Mad Cows (14 page)

Where
were
they? What were they
doing
? Maddy was in an eddy of dread. Even if Gillian wasn't a she-devil, was she remembering to put padding on coffee-table corners? Would she get safety gates, safety plugs, fireguards, cupboard locks? Was she stimulating him? What sort of games was she playing? Blindfold games,
by the pool
? She could see Jack now, face down, floating, bloated. Did Gillian know mouth to mouth? Would she remember his immunization shots? He'll get whooping cough. He was probably
whooping
it up right now. It'd be complicated by diphtheria. He'll contract meningitis. He'll turn blue and die. It'd been two weeks and still no word from her solicitor about her Crown Court hearing. If she lost this bail application she could be left to rot on remand for up to a year. Long, cold fingers of fear clutched at her gizzards. She had to get out of here, pronto. But how? It was about as likely as a UFO piloted by Elvis Presley landing on the Loch Ness Monster.

WARNING TO ALL SCOTTISH MARINE LIFE

Incoming Unidentified Object singing ‘Jailhouse Rock
'.

Over the next few days, conditions in Holloway hit the headlines, with the press making innuendoes about human rights abuses: twenty-three hour a day lockups in six-foot cells already containing the entire population of Belgium; women giving birth in chains; rat infestation . . . Talk shows besieged the new governor with requests to interview a prisoner. As Maddy was one of the few inmates who didn't think an innuendo was an Italian suppository, she was promptly recruited. (She could have cured the vermin problem for them too if they'd asked. Maddy knew from experience that there was only one way of getting rid of rats. Tell them you want a long-term relationship.)

The television green room is a charisma-oriented
environment
. Hovering around the soggy sandwiches on this crisp June morning were the Kylie Minogue Sound-Alike Competition runner-up; the usual, baffled assortment of writers on promotional tours accompanied by twenty-something ‘away day' girls exclaiming with vivacious insincerity the importance of ‘the Vegetarian Personality' or ‘Versailles; the View From Sweden'; and the actress Petronella de Winter in a slashed pink vinyl dress ingeniously welded back together with a blow torch and bits of bicycle chain – all the better to show off her recent nipple realignment.

Petronella, rising to new platitudes of achievement, was to introduce the live panel discussion on prison reform. ‘Keep calm,' the denimed researcher reassured the novice presenter as she was ushered towards the set. Petronella nuked her high-rise hair with one final blast of 505 Stay and Hold.

‘I am, like, calm!' Nuke. ‘I'm just, like, hysterical!' Nuke. Nuke.

In the simulated living room on screen, the professionally affable presenters, employing a contrapuntal style popular in America, introduced the audience to the panellists. The hosts' habitual piranha grins, fake tans and brittle, dyed-blonde blow-dries made them look like Sindy on HRT and Action Man on acid.

Maddy, who'd been busy inhaling the hospitality tray – oh to eat food which wasn't a decade or two out of date – suddenly gagged on her lemon sponge cake.
Through
a snowfall of icing sugar, she surveyed two all too familiar faces on the studio monitor: the prematurely balding poet, Humphrey (who, in Maddy's view, had more hair than talent) and the Capital F for Feminist Historian, Harriet – Sushi Socialists who dwelt in the stellar realms of London's Celebritocracy, travelling, by limousine, the eternal TV triangle:
Kilroy, Channel 4 News
and
Newsnight
. Maddy had met them during her days with Alex, when they'd gone through the motions of befriending her. After his desertion they'd dropped her faster than Woody Allen from the board of a Children's Welfare Trust. Having spent most of their lives at literary cocktail parties in the Groucho Club, it was only natural that the BBC would ask Humphrey and Harriet for their observations on life in Her Majesty's Prisons.

There was no time to register her shock, as her gormless Group 4-supplied jailoress, lips drawn back in a grimace of fascination, eagerly trotted after a sound man down the linoleumed corridor and through a labyrinth of sets to studio 5. Maddy, manacled to her, followed umbilically after. Electric cables snaked across the floor, slimy green and death-adder brown. Maddy snagged her toe on one and stumbled forward into the back of a plywood set which gave a palsied shudder. Clipboard-clutching stage hands clung to it with fridge-magnet tenacity.

