Mad Cows (29 page)

Maddy stood still, mesmerized with horror. She tried not to hyperventilate. She told herself this wasn't happening. She told herself that Life was probably just a strange experiment being carried out on a lesser planet.

‘Meanwhile, it's a simple equation. Too many single mothers parasitically oppressing the welfare system, and married, intellectually elite couples, who can afford babies – unable to conceive.' She gave Maddy a shrivelling look. ‘We simply take from the poor . . . and give to the rich.'

Jack was whimpering: his angelic face streaked with dirty tears. Maddy's arms ached for him. ‘And
you
get to make a heap of dough on the way.'

‘Citizen's arrest.' Dwina snatched the key from the utility cupboard and gestured for Maddy to climb inside. ‘I'll hand you over to Detective Sergeant Slynne, just as soon as I've handed over my other little delivery.'

Maddy's blood curdled. ‘No!'

Dwina pinched Jack, hard enough to make him gasp. ‘Well?'

Maddy's desperate wail was drowned out by the baby's sonic apocalypse. Numb with terror, Maddy was just inserting herself into the cupboard's musty maw when Mamma Joy and Sputnik moved into the living room in tandem.

‘It's Cagney and fucking Lacey,' announced Sputnik, cheerfully.

In Maddy's fight with Dwina, exhaustion, poor nutrition and breastfeeding had taken their toll. All Mamma Joy had to do however, was launch herself at the social worker – a whale in flummery – and simply sit on her. Oh, thank you, Fate Fairy. All is forgiven, pledged Maddy, sweeping Jack into her arms and pressing him to her heart.

‘I'm finkin' of getting anuver tattoo – a phoenix risin' from the ashes,' announced Sputnik, tethering the arms of the psychotherapist with a dressing-gown cord. Dwina twitched and fidgeted; a wasp in a jar.

‘Lord have mercy! Gal, on
your
arm's it's goin' to look more like a budgie over a Bunsen burner. Come on, now, move your arse.'

Esconced in the back of the Yellow VW, Maddy marvelled at Jack afresh. She inhaled his small cinnamon sigh and held him close. As Mamma Joy gunned the motor, Maddy's euphoric smile frosted. Coming down the street towards them was a blue Vauxall Astra with an aerial mid-roof: the unmistakable mark of an “unmarked” police-car – Detective Sergeant Slynne behind the wheel.

‘OK, okay. Let's not panic,' stipulated Sputnik.

‘Christ!' Maddy panicked. Well, why not stick with what she was good at? ‘Ram him!'

‘Lord have mercy! An' mess wid me nice white wall tyres?'

Sputnik lunged sideways and hijacked the wheel. The beetle lurched to the right, buffeting the copper's car off the road and smack bang into a red post-box. A cheeky grin split Sputnik's face. Slynne arabesqued in slow motion out of his vehicle, his springy ruff of hair squashed back on his skull like an Indian Headdress. Mamma Joy waved him away with regal indifference and flattened her elephantine foot to the flimsy floor. Slynne tried pursuit. With one headlight smashed, he swerved through the grey drizzle, a Cyclops shaft of light leaping in front of him.

As the getaway car founded the corner under protest, Sputnik, trumpeting that she wasn't 'alf fond of you daft bitches' and reminded them to crutch some dope on visiting day, jettisoned herself from the passenger seat and rolled into the policeman's path. The last Maddy ever heard of her was a jubilant whoop as Slynne's car was forced into a rubber-burning, metal-crunching tailspin.

Beyond Sputnik, Maddy glimpsed a gleaming Saab pulling up sedately in front of Dwina's terrace. She knew, with a sickening stomach, that it held Jack's adoptive parents. Her baby boy flung his podgy little arms around his mother's neck, as passionate as Rhett
Butler
. His fingers rigamortized on to hers. Maddy couldn't prise them free. Her heart soared in her body. She smiled a smile big enough to admit a banana, sideways.

32

If You Can't Stand The Heat; Order Take Away

THE RENDEZVOUS ADDRESS
Gillian had given Mamma Joy turned out to be a private clinic in a formal, tree-lined crescent in St John's Wood. ‘Never spit up in de air – it'll fall on your nose,' was Mamma Joy's parting advice as she grappled Maddy and Jack into an asthma-inducing embrace. Maddy loved her friend, but was not sad to see her getting out of the car and undulating down the road towards the nearest department store. Mamma Joy's driving motto was along the lines of ‘So many pedestrians . . . so little time.'

