Mad Cows (7 page)

Her foray into exotic kitchenware fared no better. Despite Gillian's limited culinary credentials – as far as she was concerned capers were things you got up to, preferably with recently divorced shipping magnates – she was busily bluffing her way into the earthenware traditional peasant cooking implements department of Selfridges, when the sales assistant she had paid to mind Jack, appeared, grimacing.

‘I think,' the nineteen-year-old (nose pinched between acrylic nails) informed the job applicant, ‘he needs changing.'

‘Yes,' hissed Gillian, resentfully. ‘Preferably for the heir to an oil fortune.'

Not
the way to conduct a job interview, she silently fumed, lying Jack on the office carpet to swab and daub.

‘Well, that's a first,' she began lamely, resuming her seat and glancing at the bewildered personnel manager across the desk. ‘The only male I've ever succeeded in changing. Oh, I got close with Milo Roxburghe,' she floundered, name-dropping frantically, ‘the Hair Extension King? An ex-fiancé of mine, do you know him? That man wore white
shoes
when I first met him.

Gillian couldn't believe how often babies defecated. ‘You're
male
,' she lamented to her homo sapien
soupçon
, as they were ejected from the store. ‘You're supposed to disappear into the lavatory with a copy of
Sporting Life
for hours on end. Don't you know
any
thing?'

Worse than the endless poo were the air-to-surface mucus missiles. Gillian had to resort to going to the corner store in her taffeta ballgown, because the rest of her wardrobe was covered in baby slime. By Wednesday morning she'd taken to wearing only fawn and cream. Not her colours, but it cut down on washing.

Gillian felt that years of attending the Paris fashion shows had equipped her for the job of Fashion Editor on
Harper's Bizarre
. All you needed to do was describe everything as
fab
ulous, am
az
ing, or 'tastic. This just meant that you hadn't seen anything like it in the last five microseconds. As babies were this year's ultimate accessory – all the Fashionista from Madonna to Michael Hutchence were sporting them – Gillian felt that finally Jack would be an asset.

‘Oh, look!' The female fashion journalists – who used their heads solely as a place to prop their Sony Walkmans – emerged from behind their six-foot flower arrangements, and, ignoring Gillian, rushed to gush over Maddy's offspring. ‘Isn't he
gorgeous
?'

Gillian stared down at Jack. He lay squiggling on the carpet like something larval. She couldn't see it. ‘I suppose someone said that to Saddam Hussein's
mother
,' she japed. Oblivious to the magazine editor's censorious glance, she prattled on. ‘Can you imagine the indignity of being a baby and having to wear those hideous all-in-one babygros? Now
there's
a fashion victim!'

The editor, in arctic tones, replied that she didn't know what Gillian was talking about. Standing up to show Gillian the door, she revealed her lame jump suit – with press-studded crutch for easy access.

‘Oops.'

Jack gurgled happily all the way down in the lift. ‘Oh, grow a neck,' she scolded him. ‘And
then
we'll talk.'

It was the same story all week; whether posing as a Prue Leith graduate (she'd landed the job to deliver hampers of salmonella and egg sandwiches to posh boardroom lunches) or an opera buff (when the Covent Garden PR director asked her how she would define her understanding of various plots, she'd flirtatiously ad-libbed, ‘just follow the bouncing dagger!') every opportunity was sabotaged by Maddy's little crumb-cruncher. ‘Talk about gumming the hand which feeds you!'

‘Indulge me,' Gillian pleaded with Jack on Friday morning. ‘I'm a severely economically inactive, neurotic, middle-aged celibate with suicidal tendencies.
Please be quiet
.' She plugged a dummy into the baby's mouth
and
watched, astounded, as he plummeted, pell-mell into unconsciousness. This time Gillian checked him in with her coat at Blake's Hotel. Cocooned in the depths of her carpetbag.

Half an hour into the interview, not only did she have the job of Exotic Plumage Importer, but the boss, Simon, an elegantly dressed stud-muffin in his mid-forties with bedroom eyes and a bionic bank balance, had asked her to lunch. It was then the coat-check girl arrived with the writhing handbag.

‘Shit!' said Gillian, eloquently. Responding to her voice, the handbag emitted a high-pitched wail which seemed to be imitating a backed-up insinkerator.

‘I'm sorry,' Simon retreated. ‘You didn't mention a child.'

