Mad Cows (8 page)

As Sputnik's only reading material contained dialogue in balloons, education classes seemed the best way of avoiding her. To alleviate the bum-numbing tedium, various do-gooders made regular, condescending appearances through the prison gates. About once a week some pulped biographer, antediluvian backbencher or remaindered author of
How to Make Loo-Roll-Holders Out of Hubby's Shirt Cardboard
and
101 Uses for Old Egg Cartons
would offer inmates their pearls of wisdom – make that fake pearls, make that
paste
. ‘Nick-sniffers,' Mamma Joy called them. The
announcement
of an acting workshop, however, was met with universal enthusiasm. The remand wing's drama qualifications were that they were bored shitless and would do
any
thing not to be banged up twenty-three hours a day. The trick was to get a walk-on part, no dialogue. This was going to be a play with a
lot
of walk-on parts, no dialogue.

In the gaol gymnasium, Petronella de Winter glanced nervously towards the door, where two bored kennel-keepers were bent over a copy of
Hello
! magazine. She took a deep breath and introduced herself as an Actress. Judging by the combination of cleavage and IQ, Maddy felt sure she'd got her start in films entitled
Moist Choir Girl
and
Make Your Own Benwah Balls
.

‘There is always a chance of like, dying on stage, especially when it's being, you know, shared with a couple of murderers,' she quipped.

Maddy's cellmate, Chanel, so-called because she was daughter number five, lifted one bottom cheek off the chair and let rip with one of her famously resonant farts.

‘All right' – the blonde actress pointed a painted finger into the audience – ‘which one of you naughty girls stole my car radio?'

The hostile silence finally persuaded this representative of the Sheer Blouse, Blank Brain Battalion to abandon her appalling, ready-made patter. She then got all Sincere, confiding that she was donating her
time
because she didn't see the assembled inmates as social outcasts but as victims of circumstance . . . she also just happened to have along with her a BBC documentary crew intent on filming her humanitarian gesture for an
Everyman
programme on selflessness.

Petronella's breathy request that they all sing ‘Kum By Yah' as a little ‘ice-breaker' (you'd need an arctic frigate to break
this
ice) lost any remaining potential audience.

Mamma Joy closed her eyes. ‘Me goin' to say me prayers, now. Anyone want anyting?'

‘Mel Gibson,' a woman called from the back row.

‘Yeah, he's perfect.' Chanel's hot-pink, Lycraed buttocks pivoted past Maddy. She stretched out on the lino, revealing flanks so dimpled they looked as though they'd been hit in a hailstorm. ‘If I ever stop hatin' men, he's the one I'm gunna stop hatin' first.'

Maddy scoffed. She'd once thought Alex was perfect, until she'd discovered he had the emotions of a Klingon. The guy probably went home at night and peeled his face off. ‘There's no such thing as the perfect man.'

‘Unless you find me a fella wiv a twelve-inch tongue who can breathe through his ears,' barked Mamma Joy.

‘Men,' Maddy continued bitterly, thinking of her ex, ‘are the reason God invented cake.'

‘Sure. You say that
now
,' Chanel groaned between sit-ups, ‘but as soon as you get out? You'll be after that
sperm
liqueur faster than you can say
swallow
. Truth is, I've been on remand so long, whenever I see a man,
any
man, I just leave a snail-trail a mile long,' she lamented, scissoring her hailstorm thighs. ‘The chicks in this nick are so horny, you can
ski
on all that love-juice. You can sit on your fanny and slide.'

The whole row erupted into hoarse cackles. With a twitch of embarrassment, Maddy readjusted her creeping underpants.

‘Watch it, girl!' Chanel mocked. ‘More than three adjustments in a row qualifies as a wank, ya know.'

Blushing, Maddy submerged her hands into her pockets. It was then she found the chocolate. ‘Ah, the sort of happiness money can't buy,' she said to Mamma Joy, facetiously. ‘Freedom may be fun, but does it have this ecstasy?' Half-masting the white flag of surrender she'd been running up to fate, Maddy mainlined that Malteser.

‘Atta girl!' Mamma Joy enthused. ‘Anudder day up de Judge's arse, eh?'

