Mad Cows (11 page)

‘Don't tell me,' Detective Sergeant Slynne mocked for Maddy's benefit. ‘It's a miscarriage of justice.'

‘Arresting me in the first place was the miscarriage of justice.
This
is the curette!'

‘Silence! Call the next case.' The usher drowned out her pleas. Only Slynne's voice was distinctive – ‘If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.' And then, finally,
the
stentorian tones of the magistrate – ‘Take the prisoner down.'

In a state of advanced disbelief, Maddy was bundled into the prison van and seated next to Joyce, a thin, prim woman in a grey cardigan and seed pearls whose husbands made a habit of leaping between her carving knife and her chopping board. (Joyce didn't call it murder. She preferred to look on it as a Kidney Transplant Scheme.)

‘So,' Joyce asked, extending a packet of Polo mints, as Maddy clambered past, ‘you didn't get a result, dear?' She made it sound like an exam.

Maddy glimpsed the faces of the other failed applicants, slumped in mute desolation. ‘My baby! She's trying to get my baby!'

As Maddy pressed her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth on the seat, Joyce tried to console her by reeling off a list of Edwina Phelps's crimes against humanity: the young girl in Holloway who'd tried to commit suicide after Dwina had her daughter taken into care; the forced adoptions – ‘Babies just seem to disappear into her bureaucratic briefcase.'

Maddy had underestimated Dwina's powers of persuasion. This was the sort of woman who could kill her husband and make you sympathize with her for being a widow.

‘I'll tell the press!' Maddy shouted frantically as the prison officer slammed the steel door in her face.

‘There's a mass of restrictions on public access to
family
cases. Judges issue injunctions against the media which stop them publishing anything.' Joyce had to raise her voice to be heard above the shopping-mall muzak tinkling over the van intercom. ‘It's all secret hearings, my dear.
Ex parte
.'

The intercom dee wah diddy dum diddy dee-ed all the way back to Holloway. Shit a brick, Alex! Maddy panicked. Thank you for landing me in this crapulous shemozzle. As far as the owner of the BBC's Best Buns was concerned, Maddy was starting to have fantasies involving cattle prods and private parts.

When the van stopped, Maddy listened to the engine ticking as it cooled. To put the icing on another fun-packed day, one of the screws informed her through the steel grille that she was now going to be charged with contempt of court. Well, thought Maddy. They got
that
right. Contempt was exactly the right word.

There were no slices left in the justice pie. They'd shown it to her, she could see everybody's fingers in it – then they'd put her on a diet. No pie for you, baby. Well, diets were for breaking. Still, the thought of what she had to do turned her stomach.

10

Pre
-Coital Depression

PENISES, LIKE SNOWFLAKES
, are each of them different. And Maddy liked them all. She liked them in different shapes and sizes. The lean, slinky, kinky ones. The thick, succulent types. The low-slung, gunslinger sort. The stubby button mushrooms. The round-heads. The hooded eyes. The meat and two veg, packed-lunch variety. She liked them long and strong and ready for action. She liked them all coy on a cold winter's morning. All this male angst over size. It's
attitude
woman are interested in. Women like a penis which says ‘G'day! God, am I glad to see
you
.'

This is what Maddy reminded herself, as she contemplated having sex with her solicitor on the interview room table of Her Majesty's Prison for Women, Holloway. She'd thought over every alternative.
She could super-glue breadcrumbs to her arms and legs and let the pigeons fly her over the wall. She could sew all her cellmates' femidoms and cervical caps into a wet suit and flush herself down the loo. Or she could sink the sausage with Rupert Peregrine.

Maddy sat down hard on the straight-backed chair and massaged her cramped toes. She would have to fake it, of course. Faking it didn't come that naturally to her. She had always thought there was little point in encouraging a male partner in practices which were not going to get her anywhere. By anywhere she meant the usual desired female destination of over the moon, off the edge of the planet or into another orbit entirely. But, she admitted to herself, all women faked it a little
tiny
bit. Not in a grand, theatrical
When Harry Met Sally
kind of way. But, face it, when women wank, do they call out, ‘Oh God! Don't Stop! Oh! Oh! OH! Give it to me, big boy!' It was all theatrics, she persuaded herself, to
some
degree.

