Foetal Attraction (26 page)

‘We have a chance to create a new breed of female. Bright, irrepressible, ambitious … Children can be programmed for success, you know. Of course, love must be conditional on achievement. That’s the secret … But why not just leave that all up to me, hmm? Catatonic is about as interesting as you’re going to be for the next few months. So don’t worry your little head about it,’ said Oxford’s Leading Feminist. A surge of nausea overcame Maddy. She gulped at the glass of water she was carrying with her.

‘Is that
tap
water?’ Harriet demanded, wrenching it free from between her fingers. ‘Murderess! You know it’s loaded with cryptosporidium.’ She dashed a look of contempt from her eyes and produced a sugary smile. ‘Now, lie back and relax. We must keep your blood temperature down, mustn’t we? We’re growing …’ she briefly consulted her textbook, ‘eyelashes today!’

The tide seemed to have gone out on Maddy’s self-esteem and will-power. She was far from firing on all cylinders. The bun in her oven was feeling more like a
loaf
. Harriet offered to rub some cocoa butter on the bulge. Although repulsed by the very idea of Harriet’s hands anywhere near her baby, Maddy didn’t have the strength to resist. She acquiesced, lying back on the plush, pink pillows of Harriet’s bed in the vulva-pink womb of a room. In a trance, she gazed at the glass case of preserved reliquaries. Maddy had the distinct feeling she too was about to be pickled.

She waited until all the inmates of the house were asleep before waddling out to the garage. Puffing and panting, she heaved open the wooden door – each creak, each groan, magnified in her mind to rock-concert decibels. With much contorting, Maddy shoe-horned herself behind the wheel of Harriet’s Volvo. Her plan was to release the handbrake and coast down the slope out of hearing distance, before hot-wiring the engine. But it was impossible to steer with the wheel embedded into the baby’s head. She released the lever which catapulted the seat backwards, but then she couldn’t reach the pedals. Dragging her suitcase past the ‘Trespassers will be Composted’ sign, she lumbered down the street, a grounded Zeppelin. She felt like the heroine of some fairy-tale who’d been under the spell of a wicked witch and was finally escaping in the dead of night. There was only one thing missing, she brooded. The frigging Prince.

Once in the village, Maddy flicked through her
Filofax
. Gillian’s entry ran into four and a half pages. Stockpiling coins, she’d concertina’d herself into a phone booth and rang every one of Gillian’s exes. Archibald, whose underpants’ size was bigger than his IQ. Montgomery, who made her go dutch at McDonald’s. Milo Roxburgh, whose back went out more often than they did. Harold, the anally retentive diplomat in the grey cardie. The aged movie star who hated cunnilingus. The alcoholic romantic novelist Yorkshireman with a penchant for wine enemas. Humphrey, he of the corrugated bottom. Only Maurice, the now married Mono-Fibre-Hair-Extension-King, could confirm definite sightings of Gillian back on the London social scene. He provided her with the number of Gillian’s latest escort, a man named Nigel, the main supplier of stud corgies to the Queen. (When it came to man-izing, Gillian had no peer – except the one who had carked it in Mexico.)

Maddy was just about to hang up, when a familiar voice replied, ‘
There
you are. My dear, am I an aunty yet?’

‘Tell me it’s not true,’ Maddy answered. ‘Stud corgies? What – do the dogs wear open-necked shirts and little gold chains?’

‘Oh, you mean Nigel? My dear, he could only get an erection on a wooden rocking-horse,’ Gillian confided. ‘I put him out to pasture days ago.’

‘Which explains why you’ve been too busy to get in touch with me,’ said Maddy with glum sarcasm.

‘As a potential client of a correctional institution, I’ve been avoiding all known acquaintances and frequenting the most lowly dives. Have just walked in the door from the Groucho Club—’

‘Was Alex there?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Maybe he’s dead.’

‘Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it? … I’ll come and get you,’ Gillian said as soon as she’d heard the full Gothic horror story of Harriet Fielding and the babe in the wood. ‘Where are you?’

The relief of Gillian’s offer jolted Maddy out of her stupor. She peered out of the grimy window of Dr Who’s Tardis. ‘I’m in a phone booth at the corner of “Look Left”, “Warning. Frogs crossing”, and “Road works in progress”.’

‘Sit tight, my dear. I’ll be there.’

