Foetal Attraction (14 page)

‘So is dandruff,’ Maddy replied dismissively. She gazed forlornly at the pink peonies blossoming across the wallpaper, at the matching curtains sashed at the waist like bridesmaids’ dresses. ‘You said we’d get married!’

‘No, no,’ Alex refuted. ‘I said we’d be together for ever and ever. That’s different. Believe me, Maddy, you don’t ever want to marry. Wives are to husbands what condoms are to sex. They kill all sensation—’

Maddy took aim and delivered a swift torpedo punt.

‘You kicked me?’ he howled, scandalized.

‘I didn’t kick you. My airborne shoe just happened to collide with your buttocks. A little selective honesty—’

He boxed her ears. They reverberated with the short, sharp shock of pain. She retaliated, with a crusher sideswipe which uprooted a clump of his carefully coiffured hair. He pinned her down on the Turkish rug like a butterfly on a specimen board. Immobilized, all she could do was bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. The bite turned into a bitter kiss. Followed by a button-popping, zip-snagging, finger-fumbling claw at each other’s clothing. Alex panted over her like a dog over his bowl. They were greedy, urgent, frenzied as half-starved strays. It was what Maddy called Wild Jungle Sex. The sort of sex, she noted dismally, that you usually have with a stranger.

‘Cap?’ he mumbled.

‘No.’ She’d been planning to make war.

‘Christ …’ With one hand, Alex rifled through the drawer of a side table. All he could find was a gimmick prophylactic which glowed in the dark and played ‘Great Balls of Fire’ when he took it out of the packet. They jackknifed on to the brass bed. Maddy waited till he got that lost-car-key look, then slipped out of his hands like a trout.

‘I thought they killed all sensation?’ she said archly, crouching away from him.

‘
You broke my will, what a thrill, Goodness Gracious Great Balls
…’ went the condom.

‘Darling,’ Alex wrapped himself around her knees and buried his face between her legs. ‘Diving for
Pearls
’, he called it, perhaps because he once ate oysters from that particular part of her anatomy. The musky smell of their sex was intoxicating. Like all women who don’t know where they stand with a man, she lay back down.

After Alex had resonated with his long, low, cello moan, Maddy lay staring up into the silken sky of canopy above her. A trace of semen was cooling on her thigh. He was sick of her. It was as obvious as Humphrey’s hair transplant. ‘Who’s the Russian?’

‘Who? Oh, I don’t know. Natasha something or other …’ Alex said distractedly, groping around under the sheets for the condom.

‘Couldn’t you find the mulatto daughter of a Lower Voltan political exile?’

‘What?’

‘Still, a Russian freedom fighter … I’m sure
she
won’t become a chink in your cultural armour.’

‘Listen, those scars on her arms were most probably inflicted by the Moscow Mafia for muscling in on their icon market …’ All Maddy could see of Alex were his Banana-Republic-Boxer-short-clad buttocks as he delved beneath the bedclothes. ‘She’s already tried to sell me a load of Byzantine silver looted from some church or other. You don’t seriously think I’m interested in
her
, do you?’

‘Then why didn’t you kiss me when I walked in?’

‘What? Oh. I’d been eating garlic, that’s all.’ This was a man who’d inhaled the halitosis of the
man-eating
leopard, the hammerhead shark, the giant squid. He was an expert at dodging danger. ‘It will all be okay,’ he said, abandoning his grope for the discarded Dunlop overcoat. As there were no maids for the weekend, he could look for it at his leisure. ‘Stay the night.’ He patted her damp thigh. ‘We’ll talk later.’

‘I don’t think so. I get the vague feeling I’m not entirely welcome.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Alex glanced at his watch. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know … It could have something to do with Harriet reading me the return train timetable before I had one foot in the door. Plus … you seem so disinterested in me—’

‘It’s
un
interested, actually. Look, I’ve got to get back. We’re organizing a new campaign for our Islamically-challenged compatriot. See you downstairs.’

In the bathroom, Maddy examined her face in the mirror. She was fifth-generation Australian. Her rellos had been sick all the way to Botany Bay on the
Sirius
. That made her royalty at home. An antipodean Princess Di. Part of the Bunyip aristocracy. All she needed was a tiara. And now look at her. What was wrong with this picture? She had given up everything for a Pom who didn’t just have feet of clay, but
entire legs
. And it was
she
who had put him on a pedestal in the first place.

