Foetal Attraction (25 page)

‘Soft in the head, you mean.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like. It’s almost impossible to be a Personality and end up a person. Do you realize how many missing celebrities there are in the overcrowded computer discs of memory?’

‘Come off it, Alex. You’re too tall for the “short man” syndrome.’

‘All that
bonhomie
… it’s a defence mechanism to make sure they don’t find out how insecure and vulnerable you are underneath …’

‘So, what are you trying to say?’ Maddy asked
facetiously
. ‘You’re just a person trapped inside a man’s body? Am I right?’

‘You get told so often that you’re fearless, you believe it. But it’s all crap.’ Alex had taken off his coat and was trying to wrap it around Maddy’s shoulders.

She shrugged it off and jerked away once more from his gravitational pull. ‘You know, Alex, you really should be blond. It would go with your brains.’

‘I’m in purgatory, Madeline … One of the only people to have suffered purgatory while still alive, me and Jesus.’

‘Oh, puh-lease. Spare me the martyr act …’

‘OK.’ He held up his hands, palms facing her. ‘Look. No holes.’

Detecting the hint of a smile, he retrieved his coat from the dewy lawn, held it before him, matador-style, and approached her stealthily. ‘Maddy …’ He smiled concupiscently. ‘Schnookums, lambikins, my boodiful baby—’

‘You’re such a liar.’ She thumped him in the chest. ‘You made yourself up. You went to a private school. You had rich parents …’

‘I still made my own way! I started at the bottom.’

‘Yeah. And kissed it.’ She clouted him again. ‘You promised to leave your wife. You didn’t. You promised to marry me. You didn’t.’

‘I can’t make things the way you want them. I mean, who do you think I am? God?’

‘No. You’re older.’

‘That’s below the belt.’

She shot him an insolent look and slapped her bulge. ‘So is this!’ she sobbed, in a wave of self-pity. ‘I’m forced to camp out at Harriet’s. You saw her! Monitoring my every mouthful! My back is aching. My legs are cramping. My feet have swollen. Even my bloody belly-button has popped inside out!’

‘You’re turning into a hypochondriac, my love.’ Lunging forward, Alex successfully wrapped his coat around her shoulders, security it with his arms. ‘Why don’t you show some interest in
my
body for a change?’ His voice was cream being poured from a jug. Up close, the air was charged with the fresh-baked-bread fragrance she’d always found so moreish. This was the man who’d made up limericks about her and sung them to the tune of Bach cantatas. This was the man who’d given her orgasms like guitar riffs and cooee-ed up her canyon. Alex smiled in that mischievous, wicked, take-it-or-leave-it way of his. And, of course, she took it.

‘Because that’s what got me in trouble in the first place,’ she said weakly. She guided his hands over her body. ‘What? No “Hey, you look good”? No “Gee you’ve kept in shape”?’

A hungry throb of expectation lit up his gooseberry-coloured eyes. ‘Maddy, I’m a man. My genetic programming dictates that I have no aesthetic response to sackcloth maternity wear.’

She anchored his hand on the Mount Vesuvius bumping between them. ‘You’ve never even talked to your baby.’ Inside, they could hear the New Year’s Eve countdown starting up. Ten, nine, eight …

‘What do you mean?’ His breath was hot on her neck. ‘What do I say?’

‘I don’t know. “Hello” would be a good start. I mean, other men talk to their babies in the womb. They sing opera. Or show-tunes from Gershwin. They recite poetry …’

Alex softly stroked her fleshy globe. Behind them, party voices shrilled momentarily as a door opened and closed. Alex drew back with stark celerity. His face drained of all expression. Maddy followed the line of his gaze. Felicity was standing on the balcony. She’d stopped dead in her tracks, a champagne glass in each hand, surveying the two of them in the gloomy garden below. ‘Four, three, two, one …’ came the annual party chorus. Felicity shuddered, not, Maddy presumed, from the cold, then retreated abruptly indoors. Alex followed and was swallowed up into the cacophony of hooters and streamers and stray kisses, paper whistles uncurling into his face like the hungry tongues of a horde of lizards.

Moments later, people were rummaging in the hall for coats and scrambling for cars. Harriet, displaying all the sensitivity of a Novocained tooth, chose the Drakes’ Range Rover for their lift home. Felicity was behind the wheel. Alex in the passenger’s seat. Maddy
couldn’t
tell if he was slurring his words from the effects of too much drink or nervous delirium.