Of course she would sit tight. She had no choice. She could see no future at all. There was no bulb in the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Great Escape

FIVE MILES DOWN
the M4, the rescue mission had somewhat inverted. They’d had to pull over so Maddy could change the wheel of Gillian’s Rent-a-Wreck – a motorized Adidas running shoe which only seemed to come up to the bumper bars of other cars.

By the intermittent flare of the headlights of passing cars, Maddy sneaked a furtive glance at Gillian. A trip to a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery and a cool fifteen thousand dollars later and the only thing about her that seemed to have changed was her name. Maddy didn’t know which spare tyre amazed her the most – the threadbare one in the boot or the tiny tricycle retread still present beneath Gillian’s belt.

‘Well, Maddy. This is probably the last intelligent conversation we’ll ever have, so make the most of it.’ Gillian leant up against the chassis and examined her cuticles. The only thing she knew about cars was how to get out of the passenger side of a Porche with
minimal
underpant flashing. ‘After the birth, my dear, you’re going to be a vegetable. From then on, it’ll all be booties, burpies and bottles.’

Maddy loosened the wheel-nuts with a spider spanner. ‘If I
do
turn into a vegetable, promise you’ll tell me, okay?’ she demanded, her eyes sliding surreptitiously sideways.

‘Great Portland Street hospital,’ Gillian suddenly pronounced.

‘What?’

‘Choice of Fergie and Jerry Hall … It’s
the
place to give birth.’

Maddy squinted up at her friend. ‘Since when did you give a damn? Don’t tell me you’re turning into a closet Pram-peerer?’

Gillian’s voice shifted gears. ‘Well, someone has to look after you. I don’t want you leaving it exposed on some hillside. It’ll only be suckled by a she-wolf and grow up to found a city which charges thousands of lire for a so-called original design – which you find in the High Street for ten quid the very next week …’

‘Who would have thought,’ gloated Maddy, pumping the car jack with metronomic regularity, ‘that beneath that Moschino-clad breast beat a maternal instinct?’

‘My dear, the
Times
announcement
always
contains the name of the hospital ward. Those who don’t list the hospital are obviously on the …’ she lowered her voice, distastefully, ‘NHS! No, the hospital will be
as
much a part of her CV as Roedean, for which, by the way, you simply must put her down.’

‘Put her down …’ Maddy mimicked, panting as she lifted off the punctured tyre. ‘Isn’t that what they do with dogs?’

‘Or there’s the Lindo Wing. Princes William and Harry and the three Geldof daughters were born there.’

‘How can I possibly go private?’

‘Don’t you want your own room? Good God. I’d want my own
wing
.’

‘And where do we get the spondulicks to pay for all this, exactly?’ She hoisted the spare into place and tightened the nuts. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, the only plastic you’ve got left is your organ donor card.’

‘The dosh I saved on cosmetic surgery.’

Maddy was immensely relieved she hadn’t told Gillian she looked ten stone lighter post panel-beating and re-upholstery. ‘So you didn’t go through with it?’

‘The stretch limo picked me up from the airport, whisked me to my private bungalow in the hospital grounds and do you know what was waiting for me there? A dozen red roses, a heart-shaped box of chocolates, a special love poem written supposedly by the man who loved me enough to pay for all this, plus a romantic cooked-to-order dinner specially prepared for two … and I thought, what the hell am I doing? The hideous truth is, I am no longer my kind of person. It’s time I changed, Maddy.’

‘And how exactly are you going to do that?’ The jack screeched derisively as it retracted.

‘Em-ploy-ment.’ She spat out each syllable as though it were contaminated. ‘It’s all that’s left to me in life’s rich needlepoint. I’m currently looking for a job which has office hours from twelve to one, with an hour off for lunch …’

Maddy was pleased to see the pinprick lights of London. Pressing her face against the glass, she wondered what picture they would make if she joined them all up.

Having finally parked her rust-bucket – it was easier to get a sex-change operation than to find a parking place in London – Gillian shouldered open the door to her latest flat in Clapham Junction.

Maddy was scrutinizing the name plate by the doorbell. ‘I can just about cop the Aspinall-Hunnicut, but
Lady
?’

‘I thought I might as well go the whole hog. Until now the only way I could get anyone to kneel down before me was to go to the chiropodist.’

‘So that’s why you spent so much time at the corn doctor.’ Maddy lugged her suitcase over the threshold. The walls of the flat were painted nicotine yellow with darker patches where other people had once blue-tacked posters.

