Mad Cows (27 page)

‘Well?' she urged, touching his arm. The place where their skin brushed seemed to burn briefly.

‘I – I can't.'

‘Is it the . . . surgery?' she asked delicately. She could never go anywhere near him without every molecule of her blood heating and her heart racing. Another minute and you'd have to
soak
them apart.

‘Yes, yes. That's it.'

‘What's wrong?' she whispered, itching with residual affection.

‘It's serious. Maddy. Life-threatening. I don't want to go into it. Must be stoic.' He smiled bravely.

A nurse clattered through the swing door with a pre-op trolley. ‘Drake, Alexander.' She recited from a clipboard in a metallic voice. ‘Facial and abdominal liposuction, minimal hair replacement and blepharoplasty. Dr Brennan, yes?'

Alex gave a sheepish nod of his streaked head. Maddy fixed him with a venomous stare.

‘Oh,' she said, with pseudo sincerity, ‘
very
serious. Life-bloody-threatening.'

‘All right. All right. The point is, Madeline . . .' Alex paused, as the nurse hauled up his hospital gown and lathered his abdomen. ‘I don't want him.'

‘
What?
'

‘You've sucked out enough of my life blood. The Down Under Dracula, that's what Petronella calls you. And now you're out for another haemoglobin cocktail.'

‘But, you said you'd be the best parent. That you could give him the best start in life.'

‘I just wanted to punish you. Good God!' he exclaimed, as the nurse bent over his stomach with a razor blade. ‘Is that en
tir
ely necessary?'

‘What the
hell
for?'

‘Rejecting me.'

‘That was nearly a year ago.'

‘Oh, I didn't realize there was a statute of limitations on revenge.'

‘Alexander, you may be fifty years older than your son, but you are just as mature.
Facial liposuction?
'

‘Jowls, neck and eyelids. Purely professional motivation. The emphasis on youth in face-to-face contact with the public cannot be underestimated.'

‘A case of mutton dressed as ram.'

‘He's doing it for
me
.' The voice was so treacly sweet it wouldn't have been out of place on a crumpet. Maddy turned to see Petronella prancing through the swing door. ‘
Aren't
you, darling?' She hastily dashed the victorious glint from her eyes before gazing devotedly upon Alex. ‘To look lovely on our wedding day.'

The colour chart on the wall of Gillian's living room was divided into four quadrants, named after each season.

‘Now, let's examine your true colouring,' Gillian announced with the remote but friendly tones of a tour guide. After removing the woman's insipid make-up (she was a full day-planner sort, Gillian felt, with not one single redeeming vice), Gillian seated her before a harshly lit mirror and stared hard into her face. There was nothing more cruel you could do to a woman. But killing a customer's confidence (Youthanasia, she called it) was a vital part of a colour-chartist's technique.

Making a lot of ‘hmmm' and ‘ah-huh' noises which Gillian hoped sounded wise and authentic, she then draped her client in a white muslin cloth and
proceeded
to hold various coloured panels up against her sallow complexion.

‘Warm winter,' she finally pronounced, a cuisinart chop to her authoritative consonants. Gillian un-stoppered her ‘beauty flash balm' and began a rapid restoration of the woman's face. ‘Watch the difference.' Women were generally so relieved to look human again, that they'd believe it was the Image Palette Consultation which had redeemed them, and not Gillian's lavish application of half a kilo of Kohl.

‘I need clothes which don't show the dirt,' the woman volunteered, with exaggerated affability. ‘What with my baby and all.'

‘Oh, you have a baby?' asked Gillian, swathing her victim in acres of turquoise. Standing back, she gasped, hand over mouth, as though discovering the eighth wonder of the world. ‘That colour
speaks
to me.'

‘Oh, yes. He's nearly one. And you?' the client asked, in a faintly interrogative tone.

‘No terracottas,' Gillian ad-libbed, ‘rusts or maroons. Never, ever. I'm godmother to a baby. He's upstairs, asleep.' She held a cornea-sizzling swatch of aquamarine material up to her client's face and nodded euphorically.

‘Crawling?'

‘Mostly in reverse. And
pas
tels are
poi
son.'

‘Where is he? I'd love to see him. Do you mind?' she insisted.

Gillian glowed proudly. ‘Dah-ling, does Zsa Zsa
Gabor
turn down a wedding proposal? I'd like nothing more . . . than a sale,' she added under her breath.