It seemed to Maddy that the reality of prison was not a rampaging throng of Patty Hearsts and Ulrike Meinhofs, but a flotsam and jetsam of sad little junkies, fine defaulters, the homeless, the jobless, people who couldn't afford to pay for a television licence or who'd fiddled the electricity meter . . . people who belonged in prison the way a Mormon belongs in the Addams Family. Except for Sputnik, of course. Maddy was convinced that this was a woman
who
'd missed her calling, say as Medical Researcher at Auschtwitz.

‘What's all the farkin' noise in 'ere. It's a farkin' loony bin, innit?' Wearing a knicker-skimming miniskirt – what Gillian called a pussy-pelmet – and white stilettos, Sputnik swaggered through the gymnasium doors and across to Maddy's row. ‘Some old slag's stolen me Maltesers.'

Inmates in the near vicinity lost the will to talk. Hell, they lost the will to
live
.

‘Which one of you fat cows is the poxy wossit what's nicked 'em?' Come on then – breave out – so as I can find the slag.' Sputnik shoved her nose into Chanel's face. She exhaled in mute supplication. Maddy's throat dried. She was next in line.

Mamma Joy sat up straight. ‘It was me, gal. All right?'

‘Wassat?'

‘I have a size twenty body to maintain here.'

‘I 'eard, right, that you, right, have got such a fat arse, right, that they 'ad to drop you in to the nick with a crane.' Stacey killed herself laughing at this bit of, no doubt, vintage crim humour. ‘But it weren't you.' Sputnik's pupils contracted, dulled, then bore into Maddy.

Back on stage, Petronella, struggling to be heard above the din of metal chair legs scraping over cement floors and women jabbering in Gujerati, was gushing about the fact that her famous director had just been
nominated
for a Bafta Award for Best Documentary of the Year. She made a feeble aside into the mike about all his programmes being ‘cell outs', before, in desperation, diving into the desultory audience and seizing Sputnik's arm for a soprano rendition of Bob Dylan's ‘I Shall Be Released'.

Maddy felt an appreciative silence was the best policy to adopt at this point. On the pretext of a pee, she made for the door at a trot, stumbling over the tripod being set up by a lighting cameraman. That is why she heard him before she saw him; jerking at the sound of his melodious voice like a fish on the end of a line. When Maddy did finally focus on Alex, it was to register the fact that her little baby boy looked just like him. Her eyes were too hot, too sore to cry.

Alex stood open-mouthed, mid-Bafta-nominated-direction, as petrified as a Pompeii dog.

‘Thank God you're here!' Maddy peered around for the ventriloquist who was uttering these words in
her
voice. This was not what she
wanted
to say. What she wanted to say was go juggle with chainsaws, dingo-dick. Much to her astonishment, she then flung herself at him, clung to his neck, gazed up into his handsome face and broke into a smile which wasn't reciprocated. She tweaked his freeze-framed cheek. ‘Um, it is customary when you're feeling pleased, to like, notify your face.'

For God's sake, Maddy thought. Was that
me
flirting? It can't be me. It's someone else. Someone
who
doesn't have a purple vagina and cracked nipples; someone who hasn't dreamt every night since the birth of stringing this man up by
his
nipples.

Steeling herself, she stood back and appraised Jack's dumb-struck father. He looked tanned, taut, edible – it had to be said – in his black Levis and white, buttoned-down Oxford-cotton shirt. A shirt so crisp she could imagine him skiing down it at Klosters (the holiday resort he usually took his wife to, mid-winter). ‘You're growing a beard?' She tucked her fingers into her palms, so that she wouldn't be tempted to touch him.

‘What?' Alex tugged Hasidically at his jaw. ‘Oh, yes . . .'

‘Why? As a substitute for your masculinity?' That was better. That nailed the bastard. If only she could also now stop fantasizing about him dining alfresco on her nether regions.

‘Maddy, look, about the police station . . .' He ran his hands through his luxuriant hair as though tossing a wilted salad. ‘I'm so sorry . . . I had no idea they were going to incarcerate you. My God. It's just . . . I was about to announce my intention of going into politics. The publicity would have been . . . How can I expect people to vote for me to help save the environment, when I can't even clean up my own act?'

It was Maddy's turn to imitate Harpo Marx. ‘
You're going into politics?
' she queried, finally relocating her voice.

‘Liberal Democrats.'

Maddy ruptured into an unoiled motor gear-cruncher of a laugh. Alex was the sort of Liberal who had copies of the
Big Issue
home-delivered. So democratic, he'd voted not to tell her about his wife, until Maddy found Felicity's short and curlies on the underside of his socks. She guffawed so hard she had to sit down.

