Mad Cows (22 page)

In the graveyard shift she took him into Mamma Joy's bed which he promptly colonized, playing soccer with her kidneys and leaving Maddy clinging to the side of the mattress for dear life. It was then she found
her
glasses –
on top of her head
. Glancing over at Jack, she saw, with amazement, that he had finally conked out. ‘Thank you, Jesus,' she whispered. ‘But hang on. . .' she conjectured, ‘is he sleeping? I can't hear him breathing. ‘Holy Hell! He's stopped bloody breathing! Oh God! Oh God! It's cot death. Jack? Jack, JACK! It's okay. Don't cry . . .'

‘GING GANG GOOLY GOOLY GOOLY GOOLY WASH WASH, GING GANG GOO . . . GING GANG GOO . . .'

See Mother Run! Hear Mother Talking to Herself! See Mother get down the bottle of tranquillizers! See Mother unable to get the child-proof lid off the jar.

Some women are born mothers, some achieve motherhood and others have motherhood thrust upon them. Two weeks of living alone with Jack in Mamma Joy's flat and Maddy would have to put herself into the ‘thrust' category.

Oh, she still worried and fretted and got toey. The pram merely had to bounce over a bit of clotted shagpile for her to think he'd be a paraplegic. He only had to gag on his milk for her to think ‘blocked wind-pipe' i.e. brain damage. A cough conjured up iron-lungs for life. Two micturations per hour and she practically had him wired up to a kidney dialysis machine.

As there were so many ‘no go' areas on the estate, and the areas you
could
go into were chock-a-block with cops no doubt carrying her mug shot, Maddy was
forced
to become a full-time prison warder, patrolling the perimeter of her kitchen, constantly on the look out for beetles, needles, loose screws. Another week of this and the latter were mainly to be located between her ears. In desperation she constructed a makeshift playpen . . . only to end up sitting in the play-pen, with
Jack
sitting
out
of it.

The fact that Jack was teething didn't help. His whinginess made him cling-film clingy. He was super-glued to her arms at all times. Like an amputee, Maddy learned to do everything with one hand – from changing a lightbulb to changing a tampon. And then there was the spittle. Maddy felt she could whitewater raft on the amount of drool oozing out of her kid's mouth. It also meant that he bit her nipple. Now
there
was a bonding experience.

But the brain-boggling blahdeblahdom of it all was the worst. Maddy was so bored she could see her plants engaging in photosynthesis. She started developing a yeast infection for a change of pace. The real highlight of the day, apart from a breast self-examination, was pumicing her callous. She only sandpapered a little at a time to make it last longer.

Desperate for company, the gas-meter reader became the most scintillating person Maddy had ever laid eyeballs on. When he left, she pretended to order carpets, skylights, kitchen gizmos, just to get people over for estimates.

Maddy soon found herself contemplating a roof-top
protest
– to protest about conditions not being as good as in prison. She hadn't known that society sentenced mothers to such bloody drudgery – with no goddamn parole in sight.

Bone-marrow-melting exhaustion exacerbated things of course. Chelsea lent her a book entitled
Solve Your Child's Sleep Problem
, but she was too tired to read it.

Maddy prided herself on her memory. She could remember what sexual position she'd locked into during Charles and Di's televised marriage; what diet she'd been on when John Lennon was assassinated; every lickable dimple on Alex's toasted-almond-tasting body . . . and yet the morning of the autumnal equinox, she walked to the corner store in her bra.

When realization struck, she dodged and darted up the stairs, bent double, scanning the horizon like a commando for sniper fire. Sticking out like a dog's balls was probably not what Mamma Joy had meant by keeping a low profile.

She tried to stay inside and just watch the black-and white-television. But the endless husbands coming home to cooked meals to chew over the day's ups and downs made her suicidal. Maddy knew with
her
luck, she'd just get her head in the oven . . . and the gas would be cut off. She'd attempt an OD on pills . . . only to end up in a persistent vegetative state. And let's face it,
she was in that already
.

To make matters even worse, sandwiched between
these
day-time TV hubbies one afternoon, was the succulent mouth of Alexander Drake, making noises about his love of children. Maddy's heart did a fast fandango.

‘Isn't it true,' the female presenter probed, ‘that your wife is divorcing you on the grounds of adultery?'