Maddy heard the show's theme music through numb ears. There was applause. An introduction of
the
Poet-Laureate-In-Waiting, the Brown Owl of the Women's Movement and a Tory MP. This was followed by the breathless announcement of a ‘Mystery Guest . . .'

‘Group 4' removed the handcuffs and clipped them on to hips already heavy with keys, truncheon, torch and other prison utilities. A man in aviator headphones, his lips attached to the mouthpiece like a drip-feed, placed his hand in the small of Maddy's back. ‘Have fun!' he insisted, before shoving her like a first-time parachutist into a graceless lurch around the pastel partition.

The audience, sardined in rows, gasped asthmatically as they'd been coached. A camera bore down on Maddy with warp speed. As did the host. He looked identical to one of those life-like male companions with latex appendage you see advertised in women's porn magazines. Except he was talking – telling Maddy how much courage it had taken for her to appear live on national television. The audience gave their Pavlovian response – tiers of clapping seals. Maddy tried not to let it go to her head. There was, after all, a huge neon ‘applause' sign strobing above the set, and they had, moments earlier, given a similar show of enthusiasm to a zucchini. It was shaped like Princess Di's profile and would be won later on in the programme.

Maddy was led behind a modular console in the middle of the half moon of pink swivel chairs. She
gave
a small nod of hello in Harriet's direction. Although Harriet was the kind of woman who believed that isometrically exercising the thirty-two sets of facial muscles it took to smile caused wrinkles, Maddy felt sure she hadn't recognized her. Humphrey, on the other hand, most definitely had. His carefully composed facial features rearranged themselves into the look of someone who'd just been handed a jar of warm sputum.

A Tory MP the shape of a squat research submarine – the sort they send to the ocean floor to take pictures of the
Titanic
and who felt he was just as ‘deep' intellectually – launched off. ‘It sounds like a special offer in an upmarket travel brochure; bathrooms
en suite
, day trips, gymnasiums galore, theatre on tap . . .'

Petronella clanked her silver slave bracelets up her tanned arms. A twitch in her bleached cranium warned that there was an opportunity for self-promotion approaching. ‘When I . . .
we
were making our film in Holloway . . .'

But the opinionated submarine was surfacing for no one. ‘To be eligible for this kind of winter break requires a substantial crime record. Yes. These are just some of the entertainments playing at a Prison Near You.'

‘A hotel where the guest is always wrong!' Humphrey depth-charged, his rubbery face babyish in its plumpness. He would not look at her. Maddy couldn't tell if his head was bent so as to avoid her eye,
or
from the weight of hair gel on his few remaining tufts.

‘Entertainment . . . I guess that's, like, where I come in . . .' Petronella tried once more to insinuate her bangle-jangling presence into the conversation. ‘There's always a chance of dying on stage, especially when it's shared with a couple of murderers . . .'

While Action Man worked the other end of the studio, Maddy scrawled on to the piece of paper in front of her the message, ‘How's Alex?' and slid it under Humphrey's nose. The floor manager in the sleeveless anorak who looked as though he had a lot of trouble getting people to remember that his name was Nigel, was making frantic signals for Petronella to remove her clanking bracelets.

Humphrey covered his microphone, tilted his chair and whispered – ‘Look, we did all drop you somewhat, after the split up with Alex . . . well, what I'm trying to say is,' he grovelled. ‘Um, well, is there anything I can do?'

‘Hmmm,' Maddy pondered, covering her own mike. ‘I've often wondered about that, Humphrey, and I think the answer is –
lousy poetry
.'

‘Unemployment and poverty don't cause crime. Criminals commit crime.
Vermin
,' the Tory MP torpedoed in Maddy's direction.

‘Hey, mate, go easy.' Maddy leant around Petronella, who was surreptitiously working her silver bracelets over manicured fingers, and placed a placatory hand
on
the politician's arm. ‘The most rebellious thing I've ever done is to open the milk carton on the “open other side” side.'

‘So, tell us, Madeline' (the desperate host addressed her as though she were a cancer victim; a
deaf
cancer victim, judging by the volume and pace of his speech) ‘Is It As . . . Luxurious . . . Inside . . . as the . . . Press . . . Have . . . Made . . . Out?'

‘Put it this way,' Maddy replied. ‘Prison is the only place in the world where you get
promoted
to a job cleaning toilets.'