‘I do loathe that party,’ he blurted, self-consciously. ‘I don’t know why we go every year.’

The silence was tangible.

‘We go because our host intrigues us … He divorced his wife to marry his lover,’ Harriet explained to Maddy, ‘and now has a secret affair with his ex-wife on the side!’

‘I imagine’, elaborated Alex churlishly, ‘that it’s just the longing to feel alive again. To be noticed. Men suffer the menopause too, you know. It’s part of growing up. Like acne, or learning to unhook a bra with one hand … You’re not the only ones who get hormonal upheaval. Oh no. Yet all the focus is on the female. You women are all on first-name terms with your gynaecologists. You get Hormone Replacement Treatment … But what about
us
? Can you imagine what it’s like to wake up one day and discover that there are more hairs on your chest than on your head? That your waist measurement is bigger than your inside leg? No marriage feels mutually happy all the time,’ he grunted defensively. ‘Everybody’s vulnerable at some stage …’

Throughout Alex’s oratory, Felicity kept ominously quiet. She drove steadily, negotiating curves with competent precision. A small animal darted into the headlights of the car. Mrs Felicity Drake suddenly accelerated, squashing it gruesomely, then reverted to
speed
and continued on her journey in calm and icy silence.

This was the worst year of Maddy’s life. And it was only half an hour old.

The Wicked Witch

MADDY, NOT BEING
in a position to look a gift horse in any part of its anatomy, stayed on at Harriet’s. But life was far from recreational. There were toilets to be unblocked and radiators to be bled. (Despite their degrees and PhDs, these people had no smarts. They wouldn’t know how to mend a spark plug or change a light fuse. Maddy felt you could fill a goddamned reference library with all the stuff they didn’t know.) She even had to save the more didactic spokeslesbian from drowning in the duck pond.

The only one who didn’t take advantage of Maddy’s handy-woman techniques was Harriet herself. Until now, Maddy had always thought that a pulse was something in your wrist. Well, it wasn’t. It was what Harriet thought it best for pregnant women to eat, deliciously garnished with roots, shoots and leaves. Which, when she came to think of it, Maddy should have been used to. Rooting, shooting and leaving was
exactly
what Alex had done to her. Harriet had her eating cinnamon twigs for her varicose veins, congealed blood for her baby’s brains and pesticide-herbicide-fungicide-free fruit for everything else.

‘The foetus goes through a series of critical stages,’ Harriet expounded, force-feeding bull’s balls and duck’s livers down Maddy’s neck. ‘If nutrition is lacking during one of these phases, the cells in question will be disturbed. You are currently growing …’ she flicked through her pregnancy tome, ‘the insulin-making cells of the pancreas. Unless you eat correctly, the baby is likely to become diabetic in mid-life.’

Swallowing the last of a bland bowlful of acid-green algae scraped from the bottom of some Norwegian fjord, it struck Maddy that this was vaguely unusual behaviour for Harriet. The sort of organically grown food her hostess was shovelling into her cost three times the amount of the other groceries. And money was a sore point with Harriet. Professor Fielding was the sort of hostess who followed her guests around, turning off lights and shutting off gas fires. She refused to switch on the heating until the guests were playing ice hockey in the hall and cross-country skiing back to their bedrooms at night. Harriet kept a logbook and stopwatch by the phone and smothered the fridge in notices saying, ‘Eat my cashew spread again and die.’ This was a woman who made the others pay twice as much her loo rolls, maintaining she used the
toilet
at University. But where Maddy was concerned, money was no object.

At first she presumed Harriet was collecting Brownie points in the Decent-Human-Being-Look-Alike-Contest. But gradually, her gratitude began to fade.

They were standing in Harriet’s kitchen by the Aga stove – a must, Maddy had noticed, in the right-on, trendy English kitchen.

‘I’ve come up with the name shortlist.’ Harriet said stealthily. She was massaging peppermint oil into Maddy’s temples to help relieve a bout of nausea.

‘Oh yes?’ Madeline sipped her tea made from lotus seed sprouts to nourish her blood yin – whatever that was.

‘Simone, Germaine,’ Harriet itemized, ‘Benazir, Martina or Emily – as in Pankhurst.’