‘Two rooms, can you believe!’ Gillian despaired.
‘Who
would have thought it would come to this? We’ll have to share the same bed.’

But to Maddy it was Kensington Palace. ‘Gill, it’s bloody brilliant.’ She felt overwhelmed with relief. ‘Whacko-the-diddle-o.’

Lady Aspinall-Hunnicut eyed her friend sceptically. ‘Maddy, I don’t know quite how to tell you this, but … you’re a vegetable.’

The Pregnant Pause

FOR THE FIRST
few days Maddy did well. She actually heard Alex promoting his television programme on the radio and didn’t switch off. She actually got through his opening piece to camera on the sexual appetite of the Libyan jerd with its pelvic thrust rate of one hundred and fifty per minute without eating a whole packet of Hob Nobs. She actually drove past the billboard with his face on it on the Cromwell Road, without causing a ten-car-pile-up. She only bought about ten self-help books for the lovelorn –
Smart Women, Foolish Choices (When Love Goes Wrong), Men Who Hate Women and The Women Who Love Them, Women Who Love Too Much, The Letters of Women Who Love Too Much
… But, in truth, how could she forget him when the product of their love was constantly kicking her in the bladder every two bloody minutes?

Gillian suggested she just knuckle down and get ready for ‘B’ day. Since she’d been away, birth classes
had
become more and more combative. Not only were the women competitive about who was enduring the most discomfort, who’d put on the least weight, whose birth plan was the most natural (for Maddy, natural birth meant not wearing her contact lenses), but couples were also attempting ever more advanced birthing postures, resulting in dislocated facet joints in the lower back and the odd hernia.

Maddy had enlisted Gillian as ‘support person’. For her initial visit, old classmates who’d graduated into motherhood were back from the battlefield, to show off scars and share their stories. Or rather gories. Not one gruesome detail was spared.

‘Hurt?
Hurt?
’ squealed Cheryl. ‘Listen, sister, you’re in so much pain, they cut you from arsehole to cunt … and
you can’t feel it
.’

More unsettling were the women who reported easy births. Like plane crashes, Maddy felt they statistically increased her chances of having the full-episiotomy-forceps-delivery-five-day-still-birth-catastrophe.

Just to cheer the class up further, Mrs NW3 chose that moment to share the discovery of a terrific video service. ‘They record you reciting your own will so that you can “host” the reading!’ gushed Pamela. ‘You know … just in case anything goes wrong during the delivery.’

Whilst demonstrating the female reproductive organs with the aid of her mauve crocheted uterus, Yo-Yo absent-mindedly poked her little finger right
through
. ‘Oopsie …’ She smiled that saccharine smile. ‘As I always say, Girls, we’re here for a good time, not for a lifetime.’ As the perforated purple womb lining unravelled, grown women wept.

It was then that Maureen’s
de facto
Darryl opened his bag and extracted his pet python. ‘See? She’s daft she is. It’s bloody ’armless. That’s why I brung it. Nuff said?’ Men fled and women went into labour.

Gillian, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet throughout the class, squeezed Maddy’s hand. ‘Just fear one day at a time,’ she advised.

Maddy took Gillian’s advice. Monday she awoke in a cold sweat, fearing osteothrombosis. Tuesday, it was spina bifida.

‘What is it today?’ Gillian asked through sleep-encrusted eyes as Maddy sat bolt upright in their communal bed.

‘No toes.’

‘Look, the baby is perfectly healthy and you’re just being irrational, hysterical and ridiculous if you imagine it to be otherwise. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘And I don’t want you to give it another minute’s thought. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘What is it today?’ Gillian croaked the following morning round 2 a.m.

‘Cleft palate.’

In the end Gillian consoled her that there was
something
seriously wrong if you
didn’t
imagine your baby had some hideous genetic failing at least six times daily.

The due date moved towards Maddy as torpid as a tide. She was constantly tired. Clothes, cups of decaff coffee, mail – they might as well have been made of iron. Reading the newspaper was her version of weightlifting. Getting into her underpants was like wrestling with a blancmange. At least, post birth, she would be able to get dressed without realigning her spine. By the end of the ninth month, Maddy was more bored than she would like to admit about the question of what was best to rub on to cracked nipples – lanolin or cocoa butter - and whether or not perineal massage would reduce tearing. What she wanted was a baby-sitter. Not later. But right away. She’d been with the kid since the moment of conception. She wanted to be alone. And now.