Alex unzipped a self-deprecating smile of devastating sincerity. ‘Like all men, Miranda, I need a wife perfect enough to understand why I'm not.'

The interviewer dragged her eyes away from his crotch and, going into bat with her eyelashes, praised Alex for being so nice.

‘Nice!' Maddy shrieked at the set. ‘Oh yes, he's nice at first, then he will virtually become another person – that person is usually Attila the Hun!' Crash-diving the channel changer, Maddy wondered how she had ever loved such a bottom-feeder? She vowed never to lower her standards again – well, not unless she was really, really horny.

Stock-piling coins, Maddy commandeered the only unvandalized public phone booth on the estate. An hour later, she'd tracked down the compulsively sociable Mamma Joy at a cousin's chiropodist's son-in-law's hairdresser's step-daughter's masseuse's in Birmingham. ‘Any word on those passports?'

‘We won't know nutting for at least a mont; maybe six weeks . . . maybe more—'

‘Six weeks? OK.
I'll hold
.'

‘You awright, gal?'

‘Oh yes, fine, except that he won't stop crying, he hates me and I'm a hopeless mother.'

‘Dere's only one ting to remember, gal,' came Mamma Joy's reassuring tones. ‘If you shake de baby too hard, him will get brain damage.'

Maddy laughed. She snuffled back her tears. She cradled Jack to her.

‘I know I said to make like de snake's willy and lie low, but you need to get outa dee flat. You
really
do. Dat flat of mine can get to stinkin' like a dead mon
goose
. You hear?'

The payphone cut off. Maddy opened up her wallet. It was a moth graveyard in there. ‘Some day, son, all this will be yours,' she informed Jack sarcastically.

Money or no money, there were not a lot of recreational facilities open to Maddy on the estate. She could watch the council ratcatcher. She could watch the rats evading the council ratcatcher. Alternatively, she could watch the loan sharks in a feeding frenzy on the shoals of poverty-stricken single parents.

When Maddy leaned into Fin's Nissan and asked for some cash to tide her over until Mamma Joy's reappearance, he languidly dipped into his Tesco's shopping bag and produced a bundle of fifty-pound notes. He smugly peeled off eight.

‘Don't forget.' Maddy had to strain to hear him above the tape deck thudding at full throttle. ‘I know where you live.'

‘Oh, well, hey! Then come on over –
the dog's in heat
.'

‘Want any gear?' As there didn't appear to be any bullet holes in her upper body, Maddy presumed he hadn't heard her. ‘How 'bout some blow?' he shouted.

Jack beamed at Fin euphorically, ravenous for experience. Maddy remembered back to the days when she too, had got high on life . . . but lately she'd built up quite a tolerance. Oh, where was Gillian when she needed her? Throughout Maddy's life, men had come (the nights they didn't have Brewers Droop) and gone. It was her female mates who'd remained true blue. Split up with a man and people cluck and sympathize; they read you Dorothy Parker poems and buy you exotic cocktails with umbrellas in them. They rush over with
Tank Girl
video rentals. Break up with a best friend and nobody could give a fig. Bugger it. How the hell had she ended up with such a pair of warm personal enemies?

As she snatched the money from Fin's grimy fingers, Maddy had an awful feeling about the dice dangling from his rear vision mirror. They were loaded.

21

Eggs Benedict

GILLIAN, A GRADUATE
of the Prudence Prendergast Finishing School, was at a loss to know the correct etiquette for finding a live sperm donor. She'd thought about insemination, but the anonymity of it worried her. What if he had bad teeth? Ingrowing toenails? A tendency to heavy-metal music? The question was: how did one go about enticing a man with whom one wanted to have babies? Perfume ads were full of promises of romantic attraction. Obsession said, ‘I'm a fun-loving babe.' Allure said, ‘You'll have to buy me an expensive dinner first.' What Gillian needed was a perfume which said, ‘Fabulously Shagable Sex Goddess Who Wants You To Father Her Children. And I'm
Ovulating Now
.'

With her eggs counting down to their monthly blast
off
, she enlisted the help of a computer dating service. Her perfect match, it appeared, was Benedict, a six-foot-one, thirty-two-year-old Open University lecturer, with hazel eyes who liked travel. He was, Gillian decided, N.B.F.M.K. (Not Bad For Milton Keynes). But she lost her appetite even before they sat down for dinner.