‘OK, I lie, I cheat on my wife, I drink, I won't identify ex-girlfriends when they call from cop shops in the middle of the night, but name one
really important
shortcoming?' Alex unleashed a lopsided smile of irresistible roguery.

‘But Liberal Democrat? Hey, I get it. It's like when you called yourself a “new man”. It's just a
phrase
you're passing through.' They always talked like this; verbal ping-pong, with mouths as bats.

Alex cocked one hip in casual arrogance, then lowered his muscular frame on to the bench next to her. ‘It's a smaller organisation. Easier to get things done, get changes implemented.'

‘Oh, I get it. “Smaller organization”, meaning that it'll be easier to get a Peerage.' During the year they were together, Maddy had learned to read between Alex's lies. She turned her palm towards him, traffic-cop style, putting the brakes on his protestations. ‘I don't care, okay, as long as you treat me like a voter.'

‘What's
that
supposed to mean for Christ's sake?'

‘Be nice to me for once. Look . . .' She sighed. Maddy had expected detestation when she saw him again. But
all
she could think about was Alex emerging from the shower in the mornings, his tanned torso swaying above the knotted towel; tangoing buck-naked on the dining-room table singing Cole Porter songs; the time they'd licked the fresh caviar of Caspian sturgeons from each other's navals. ‘I don't know what came between us.'

‘Um – you had a baby against my wishes and then rejected me.'

‘Rejected you?' Maddy reeled around violently to face him. ‘Oh, I'm so sorry. It's just that I obviously needed an etiquette guide entitled
What To Do When Your Fiancé is Still Married
.'

‘You never asked if I was married with children,' he said curtly.

‘Go tell it to the Male Excuse Hall of Fame, okay?'

Alex impaled Maddy on his topaz gaze. ‘My conscience is clear.'

‘Well, buddy, you've obviously got amnesia. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out that it takes two to make a bloody baby.'

‘Don't try and guilt trip me, Maddy,' he whispered, suddenly alert that the lighting man might overhear a suck and tell story worth selling to the
News of the Screws
. ‘You made the decision to have the child – despite my objection. You've always been your own person.'

‘Only because I was nobody else's,' she said sadly. It had rocked her to her core, seeing him again.

‘I tested positive to allergies to nappies, Lego, and broken sleep. Remember? You
knew
that.'

A shudder ripped through her. Marooned in Holloway Prison, this conversation was about as relevant as arguing over who would sit at the captain's table on the
Titanic
. ‘Look . . .' she coiled her fingers around his warm, brown forearm. ‘It doesn't matter. What
matters
is that you're here and can clear up this whole god-damned mess.'

‘Of course . . .' Alex replied neutrally.

She strengthened her grip. ‘You will help me, right?'

‘Yes, yes . . .' he said in the trouser-adjusting voice men use when they're being all Male and evasive. ‘Though, of course, it must be handled delicately . . .'

Delicacy was the last thing on the mind which was vaguely attached to the toothpick legs, pale and goosepimpled, which pushed between the two ex-lovers at that precise moment. Maddy had just opened her mouth to reply to Alex, when a tongue not unlike a slab of condemned salami shoved its way down her throat.

‘J'know what I need, Malteser-breath?' Sputnik asked in a voice both aloof and viscous.

‘Some double-strength Fem-fresh?' Maddy ventured, gagging.

‘Body heat.' Sputnik jerked her bony pelvis into Maddy's frame, pinioning her back against the wall.

‘Really? You could get equally warm by wetting
your
finger and sticking it into an electrical outlet,' Maddy suggested.

‘Do what?'

Maddy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh well, at least the screws know that you're not taking any mind-expanding drugs.' Not just Alex, but the whole prison seemed to hold its breath. Sputnik tightened her pneumatic embrace on Alex's former girlfriend.

Now if Maddy hadn't been walking around with two Ayers Rocks strapped to her chest; two huge, hard, insanely sensitive Ayers Rocks which were agony to the touch, she wouldn't have done what she did next – at least not without protective head gear and a good surgeon on tap. Letting out a low roar, she landed a punch to the side of her tormentor's head. Sputnik retaliated, forcing Maddy into a lop-sided waltz. They hydraulicked about, scratching, tearing at each other's hair, sinking teeth into any bit of accessible flesh.