‘It's not
my
baby,' Gillian jabbered. ‘His mother's off stamping due dates for the prison library.' Her employer's eyes bugged out. ‘Not that I make a habit of fraternizing with felons, but . . .'

‘This job, Miss Cassells, requires long hours and late nights.'

‘I need to fit him with a silencer, that's all.' Gillian groped urgently through her bag, excavating the contents – a half-chewed rusk, a rattle, a musical frog, one soiled diaper and a tube of iridescent pink nappy-rash cream – on to Simon's desk. ‘He needs the Betty Ford clinic for dummy addicts,' Gillian said, above the howling. ‘A dummy detox unit. Do it cold turkey, no-neck,' she snapped at the child,
sotto voce
.

Her employer winced with alarm.

‘I mean, one must be cruel to be kind, correct?' Gillian gave a fake laugh in an effort to salvage the situation. ‘After all, boys will be boys. Mind you, so will a lot of octogenarian business men I know.' The look on Simon's face alerted Gillian to the fact that this may not have been the most tactful comment. ‘Though obviously not
you
.' It was the sleep deprivation, that's what it was. She'd been taking lobotomy pills.

Later that day, Gillian invested in a play pen and incarcerated the baby without trial. Like mother, like son, she thought dismally. ‘Call Amnesty International. See if I care.' She would add a sign – ‘DANGER. Put Fingers Inside Bars At Own Risk.' She dropped a bottle into the baby's mouth. ‘Drink it,' she demanded, delivering her version of the starving millions in Africa spiel. ‘You know,
there are children in Knightsbridge with eating disorders!
' It was only then that it struck her that she was actually conversing with an infant.

Pouring a large gin and tonic, she tried to talk herself off the psychological windowledge where Maddy had pushed her. Failing, she put her hennaed head in her hands and sucked morosely on the plastic pacifier.

7

The Clit-Lick Hilton

MADDY'S EYES HAD
not adjusted to the dimly lit corridor of the remand wing. She had a distinct sensation that she was being watched. Not particularly perceptive of her, as the surrounding gloomy shapes were breathing adenoidally. The hairs pricked up on her arms. She backed instinctively towards the wall. She thought of those air fresheners people have on toilet cisterns and the backs of car seats which exude alpine and eucalyptus aromas. In prison, there's an invisible scent-tree too, only it impregnates the atmosphere with paranoia and fear of imminent death.

‘H-h-hello?' Like a bat, Maddy sent off conversational sonar bleeps to gauge the positions of the oglers.

A thin, wiry shape with the dress sense of Liberace stepped out of the shadows and prodded Maddy in
the
throat with a scalpel nail. ‘What choo lookin' at?'

Shaved into this woman's dyed purple hair were the words ‘Made in London'. Maddy wondered if the charges against her were ‘Assault with intent to kill a hair colourist'. Her adversary's footware, the sort which could crush light aircraft, propelled her to the daunting height of six foot two. She launched into a ‘you slag this' and ‘you slag that' diatribe, punctuated by an oyster of phlegm which hit Maddy full in the face before beginning it's slow, gruesome descent down her chin. She told herself that she wasn't frightened. She told herself that she'd been in scarier situations – lip electrolysis, labour without an epidural, dinner with the London literati . . . But then
why were her teeth fillings dissolving?

More lurking inmates came into focus, sporting that over-experimented-on-lab-rat look.

‘Who's it, Sputnik?' demanded a specimen with dirty blonde hair, red satin shorts, a ruby nose ornament and a facial expression a little too canine for comfort.

‘It's that kid killer, wotsits,' Maddy's assailant declaimed, in the staccato of the seriously tense and totally deranged. Maddy noted the small pupils and the choppy, twitchy movements of a woman sweating out a drug high. The nickname was disconcertingly clear. Sputnik was in her own orbit.

‘Ja know what I'm gunna do to ya, beastie?' She gave Maddy a look which meant pain.

‘Gee, I don't know . . .' Maddy took a wild guess. ‘Braid my labia?'

‘Punch your fuckin' head in, nonce.' Tough? This was a woman who did her own bikini waxes.

‘I didn't hurt my baby, okay?' she faltered.

‘Why thuh fuck should we believe ha?' With one swift punch to the stomach, she concertinaed Maddy to the cold, cement floor. Sputnik stood over her – a brittle body encased in jeans so tight you could trace the outline of the sultana she'd had for breakfast. Maddy's eyes frantically sought out the prison officers at the far end of the association room. They roamed, big, bored cats, completely blasé about Maddy's life and death drama.

