Mad Cows (19 page)

‘Hah, hah,
hah
,' he mocked. ‘When it comes to the duplicities of arms to Iraq or the purchase of MPs' favours, okay,' he conceded, smooth as engine lubricant. ‘But we Liberal Democrats can weather the odd sexual misdemeanour. Paddy Ashdown's rating went up, remember, when his affair with his secretary came to light. In fact, women all over the country were suddenly desperate to mountaineer his scrotum pole.' In vain, Alex tried to work his hands into the pockets of his fashionable jeans. They were so tight, his testicles had applied for a transfer. Hoping she hadn't noticed, he casually hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and kept talking. ‘Even the printing presses have metal fatigue in the Moral Outrage Department.

With a searching eye, Maddy surveyed her ex in a momentary beam from a truck's headlights. ‘You've been doing sit-ups underneath stationery vehicles again, haven't you?'

‘The public no longer care if your fly's open . . . as long as your mind is too.' He tousled his mane in the rear-vision mirror. ‘I'm standing as a self-made man who—'

‘Worships his creator?'

‘– who owns up to his past,' Alex corrected imperiously. ‘Winning the hearts of everyone through my candour and self-deprecating confessions of how hard it's been as a single father . . .'

Maddy, jerking towards him, hit her head on the sun visor. ‘
You?
Bringing up a
child?
Alex – try not to panic, but I think you're having some kind of coke and aspirin flashback . . .'

‘All we ever hear about is sex discrimination, racial discrimination . . . well, what about the blatant discrimination against
dads?
'

‘With
your
fathering skills,' Maddy predicted with cold amusement, ‘his hobbies will include the botched assassinations of female movie stars; an abnormal attachment to ferrets—'

‘Ninety per cent of divorces are initiated by women. Yet the poor bloke has only a one in
ten
chance of winning custody of his kids.'

‘Oh God, I feel a bumper-bar sticker coming on.'

‘Yet when a man is sacked from his family,
he's
the one who has to pay the redundancy! No wonder our sperm count is bloody well dropping!'

The absurdity of Alex's pronouncements jolted a laugh out of her. ‘Alex, you couldn't possibly bring up a child on your own. Your fridge is too small. There's nowhere to put all those awful finger paintings.'

‘You can now even bloody well fertilize yourselves! A quick squirt with a turkey baster is making us
physically
redundant,' he swashbuckled. ‘Now you're trying to make us emotionally redundant as well.'

‘Earth to Alex. Come in . . . It's called Learned Helplessness, you drongo; a special talent perfected by generations of fathers—'

‘Fathers who now have to categorize themselves as the
genetic
father, the
biological
father, the
legal
father, the
social
father—'

‘Tragic,' Maddy said with mock sympathy. ‘It's cruelty to dumb animals, really.' She was laughing so hard, she had to unbuckle her seat belt. ‘Alex, um, it's a bit late to start playing Bob Cratchit, ya know?'

‘Well, I am
not
the feckless father of modern demonology.'

‘Get real. Think back. Do you really want to have those little gates all over the house again? To only buy food which harmonizes with animated cooking utensils on day-time TV? I mean puh-
lease
.'

‘The point is, Madeline,' he interjected, changing psychological gear, ‘at last I've decided to try to be a proper dad.'

With a sinking feeling, Maddy realized that he was serious. Flicking a side lever, Alex scooted the driver's seat backwards and nonchalantly stretched out his legs. Maddy was instantly ambushed by a memory of the time they'd made love in the carwash, during the wax/dry cycle. Now
that
was the true definition of autoeroticism. How the hell had they got
here
from
there
, she pondered, sadly. ‘Forget it, Alex. I'll never give Jack up.'

‘Depends who finds him first, doesn't it?' There was a thrilling note of triumph in his voice.

Maddy felt a cold hand reach into the pit of her stomach. ‘By the time you track him down, we'll have buggered off out of England.'

‘That's called child abduction. Under the Hague Convention, to which Britain is a signatory, it's presumed to be in the baby's best interests to stay in the country where he was born.' Alex had suddenly taken on the speech pattern of an android from
Robots From Planet Bastard
. ‘Even if you get custody, which I doubt, my access hours will mean that you have to stay in London.'

