Mad Cows (21 page)

‘What the hell's “gross motor skills”? Driving a tacky car?' Maddy plucked Jack out of Gillian's embrace. He responded with a heart-wrenching howl and stretched his plump pink arms back in her direction. ‘What bedtime stories have you been reading him? The Wicked Biological Mother?' She frantically rifled through Jack's stuffed toys. They seemed to have reproduced overnight. ‘What the hell does he want?' She proffered a teddy which was received with undisguised disdain.

‘He wants the bear with the
chewed-off
ear, obviously,' Gillian condescendingly translated, ‘and
moi
, of course. Come and give Aunty Gilly a kissy wissy, snooky wooky. He's got a lip-lock on him like Sandra Bernhard.' As Gillian's face lowered towards Jack's, he stopped crying immediately. Her mouth curled into a self-congratulatory smile. ‘Face it. I'm what he needs, Maddy.'

‘What he
needs
is to get to sleep,' Maddy stipulated tartly. Jack's body strained against her as she barrelled down the hall.

Gillian swabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. ‘He likes you to blow on his eyes to get him to close them,' she said with sniffy superciliousness. ‘He also likes baby massage, deep bath technique,' she called after them. ‘Or putting the bouncinette on the washing machine. But only the spin cycle.'

‘Go F.U.C.K. yourself,' said Maddy eruditely. Jack was
her
baby. She knew better than anyone how to comfort him.

An hour later, Maddy resorted to bribery. ‘Exactly what will it take for you to go to sleep? Money? A trip to Disneyland? The promise of one of my organs if you're ever in a plane crash?'

Crouched miserably on the laundry linoleum, watching Gillian's smalls circumnavigating each other, Maddy felt so suave she could hardly stand herself. As if it wasn't bad enough that Holloway's resident trauma critic, Edwina Phelps, Detective Sergeant Chinless Drongo and the entire Metropolitan Police Force were after Jack and her, now she also had to contend with her ex-lover and a maternally correct baby-snatcher.

As far as Gillian and Alex were concerned, this was war . . . If only she didn't have such good taste in enemies.

Maddy contemplated an entry for Jack as the youngest ever plastic-surgery patient. They'd both get Ivana Trump cheek-bones and matching Michael Jackson noses. It was either
that
or take up residency on a remote Papuan hilltop. She tried to tell herself that things were always darkest before the dawn, but in Maddy's experience, things were darkest just before a complete bloody eclipse.

By the time the machine reached spin dry and Jack
was
dozing soundly, Maddy knew one thing for sure – she would have to go on the run again. But to
where
? She had recently known only one beacon of security in a dark and dangerous world – a twenty-stone beacon with varicose veins and heartburn. But how to find her? She'd just have to play it by foot.

20

Ging Gang Gooly Gooly Gooly Gooly Wash Wash

‘WHAT DE HELL
ya been up to!' Maddy would have answered except that she'd emerged completely winded from the vertebrae-crushing embrace of Mamma Joy. ‘I bin givin' it a bit of dis' – Mamma Joy bent her elbow in a poor mime of a person drinking a pint of beer – ‘an' a bit of dat' – she punched the air boxer-style – ‘an' a bit of de udder' – she hydraulicked her massive hips backwards and forwards.

They were sitting in a mildewed flat in a high-rise block on an estate in North London. The aquamarine, fuchsia and red russet walls – suggesting a special deal on discontinued lines of paint – were puckered with water blisters and blobs of mould the colour of guacamole. The television played an old episode
of
Father Knows Best
. But the fathers in this area had shot through long ago.

In tracking down Mamma Joy, Maddy had expected to be busier than a Bosnian brick-layer. But she'd underestimated the old lady's notoriety. Mamma Joy was world famous – in Hackney anyway. She'd beaten her theft charge after a store detective failed to turn up for a court hearing She had also developed a new line in scams.

‘Mamma Joy, says I, Mamma Joy' – her diamond flashed wickedly in her front tooth, as she jounced Jack on her knee – ‘dere be a flaw in ya system, gal. Youse gettin' caught far too often.' She winched her left breast, which had wandered too far under her armpit, back into alignment and readjusted the Hermès scarf at her throat. ‘De flaw is goin' out of de store.' Her new scam, she explained, was to damage an item of clothing in the changing rooms, then claim her ‘refund' from customer services, professing that she had lost her receipt. ‘Den I get de minicab to de next store, even better dressed dan de last one!'

With the indefatigable zest of a débutante at her first ball, Mamma Joy showed Maddy a map of England, her shop-lifting future clearly routed from Marylebone Road to Merseyside. This was a woman with the gift of the grab.

