Mad Cows (16 page)

‘You ruined my health. If I'm ever tempted to say the words “I want you back”, I pray my saliva dries up.' He chugalugged another drink. ‘Or that I go mute . . .' There was an animal urgency to his movements. ‘Or . . . have a bloody brain haemorrhage . . .'

‘
You want me back?
' she said, confounded. When it came to life's experiences, Maddy was a shopaholic. But this was something she hadn't bargained for.

‘I didn't say that,' he replied staunchly. ‘Why? Do you want
me
back? Is that why you're here?'

‘I didn't say that.' She yanked on Felicity's T-shirt. ‘I'll always love
you
, Alex. It's just your life philosophy, pseudo-male Feminism, rotten, ratfink, dirty-dingo lying and dress sense I can't tolerate.'

This time Alex allowed himself an absolving bark of laughter. He threw back his head and guffawed.

‘Do – do you still love
me
?' she hazarded. Alex stared at her for so long that she felt herself redden under his scrutiny. ‘Look, it's not the sort of question you have to swot for.'

He got up out of his chair. He got closer and closer . . . so close he was looking like a Picasso painting. Their noses rubbed together and then their lips did a melting marshmellow impression.

When they drew apart, Maddy was breathing hard. ‘Just because I've forgotten what we were fighting about, doesn't mean I've forgiven you.'

‘Me neither.'

‘What
were
we fighting about?'

‘Whatever it was, the fact that we were fighting at all says that this is not a good idea,' he responded, moving away. Maddy noted the stippled surface of the skin on his neck. He might be saying that he didn't want her, but his
body
was saying something else all together.

‘Absolutely. I agree.' (At least one or two of her neurones were standing firm. ‘The guy's a lying mongrel. Don't do it,' they whimpered into the mental void where her brain used to be.) ‘I mean, a soufflé doesn't rise twice, right?'

‘Right.'

As Maddy threaded on Felicity's old jeans, Alex pretended not to watch and Maddy pretended not to be aware of Alex watching. He passed her a pair of sandals. Their hands brushed briefly. There was so much electricity between them it could have been privatized.

‘It's a shame you hate all men.'

‘Oh, I don't know. A month in a women's prison does tend to recalibrate a girl's opinion of the opposite sex, somewhat.'

They sat in heated, awkward silence.

‘What are you thinking about?' Maddy probed, finally.

‘Me chewing your way out of all those clothes you just put on.'

‘Me too.'

The next thing either of them knew, their teeth were colliding in mid air with the sort of passion that would require months of periodontal work. It was the kind of sex, Maddy reflected, that you have as a teenager. Sex that wouldn't let you stop thinking about it afterwards in full Technicoloured detail. It would be vaginal déjà vu. For weeks. Maddy felt sorry for all the women who would never know what it was like having Alexander Drake take his warm mouth to you.

The sun was tinting the morning sky when they finally pulled apart. They lay across the sheets, stunned by their sexual symbiosis.

‘Playing hard to get, eh?' Maddy panted, adding, ‘I don't want you to get the wrong idea. It's just that I'm kinda carnally malnourished at present. I get aroused glancing at that picture of Paul Newman on the salad dressing.'

‘Oh, really?' Alex laughed. ‘What a shame, 'cause I was thinking it was time we got married. We have, after all, a three-month-old baby,' he bantered. ‘People are starting to talk.'

Alex leant up on one elbow. He traced the stretch-marks the baby had branded her with. He bent over her abdomen and tenderly kissed the puckered skin. He suckled the milk beads from her breasts.

‘Forget Mother Love. The real reason I have to find Jack,' she explained, ‘is my breasts are about to
explode
. The IRA could use me as an incendiary device . . .'
Her
voice trailed away into a vibrating whisper.

This time he moved over her body slowly – slow as a t'ai chi master going through his paces.

‘The Sperm Liqueur,' Maddy laughed to herself, wiping a white coruscation from her lips.

Alex's breath was hot in her hair. ‘Why am I so bad at relationships?'