‘I have two words for you,' Maddy panted. ‘
Social Services
.'

This stonkered them. To women who've been handed the stiff cheese from fate's
fromage
trolley, these were the most terrifying words in their limited lexicon. The miserable herd stopped jostling and glanced indecisively at Sputnik who answered their silent query by pitching her high-heeled Doc Marten down into Maddy's side, hard.

‘They were going to . . . take him away . . . into care.' Reasoning with Sputnik, Maddy surmised, was a little like pissing into a hurricane. ‘I smuggled him out.' She braced herself as the psychotic Rockette prepared for some more fancy footwork.

‘Lord have mercy! Can't you smuggle me out too?'

The old lady was so submerged in her own flesh that although each step was bringing her closer, she seemed to be moving in ten directions simultaneously. Beneath the diamond-encrusted tooth enamel, a familiar flight of chins led to a balcony of bosom above the gargantuan stomach. The thought of Mamma Joy being smuggled out in anything less than a greyhound bus sent titters through the edgy scrum.

‘Or, preferably me man,
in
. . . without his wife knowin' dat is.' She bundled Maddy up off the floor and into a bear hug. ‘Where dere comes no beau, de cobwebs grow.' This was a woman who made Zorba the Greek look introverted. ‘I know dis lady. She love her ba-by. Wot you chargin' her wid, eh? Aidin' and abettin' the escape of a minor? Hee
hee
hee hee hee.'

Sputnik's phlegmy growl indicated her displeasure. ‘You ain't tryin' to fuck me around are yer, yer fat cow.'

‘You are just as high in my opinion as ever, gal.' Mamma Joy turned, depositing a breathy side into Maddy's earhole. ‘On crack, dat is . . .'

Maddy in tow, she parted the anti-climactic throng with breast-stroke movements and waddled, as though wearing tights two sizes too small – towards the few library books shelved in the corner of the association room. As they pretended to flick through the fascinating range of donated reading material –
Taxidermy for Fun And Profit, Bulgarian Nautical Commands For Beginners, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini –
a Novel
– Maddy whispered gravely, ‘What brought
you
here?'

‘Minibus, what cha think?' Mamma Joy chortled hoarsely.

‘I didn't think people got sent to prison just for . . . I mean, shop-lifting.'

Mamma Joy narrowed her eyes. ‘You tink I did a murder? I was tinkin' about it . . .' She erupted into that stagey cackle. ‘No. Me neva done no murder. I'm guilty though – of
gettin' caught
. Tings can get a little awkward when a fella put he hand into him pocket, to find yours already dere.'

Maddy watched Mamma Joy's mouth – bright red, even without lipstick – with the fascination of despair. ‘How long before you up in fronta de Judge?'

‘I dunno . . . about a week.'

‘Dat no time at all. I know
marriages
lonelier dan dis.' Mamma Joy patted Maddy in a magisterial way. ‘Time passes.' Yeah, thought Maddy, avoiding Sputnik's rapacious gaze, like kidney stones. The three-thirty dinner bell brought a cadence to her conversation. ‘And stay away from Sputnik. She
was
goin' to anger therapy classes . . . till she head-butted de psychology woman. Hee,
hee
, hee hee . . .'

But staying away from Sputnik was not as easy as it sounded. The woman was fixated. At meal times she'd position herself a fork-prong's distance from Maddy, skewering her with a look of mild hunger. It was clear from the way Sputnik attacked her sausage – stabbing
it
with the plastic knife, twisting, yanking it out, then stabbing it again and again – that GBH was a vocation.

Sputnik also seemed to specialize in full bladder synchronization. Every time Maddy ventured into one of the two bathrooms on the L-shaped wing, there she would be in her peripheral vision, sniffing primordially. Maddy would have avoided the showers altogether, except hot water was the only relief for her lumpy-as-boarding-school-porridge breasts. The milk Niagaraed on to her feet. There was so much hair clogging the drain that Maddy was tempted to get down and shampoo it. It was the only plug hole she'd ever seen which needed a cut and blow-dry. But bending over in the near vicinity of Sputnik would be a major misdemeanour. Bend Over; I'll Drive' was the woman's motto. Maddy watched her with what could only be described as mounting apprehension.