It was good to look into her familiar face, corrugated with laughter lines and to hear the see-saw lilt of her voice, even though Maddy's ears had to strain above
the
juddering pulse of rap music thundering from a nearby flat by a band she wouldn't have been surprised to discover went by the name of Dead Yak's Smegma.

‘Drug dealers. No better neighbours. Dem like a quiet life and dem on de look out 24/7.' Yeah, waiting for an unexpected nark at the door, decoded Maddy.

A young woman who introduced herself in an unruly composite of consonants as ‘Chelsea Gore-Plunkett-Fluff', crammed herself into Mamma Joy's flat through a hole in the wall, to heat her baby's bottle. Double-barrelled names, once exclusive property of the upper classes, had been adopted by these Niebelung Estate dwellers with delicious tongue-in-cheekiness. Posh, police-escorted do-gooders visiting the estate for various publicity purposes were now finding themselves out-hyphenated by the proletariat.

Chelsea had pale, naked legs, plastic stilettoes, loopy earrings dangling lower than the hem of her micro mini, a complexion pumiced by anxiety and peroxide blonde hair with the roots showing. It seemed mandatory to have roots on the estate. Maddy would have to dye her scalp black.

‘The friggin' gas company cut me off again,' the woman complained.

‘Won't the council do anything?' asked Maddy.

‘They do nowt! When I told 'em I needed a stove for
the
baby an' that, they told me to buy food that neva needed no cookin','

The girl was an expert in one-downmanship: ‘Round 'ere if you see a bleedin' cat that's still got two ears, it's here on 'oliday,' Chelsea theorized. ‘Whyja wanna move 'ere?'

‘I think I'll like it.' Maddy squinted through the grimy window into the stagnant summer air, gauzy with smog. ‘If only I could
see
it.'

With Mamma Joy off on her ‘shopping spree', Maddy was to lie doggo in the flat until things cooled off. This would give the old lady plenty of time to organize fake passports and arrange for her and Jack to be stowed in the hold of a cargo plane of dubious craftsmanship that was not only the pride, but the
entire fleet
of a country Maddy couldn't pronounce. Now
that
was something to look forward to.

It was while escorting Mamma Joy to the mini-cab office later that afternoon (only armour-plated taxis would venture on to this estate) that Maddy got a better idea of her new home. There were five tower blocks, each twelve storeys high, with low-rise battered and burnt-out housing in between. The architectural acne of satellite dishes sprouted from every surface. The whole place had more antennae than Kennedy Space Center. The streets, named with mocking, slit-your-wrist irony – ‘Meadow Lane' and ‘Buttercup Way' – were deserted except for the odd lone kid on an L-plate motorbike doing wheelies,
weepy
-eyed dogs with advanced skin conditions and scabs of graffiti written in blood reading ‘HIV+'. Britain's inner-city council estates make you believe the world really was built in six days.

‘What about the boys in blue?' Maddy asked, nervously, as they neared the Mile End Road.

‘De Babylon! Huh!' Contrasting the surrounding neglect and degradation, Mamma Joy gave off a rich, dark glow. Her face split into a mutinous grin. ‘Dey come once to see me in de flat. When dey come out, de kids dem take de wheels off de police van!'

As Mamma Joy trundled into the mini-cab office to haggle over the price, Maddy cast a despondent eye upon the sad assortment of crack addicts huddled on the urine-soaked staircases. Kids sniffing solvents dotted the landings: escapees from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

The car-horn blast of an unmusical bar of ‘La Cucaracha' heralded the arrival, in a fug of car fumes, of a young man who introduced himself as Fin. He looked as thick as a plank, only less intelligent. He had zit traces on his mummy's-boy pallor and drove a nicotine-coloured Nissan, the back shelf and dashboard of which were crowded with stuffed mascots. A furry racoon's tail in Arsenal footie colours dangled from the aerial. Maddy had little doubt that Fin was the sort of male who liked movies with ‘Pork', ‘Death' or ‘II' in the title.

‘A new mum, eh?' His hairless elbow jutted out
of
the open window. ‘Indefinitely idled then?'

‘I'm sorry?' Folding Jack closer, Maddy stepped back up on to the kerb.

‘Non-waged? Economically marginalized? Voluntarily leisured?' The vocabulary sounded alien wrapped around the wide, slovenly vowels of his East-End twang; an eardrum-shredding accent which sounded like a disease of the throat.

‘You mean, am I broke? Yes.' What she wanted to ascertain was whether Fin was ‘alternatively schooled', but thought better of calling moronic a man who was capable of road-rage.