‘What makes Chinese women so wonderful,' said Ben, authoritatively, sucking an olive from its tiny skewer, ‘is the small vagina. It just goes “Pop!”'

What would he make of
her
? Gillian wondered, grimly.
Channel Tunnel
? ‘Yes, quite satisfactory,' she retorted snidely, ‘if you've got a minute penis. Personally,' she said, pushing up on to her high heels, ‘I prefer a man who touches the sides. Like nature, I abhor a vacuum.'

He wasn't a N.B.F.M.K. after all, but an A.A.A. (Absolutely Awful Anywhere).

And so her biological clock ticked on.

22

The Earth Mother Mafia

THE LITTLE GIRL
in the red jumpsuit was interrogating her minder about why exactly the cow felt compelled to jump over the moon. The freckled three-year-old was meticulously wedging Smarties up her nostrils while explaining to a plastic Power Ranger that she ‘
had
to do it for the aardvarks'. And the four-year-old wearing a tea cosy as a balaclava was demanding to know if there was a God.

‘Who cares?' butted in Maddy, winking at the woman the child had been berating. ‘Mummy and I are too busy worrying whether or not we can get a babysitter at five minutes' notice, aren't we?'

The young woman in stretch leggings and T-shirt eyed Maddy coolly. ‘You're a mum, aren't you? We're the nannies. The
Mothers
' – she said the
word
as though it was carcinogenic – ‘are over there.'

‘Oh, right,' Maddy reshouldered her nappy bag, hoisted Jack up on to one hip and crossed the old church to join the parents in the pews beneath the ornate organ pipes. The mothers, despite hastily applied lipstick and liberal coatings of Estée Lauder's Beauty Flash Balm, couldn't disguise their exhaustion. The nannies – gregarious, well groomed and Adidas-clad – looked more like personal trainers.

‘Are you a Tiny Tots Mum or a Crescendo Mum?' beamed a woman in her early thirties, in a cheesecloth smock through which you could strain tofu.

‘Um . . .'

‘It's just that I haven't seen you at this group before. I'm the mother of Smarties-Up-Nose. And this,' – she indicated the woman on her left – ‘is the mother of Squashed-Banana-In-Hair.'

‘Um . . . I'm Madeline and this is Jack.'

‘Laeticia!' Smarties-Up-Nose embraced Cheesecloth Smock.

‘Ophelia!' Banana-In-Hair bounced up to
his
mum.

‘Your
kids
call you by your
first
names? Jeepers, you're very informal around here,' Maddy joked. ‘I mean, it's not as though you've known each other all that very long.'

The mothers gave Maddy a distrustful look.

Laeticia indicated the nannies on the other side of the room with a slight inclination of her diamantéd
slide-combed
cranium. ‘You're one of
us
?' she asked, suspiciously.

‘A mum? Oh, yeah . . . from the estate. ‘Estate' made the confusion of tower blocks and dilapidated tenements sound so grand. Hitler's bombs had left London randomly pot-holed. Housing estates had mushroomed, fed on the fertilizer of post-war socialist idealism, and now sat hugger-mugger with the interior-designed homes of the fiercely fashionable. Laeticia's entire demeanour softened into a throb of insincerity. ‘Oh . . . Sebastian . . .
do
meet our latest recruit . . .' She was over-enunciating all of a sudden, like a children's TV presenter. ‘This is Madeline. From the
estate
. Sebastian is our resident New Man.

Maddy was yet to be convinced that such a species existed. In her books, having poor musculature and reeking of patchouli oil did not a Male Feminist make. ‘Sebastian's writing a book about his fathering experiences . . .'

‘I'm in it!' bragged Ophelia.

‘So am
I
. . .' amended Laeticia, proprietorially.

Sebastian, a sleeping newborn cocooned up against his chest, looked up languorously from his lined notebook. He examined Maddy over his fashionable John Lennon specs. ‘Hi.' The lone man in the midst of a group of lonely women, Sebastian didn't have to make much effort to be riveting. By the look of his crisp jeans and spotless jumper, no doubt hand-knitted by Peruvian lesbians, Maddy suspected him of being a
Gentleman
Father: the type who held forth at every opportunity about the joys of fatherhood . . . but farmed his kids out at the drop of a small turd.

‘So, what do you think, Sebastian?' beamed Ophelia, holding up a Peter Pan costume she'd been working on.