There was an affected ease about the woman's smile. ‘My baby does this rather amusing little bottom shuffle . . .'

‘Sounds like he's dealing from the bottom of the deck!' Gillian said conversationally. She went to fetch Jack from the nursery, completely unaware that life was about to do just that.

‘May I hold him?' asked Cool Summer, her voice the consistency of tepid mayonnaise.

‘Of course,' Gillian complied, the fifty pounds for the course of Palette Consultations already spent in her mind.

The baby tugged happily on the pussy bow which frothed so frivolously on the woman's neck.

‘For Christ's sake, Alex,' Maddy entreated, aghast. ‘A
weather girl?
'

‘What's, like, wrong with that?' Petronella demanded, bristling.

‘Oh, nothing. It's just, you'd be better off marrying a god-damned shopping trolley. I mean, at least it has a mind of its bloody own.'

‘We're rushing things' – Petronella planted a proprietorial kiss on Alex's perspiring forehead – ‘because of the baby.'

She might as well have pushed Maddy out of an aeroplane with a cast-iron parachute. ‘I'm sorry?'

‘We're, you know,
expecting
.' She patted her concave stomach.

‘Nurse,' Maddy said, feigning calm, ‘when they're doing Mr Drake's hair transplant, get them to sew the hairplugs in the shape of the word “Bastard”, will you? . . . What about Jack?' she pleaded.

Alex looked at Petronella, then gave a helpless flap of his arms. Maddy turned to the weather girl. ‘It's strange, isn't it, this recycling urge which hits men in midlife. He dumped his wife for me. Dumped me for you. I give it one year before you're checking his hairbrush for strands which are not
his
. . . Pretending you like to take his coats to the dry cleaners, so you can go through his pockets . . . reading between the lines of every Amex statement, and the figures you'll be looking for will add up to “dinner for two”.'

‘I happen to believe marriage to be sacred,' huffed Alex, his lips protruding from a duvet of shaving foam. ‘My affair with you was a complete aberration. A mutual aberration society. A,' – he groped for the right words – ‘sexual swan song.'

‘Yeah, and Jack's our cygneture tune,' Maddy out-punned him.

The nurse checked her watch, braced open the door and manoeuvred the bed towards the hall.

Maddy held on to the end of the bed. ‘Why the hell are you going through with this, Alex?'

‘To keep myself young,' he said, with all the ebullience of a limpet. Maddy realized then that Alex
would
make a good politician after all; he possessed an infinite faculty for self-deception.

Petronella gave the bed an irritable tug aisle-wards.

‘Alex, it's a midlife crisis. Women shoplift and get hot flushes.' Maddy yanked back on the bed rails, her shoes skid-marking the linoleum. ‘A man's symptoms are remarriage with a bimbo, a Porsche purchase . . .'

‘Bimbo!' Petronella's face clouded, appropriately for a weather girl, with fury. ‘Could someone, like, call security?'

‘That's how Porsches are advertised,' Maddy persevered. ‘Used to drive through midlife crisis. As new . . . And plastic surgery.'

Alex suddenly appeared wracked, dwindled. The look in his eye was not unlike that on the face of a fish on a slab of ice in the Harrods food hall. Maddy's anger muted to an abstract feeling of pity. She felt a sentimental fondness for Alex; similar to her feelings for the picture postcard England she'd come all this way to find no longer existed.

The mobile bed was approaching a sign which read, in Maddy's heightened state, hilariously: ‘Medical Staff Only. This door is alarmed.' And so, thought Maddy, am I. Grabbing at him, she could feel his backbone through the starched tunic. ‘Alex,' she implored, ‘don't do it!'

‘Security!' the cry echoed down the hall.

‘Alex, I need you,' she begged from a mouth which was little more than an unsutured wound. ‘Please help me.'

Petronella shoved the nurse out of the way and propelled Alex towards his vile but somehow inevitable fate.

‘The only thing I ask is that you get him circumcised,' Alex said, his voice plaintive with defeat. ‘After all, I
was
.'

‘Yeah,' acquiesced Maddy, darkly, ‘and they threw away the wrong part.' It struck her, grievously, that Alex was empty inside. She had been sucked towards him, really, like an astronaut in the gravitational pull of a black hole.

An arm-flailing commotion erupted by the lifts. Maddy didn't recognize the encroaching figure at first because it was running down the corridor. The only thing Gillian ever ran down were reputations.