She wouldn’t stay. She couldn’t bear it. Tomorrow
was
Sunday. She could picture them, scouring the ‘Lifestyle’ and ‘Random Notes’ sections of the papers, looking for random notes on their lifestyles. It was over with Alex. Maddy was still chewing on a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum long after the flavour was gone. It was time to spit him out on the pavement and let some other poor scmuckette get stuck with him. When it came to the writing on the wall, Madeline Wolfe was a speed-reader.

Strangely, she now felt gelid sperm collecting in the crutch of her underpants. Maddy pocketed them without wondering why. She threaded her legs into a pair of Sonia’s discarded pantihose, turned up the bathroom scales by half a stone – the best revenge she could think of on a weight-conscious hostess – and went downstairs.

The women were busily clearing off the table as their radical Male Feminist partners slouched over ports and whiskies or disappeared behind their copies of the
Independent
. In the kitchen, the right-wing chauvinist policemen were helping with the washing-up.
What was wrong with this picture?
’

Alex was sprawled across the lounge, scratching his stomach with languorous, long-fingered movements. His shining eyes, his melodious laugh, his idle limbs broadcast sensuality. And Natasha was definitely on his wavelength. Maddy realized then that she’d been thinking with her clitoris. Alex’s strong suit was his sexuality. If their relationship had ever had any
other
suit, it had definitely been packed in mothballs.

‘Alex, this relationship is over,’ she announced, with as much sang-froid as she could muster with strands of his pubic hair in her teeth. ‘I’m sick of you coming the raw prawn.’

‘The raw what?’ Humphrey sticky-beaked over the spine of his
New Statesman
.

‘In English, I think you’d say he was a disingenuous crustacean,’ Maddy elaborated. The rest of the room regarded her with blank impatience. ‘It loses a little in the translation … Well?’ She scanned Alex’s face for a reaction. He sucked blithely on one of Bryce’s cigars. Dextrous as a cat burglar, Natasha leapt on to the couch beside him. She purred, all furry and familiar. ‘Anyway, I just thought I’d tell you now so that you don’t have to wait for the detailed exposé in the
News of the World
.’

Alex’s face went as limp as his hostess’s perm. ‘Maddy, Maddy, my love …’ He moved towards her. Harriet placed a restraining hand on his arm.

‘The success of a good party’, Sonia chirped desperately, ‘is shuffling the pack – putting unusual people together and seeing how they get on.’ The little plastic whales dangling from her ear-lobes jiggled nervously. ‘And if it’s confrontational, so much the better …’ The Hostess with the Mostess gave an anxious laugh. Her husband had vanished with Imogen, ostensibly to put the baby down, hours ago.

‘All right, you movie buffs,’ announced Bryce,
bursting
back into the room. ‘Through genius and cunning, I happen to have got hold of the illegal video of Robert Maxwell’s autopsy. Bring your popcorn, kids!’

Last time they’d all had dinner together, the entertainment had been Elvis’s alleged autopsy, entitled
The Burger King Video
. The time before, an appearance by the author of a banned book on euthanasia. The time before that, a disgraced Cabinet Minister. They collected and swapped fly-by-night celebrities like baseball cards – ‘I’ll trade you a David Mellor for a Klaus von Bülow’. Maddy’s patience had really reached the Plimsoll mark with these people and their parlour games.

‘And I’m not looking after that stupid mutt of yours either,’ she blurted out. ‘I’ve finally realized why you moneyed English like dogs so much. It’s so good to have something you can relate to
on your own level
.’

It was the line she’d practised in the bathroom mirror, and she’d delivered it, she felt, with seething aplomb. It was only when she’d turned on her heel, stalked out of the room and was groping for her bag amid the putrid, gamey overcoats in the hall that, feeling a draught, she realized she’d accidentally tucked her tartan miniskirt into her pantihose elastic.

Maddy got the distinct impression that her High Life Visa had just expired.

The Job

BASICALLY, WHAT ALL
men want is a lingerie model with a tubal ligation and a Ph.D. This was the realization Madeline Wolfe made when she found herself in the mean streets of Tory Britain, mid-recession. With no contacts or references, there was not a lot on offer. Not to mention a surprising lack of demand for scuba-diving instruction. She could granny-sit for an agency. This involved doing the shopping and cleaning for some old person. A ‘sleep over’ from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. paid extra and having to get up more than twice in the night paid double that again. If she made sure to give the old codgers plenty to drink as they toddled off to bed, she could just about make a living. Standing in a police line-up paid four pounds an hour. Or she could gel her hair, pierce her nose and loiter around Piccadilly Circus charging ten quid a photo to Japanese tourists. She could be a school dinner lady in blue cap, nylon overalls and beige stockings cooking
pre-mixed
, powdered potato. The pay was poor, but you got to take home bowls and bowls of left-over rhubarb custard. There was a service allowing ‘little guys to look like studs’. The job entailed flirting with them at parties, to make neglectful girlfriends jealous. It paid forty-five pounds per flirt – but no GBH insurance.

