Mad Cows (28 page)

A cry of anguish unrolled down Maddy's face like a window blind. ‘Who for?' her voice grated in her dry throat. It hurt her to spit out the words. ‘When?

Where?'

‘Her niece picked them up this evening. New Zealand lass. On the traditional trek to Europe. The transaction, I believe, is to take place tomorrow. A vested interest, masquerading as magnanimity.'

‘You're the one whose English hasn't improved,' Maddy yowled.

‘Talk proper so's I can understand what youse say-in'.' The cat's Pernod coloured eyes bulged balefully as Mamma Joy tightened her grip.

‘Ten thousand pounds, I believe, was the payment.'

The women gasped, as a trio.

‘Nice couple, though. He's in advertising.'

Maddy fought back a debilitating fit of crying.

‘What we goin' to do wid you now?' Mamma Joy tweaked his flabby cheek. ‘Maybe I should just rape you?'

‘No!' Peregrine mewled with febrile anxiety.

‘You
say
no,' Gillian teased disdainfully, ‘but do you really
mean
no?'

‘Please don't labour under the misconception that this little contretemps of ours will not remain strictly
entre nous
,' he Uriah Heaped. ‘Butter Truffles and I were going to satiate our hacienda hankering in a week or two, but we could depart earlier. Today perhaps. Hey, why be a slave to self-control?'

Maddy wailed. Why indeed? Her fist had come down on Peregrine's head before she realized it was raised.

Their rushed plan had to be simple. It was hatched over hot chocolate huddled together in Mamma Joy's fetid living room. Gillian fought recruitment. As far as she was concerned, breaking and entering was a much more terrifying, nail-nibbling experience for the break and enterer, than the person being broken in
to
. The person being broken in
to
only had to worry that you might forget to take the family heirlooms they hate and have over-insured. The breaker
-in
, on the other hand, had to worry about being skewered on gate railings, barbecued on electric fences, gnawed by Rottweilers and caught on closed-circuit security cameras
whilst having a bad hair day
. (A ‘Lockerbie', she called it. A Hair Disaster.)

Then there was the trauma of finding a ladder in your stocking, once you've got it on over your face.

Gillian was saved the ordeal by the arrival of Sputnik. As Mamma Joy ushered her into the flat, Maddy was surprised to detect a meek look in her
eyes
; defeat in her rounded shoulders. Removed from the prison environment, she was like a bat in daylight – dazed and disorientated. Her predatory expression had collapsed into one of troubling humility. Her once purple hair had grown long and lank. The slave bracelet around her scrawny ankle made her look like a plucked chicken.

‘What the hell is
she
doing here?' Maddy shrilled. As the hours ticked by, she'd become more wound up than a Taiwanese watch.

‘She goin' to set de fire for us.' Mamma Joy had a burning desire to smoke Dwina out of her house by the means of a spot of arson at her office. Maddy, using forged social service documents (Mamma Joy's recipe for Cat Creole had proved an excellent Peregrine motivator) would then steal back her baby from the dim New Zealander.

‘Why?' Maddy asked suspiciously. ‘Friggin' hell! You're not still trying to take up residency in my undies, are you?'

‘Wassat? I wanted ya to get it down, that's all . . .'

‘
Go
down is the expression I think you're looking for.'

‘On paper. Me life story,' Sputnik said, declining her stereotype. ‘I can't write, see.'

‘Wait. You wanted me to write your
memoirs
?'

‘That Tonya Harding cow, Amy Fisher and Joey Bottafuoco, those Menendez Bruvers – the ones that murdered their parents. All them geezers got movie
deals
an' that. Who said crime don't pay, eh? That's why I planted the Malteser. To have somefink over ya.'

Prisoners used to dream of escape, thought Maddy. Now they dreamed of feature films and book rights –
How to Kill Friends and Influence Morons
. ‘You mean, you didn't want to have sex with me?'

‘Shit, no. Wiv a skinny-arsed bitch like you?'

‘But why do you want to help me now?' interrogated Maddy, with more hostility than she felt.

Sputnik picked at the hole in the sole of her tennis shoe.

‘You could end up back inside.' Maddy watched her nibble at the skin on the side of her nails. They were fairly well gnawed already and she drew blood quickly. Her glazed eyes darted to and fro.

‘Everybody knows me Inside,' she appealed softly. ‘I'm a Somebody in there. Out 'ere, well, it does me 'ed in.'