This
was
something new: admitting he was wrong. Maddy added it to her mental checklist of things she liked about him – his penchant for puns (punnilingus, he called it). The fact that he actually knew all the twenty-five functions of his Swiss Army knife. The curve of his buttocks in black denim. His mischievous streak (he'd once given her oral sex in the Planetarium's Photo Me Booth – she still had the Polaroids to prove it). The way his nose crinkled when he laughed. The dedicated scrutiny he gave a wine list, as though he'd written it.

‘The truth is, I've never been good enough for you, Maddy.'

‘That's true!' She looked at the father of her child. Maybe she'd judged him too harshly. She had been hormonal, for God's sake. And where had going it alone got her? Destination Nowhere.

‘Do you know what I've realized? Getting back to the simple things in life . . . that's what's important.'

She yawned, cavernously. ‘We'll talk about it
tomorrow
while we're shopping for His and Her hand towels at Habitat.'

Coiling into his broad back, she replayed their Sex-o-rama on her mental screen. Skin humming with pleasure, the taste of Alex on her tongue, heady on the oxygen of resuscitated hopes, she buried her face in his neck. ‘By the way, the only qualification for parenthood is knowing someone who
can
make scale models of NASA space stations using old school boxes at short notice on a school night.' And then, muscles like melted butter, body warm as bathwater, she lost consciousness, abseiling into a deep, deep sleep.

16

Fear Of Landing

WHEN MADDY AWOKE
at 2 p.m. to find the bed cold, the flat empty and no note, she didn't panic. After a decade or two of dating blokes and pretending there was no difference between the sexes, she had now decided that men were from a different planet. She couldn't think of one female who waited for the Toilet Fairy to change the roll on the spindle or would prefer to die rather than ask directions (which is why they now always include a token female on the space shuttle). Nor had she ever seen a woman play air guitar in front of a mirror or fiddle with the fridge thermostat
just for fun
. These differences weren't down to nurture, this was
nature
.

The truth was that men were missing the DNA structure which enabled them to find the nail clippers,
the
TV remote, dry-cleaned shirts, matching socks, Panadol and black bow-ties – the things that were located,
amazingly
, exactly where they'd been for the past ten years.

Men were genetically geared to stand in front of the open refrigerator door and gaze at the interior for hours waiting for something to materialize; to rip holes in the sides of bread packets; blow their noses in the shower and pick them at traffic lights; to insist on driving the car – except at the end of a drunken dinner party when they suddenly announce that
you'd
better drive; to believe that the petrol gauge reading ‘Empty' was the signal to drive another 10 K . . . and leave no note declaring undying love after a romantic night of unsurpassed passion. Maddy refused to take it personally.

What she decided to do instead was track him down. It wasn't hard. Rummaging through his desk she found the gold-embossed invitation to a cocktail party to aid the Royal Soil Society at Highgrove House. Alex, more popular than the Heir Apparent, wouldn't have needed it to gain entry. All Maddy had to do was slip into some of the ex-wife's sartorial cast offs, Tipp-Ex out Alex's first name and add the inky curlicues of her own signature. ‘Madeline Drake' it now read (she realized, with a jolt, that she liked the way it sounded) and take the train to the Cotswolds.

The harsh apprenticeship of the past month had changed her. It had changed her enough to know that
it
was stupid to expect men to change too much. She picked up Alex's discarded clothes from the floor and folded them tenderly. It was like her mother always said – better the devil you know . . . than the devil you're not sure about.

Maddy had made her bed and now all she wanted to do was lie in it –
with him
. Was that so terrible? To want to make a go of it with the father of her child? Erica Jong had written
Fear of Flying
about summoning up the courage to cut loose . . . well, Maddy's book would be called
Fear of Landing
– an irrational terror of setting up house and cooking shepherd's pie. Alex had actually said last night that they should get married. Were you joking? She asked the photo on his gym membership card as she untangled the blizzard of bedclothes. But Men never joked about the ‘M' word . . . Did they?

Now, for the first time in her life, Maddy admitted that she needed a man. She wanted to be able to talk in the plural – ‘we'll do this' and ‘we did that'. She wanted to be number one on somebody's speed dial. She wanted to be cherished. She wanted someone to do the harmony line on ‘I Got You Babe'. To laugh at her jokes. Damn it. A girl just couldn't kiss her own upper eyelids. This was a woman famished for ordinariness. It was time to make a declaration of Dependence.

