Foetal Attraction (3 page)

‘I’ve rented us something new. My old flat was so dark and dingy. I wanted a place like you – fresh and full of light.’ Alex leant across and kissed her full on the mouth. ‘All I can offer you, my love, is a lifetime of lubricious encounters in the water closets of the world, a place in the dole queue in the mean streets of Tory Britain and an unmarked grave in our feminist council’s Women Only cemetery.’

‘Really? Women who’ve had to lie underneath men they hate all their lives, but refuse to lie next to them in death? I like it.’ She kissed him back, slithering her tongue down his throat. ‘I’ll take it.’

‘It’s bloody freezing.’ Maddy swiped a blanket from the bed and swathed herself against the draught. ‘Oh, well. At least we won’t have to go outside for a breath of fresh air.’

Alex cloaked her in his arms, his breath warm on her neck. ‘It’s just my subtle little way of keeping you under the duvet.’

For the first few days, Maddy’s London sightseeing was limited to the pastel floral landscape of the bedspread. Immune to the outside world, they had entered the Lovers’ Dimension, only aware of a tangle of legs and tongues and toes. They kissed so much their lips got chafed. ‘Lip-lag,’ Maddy called it. Phone calls went unmade, as did beds. Newspapers went unopened, headlines unread. They developed a gluttonous appreciation for each other’s body, memorizing whole constellations of moles and birthmarks, freckles and scars. They stayed up all night and slept all day. They ate straight from the bowl with greasy fingers and licked each other’s faces clean. They were in the Lovers’ Dimension, where you make up limericks about each other and sing them to the tune of Bach cantatas. They used words like ‘longing’ and ‘languish’ and ‘ravage’ without embarrassment. He called her Schnookums, Lambikins, Snuggles, Didims, his boodiful baby. She would call him Hunk, Hot to Trot, Hannibal (the Cannibal) or Horace, after the blue-tongued lizard she’d had as a kid. They had entered the Lovers’ Dimension, where you have bubblebaths at 4 a.m. then make love in every room in the house, in every position, despite slipped discs and frostbite.

When blue balls or lovers’ nuts, as Maddy referred
to
them, forced them to resurface, they sat entwined in the back rows of theatres, the words washing over them, the heat of their scrutiny reserved for each other only. They had entered the Lovers’ Dimension, which allowed Alex to whisper during
King Lear
that he loved her ‘No holes Bard’. And for Maddy not only to think that witty, but to fire back at warp-speed that ‘punning was fecund nature to Shakespeare’. The Lovers’ Dimension is a place where you do all the things which make you puke when you see other couples doing them. The Lovers’ Dimension, if you haven’t been there, makes alien-infested planets visited by the
Starship Enterprise
seem ordinary.

‘I’ll be back by the time you’re over your jet-lag,’ Alex promised, the second week into their hormonal honeymoon.

Maddy stopped licking his armpit and looked up. ‘You weren’t serious about the dole queues of Tory England, were you?’

‘I’ll get a job sorted out for you. Researcher or assistant …’

‘But I want to go with you on this trip,’ she whined, her taut and supple body brown against the pale sheet.

‘Maddy, we’re on the trail of an ivory poacher. It’s too dangerous. Hey, I’ll think of you every time I undergo a border body search, okay?’

Alex retrieved his coat from beneath a weeks’ worth of soggy take-away cartons and rummaged through the
crumpled
pocket. He produced a travel folder stamped British Airways. Maddy beamed up at him. The only thing England had going for it, according to her friends, was its proximity to everywhere else. She was hoping for Prague, though Paris would do. Ensconced in his hotel room in Sydney, they’d once listed the countries they would visit together in the world, bar Iraq, Iran, Sudan, the Costa del Sol and Canada.

He handed her a brochure. Her eyes slid hungrily through the prose seeking her destination.

‘The Prue Leith Cooking Course?’

‘A prize for all my air miles. It’s either that or a Murder Mystery Weekend in Brighton.’

‘But, a cooking course?’

‘Yes.’

‘In
England
?’

‘So?’

‘Alex, we’re talking about people who took jelly and eels and said, “Hey, let’s put them together!” ’

‘I just thought it would keep you off the streets while I’m away. Besides, we can’t live on tepid tandoori for ever. My head is no longer on speaking terms with my stomach.’

‘We’re talking about a country whose sole contribution to world cuisine is the
potato chip
.’

‘Hey,’ he said in mock defence, ‘you’re forgetting Spotted Dick.’

‘Sounds like something you’d catch in King’s Cross.’