Maddy couldn't believe that she was the one now in retreat. Alex had turned the tables with the expert ease of a removals company. ‘I'll take you to court, you lily-livered piss ant!'

‘All being equal, the courts come down in favour of the mother . . . but you're an escapee!' He loomed over her, foot flat to the floor on the vocal accelerator. ‘An illegal immigrant – facing two charges of theft. And proposing to do that which will lose you the sympathy of every English judge, namely kiss and sell. That will definitely nuke any chance you have of winning custody of Jack. Besides, what kind of mother are you?' With calculated cruelty he set about stripping her down to her emotional chassis. ‘You don't even
know
where your son –
my
son – is.' Maddy reeled from the verbal whiplash of his words. ‘My solicitor says if you surrender yourself in order to claim custody against me, you'll be further charged with abandoning a baby under the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861.'

Alex's face was hard, panel-beaten; eyes on high beam.

‘You bastard.' With shot-put aim, she sloshed her beer over his head.

Alex peered at her from beneath his yeasty mask. ‘I take it,' he volunteered, ‘that we are having a difference of opinion on this?'

Lurching out of the Porsche into air leaden with traffic fumes, Maddy eyed the ex-love of her life with bitter resentment. She hoped it was the last time she'd ever see him. ‘I'll always cherish the initial mis-conceptions I had about you, Alex, you, you – jerk off.' Maddy felt doddery, concussed: victim of a Hit and Run Romance. ‘No. That description's too good for you. Sperm, after all, has a one in a hundred million, trillion, billion, zillion chance of turning into a human bloody being!'

She ran as fast as she could, hurdling the service-area hedge, squeezing through the steel fangs of smashed railings and down through the trees masking the road which would lead her back to London. She stood in the gloaming, hooked her thumb horizontally and waited for a lorry.

What the bloody hell was she doing coming a gutzer, a hemisphere from home, soggy bra-ed and broken-hearted? Not only was she on the run from the cops and Dwina the Czarina of Psychobabble, but now from
Alex
. Eating the dust of car after car, staring at the dark scar of road disappearing into the distance, she drew a bleak conclusion. An Englishman's love is like his central heating; it may keep you warm, but is nothing more than hot air.

With the net closing in around her, Maddy raged against her own absentmindedness. Losing the love of her life was one thing, but losing her
son?
Women didn't
lose
their sons. I mean, what was he? A
sock?

Biting back tears, she dismally counted up the days since she'd last seen her darling. She panicked at the thought of how the hell Gillian was coping. This was a woman who thought ‘crèche' was a French car accident. Maddy had promised it would only be a week. That was
three months ago
. She was probably right now trying to insert Jack into a condom-vending machine for a refund.

She had one question for Gillian, when and
if
she finally found her.

The name of a good psychiatrist.

Part
Three: Weaning

‘Puerperal depressions
. In actual fact there is no such condition, but some women who are liable to mental illness may become emotionally unstable, and pregnancy, delivery, the puerperium and responsibility of the new baby may impose an unreasonable strain upon them, leading to the onset of mental illness. There is nothing specific about pregnancy or delivery which causes a woman to develop a mental illness. Any other stress, strain or emotional disturbance of similar severity may quite easily provoke mental illness in such a person.'

Pregnancy
, Gordon Bourne

19

The Blue Eyeshadow Brigade

IT TOOK MADDY
a moment or two to recognize the woman who answered the door of No 6 Chepingstow Crescent, Milton Keynes. It made her think of those ‘before' and ‘after' make-over photos in women's magazines. And this person looked like the ‘before'.

‘What?' Gillian read Maddy's mortified expression and glanced down at her fluorescent stretch leggings and pastel terry towelling scuffs. ‘Do I detect slight disapproval pertaining to my attire?'

‘Put it this way, Harvey Nichols are flying their flag at half mast.' Even the garden gnomes huddled together on a neighbouring lawn seemed to be gawping at Gillian.

‘Where's Jack?' Maddy clamoured, pushing past her.

‘Are you implying that I am some kind of fashion victim?'