Gillian appeared on the street moments later, staggering beneath the weight of two suitcases, three pot plants, six cardboard boxes and a fish tank.

‘Think Thelma. Think Louise,' Maddy snapped, helping to shoe-horn Gillian's possessions into the
flame
-hooded beetle. ‘We are on the
run
, you know. What the hell is this place?'

‘Well, in the basement, a steady stream of men masturbate, helped along by soft porn videos – or for the real wankers, certain passages of Melvyn Bragg. And upstairs, women have their eggs extracted under anaesthetic.'

‘What is it with you English people who can't speak English?' Maddy crow-barred Jack off her hip and gently deposited him on the driver's seat.

‘A classified advertisement in the personal column of a quality newspaper. Well, the
Telegraph
. “Egg donor wanted.” There's a national shortage apparently. The ad was placed by a sort of “egg broker”. At £4,000 per omelette, it was an offer I just couldn't refuse.'

Maddy rocked back on her heels. ‘You
sold your eggs
?'

‘Having babies in test-tubes – much less agonizing, dah-ling.'

‘Why?'

Gillian's colour drained; her emotions held in check. ‘You are looking, my dear Madeline, at an anomaly. Brought up to live luxuriously ever after, yet the only stately pile I've inherited is my father's tendency to haemorrhoids. Brought up to marry someone rich, yet not blessed with any particular pulchritude. With the onslaught of the epidermal sabotage you euphemistically refer to as “character lines”, my only means of obtaining a sugar daddy is with a dowry.
Post
Lloyd's-crash, my chances of becoming a wife are, well, remote is the kindest conclusion. As for becoming a mother? Ah . . .' she sighed, her trademark bravado rekindling, ‘so many men, and
so many reasons not to bonk any of them
.' Gillian rallied a smile. ‘So, I thought to myself, why put all your eggs in one basket? Or, one bastard, if I were prone to the lowest form of wit. This way I get to have thousands of little
me's
running around. Isn't that
fab
-u-lous?'

Maddy gawped at the idea.
One
Gillian had nearly upset the balance of the universe. She did, after all, think the world revolved around her.

‘This way I get to make babies
and
money.' She handed Maddy a thick wad of the same. ‘Down payment now, dah-ling. More when I complete the three-month programme.'

‘You did this for
me
?' Maddy blushed. She'd been on a regular diet of her own words of late.

‘Not entirely,' Gillian bluffed. ‘There is the odd incentive for remaining unfettered in the familial sense; a house free of televised sports for one. Now . . .' Lifting Jack, Gillian slid in behind the wheel and traced a crimson nail over a road map. ‘I presume it was a member of the male species who devised a navigational system where one inch equals 100 kilometres.'

Gillian, thought Maddy with deep admiration, was the type who would have danced on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

* * *

‘Where are we going?' Maddy demanded, as Gillian turned on to the M3. ‘This is the motorway. She who hesitates is not just lost, but, you know,
ten miles from the next exit
.' Maddy's nerves were more than frayed. They were starting to resemble the hairstyle of a Rastafarian.

‘Trust me, dah-ling,' Gillian advised, cocking an elbow out of the window. For some reason Maddy did not find this thought a great comfort.

As they beetled south, Maddy kept a constant vigil for the police – scanning ahead for road blocks, searching the thundery skies for incoming choppers. Gillian was more worried about whether or not she could drive without spilling water from the terrapin's fish bowl clenched between her legs. Nor would she drive fast, in case the pot plants fell over in the back of the car.

‘Gillian, it's a
getaway car
. We're
supposed
to go fast, for Christ's sake.'

‘I nurtured that rhododendron from a seedling,' Gillian protested. ‘It's indis
pen
sible, dah-ling.'

Maddy made a half-hearted poke through the junk stuffed to roof level. ‘Oh
right
, like the glass snowstorm of Kuwait and the paper “
Piglet and Tigger Too
” party hats?'

As Maddy worried about how the hell she was going to get out of the country without a passport, Gillian admitted that she was also agonizing – had she
turned
off the heating? ‘Did I disconnect the milkman, and the meter reader?' she mewled aloud.

‘Gillian, repeat after me, “
My velour track-suit days are over
.” Just concentrate on the road, okay?'