Fin slewed open the car door in Maddy's path and ponced to his feet. He was wearing baggy khaki shorts and reflective sunnies. Maddy marvelled at how Britain had ever managed to colonize the globe on such pale and piddly little legs. ‘Ten per cent a week,' he said, expansively. ‘Them's me terms. Otherwise, it's guts for garters time.'

Fin, Maddy finally deduced, was a Loan Shark. With a disdainful huff, she shoved past him into the office.

‘Ya sure you'll be awlright, gal?' the hammocks of Mamma Joy's aubergine-coloured arm flesh swung in the breeze as she bear-hugged Maddy.

‘Do you know how long I've been waiting to have some time alone with my baby?' Maddy spluttered from a face concertinaed between Mamma Joy's 38D Bombes Alaskas. ‘Four months. It's going to be
heaven
.'

‘So dat's why you're grinnin' like a wave on de slop bucket!'

Maddy watched Mamma Joy's cab lurch off at speed. It bounced into a stationary vehicle, taking the wing mirror and half the paint from the passenger-side door. The mini-cab's bumper bar sticker read ‘God is my Pilot'.

‘GING GANG GOOLY GOOLY GOOLY GOOLY WASH WASH, GING GANG GOO . . .' Maddy checked her watch. Six a.m.! God, she'd thought it was going to be
much
later. ‘GING GANG GOO . . .'

She placed her insomniacal offspring into his baby walker, which Jack immediately took as a cue to play hockey, scoring a goal with his head. Oh well, Maddy thought, sweeping up the ceramic shrapnel from a fallen vase, at least it wasn't a priceless one. ‘Living with you,' she told him, ‘is like co-habiting with an entire demolition squad, do you know that? Hey, come on now. Don't cry. Mummy didn't mean to go crook at you . . .' She yanked him into her arms. ‘GING GANG GOOLY GOOLY GOOLY GOOLY . . .' She checked her watch again. It was five past six. ‘Damn,' she said aloud, ‘I thought it was
much
later.'

At breakfast-time, Jack refused his rice cereal. ‘Look, pretend it's the slime-coated underbelly of a dead slug, okay?' She knew by now that babies would only eat food which had been dropped on the floor,
stamped
on, licked all over by a dog, then kicked into the corner and covered in fluff.

‘Oh, it's so good for mummy wummy to see bubby-wabby. No one loves you as much as I do. Think of all the wonderful things we'll be able to do together! Like . . .' Maddy checked her watch. ‘What time is it again?'

For his midday meal, Maddy secured him into a high chair. Jack proceeded to throw everything over the side. It was like dining with Henry VIII. Bugger those books on balanced meals, cursed Maddy. A balanced meal was whatever stayed on the spoon en route to Jack's mouth. ‘I'M SINGING IN THE RAIN, JUST SINGING IN THE RAIN . . .' The only way she could get him to sit still long enough to sneak something surreptitiously into his moosh was to perform a tap-dancing, umbrella-twirling Busby Berkely spectacular. ‘WHAT A GLORIOUS FEELING I'M HAPPY AG—' Which was fine, until she noticed the entire gang of resident drug-dealers peering through the hole in the wall. But whenever she stopped, he'd start crying again. ‘I'M SINGING IN THE . . .' Shit a brick. This child was more demanding than Frank Rich.

By the end of lunch, there was so much congealed egg in the kitchen, she'd need a blow torch to remove it. The only gourmet treat which
did
interest him was salvaged from a nostril. He offered the grey globule up to Maddy like a party hors d'oeuvre.

The afternoon's activities involved trying to locate the missing goldfish. Maddy saw Jack licking his fingers and hoped to hell he hadn't developed a taste for sushi. Then there was the moment when he discovered that poo could be a decorative option. By mid afternoon, Mamma Joy's flat was fast resembling the Maze prison.

The lady on daytime TV was lamenting the fact that the time with one's baby went so quickly.
Quickly?
Really fucking slowly, was more the observation Maddy was looking for.

‘ROCK A BYE BABY ON THE TREE TOP, WHEN THE WIND . . .' By one o'clock in the morning Maddy was begging Jack to go to sleep. She'd drive him around the block . . . only she didn't have a car. She'd read him a story, only she couldn't find her reading glasses. ‘BLOWS . . . THE CRADLE WILL . . . You are
not
Margaret Thatcher, okay?' she told him at 2 a.m.. ‘You do
not
need to sit up to do your red boxes . . . ROCK, WHEN THE BOUGH . . . If I have to keep pacing much longer, it's goodbye Julie Andrews,
hello
Myra Hindley, got me?' she told him an hour later. ‘Hey, playing “hunt the dummy” at 4 a.m. is not my idea of a good time, okay?'