Foetal Attraction (15 page)

It got so that Maddy even missed his grammar correction. She wrote him love letters which she didn’t post, signed ‘yours in vowel-roundness’. She read
Private Eye
to see if there were any hints of a Drake marriage break-up. She stuck pins in a voodoo doll named Felicity. After a particularly grimy grope at her nether regions by Mr Tongue and yet another refusal of her request to see the dentist, Maddy felt a strong urge coming on to cook an Italian meal …

With the over-oiled hypochondriac in hospital, Maddy spent the house-keeping money on whisky and just lounged around the empty apartment eating hand-peeled prawns (the cats were promptly put on a
diet
of boiled spag), cherishing her hurt and nursing her anger. She worked away at it, as you do the quick of a torn nail. She thought about Alex. How could she have become addicted to a man so different from herself? When he danced, he did ‘the twist’ and the ‘mashed potato’. He listened to records by dead people. At discos, other dancers were surprised he’d learnt the lyrics so fast, not realizing that he knew them from the
first time round
. Was it all an hallucination? Could a mere hallucination be as powerful as heroin? Who exactly was this man she loved? Maddy vowed to find out.

Breaking in was easy. Living alone most of her adult life, it was a skill she’d acquired, along with re-plastering walls and replacing tap washers. Sliding a tube ticket between the door and the jam, the lock yielded effortlessly.

Alex’s Maida Vale flat was not the dark and dingy place he’d described at all. The conservatory glass illuminated everything in shafts of light, as clean and bright as blades. But it was not the priceless, primitive goddess sculptures or the mounted billion-year-old rock fossils that alarmed her, but the little tiny details – reminders blue-tacked to the kitchen cupboard not to oversleep and to buy loo paper. The notes scribbled on the back of envelopes instructing each other to fill the ice-cube tray, unclog the yoghurt-maker, defrost the lasagne. The flyers for jumble sales and church
fairs
, political meetings and chamber music concerts crammed beneath pineapple magnets on the fridge door. The contest forms for the all-expenses-paid trips to Tuscany, the children’s finger paintings, curling at the corners like stale cucumber sandwiches. The combs with missing teeth, the trinkets and ornaments, all tokens of a shared past. The circled dates on the kitchen calendar – dates from which Maddy was excluded.

This did not look like a relationship on its last pins. The apartment was bursting with well-tended plants. They seemed to watch her censoriously. Their rubber arms jutted accusingly towards her. A menagerie of teddy bears, mechanical turtles and iridescent plastic llamas leered at her from bookcases, sofas and the tops of television sets. In the nursery, toy soldiers grinned knowingly. Retreating, she crushed her instep on a segment of Lego. Hobbling into the bathroom, she saw four toothbrushes, well used. A tube of spermicide, half-squeezed.

Maddy was suddenly making noises like a sink that has blocked up. Trying to swallow sobs, she scuttled across the croquet-lawn coloured carpet to the master bedroom.

From the dressing table, her own face beamed at her. But more lined, more confident. Felicity. She struck a different pose in each photo. Serious in academic gown. Perky in ski-suit. Sensuous in ballgown. Or just laughingly draped across the man Maddy loved.
Maddy
tore back the sheets, inspecting them microscopically for traces of sperm. She buried her face in his crumpled pyjamas and inhaled deeply that fresh baked bread smell of his. On the bedside table a silver frame played host to a group snap. They grinned mockingly – the smug faces of the ‘happy family’ in a life-insurance brochure.

It was over. Alex would never leave. He was an astronaut umbilically attached to his spacecraft of job, family, marriage – dependent on them for survival. The sheets, she noticed, were patterned in tiny cucumbers. The pillowcases on the bed read Yes in muted pastel. Maddy resolutely flipped them over on to No. No. No. No. She buried her face once more in the flannel stripe. The stupid bugger, she thought, and threw up into his pyjamas.

Foetal Attraction

MADDY HAD LEARNT
over the years that love, like gonorrhoea, was curable. Curable in a way that, say, a head-on collision with a petrol tanker was not. As despondent and wretched and heart-broken as she was, she knew that eventually she would get over it. While it was true that she’d once taken two years to get over a bloke she’d never met – he was David Cassidy of the Partridge Family and she was prepubescent – she had recovered.