Maddy felt less convinced when Peregrine entered the room, all eighteen stone of him, secured the door and plonked a packet of condoms on the table between them.
Pre
-coital depression set in.

‘Did you see him?' She couldn't keep the jangled anxiety out of her voice. ‘Did you see Jack?'

‘After our harried communication in the court cells in which you begged me to go to an address in Clapham to verify the existence of your son, I
perambulated
to the designated rendezvous as promptly as decorum would allow—'

‘Yes! Yes!' Peregrine's concupiscent expectations had made him even more verbose than usual.

‘– to encounter a most agitated Edwina Phelps.'

‘That low-life! That two-faced Hitler on heat—'

‘The basement flat of Number 16a Ludgate Street, Clapham is now inhabited by a . . . what would the correct collective noun be? A “litter” of Pakistani children. Ms Phelps was alone and as lost as I.'

‘But 'cause you bumped into each other, she'll have to file an official report, won't she?'

‘Yees . . . But it also makes your confession of the baby's whereabouts look false. The baby is not thereabouts. Nor is the alleged accomplice, Ms Gillian Cassells.'

‘Just get me into the Crown Court. I'll spill my guts to the judge. Gill's lived in that basement for at least six months! And I want my case for bail heard urgently. This week. Plus' – and here Maddy heaved a resigned sigh – ‘that substantial surety. I'll pay your price.'

Peregrine lopped behind her chair with the natural grace of a steam-roller. ‘Done.'

‘Done over, you mean?' His clammy hand was on the base of her scull, massaging muscles macraméd with tension. ‘How do I know I can trust you?'

‘Because I'm a professional,' he mumbled. His lips were on the nape of her neck. It felt like a couple of
slugs
having a cardiac arrest. ‘A member of the Law Society.'

‘What about AIDS?' Maddy blurted, desperately. ‘Hey! Why don't I just strip off and you have a quick squizz. I mean, you don't want to put me in your
mouth
, you never know
where
I've been . . .'

‘Why do you think I chose you? You're none of the H words – Haitian, haemophiliac, heroin-addicted or a promiscuous male homosexual.' His hot, flaccid tongue was in her ear, swirling in a laundromat effect.

‘Rules.' In a burst of abhorrence, she slapped him away. ‘Don't touch my ear. OK? I've got an infection. Nor my breasts, for that matter. They're sore. Or anything below the navel. I've just had a baby, for Christ's sake. My vagina's closed down due to renovation.'

In reply, Maddy glanced up to see his big fleshy mouth descending upon hers. Peregrine had ointmented his cold-sore into remission, but not the pustules she could glimpse, at this close range, beneath his black polo.

In an attempt to dodge his mouth, she hauled his jumper up over his head. Peregrine stood there, straight-jacketed for a moment, arms up in surrender, head wedged in the neck hole. Maddy was tempted to shout for the screws, but she thought of Jack. The truth was, she couldn't
stop
thinking of Jack. When she'd given him to Gillian, she should have asked the doctor for a Nicorettes for baby-addiction – a progeny-patch, which released small doses of baby into her system;
less
and less each day until she got over him, so that she wouldn't have to be doing this.

Peregrine executed a clumsy accidental mambo as he wrenched his head free. It emerged from its cashmere burrow wearing a lascivious grimace. Maddy watched in horrified fascination as he started to unzip his fly. She could see the dark stripe of hair descending from his navel – a strand of licorice, glued to his dank abdomen. He placed her quivering hand on to the grey flesh of his gargantuan stomach.

She would simply think about something else. Her overdue book at the prison library. Her new moisturiser . . . the war in Chechnya.

Peregrine pulled her roughly against him as he yanked down his trousers. His skimpy underpants were wittily patterned with little red devils carrying pitchforks. The bulge inside strained skywards. It looked more like the sort of thing you climb into to await countdown, 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . ‘Touch me,' he ordered, cold spittle staining her cheek.

With repulsed reluctance, she ran her hands over the bumpy topography of his skin. Her fingers felt clumsy, as though wearing oven mits. Peregrine removed her numb paw from his back and placed it between his legs. ‘You're special, Madeline,' he panted. ‘You're not like the rest. I really do like you, you know . . .'