There was a sad silence while this wretched information was absorbed. A life of children's homes and detention centres and ‘giving up' was all she could succeed in.

‘Sweet Lord, gal!' Mamma Joy slapped her herculean thighs. ‘Let her do it.'

Sputnik, taking Maddy's silence as a yes, was suddenly possessed with the radiance and energy of a girl in a tampon ad. Like a warrior into battle, the first thing she did was shave her head.

As she watched Sputnik assembling her incendiary
calling
card, Maddy willed herself to stay calm. She had to bluff her way into Edwina Phelps' house, be convinced as a Scarf Draper and rescue Jack. She must
not
take to Dwina's furnishings with a chainsaw. Nor should she wait and strafe her with a machine gun. She might just put some Nair Hair Remover in her enemy's shampoo if there was time, but that was
all
.

‘What the hell's happened to your tooth?' Maddy asked when they rendezvoused with Mamma Joy a few hours later in the estate's car park. The sparkle was missing from her smile.

‘Dat nutin', gal. I soon get anudder one when tings back up.' A majestic sweep of her arms revealed the proceeds of the diamond sale – a hot yellow VW Beetle holed up behind a graffitied lamp-post. The car was so dilapidated, no one would insure it – they'd just give you a survival kit. The stickers covering the chassis read ‘My other husband's a stud muffin', ‘We're staying together for the sake of the cats' and ‘Smile, it's the second best thing you can do with your lips'.

It seemed to Maddy that the stickers were the only thing holding the rust-bucket together.

‘De get-away car,' Mamma Joy grinned.

‘Did you
have
to purchase a vehicle with red flames licking their way up the bonnet?' asked Gillian, mortified. She was not having a good day. The grot and grime of Mamma Joy's flat (‘that's not
dust
,' she
had
said, running finger along a shelf, ‘that's
topsoil
!') was bad enough, but she was now expected to get into a car whose bumper stickers she didn't agree with. ‘What is left of my reputation will be ruined, you understand.'

‘Your reputation is like your virginity, gal; just sometin' extra to carry around. It's de first time me have intermittent wipers!' Mamma Joy trilled. ‘Hmm,
yes!
I is comin' up in de world.'

With Mamma Joy driving and Gillian navigating (using the map-reading technique made famous by millions of finishing-school females before her – it's one fingernail's length further towards the red dot and then veer left.) they deposited Sputnik, beaming like a demented cherub, outside Dwina's office. Maddy disembarked near the Highgate address Peregrine had given them.

The freezing air punched into her like a fist; it was colder than a polar-bear's bum. Maddy couldn't believe the Gothic twist to the plot – plot being the operative word. The best position for Dwina-surveillance was from the shrubbery of Highgate cemetery. Maddy, dodging frozen blobs of dog shit, crouched amid the skewed tombstones – it was like being inside the dank mouth of someone dentally challenged – and strained to see through the ten-denier fog until her eyes ached. Branches scrabbled at the air above her. A feeble dawn tinged leaden clouds. In the livid light, London stretched out below, bleak
and
desolate. Something touched her in the dark. Her heart pogoed into her mouth. Before she could scream, the shape purred. Maddy looked down at a half-starved cat performing a minuet around her trembling legs.

At cock-crow, as planned, Maddy, willing her teeth to stop castanetting, detected a smudge of light in Dwina's house. An eternity of minutes later, the front door of the gaunt terrace wheezed open. A spoke of light fell on the path. Dwina, still stabbing her arms into her coat, scuffled out from the dimly lit hall and hurled herself behind the wheel of her maroon Montego.

At first it wouldn't start. In an agony of dread, she waited and watched as Dwina tried to fire the ignition. The emphysemic engine strained. Maddy held her breath. Finally, the yolk-yellow headlights reflected in the wet bitumen wavered in the rain and she was gone.

Layered in coats and cardigans, Maddy the Michelin woman levered herself down from her eerie perch and, clutching her fake papers, rolled across the deserted road and punched the bell. She was so psyched up that when the door eventually opened to reveal a young woman with an eyelash curler clamped to one eye-socket and a mascara wand hovering near the other, the ordinariness, the indifference made her gasp. ‘Yiss?'

Maddy extended the papers. ‘Social Services.'