Conceivably then, that could have been the end of everything … except for the fact that a day or so later, Maddy suddenly started to look like a nurse in a Benny Hill sketch. Her breasts were developing faster than a polaroid. At first, she just pretended that it wasn’t happening. But there were other signs too. She awoke each morning with a tongue like rancid shagpile and threw up till lunchtime. A lumpy laugh, it was called back home; a kerbside quiche. Though
exhausted
, she couldn’t sleep. She lay at night in Mr Arnold Tongue’s empty four-poster, counting sheep – an entire flock. The thought of tea, coffee or alcohol had her shuddering. And she was late.

At least she now knew that there was something worse than getting your period. Not getting it.

Maddy shrugged it off. She was always overdue with everything, from rent to library books. It was nothing to worry about … was it? She spent hours doing pitiable calculations. Consoling herself that she had always been innumerate, she decided to buy a pocket calculator. Once purchased, though, she never quite got round to doing the sums, but developed a sudden passion for working out the square root of seven to the point of infinity. Even when she had the irrefutable mathematical evidence, she convinced herself it was a phantom pregnancy. Maybe early menopause? Or more likely, wind. ‘Chick-pea stew’ she nicknamed her imaginary foetus. ‘Baked beans on toast.’ Another week elapsed before she bought a six-pack of pregnancy tests.

‘Hold the stick in the urine stream for a few seconds…’ the brochure read. And it wasn’t until the blue line appeared in the paper window that Maddy admitted what she’d known for weeks. She was a ‘woman in trouble’. ‘In the pudding club.’ Preggers, up the duff, with a bun in the oven. She had taken the pregnancy test … and failed. This was one test you couldn’t cheat on.

The poetry had gone out of their love affair. She had suddenly become the heroine from a nineteenth-century penny dreadful.

All she could do was lie on the bathroom floor and adopt the foetal position.

Terminally Inconvenienced

‘PREGNANT? MY COMMISERATIONS.’
Gillian’s face was half-obscured beneath a souvenir sombrero. ‘Were the instructions on the pill packet too difficult to understand?’

‘Ha, bloody ha. I took every precaution, bar lesbianism. The condom bloody well melted. What can I tell you?’

Gillian was haggling with the airline officials at a desk in the arrivals hall. Her ex-lover was lying in a coffin in the cargo hold and Gillian was arguing that she was entitled to his quota of duty-free which had been confiscated coming through Customs. He may be dead, but he was still a paying customer. In fact, according to her, it had cost her more to fly him back horizontally, eating and drinking nothing, than sitting up in first class, scoffing it all. Judging by the head-scratching perplexity of the name-tagged hostesses, this was not a scenario which had previously arisen.

‘What does That Man have to say about it?’

Maddy made a myopic study of her gnawed cuticles. ‘He’s away.’

‘Of course. Silly me. Well, when exactly do you next expect him to grace our shores with his illustrious presence?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Oh, when he’s saved the lowland tropical forests of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, rescued the one thousand invertebrate animals and twenty-five thousand plant species threatened with extinction, eradicated global pollution, controlled the world population explosion and liberated all creatures imprisoned against their will the world over … About then, I expect.’

Gillian grimaced. ‘Why is it that your loved one prefers doing stories in the sort of countries one has to have injections for? Who’s doing the little op? I know a good man in Harley Street.’

Like a bomber pilot, Maddy swooped down to a low altitude, took aim, then opened the bomb bay doors. ‘What makes you think I want to get rid of it?’ It was true that at first Maddy had seen her body as a traitor, conspiring with the enemy. But recently she’d called a truce.

Gillian focussed fully on her friend for the first time. She stopped strumming her plectrum nails on the laminated counter top. ‘Well, I suppose you could always sell it through the small ads. Babies go for quite a bit nowadays. In fact, if my luck continues the way it
has
been … If it hadn’t been for an a
dor
able Embassy diplomat chappie …’ She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He shuffled off his mortal coil on the job, you know. I had to take another room, to avoid scandal … the family thought he was on some archaeological dig. My dear,
I
was the one poring over an old ruin. Ugh!’ Weak-kneed, she leant against the desk for support. ‘Deaf, blind and dentures … Can you imagine?’

‘What happened to experientially enhanced and aurally inconvenienced?’