‘It's just the novelty of being with a female you don't have to inflate.'

‘Take off your top.'

With leaden fingers she fumbled at her iridescent tank top, peeling it down to waist level. ‘So when do I get to meet your Oldies?' she said with bitter sarcasm.

‘Take off your bra.'

Biting back her nausea, Maddy acquiesced. Peregrine knelt before her in ogling wonder. Her breasts launched out at him, two rising Zeppelins. He sighed reverentially. Reaching out a tremulous hand, he touched her right nipple.

Maddy felt the hot, dragging gush of ‘let-down' a split second before she saw the white arc of milk spurt forth and squirt her solicitor in the eye. Her left breast started lactating in sympathy. She was like some Michelangelo fountain in a Roman square, geysering milk.

Peregrine capsized backwards, sodden and repelled. Spluttering, he mopped his face and hair with his hands. Everywhere he turned, to get out of the line of fire, Maddy swivelled in the same direction. A repressed laugh unrolled down her face. What started as a slow dribble of mirth swelled into a cascade. Laughter shimmered off her.

‘I told you' – she could hardly get the words out – ‘I told you – not to touch my—'

‘Shut up!''

‘You'll smell like yoghurt for weeks.'

Her solicitor's penis deflated faster than a pump-up plastic lilo at the end of a beach-side holiday. As he scrabbled for his clothes, Maddy plunged into another
vortex
of laughter. ‘I see that the age of
shrivelry
is not dead!' She cackled. She roared. She realized that she hadn't laughed like this, completely abandoned, for the longest time. It felt better than champagne. It felt better than valium.

‘Go on! Laugh!' His face had gone apoplectic-maroon. ‘You'll have plenty of time to laugh whilst contemplating your long sentence.'

‘Oh, well. As long as they don't put a preposition at the end of it,' she countered contemptuously.

Peregrine was reinstated in his vest, shirt and polo neck sweater; his arms hung down, ape-like, to pull up his underpants and trousers. His detumesced appendage resembled a par-boiled party frankfurter blue-tacked to his groin.

‘So, tell me, Mr Peregrine,' Maddy asked, as he made for the door, ‘does this count as a date?'

11

The Deposit

IF THERE WAS
one thing Gillian had learned from life it was that when the cat's away . . . she's more than likely been squished flat under a car tyre. (That, and not to change a tampon whilst wearing a diamond ring over 20 carats.)

It had been two and a half weeks, and still no word from Maddy.

For someone with the maternal instincts of a guppy fish (Gillian had encountered this aquatic type prone to dining out on its young in one of Alex's nature documentaries), two and a half weeks with a baby had been quite an alien experience. (‘It's a lifeform, Jim, but not as we know it.') But not as alien as the out-of-money-experiences Gillian was having at the Savoy. The bill they'd run up now resembled the national
debt
of a small South African country. Gillian's best tip about being rich was to treat money with contempt. This enabled her to ignore the polite ‘we neglected to obtain your method of payment – perhaps at your convenience, you could drop by the desk?' requests for at least a week. Then she'd palmed them off with paper – it would take five days for Barclays to put a bounce in her cheques. She had exactly twelve and a half hours to think of something.

‘This may be news to you, Prince Poop,' she postulated, trowelling yoghurt from her breakfast tray on to a teaspoon, ‘but you can't actually absorb food
through your skin
. It has to actually go
into your mouth
.' In reply, Jack irritably smeared the lumpy white putty through what passed for his hair. ‘Dullsville, dah-ling. Good
God
!' she lamented, a yawn elongating her face. ‘Whoever though I could be bored by a younger man?'

She pressed her nose against the window pane and looked longingly up the river to the crenellated Houses of Parliament and the smugly squat Big Ben. All around her London was throbbing with life. Jack, whimpering, gave himself a yoghurt facial, splattering as he did so Gillian's last remaining unpawned piece of clothing. ‘Controlled crying,' she realized, was the art of
not
shattering into tears when a baby wiped his hands on your cherished Christian Lacroix.

Jack lolled listlessly on the cushions she had shored up around him on the art-deco bed. Two red spots had appeared, high on his cheeks. They'd been there since
yesterday
. As had the rivulet of mucus emanating from his nostrils. He whined plaintively.