Gillian's driving technique chiefly involved a continual readjustment of the rear-vision mirror to lip level. When Maddy made the panic-stricken suggestion that stationary make-up application might be preferable to the Pointillist look, Gillian refused to pull over. ‘We're only stopping for essential purposes.'

‘Oh, you mean a tanning bed and the use of a curling wand? What about
food
?' Maddy asked, as the bitumen arteries leading back to the heart of London became fewer and fewer. ‘That's an essential service – even to a pretzel like you.'

‘We might be recognized.'

‘What do you bloody well suggest we
do
then?' Catch wild game and eat it?'

‘Well, yes, dah-ling. Why not?'

‘Oh, and what are we going to trap it in?
Your jeans zipper?
Let's just stop for a coffee?' Maddy pleaded, one hour down the motorway.

‘Too dangerous,' Gillian insisted. ‘There could be police.'

‘What are they going to charge you with? Driving under the influence of caffeine?'

‘I packed tea,' Gillian said, defensively, gesturing over her shoulder. ‘
Some
where.'

‘Of course! English penicillin.'

‘Well, perhaps we could stop and make a fire.'

‘How?'

‘You're Aust
ralian
. You're supposed to know how to do these things. Outback ingenuity and all that. Rubbing together two sticks, I presume.'

‘Fine,' said Maddy, curtly. ‘As long as one of them's a match . . . Where the hell are we going, Gill?' Maddy nagged, two hours later.

‘Must you always bring up such contentious subjects while we're travelling at speed on a motorway? You'll know soon enough, dah-ling,' she stated, mystifyingly.

Maddy had a sinking feeling. Flying blind with Gillian Cassells inspired the same confidence as, say, an episiotomy performed by Helen Keller.

33

A Few Nappies Short Of The Full Load

IT TOOK GILLIAN
three circumnavigations of the misty car park and ten hair-raising attempts before she manoeuvred their flame-flecked neon yellow car into a disabled parking place.

‘Why can't they have parking spots for
abled
drivers?' she asked, killing the ignition. ‘That's what I'd like to know.'

Maddy peered out of the passenger window at a scant nebula of lights – bobbing lights. Her suspicion that she could discern boats at anchor was confirmed by the percussion of aluminium masts clanking in the wind. ‘Gillian, where the hell are we?'

‘Poole,' she answered, mysteriously.

‘Um. . .' Gulls bickered tetchily overhead. Maddy knew just how they felt. ‘
Why?
'

‘Because you are going on a little trip,' Gillian
stated
. ‘It's a beautiful boat. A forty-four-metre Benetti. Belongs to a press baron. A mogul. The skipper's sailing it to the Caribbean. Tonight. And you and Jack are going with him.' Gillian strode off down the pier.

Maddy's eyebrows nearly shot off her forehead. They looked as though they were having a party without the rest of her face. ‘Ah, Gill, I don't know if you're aware of this . . .' Maddy, zipping Jack into his snow suit, stalked after her. ‘But the Atlantic is famous for having no land mass at which to disembark when you get sea-sick.'

‘It's the only way to elude Customs. Pretend the baby was born at sea or somesuch. Then you can apply for a passport in the Grenadines. Or simply buy one from a corrupt politician in Antigua.

‘Gill,' Maddy panted, catching her up. ‘Remember when you said you might be too old for jeans? Well, guess what? You
are
. In fact, I think it's senility, the way you're bloody well talking.'

‘From there, Skip tells me you can hitch a ride with a “boatie”, I believe was the vulgar vernacular – homewards.'

‘Skip?'

‘He was one of my AIs. A favourite actually. My Swiss Army Man. Handy for everything, dah-ling. Can mend fuses, change car tyres, open bottles with his teeth and, oh! What nifty additional extras.'

Maddy openly gawped at her friend. ‘You're putting me in the hands of a one-night-stand? Oh, that's comforting.'

‘He showed me a lot of things, actually.'

‘Like what? His
gun collection
?'

‘That Australian men aren't as abhorrent as you maintain.' Gillian had reached the side of a long, dark boat, riding high in the inky water. It was sleek and shark-like beside the other vessels. ‘I was going through a stage where I had my heart set on having a little girl.' Gillian stepped lithely on to the ladder. ‘I read an article about deep-sea divers being more likely to father baby girls than boys.'