Gillian snapped back to rigid attention. ‘That, my dear, was before I got stuck with the hotel bill. Yes …’ she mused, fingering the tassels on her hat, ‘I just might go into the human incubator business myself. Luxury womb to rent …’ Gillian ran her lotioned palms the length of her body, ‘sought after position …’ curving and undulating where anatomy dictated, ‘in exclusive neighbourhood.’

‘It’s just … I got to thinking … This could be the way to bring us back together.’

‘Do you think I could salvage his cardiac pacemaker? I could sell it as new. Or “pre-loved”, perhaps. There must be a market for such things.’

‘I mean, maybe it was meant to happen.’

‘If only I’d videoed his final moments, I could have sold it as a snuff movie—’

‘Gillian, are you listening to me?’

‘Actually, I’m trying not to. Be sensible, my dear.
Wouldn’t
you rather have a Porche? They’re more fun and much less expensive.’

‘I wouldn’t marginalize him the way Felicity did.’

‘What about a Chanel suit?’

‘He was too young when he had the twins. He’s at the right age now.’

‘A time-share lodge in the Swiss Alps?’

‘Gillian, you have hidden shallows, do you know that? Don’t you ever get tired of living just for yourself?’

Gillian reapplied a slick of magenta lipstick. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Concorde to New York one week-end, yachting off Mustique the next. It’s all so super
fic
ial. God knows, I’d rather be sitting around expressing my milk, or whatever it is you Earth Mothers do. Now
there
’s real fulfilment. All this drinking and flash clothes and fast living, well, it doesn’t amount to much really, does it? It must be truly fabulous having to plan every single second of every single day. Discovering which of the Menu Masters is the tastiest … In a way, I envy you. I really do.’

‘Look, Alex and I have been derailing, fast. I don’t know … this may be just what we need to get us back on track.’

Gillian patted Maddy’s hand consolingly. ‘You’ve been taken hostage by your hormones, dear. This is not you talking.’

Another airline official, accompanied by a senior
customs
officer, arrived to quiz an agitated Gillian about what exactly she had in the cargo hold. The curious gaggle in the queue behind strained forward hungrily. Gillian readjusted her sombrero for maximum anonymity.

‘A terminally inconvenienced passenger,’ she replied softly.

The grey official looked at her blankly. ‘Modom?’

Gillian shuffled closer, as did the queue behind. ‘A passenger who failed to live up to his wellness potential …’ she raised her plucked brow expectantly, willing him to understand.

‘I’m sorry, Modom, I—’

‘My antique cock collection,’ she concluded tersely, sending the official scurrying into the back room and the people behind bickering like birds over crumbs of overheard conversation. ‘
What
did she say?’ ‘She
never
!’

‘Forget it, Maddy,’ Gillian declared. ‘He’s going to take one look at your swelling stomach, think of his disastrous marriage and run a mile.’

‘I have to prove to him that I am from a different generation than Felicity. I have to prove to him that I’m independent. Strong … That I won’t lose my stomach definition.’

‘He’s already failed the fatherhood test. Do you really think he’ll want to sit for it again?’

‘Alex always says that nature can be nurtured. I mean there are some species where the male actually
sits
on the eggs and rears the young … The male sea-horse gives birth, you know, and not without pain either!’

All through the paperwork and official interrogation – ‘But, Modom, what can a dead person possibly want with a litre of beverage with alcoholic content not exceeding fifteen per cent, a carton of cigarettes, a camera, one Sony Walkman, a CD player and an electric can-opener?’ – Gillian and Maddy continued their argument. They did agree on one thing, however. Go straight to the doctor. Do not pass go.

The Fang Carpenter

TELLING ALEX WAS
all, Maddy decided, in the timing. She planned to be witty and pretty and at her most alluring. She would wax everything and wear suspenders. She would pluck her nipples, trim her pubes, dry her hair upside down. She would cook a Prue Leith gourmet extravaganza. She would leave hagiographic letters from old lovers lying around raving about how fabulous she was. But despite meticulous preparations, it didn’t quite work out as planned. Maddy was sabotaged by her tooth. It was, as Alex would have said, driving her to extraction. As she could no longer drink to dilute the pain, a trip to the Fang Carpenter’s was inevitable. She was tilted, arse over tit on the dentist’s chair, her mouth gawping cavernously, when Alex suddenly appeared.