Alex folded her in his arms. ‘Well, I don’t have
to
worry about catching anything, not any more …’

She pushed him away. ‘Except planes, apparently.’

‘I’ve got to work, Maddy. This is the longest twenty-four-hour flu in the whole of human history.’

‘I know … It’s just …’ She thumped him in the arm. ‘You ratbag. When I saw BA, I thought maybe you were taking me on a dirty weekend.’

‘I’m sorry, pumpkin. I will. Where would you like to go?’ He nibbled at her knicker elastic. ‘I know a cosy little spot. It goes by the name of G.’

‘You’re sick,’ Maddy groaned in delight.

‘You won’t be lonely.’ His muffled voice drifted up to her. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you …’

But she was no longer listening. She’d have to let her friends know. The beer wasn’t warm in London at all.

A few hours later, Maddy awoke and groped groggily across the arctic linen. She sat up, alarmed. She kicked back the quilt and hoisted open the blind. The row of houses opposite, stacked up side by side like grey cardboard shoe-boxes, seemed to be cringing from the spring sunshine. There was the sound of a key and then the asphyxiating and unmistakable smell of soggy dog invaded the flat. A massive muscle of steaming fur came hurtling at her down the hallway.

‘My love, this is Moriarty. While I’m away … would you mind …?’

Maddy had mountaineered the dressing table in
seconds
flat. Her ‘surprise’ crouched and regarded her with a rheumy eye.

‘It’s all bluff. He’s an old family pet.’

‘Alex, this is no family pet. This is the Hound of the Baskervilles.’

‘He’s easy to feed.’

‘You just throw in unopened cans, am I right?’

‘It’s walk-time, that’s all.’ The dog of death strained at his leather leash. ‘Moriarty. Heel. Heel.’ Alex shrugged helplessly. ‘He usually obeys orders, honest.’ And made for the door.

‘Hey, and what about
my
walk-time? I’ve been cooped up in here for—’

The door closed. Maddy poked through Moriarty’s possessions – a washable doggy duvet, a Petrodex home dental kit containing enzymatic paste and gauze pads. It seemed to Maddy that in this country,
owners
obeyed their
dogs
.

Later, as she and Alex lay post-coitally coiled beneath the covers, the dog growling in the yard below, Maddy confessed a preference for cats.

‘Cats?’ Alex fumbled for the remote control and zapped the television into life. ‘Cats are the original yuppies. They’re upwardly mobile,’ he said dismissively. The television tuned into a close-up of his own face. ‘Not to mention vain.’ He pressed his thumb repeatedly into the volume pad. ‘And unashamedly selfish.’

‘… Chief Inspector Giscard …’ the sibilant tones of
Alex’s
presenter’s voice drowned out his own … ‘you have denied that the Greenpeace protestor was physically assaulted whilst in custody. Then how, sir, do you explain that ebony shoe polish found on the crutch of the suspect’s trousers matched the expensive brand you use on your ebony boots?’

‘That got him.’ Alex hit the volume button once more. ‘The Frog bastard!’ He lay back, preening.

It suddenly struck Maddy that Alex had never sent her his list of faults and foibles.

If she hadn’t been so lost in the Tunnel of Love, this would have been the first clue to the emotional white-knuckle ride that was about to begin.

A New Taste Sensation

MADDY’S MOTHER INSISTED
that the way to a man’s heart was through his belly. Despite her daughter maintaining that this was aiming a tad too high, every birthday brought another deposit of gift-wrapped garlic crushers and crock-pots. But Maddy had steadfastly refused to be trapped into domesticity. As far as she was concerned, ‘home cooking’ was the place where a bloke thought his girlfriend was. Which is why the Monday morning that Maddy began her tuition, she slunk to the Prue Leith School of Cookery in heavy disguise. If word leaked back to Sydney, she’d be a laughing stock. This was the 1990s. The only thing a woman worth her salt brewed these days was trouble.

Re-reading, for the hundredth time, Alex’s latest postcard – ‘Greetings from Poacher’s Paradise. Local police jumping to the usual
contusions
. A case of don’t cull us, we’ll cull you. How’s the cooking? Can’t wait to have you on my menu’ – she tucked it down her
tasselled
bustier and entered class. Maddy had dressed down for the cooking course, in a cropped, fake leopardskin jacket, red leather mini and elasticated riding boots. The others wore pearls with their cooking aprons. The floral ‘get to know each other’ name-tags, like something kindergarten pupils wear, read ‘Clarissa’, ‘Octavia’, ‘Saskia’. Those with triple-barrelled names sported two cards to fit it all in. They were busy chatting about their mummies and their ponies and their pre-masticated ideas of love and marriage.