‘Fashion
mortality
would be closer.'

‘Well,' said Gillian defensively, following her friend at a trot, ‘it's just not practical to wear Chanel whilst making choux pastry with one hand and a patchwork quilt with the other.'

‘You're making
choux
pastry?' Gillian seemed to have shed her old identity with chameleon-like nonchalance. This was a woman who'd taken baking lessons from Marie Antoinette. ‘Are you nuts?'

‘I, my dear, am the Imelda Marcos of choux pastry,' she punned. ‘Cuppa?'

Maddy's scepticism dissolved into astonishment as she followed her old friend into her floral-posied, tea-cosy, spotlessly twee kitchen. The décor was vintage Brady Bunch. The laminated counter was lined with minute tupperware containers into which Gillian was spooning small quantities of puréed primary colours Maddy presumed to be vegetables. This woman, who had only ever waxed lyrical about men and money, was now waxing parquet and making her own pot pourri. The food in the pantry was stored in order of expiry dates; the pegs on the clothes-line were colour co-ordinated with the washing. On the sink sat a dish of peach-coloured soaps in the shape of shells. A wooden painted pineapple held recipes cut out from women's magazines. An invitation on the noticeboard announced a surprise party for the pet terrapin. There
were
hospital corners on the newspaper lining of the hamster cage, for Christ's sake.

‘Gill, um . . . don't you remember when we used to hunt in packs for men with Mercs?' Maddy wondered if it had been wise to bring this up while
she
was unarmed and Gillian had a loaded spatula in her hand.

‘You're thinking of someone else, dah-ling. The only vehicle
I
own is a Maclaren buggy.'

On the window sill above the sink sat a china dray pulling a porcelain wagon – the sort of house ornament which indicated the immediate deduction of twenty points from the IQ of the inhabitant. A framed weeney green handprint Maddy assumed to be Jack's was magnetized to the refrigerator door.

‘Where is he?' she entreated.

‘Beddy-byes.'

Maddy picked up the tiny cocktail frock Gillian was sewing for Jack's cabbage-patch doll. ‘What the hell has happened to you? You've become some kind of' – Maddy gulped; the word was like jellied eels in her mouth – ‘
housewife
.'

‘I certainly have not.'

‘Well, what would
you
bloody well call it?'

‘I'm a domestic engineer, if you please.' She handed Maddy her tea in a mug festooned with euphoric sunbeams and iridescent rainbows. ‘A highly skilled operative at the interface between culinary and residential management provision and in-home pedagogy. And now, if you'll excuse me for a tick, I
have
to de-mildew the shower curtain before bubby-wubby wakes.' She unselfconsciously slipped on a plastic barbecue apron cutely appliquéd in a double-entendre about love, meat, men and cucumbers.

‘Hey! Domestic Engineer!' Maddy called out sneeringly as she trailed Gillian into the living room. ‘Better watch out that halo doesn't slip and, you know, choke you to death.'

Her crowing was guillotined by the ‘swing-o-matic', a wind-up swing which allows baby to orbit for hours, arcing back and forth across the living room. The airborne seat caught Maddy in the epiglottis. She lurched sideways, only to find herself entangled in some kind of navy canvas pouch suspended from a roof beam, embossed with the name ‘Jolly Jumper'. Half harnessed, the velocity of her backwards fall suddenly trampolined her ceiling-wards.

Gillian, impervious to Maddy's impromptu balletic entrance, was half-way up the stairs with a squeegee mop in her hands.

‘It's taken me six goddamned weeks to find you, Gill, and yet you don't seem all that bloody pleased to see me.' She gestured to the domestic sceptre in Gillian's hands.

‘What? Oh. I'm sorry.' Gillian dragged like an anchor down the stairs. ‘It's just this house. It was flats, you know. You could heat a can of baked beans in every room,' she shuddered. ‘I've thrown out a couple of Trinidadian families and walled over a few
corpses
, but there's still so much to do.'

Maddy looked at her old friend mogadonically. ‘I'm glad I found out how boring you are
now
and not whilst on a walking tour of the bloody Lake District. But Gillian, really.
Milton Keynes?
'