OK, she knew she'd survive without him, but goddamn it: she was sick of surviving. The trouble with
being
a woman at the end of the twentieth century, she told the toothpaste he'd left enamelled to the bathroom mirror, is having to be so damn strong all the time. Fixing fuses in the middle of the night and fending off muggers and jacking up car tyres in the torrential rain – any more of this equality was going to put her in the bloody loony bin.

Alex would be her human Wonderbra; uplifting, supportive and making her look bigger and better.

Sluicing his shaving stubble from the sink, she buried her face in his dressing gown and inhaled. Alex was the itch around her heart she'd tried for months not to scratch. But God, how she'd missed him. ‘Love at second sight,' she mused cynically as she scrubbed tea-cup stains from his bedside table. What a labour-saving device for a single mum with a high sex drive! Hell, if it hadn't been for bra fittings at Marks & Spencers, Maddy wouldn't have had any sex life at all for – she made a dismal calculation on her Ajaxed fingertips –
the last nine months
. One thought of Alex naked and her tongue was hanging so far out of her head, his shagpile got a free shampoo. But no, it was more than that. Much more. And this time she wouldn't let him run out on them.

In a triumph of imagination over intelligence, Maddy, as she dumped crusty plates on the kitchen counter and snapped on the rubber gloves, forgave Alex his faults and foibles. With a shrug of her athletic shoulders, she discarded her mother's favourite
warning
(beside not putting anything in her mouth which hadn't been peeled) – ‘it begins when you sink in his arms . . . and ends with your arms in his sink.'

Maddy swallowed her principles as easily as Alex's sperm liqueur.

With high hopes and a singing heart, she finished her coffee, rinsed the mug and placed it on the sink upside down to drain – unaware that she was about to discover that all Alexander Drake knew about love could be written on the side of it . . .

17

Middle-Class Hero

THE ENGLISH UPPER-CLASS
have a condescension chromosome. Never does it manifest itself more obviously than at gatherings where they're forced to rub shoulder-pads with the Just-Landed Gentry – the media moguls, lottery winners and Arabic department store owners tolerated because of the obesity of their bank balances. A two-tiered invitation system has been invented to keep the Snobs and the Yobs slightly separated – gold-embossed invitations providing the Aristocracy with entry to the inner sanctum, while plain white invitations relegate the Hellocracy to marquees on the lawn.

But having paid their mandatory ‘donation', the plebs and celebs were usually hell-bent on getting their money's worth. As Maddy searched for Alex, she
saw
them poking their nose-jobs against every windowpane of Prince Charles' neo-classical Highgrove hideaway.

Maddy overheard the Prince explaining his organic sewage system to a small cluster of sycophants who washed his well-meaning words away in an adjectival gush of praise and appreciation. The minute he moved on towards the Herb Garden, it became clear to Maddy that the only thing
these
people knew how to soil was a reputation.

‘It's a bowel obsession. That's the trouble. Di, silly cow, spends £17,000 a year on colonics and Charles has cocktail parties to show off his compost –
that
was last week's menu . . .
this
is this week's . . .' wittered a woman dressed from feet to facelift in Donna Karan. Her starved body and Big Hair gave her the dis-proportioned look of a trendy extra-terrestrial.

‘Min' you, does explain why Diana's so thick . . . Put the enema machine on too high, din they? Sucked her bleedin' brains out.'

Ostentation was banned in the Caring and Sharing Nineties. The men's concession to dressing down was to wear T-shirts with their Versace trousers; neck crystals in lieu of gold ingot.

‘Presumin' there was anyfink there to suck out in the first place!' said a man intent on proving the height of his own IQ by sporting a T-shirt which simply read, ‘Stacked.'

‘The sooner he marries Camilla the better,' predicted
a
forty-something type recently described in
Hello
! Magazine as ‘fun-loving'. (This was social-speak for mammoth breasts and alcoholic tendencies.) ‘Once he's investitured . . .'