‘Oh. I was thinking more along the lines of Azaria.’ Harriet’s fingers stopped kneading. Maddy looked up expecting Harriet to reciprocate with a smile, but there seemed to be a large extractor fan which sucked all the humour out of the atmosphere in Harriet’s house. ‘You know, the Dingo baby? It’s not a name any other Australian girl will ever be christened with,’ Maddy persevered recklessly. ‘Oh, she’s kicking. See, she likes a bit of black humour.’ Maddy shifted her weight as the baby hydraulicked about her abdomen. She had to get down on the floor on all fours to relieve the
backache
. ‘Jesus. There’s a world-cup soccer final going on in there.’

‘A ball-kicker,’ Harriet thrilled. ‘We need more girls like that! You see? That’s why our baby needs a strong, Feminist name.’

Our baby?

But it wasn’t just the name Harriet had taken control of, it was also the clothes – smocked romper suits, Liberty lawn frocks, a hooded cape, matinée jacket and shawl in cobweb lace made by hand on a remote Shetland island out of the softest one-ply cashmere. She’d also selected the hospital and chosen the midwife. ‘We don’t want a panic merchant who plies you full of drugs. We want baby coming into the world unimpaired, so she recognizes us instantly.’

Us?

Harriet started wearing a strap-on, twenty-eight-pound ‘empathy belly’, so that she could experience the sensation of pregnancy. Every morning, she filled the special womb compartment with eight pints of hot water and two lead weights to produce backache, shortness of breath and increased blood pressure. This was followed, a few days later, by the appearance of an artificial breast ensemble which manually pumped milk. A kind of colostomy bag, but for the breast. ‘So that I can get closer to the whole maternal experience,’ she explained. ‘All I have to do is pour in your expressed milk and then breast-feed my adopted baby … Isn’t that exciting?’

Adopted?

Harriet was convinced that women were smarter than men. ‘The genes for intelligence are carried in the X chromosome – the chromosome women have in double supply!’ So saying, she enrolled the foetus in womb university. Every afternoon, Maddy would wake from her nap to find Harriet either hovering over her abdomen reading aloud from Andrea Dworkin (the eminent reading to the imminent intellectual) or clamping the stereo headphones across her belly to blast the baby with Bach and Mozart. ‘Music appreciation can be taught to foetuses. I’m sure she prefers classical. See how she moves?’

‘I’ve decided to educate her here, at home,’ Harriet decreed one day to an increasingly incredulous Maddy. ‘Hot-housing techniques. Flashcards from birth. Purposeful toys … The state school system has been so eroded by the Tories. And public schools … Well, we all know they’re a form of child abuse. The other good news is that I’ve consulted medical journals and if I start hormone injections about now, I’ll actually be able to lactate. Isn’t that exciting? I’ll actually be able to feed my baby.’

My baby?

That night a message chattered through Harriet’s fax machine. It was a guide to a One-Day Parenting Fair. There were brochures for short tennis for tots, kiddie karate and private dance, music and drama classes for rug-rats eighteen months and up. Plus a
typed
information sheet on how to deliver a baby at home.

‘Harriet!’ Maddy had barged into her bedroom. The room was full of reliquaries. Bits of saints’ nostrils, eyebrows and shin bones, pickled in old jars, poked from every surface. Maddy idly wondered what the owners would make of the peculiar fate of their bits and pieces. The décor was deep pink with plush cushions, upon which Harriet was reclining. ‘I’m not having a home birth, I’m having the baby at the hospital.’

‘I think it’s best to let me decide that. You’re eight and a half months pregnant. You’re irrational now. It’s hormonal. Why not leave all the big decisions to me?’ Harriet didn’t
pat
, but
mat
ronized her.

‘Because it’s not your baby. It’s mine.’

Whenever Harriet got angry, she became efficient. Gardens were weeded, files filed, the dust-buster would hum up and down the carpeted stairs. She now got up and fussed over Maddy; manoeuvring her into a chair, lifting her feet on to a cushion, placing a pillow behind the small of her back. ‘Let’s face facts, shall we? Here you are, heavily pregnant, with no money, no home, no husband. The truth is, you are little more than an irresponsible, spoiled child, in no way prepared for this human being who’s coming into the world. That child needs me …’ She gave a placatory smile. ‘Of course, you’ll always be its
biological
mother.’

A finger of ice shuddered down Maddy’s spine. For once it was not caused by arctic temperatures. Outside the window the lament of crows filled the funereal skies. Everything about the room, the house, the weather was oppressive. The clouds had been like a grey duvet smothering the landscape for weeks on end now. Maddy hated going outside, for fear she might bump her head on the sky.