's optimism dissolved like aspirin in aqua. The bare walls, the hard bench, the stench of urine; it was wintery with despair. All along the corridor, prisoners were calling out for a loo or a light, begging to be allowed to open their bowels, see loved ones, talk to after-shaved solicitors, or get a nice hot cuppa. In the hallway, it was chaos. Maddy could hear all the other solicitors and social workers bellowing to their clients through the cat flaps. ‘So you were abused as a child? Who wasn't?' ‘Bottom line is – the girl, she suffered no physical harm, right, apart from being raped.'

The spy hole in Maddy's door flipped open. Dwina's face, shrouded in a cloud of Body Shop secretions, appeared in the grim porthole.

‘This is your last chance, Madeline. Your solicitor—'

‘Peregrine? Oh don't tell me,' she replied sarcastically, ‘I bet he's fired with enthusiasm.'

‘But you
can't
fire him. Not under the new legal-aid rules. That means unless you tell me the whereabouts of your baby, he'll blow your bail application and it's back to Holloway.'

The slight tremor in her voice caught Maddy off guard. She made a casual inspection of her new
lacquered
nails – when really all she wanted was to put them in her mouth and gnaw them
up to the elbow
.

‘One struggles not to get too involved – to keep one's distance. But there are always the cases which stay with you. Like
yours
, dear.' Maddy had a crick in her neck from bending to converse through the hatch. Behind Dwina, the building's dark entrails wound out of sight. ‘I shouldn't have pushed you on the adoption. You need time to think about what's best for baby. I can see now what a good mother you are.'

Grief gushed into Maddy's throat. Dwina had hit an emotional artery. Maddy torniqueted her feelings, tight.

‘The first three months is the critical bonding period between mother and child. The skin contact, the closeness . . .' Maddy detected a subdued sob in the psychologist's voice. ‘Imperative in avoiding psychiatric disorders in later life.' Maddy had never felt so tired. She had the resilience of a Claes Oldenburg Sculpture. ‘Madeline, let me get your baby back for you.' Dwina's words were like anaesthetic. ‘The address, Madeline. I need the address.'

The door opened. The key-jangling jailer called her name in a ten-pack-a-day voice. ‘You're on now, darl'.' Maddy stood, automatically. Dwina's hand was warm and soothing on her arm as she passed.

‘I've done my best, Madeline.' Dwina's voice sounded bruised. ‘If you don't give me that address, I'm throwing in my psychoanalysis books,
and
off to the Cotswolds to open a little craft shop.'

Maddy gulped for air. Her breasts hardened and milk seeped through her nursing pads. Thoughts of Jack left her euchred, washed up and totally wasted.

‘16a Ludgate Street, Clapham.'

The look on Edwina Phelps's face was not unlike the look of a born-again Christian making a convert.

Maddy concentrated on the expanding slit of light as she climbed the stairs into the well of the court. She was hours, maybe minutes from freedom. She had found the silver lining inside her dark cloud.

‘Bail refused,' the magistrate intoned, with less deliberation than he'd give to a sandwich order.

‘What's he saying?' Anxiety coated Maddy's tongue. Forgetting her body-language instructions, she gripped the dock's metal railings, knuckles tight and white, tendons taut.

Peregrine cleared his throat. ‘There's a regression, time wise, on your bail application.'

‘A
what
?' She felt glazed and unfocussed.

‘We'll have to appeal to the Crown Court . . .' he whispered. ‘The infanticide thing. They want psychiatric reports . . .'

Maddy couldn't breathe. The courtroom billowed, the walls spun, her temples pounded, although the rest of her appeared still to be functioning because her mouth was moving and words were coming out.

‘But I've told you about the baby. I told
her
.' Maddy jabbed desperately in Dwina's direction. Dwina was handing Slynne a packet of Nicotinell, which he was receiving with a sheepish grin. A ragged flicker of doubt zig-zagged across her brow. ‘Dwina! Tell them.'

A few people glanced at Dwina who gave a light ‘what can you do?' laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion – the way Salome would have laughed, post-head. A cold blade of realization knifed into Maddy. Edwina Phelps had been friendly in the way an intestinal parasite is friendly. This woman was a top order predator. Dwina, She-Bitch of the S.S.; the sort who'd like to become the Führer's play-thing. Edwina Phelps had wanted her to sign Jack over for adoption. Now she wouldn't even
need
adoption papers, because everyone believed Jack was dead. All Dwina had to do was seize him from Gillian's flat in Clapham.

‘She just wants to keep me in jail so she can steal my baby!' Maddy blurted.

‘Not even the O.J. jury would believe
that
,' quipped Dwina to Slynne.