Mad Cows (31 page)

Above the horizon sat a lop-sided moon. The sun was going down over the land. A shaft of hazy vanilla light intercepted the gloomy clouds and bathed the deck. The spray from their boat glinted with rainbow fragments of light.

Just for a moment she glimpsed, there in the luminous foam, the possibility of happiness. She kissed Jack's eyelids, half shuttered as he fought off sleep. At least she was now wise enough to know that as far as Happily Ever After went – well, it was best to take it on a day-to-day basis.

Epilogue

34

The First Year Check-up

GILLIAN DONATED DOZENS
of eggs to happy couples, then fell pregnant with quads, naturally – to her gynaecologist. The birth isn't covered by private insurance, but it is by the national media. She sold the exclusive rights to a baked-bean company making her incredibly rich and resulting in five proposals of marriage.

The run up to the General Election was marked by the sheer number of photographic spreads in glossy magazines celebrating ALEXANDER DRAKE'S happy marriage to Petronella de Winter. Personally he had come to the conclusion that he
could
be happily married . . . all that was stopping him was his wife. Alex's anxieties were exacerbated when his hair
transplant
, which had started to grow back in, seemed to be sprouting in the shape of the word ‘bastard'.

DWINA PHELPS was arrested for a string of child abductions and sentenced to six years in Holloway where she is now preyed on by a vindictive psychologist of her
own
. Her appeal is pending, but she has little faith in a system of twelve people too moronic to get out of jury duty.

DETECTIVE SERGEANT SLYNNE retired from the force to join a psycho-dynamic Buddhist rebirthing centre in Brighton. Having left his wife for Edwina Phelps, only to be rejected, his mind is wandering (a shame, as it really is too small to be allowed out on its own) towards the Men's Movement. He was last glimpsed clutching other hairy middle-aged men in a forest in Connecticut.

PETRONELLA DE WINTER was finding that it could take
years
to become an overnight sensation. She staves off the boredom by going through Alex's suit pockets and reading between the lines of his Amex statements for signs of infidelity. The press has begun to test the temperature of their relationship . . . with a rectal thermometer. Her only solace is her weekly riding lessons with one Captain James Hewitt.

* * *

MAMMA JOY finally hung up her balaclava when she was head-hunted by a large PR company. Her strategic planning potential (escaping from a prison van) and bold competitive initiative (avoiding recapture) and shop-lifting scams (creative accounting) made her excellent entrepreneurial material for New Labour's stake-holder society.

SPUTNIK's autobiography,
Inside Me Inside
, got favourable reviews from the pro-prison reform lobby led by Feminist Harriet Fielding. She sold the film rights to Michael Winner. And in this case, you
could
judge a book by its film.

RUPERT PEREGRINE washed up as an ‘entertainment's officer' at the floating Club Med Resort moored by the French at Mururoa Atoll. Soon after, Butter Truffles was eaten by an iguana.

HUMPHREY. Well, they said he'd never make it; and he didn't. Humphrey lost his position as Poet-Laureate-In-Waiting when a drunken spoof he wrote on the Royal Family, entitled ‘I, Corgi', was published in
Private Eye
.

Madeline's mother, MRS NARELLE WOLFE, received a prank call from someone claiming to be the Prince of Wales. She used her rape whistle.

* * *

JACK WOLFE enjoyed his first birthday on March 25
^th
, sitting on Bondi Beach, strewn with drunken Pommy backpackers, eating sand. Despite his quirky gene pool, Jack was now running (a kind of bow-legged, professional jockey look) and talking (the Virginia Woolf stream-of-consciousness, what's-on-his-lung-is-on-his-tongue, goo-goo-gar stage). It was also beginning to dawn on him that he would soon be able to out-run his mother by about eighty CPSs (collisions per second) and was probably capable of putting the guinea pig into the blender and turning it on
all by himself
.

MADELINE WOLFE had begun to tell her little boy an unbelievable story. ‘Once upon a time, Mummy had a brain, career opportunities and no stretch marks. Then she met your daddy, went to the other side of the world on a great adventure . . . and ended up a few nappies short of the full load.' She hadn't decided whether or not the story had a happy ending. Her friends, however, maintained that they had never seen her so content. Maddy concluded that, yes, it could be happiness . . . but then again it could be a chemical imbalance.

ENGLAND'S OFFICIAL MOTHER OF THE YEAR washed and dressed her children, deposited them at play group, cleaned her house impeccably, then jumped to her death off Archway ‘Suicide Bridge'. Her
suicide
note read, ‘Billions and trillions of lemmings can't be wrong.'

KIDDIE COMMISSARS Penelope Leach, Miriam Stoppard, Sheila Kitzinger, et al. are still writing sanctimonious, guilt-inducing books about perfect mothers, who, unlike Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, cannot possibly exist.

About the Author

Kathy Lette first achieved
succès de scandale
as a teenager with the novel
Puberty Blues
, which was made into a major film and a TV mini-series. After several years as a newspaper columnist and television sitcom writer in America and Australia, she wrote ten international bestsellers including
Mad Cows
(which was made into a film starring Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel),
How to Kill Your Husband and Other Handy Household Hints
(recently staged by the Victorian Opera, Australia), and
To Love, Honour and Betray
. Her novels have been published in fourteen languages around the world. Kathy appears regularly as a guest on the BBC and Sky News. She is also an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2004 she was the London Savoy Hotel's Writer in Residence. In 2010 she received an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University.

Kathy lives in london with her husband and two children. Visit her website at
www.kathylette.com
and on Twitter
@KathyLette
.

Also by Kathy Lette

The Boy Who Fell to Earth

Men: A User's Guide

To Love, Honour and Betray (Till Divorce Us Do Part)

How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints)

Dead Sexy

Nip ‘n' Tuck

Puberty Blues

Altar Ego

Foetal Attraction

Girls' Night Out

Mad Cows

The Llama Parlour

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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MAD COWS

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409043249

A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552775946

First publication in Great Britain
Black Swan edition published 2012

Copyright © Kathy Lette 1996

Kathy Lette has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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