It was easier than Maddy had ever imagined. Jack was sitting on the living-room couch in front of a Disney video, flinging food in his renowned imitation of a lid-less blender. He squealed with joy, put out his arms and, much to her astonishment, stepped towards her, legs wide apart like a gunslinger.

Maddy's heart beat gave a ragged thud. ‘He walked!' In a daze of joy, she lavished him with loud kisses, even on his creamy, dreamy eyelids.

The niece picked black globules off the tips of her lashes. ‘So what?' she shrugged, eyeing Maddy narrowly. ‘You'd bitter hand round till my Aunty gits back. I'm jist babysitting.'

Maddy looked at her tangle-toed darling, his plump, pink mouth gurgling, his eyes glittering with glee, and tried hard to swallow her elation. ‘No time. It's all official.' She made a dart for the door.

‘Hey, what's goan on?'

The niece's question was answered by the chilling voice of Edwina Phelps. Maddy hadn't heard the key clicking in the lock but, rounding into the hall, there was her enemy, blocking the exit in a paisley dress disconcertingly similar to her living-room curtains.

‘Hello, Madeline,' Dwina said with greeting-card courtesy. ‘How are you? In all the chaos I forgot my office keys.'

‘Oh, thank you, Fate Fairy.' Maddy cursed inwardly. This was the same Fate Fairy who'd given her a mother who knew the difference between marjoram
and
marijuana. The same Fate Fairy who'd sent Maddy into Harrods to buy a packet of prunes.

‘A patient,' Dwina explained to her niece, in a voice of unfathomable composure. ‘I'm her psychotherapist.'

‘With the emphasis on psycho.' Maddy cleaved Jack tightly to her. ‘Think “social worker” by day . . . Norman Bates by night.'

‘You're projecting again, Maddy! Now, give me the baby.'

‘No! You stole him and now you're going to sell him to the highest bidder!'

The niece poked absentmindedly at a pimple.

‘These women. They'll say anything.' Dwina's voice was even, conversational, as though discussing a bus timetable. ‘As if I could ever do such a thing. I
adore
children.'

‘Yeah, I bet that's what it says on your charge sheet.'

‘Now, come on, lovey. Give me the baby.' She made a move towards Maddy.

‘Why?' Maddy shoved her backwards with one hand, into an armchair. ‘Why the hell are you doing this to me?'

‘Good! Vent! Vent! Let go!'

‘What have Jack and I ever done to you?'

‘She thinks
all
babies are hers,' Dwina explained with quiet lucidity. She was breathtakingly plausible. ‘The trouble is, she hasn't found her inner child.'

‘No, but you've obviously found your
inner arsehole
. . .
If
she's not lying,' Maddy implored the girl, ‘why doesn't she call the cops?'

The niece, holding her eyelash curler like a handgun, turned on her relation. ‘You
did
say you'd take me to a restaurant which revolves, Aunt Dwee, for my twinny-first,' she said, sincere with petulance. ‘And all you gave me was that bloody salad dryer. I hate salad!'

‘Sweetie,' Dwina said, placing her hands just so on her panty-hosed knees. ‘Why don't you take my car to work? You're always pestering me about it. I won't be needing it today,' came her clotted cream consonants, ‘except to take you to a,' – she raised her index finger ceilingwards and twirled it – ‘
certain restaurant
for dinner.'

The New Zealand niece's plain, impudent face lit up. ‘Brill.' In a wave of her mascara wand, she was gone.

With bolt of lightning speed, Dwina's five foot three inch body flew across the room as though propelled by a poltergeist. Grasping Jack under her left arm, Maddy lashed out with her right. She felt like King Kong, swatting planes with one paw, whilst maintaining her precarious perch atop the Empire State Building with the other. Dwina yanked Jack's arm. He yelped. Maddy got a retaliatory hold on Dwina's hair. Dwina tugged harder on Jack. He screamed in pain.

‘Stop!' Maddy begged. ‘You'll break his arm!'

‘Let him go then!' Dwina spat, looking at her murderously.

Maddy, her nose bleeding, scratch marks down
her
face, her heart drilling against her ribs, did the only thing she could. She let go of her darling.

‘Make one move and I'll hurt him.' A rictus smile spread over Edwina's face. ‘Women like you shouldn't have babies,' she said with cold-blooded complacency. ‘You should be forced to wear contraceptive patches. With an IQ test required before removal. Women like you should be spayed.'