‘It's Jack!' she puffed, hurling her asthmatic form across Alex's bed. The rapidity of her descent set the bed on wheels scuttling into a medication trolley which capsized a spectacular confetti of coloured pills all over Petronella. Maddy's belly churned and shrivelled as she gazed upon Gillian's ashen visage. ‘She took Jack.'

Maddy gasped, loss filling her lungs. ‘What?' She shook Gillian by her bony shoulders. ‘
Who?
'

‘Edwina Phelps.'

Part Four: Bonding

‘Watch your baby; let him gaze into your eyes so that the outside world does not distract either of you. Never leave him in strange situations.'

The Baby Pack
, Penelope Leach

31

Handbags At Dawn

GILLIAN, IN AN
uncharacteristically papal gesture, flung herself horizontal and kissed the pavement of a side alley in Soho. ‘Somebody mug me! I can't tell you how divine it is to be out of the suburbs.'

‘Gillian, for God's sake,' Maddy hissed, taut as a wire. At the loss of Jack, her maternal instincts had come tidal-waving back.

‘Maddy told me you love dat place.' While Gillian and Maddy played ‘Spot the Cop', Mamma Joy was threading a wire coat-hanger down the inside window of the passenger side of Rupert Peregrine's decrepit XJ6.

‘A Milton Keynes shop assistant asked me if I was moving in permanently. “Can you get mangoes all year round?” I enquired. “Mangoes?” she queried. “pre
cis
ely,” I replied.'

The light in Peregrine's second-floor office was extinguished just as Mamma Joy eased the lock upwards.

‘Gillian! Get in.'

Maddy and Gillian shrunk down into the rancid darkness of the back seat filthy with fag ends and waited for the sound of the key in the lock. The news on the sour-grapevine was that one of the Holloway ‘lifers' was pregnant. Rupert Peregrine was the prime sleazy suspect.

The car lurched as Maddy's solicitor squeezed his waistline of Ordnance Survey dimensions behind the wheel. Mimicking the move she'd seen on endless TV cop dramas, Maddy held what she hoped felt like a gun (but was really one of Jack's Tommee Tippee trainer cups) up against the base of Peregrine's dandruffy skull. Gillian leaned over and extracted the keys from the ignition.

‘Dwina has taken Jack.' Maddy's throat was so constricted with grief that her voice came out in grave, low tones she didn't recognize.

‘Well, well, well,' Peregrine said, snidely contemptuous. ‘Isn't life bedevilled with perplexing little conundrums.'

Maddy thrust the baby's beaker harder into the blubbery folds of his neck. ‘If you don't help me, I'll testify against you. Oh, yes. It was a pleasure working
under
him, your honour. Very
laid-back
attitude.'

‘
Really?
I would have thought absconding from Ye
Olde
Women's Prison could perhaps put a small indentation in one's credibility . . . but what would
I
know, a humble lawyer?' Peregrine shrugged, not a dent in his scabrous charisma.

‘Listen, you swivel-eyed, impotent inebriate—'

‘I see that your grasp of the Mother Tongue has not improved. There is no such thing as an impotent man,' he replied, scathingly, ‘only
blemished women
.'

This called for female reinforcements. Maddy gave the nod and Mamma Joy thundered out of the shadows and origamied herself in beside the truculent solicitor. With scornful nonchalance, Peregrine made a sluggish move to open his door.

‘Oooh, I tink you is in too much of a hurry.' Mamma Joy's chin rolls quivered with mirth.

‘Especially when she's got a loaded cat in her pocket,' Maddy added triumphantly.

The fleshy acreage of Peregrine's face fell. ‘You've got Butter Truffles?' he asked in a clammy voice.

Mamma Joy produced the over-fed fur ball and held it just out of Peregrine's reach. The cat whined harrowingly. Butter Truffle's owner twitched, perspired, fidgeted. ‘Well?' she asked, stretching the feline's neck to a wringable length.

‘I didn't want to do it,' he bleated.

‘Do what?' demanded Maddy.

‘It's genetic. A primitive instinct for survival . . .'

Mamma Joy tightened her lock on the cat's larynx.

‘But various psychological nooses seemed to be
drawing
closer . . . and a career change appeared suddenly desirable.' He spluttered, catching his carbolic breath. ‘Somewhere humid which involved cocktails with pastel parasols in them . . . Ms Phelps is helping me finance my . . . early retirement. All I had to do was draw up some fake adoption papers.'