‘Hi,’ Maddy ventured, sitting at her assigned desk. The women nodded curtly and smoothed their starched white aprons as though they were ball gowns. The walls glinted with an armoury of copper pots and flan pans. The ingredients for the day’s cooking were set out on trays, weighed, neatly wrapped and ready for use. The cooking instructress, Priscilla (call me Plum) proceeded to list, with a missionary zeal, the day’s culinary objectives. Haggis, tripe, steak and kidney pud, black sausage casings and Kidneys Robért. The top bench, flanked by a central bank of ovens and gas rings, was littered in slaughtered and quartered members of the animal kingdom. Plum was up to her elbows in their most intimate anatomy. Maddy looked away as she held aloft what resembled a tangle of bicycle inner tubes. A life of Indian take-away was looking more and more appealing.

Maddy was mentally immersed in X-rated reruns of
Alex’s
greatest bedroom hits, when the door rasped and twanged and a woman entered. Her dark head emerged from her fur coat, like a bandicoot from its burrow.

‘The name, for those of you who don’t know,’ said the interloper, ‘is Gillian Cassells.’ She was dressed loudly with a voice to match. Once Gillian had shed her pelt, Maddy could see that she was fashionably thin. So thin, in fact, she could have been attached to her own charm bracelet. Mind you, her bracelet was the only charming thing about her. ‘And this’, Gillian Cassells pointed towards the door, her nails snapping forth from a clenched fist like five lethal flick-knives, ‘is Imelda.’ A miniscule Filippino woman bobbed into view. ‘She’ll be appearing from time to time to do my washing-up for me.’ She sheathed her flick-knives. ‘I have delicate cuticles.’

The Octavias and Clarissas and Saskias observed the late-comer dubiously. To Maddy’s cringing regret, Gillian shimmied on to the empty stool at her side. Having perched her pert posterior, she reached forward and crisply tore one clean white sheet of notepaper from Maddy’s pad. ‘I’m sure you don’t mind.’

Maddy placed the notepad primly on her lap. ‘Be my bloody guest.’

‘An antipodean?’ Gillian slid her overly made-up eyes the length and breadth of Maddy’s attire. ‘Don’t tell me. Your clothes are still in storage?’

‘Pay attention, gels!’ Plum trilled. ‘One must soak the brains for twenty-four hours to get rid of any nasty bits.’ Maddy felt that this was the procedure from which Gillian Cassells’ grey matter could benefit immensely. When she imparted this helpful observation, Gillian uttered a little hiss of amusement and crossed her sheerly stockinged legs. ‘So, what kind of husband are
you
after?’

Maddy’s face flushed with exasperation. ‘What?’

‘A cooking course is part of an Englishwoman’s dowry. Look around. Do any of these women look married to you?’

Maddy put her head in her hands in mock shock. ‘Is this the nineties? Oh God, for a minute there I thought I was in some terrible Doris Day time warp.’

Gillian narrowed her eyes with glee. ‘Oh, goodee. A feminist. What fun.’

Maddy felt a spasm of irritation zigzag across her temples. Who was this terrible woman? She’d strutted straight out of the pages of the
Sloane Ranger Handbook
. Maddy had never met anyone quite as narcissistic. Gillian Cassells was the type to jump out of her own birthday cake. Maddy drummed her fingers on the stippled bench surface and resolutely ignored her new neighbour.

‘Do you know what feminism has achieved for women?’ Gillian baited. ‘Ulcers, coronaries and shorter life spans.’

Maddy’s resolve melted like the butter in the
demonstration
saucepan. ‘Not to mention the vote, abortion, the freedom not to sit around waiting for Mr Right—’

‘Mister?’ Gilliam reeled back, scandalized. ‘My dear, who said anything about
Mister
? I’m not waiting for Mister Right, but Lord, Baron …
Marquis
Right, at the very least!’

Maddy turned her back dismissively and tried to concentrate on the teacher’s instructions. Plum was wielding what looked like a judge’s gavel. With it she pounded the tangle of bicycle inner tubes until they resembled something they had recently run over. The smell of corrupt flesh was overwhelming.

Gillian leant conspiratorially close and whispered hot in her earhole. ‘Seeing as you’re new to our shores, a little advice. A potential husband must have three qualities. A good background, a good school and – most importantly of all – cash flow.’

‘Excuse me, Zsa Zsa Gabor, but does the word “sponge” mean anything to you? “Gimme girl”, “gold digger”, “fortune hunter”?’