‘You!' When Harriet finally recognized Alex's ex, a look not unlike David Attenborough spotting a rare dung beetle crossed her austere visage. ‘I know this remand prisoner!' she gloated. On the Liberal-Left Intellectual Kudos Chart,
knowing
an actual prisoner was on a par with co-authoring a book with a black man. ‘The only thing she's guilty of is being a woman!' A pile of shiny silver quoits lay in Petronella's lap. She painstakingly transferred them to the carpet between herself and Maddy, who wasted no time edging them closer with her foot. Screened by the modular console, she furtively pocketed the lot into her crimplene slacks. ‘This young woman would never do anything illegal.'

The chat-show host squeegeed at his brow. A blob of foundation came away on his hanky. Maddy sneaked a sideways glance. Was it fake tan, or merely
rust
?' Don't you find it worrying that women are much more likely to be remanded into custody than men for the
same
crimes?' he asked the Minister for Compassion. ‘The fact that women may go into prison as mere shoplifters but leave as drug addicts . . .'

‘How! That's what I'd like to know. They didn't smuggle drugs into Alcatraz!'

Petronella turned the smile which was sutured on to her face in Maddy's direction. ‘Maybe our remand prisoner can tell us?'

‘What? Oh, I don't think you really want to know . . .'

‘No. No. We do!' the hostess entreated, enthusiastically.

The entire studio was focused on Maddy. ‘Well, okay,' she shrugged. ‘Crutching.'

‘Crutching?' Petronella enquired, with a farcically solemn expression.

‘Yes. You hide things in your fanny and sneak them in that way. One woman I know, her vagina is like Mary Poppins' bag. She could hide a grand
piano
in there.'

A stupefied silence descended on the studio. Both hosts seemed to be in a conversational holding pattern. ‘Um . . .' said Sindy. ‘Um . . .' added Action Man. Maddy had a feeling that she would
not
be winning the zucchini which looked like Princess Di's profile.

‘There's always the chance of, like, dying on stage,' Petronella began talking once more, it was a nervous habit of hers to avoid thinking. ‘especially when it's shared with a couple of . . .'

Cued by the anoraked floor manager, Action Man revived his jack-o'-lantern beam and wrapped up the segment by reciting the day's forthcoming human menu. Next was the transvestite who went shopping with his wife, followed by the mother who stole her daughter's boyfriend, a would-be vampire, two wives who let their husbands date other women; and a straight man who posed for gay magazines. Maddy marvelled at the rubbish television pushed to its public. Chanel sold shit and got ten years. Chat-show hosts got a spread in
Hello!
Magazine. Sindy had now coasted to the other wing of their mock living room to introduce the runner-up Kylie Minogue impressionist.

As the pseudo Singing Budgie warbled into view, the Sleeveless Anorak hissed at the prison panel to remain seated. Maddy's eyes located ‘Group 4' in the wings, amid the boa-constrictor cables. She was gazing, awe-struck, mesmerized by the lozenges of coloured lights illuminating the India-rubber breasts of the fledgling pop star. Her head bobbed up and down as she strained for a better view, giving her lacquered, black, centre-parted cranium the look of the beating wings of a beetle.

It was only a hairline crack in her jailer's concentration but, Maddy thought, big enough to slide through. A camera shift offered her a temporary eclipse from view. An opportunity had arisen. It was like a train stopping at an unscheduled station. No time to check the notice board, no idea of destination,
it
was just now or never. On a dizzying impulse and furtive as a fish, Maddy slipped into the cool, liquid shadows.

By the time Action Man and Sindy had kicked off the next segment of their televised freak show with the kind of soul-searching questions which had plagued Socrates – ‘Why do men want to get their leg over other women besides their wives?' – Maddy had crept into a dressing room marked ‘Esther Rantzen' and changed into a tweed twin set, complete with curly blonde wig. Looking like an albino merino with a couple of venture capital portfolios up her sleeve, she pocketed as many complimentary honey-roast peanut packets and miniature chocolate-bars as she could, and executed a Grand National dash down the corridor. Eyes darting, she made a disorientated reconnaissance. Staunching her terror, she resolved to walk, not run. She would stride purposefully. She would exit straight through reception and take the consequences.