When she wasn’t sifting through these scintillating job offers, Maddy sat staring at the phone waiting for it to ring, hoping it was out of order and dialling the operator every ten minutes to check. After a week of this, she received the ‘quickest’ of notes from Alex, just to say:

‘How much I love you and how that very love cautions against me taking you on my next assignment. I am up against an unscrupulous, malicious and infantile government machine which would be quite capable of planting drugs in your luggage as a way of embarrassing me. It’s not that I don’t want you. I want you more than anything in the world. But the heat is on and I must take care not to be singed. I don’t think they will hurt me physically, so don’t worry on that score. And don’t worry about your social gaffes at Sonia’s. All’s forgiven. PS: I know you were only joking about
News of the World
. You’re far too stylish to do anything so trashy. If I don’t call, it’s because my hotel phone will be bugged. Love to Moriarty.’

Social gaffe? What – gatecrashing? Where Maddy came from that wasn’t a social gaffe. Slicing your
boyfriend’s
testicles into tiny fragments with a razor-blade – now there was a social gaffe.

As for Moriarty? English men were so romantic. The only love token Alex had left her was a barrel-chested, flea-blown beast with gnashing jowls and quivering drools. It was not easy being the reluctant custodian of a mutt at least three stone heavier than you were.

The first thing Maddy had to do was get out of the Islington flat. The moon had more atmosphere. She would get a job that was ‘live in’. All she could find at first was a gig home-sitting pets … But that didn’t last long. Moriarty, who’d obviously been bought from a Maximum Security Pet Shop, had a habit of eating her charges. From Pekinese to guinea pigs, they all bit the dust.

What she finally settled for was a position as ‘cook and companion’ to an aged hypochondriac in Knightsbridge. He had sixty allergies and could only eat pigeon, cod, melon and peas. Cuisine really means ‘quizz-ine’, she quickly realized. ‘Grives Froides’ and ‘Fricandeau de Poisson’ – the posh recipes he demanded took longer to decipher than devour. The only other thing on his menu was Maddy. Every time she passed by, his nicotine-ochred fingers would fasten themselves on to some part of her anatomy.

‘I bet you’re a naughty girl,’ he’d leer, dried spittle flaking at the corners of his drooping mouth. ‘Girls like you could do with a good spanking …’

If a slug and a blancmange copulated, Mr Arnold Tongue would have been the end product. This was blood money.

Despite his allergies, he was the neurotic owner of eight felines whose peccadillos Maddy had to memorize and indulge. The insolent Persian enjoyed Beethoven and having his belly rubbed. The mangy tabby liked to be serenaded by hit tunes from
South Pacific
. The pampered grey had a penchant for Proust. While Maddy had the sole use of a dark, dank dunny in the potting shed, the cats had their own luxurious bathroom. One of her jobs was to sift through the litter tray with a fish slice and flush their turds down the toilet. While the cats feasted on hand-peeled prawns three times a day, which they regurgitated (being stuffed to the whiskers already) Maddy had to live on canned spag and boil-in-the-bags. While a cat only had to turn up its nose at its bowl to be whisked off to the vet, Maddy was refused time off to see the dentist about an abscessed tooth.

Rubbing cloves on her gum, she consoled herself that if it got too bad, all she had to do was spike his food with olive oil to boomerang him back into the clinic.

For the first two weeks, Maddy concentrated on her work. She wanted to ignore Alex, but it seemed she couldn’t escape him. First, there’d been the missing condom. She’d found it, inside herself, on the way
home
on the train from Sonia’s country mansion – a plastic postscript. Then there was Moriarty, smuggled into the basement, terrorizing the cats and chewing holes in the Persian rug. And then there was the fact that Alex was constantly on the television. Every time Maddy turned on the box, some blow-waved personage was saying ‘and my next guest needs no introduction …’ before introducing him. And there would be Alex, sharing the chat-show-studio couch with people Maddy had only seen on postage stamps. She’d frantically hop channels, only to find him being satirized by a puppet on
Spitting Image
. She’d switch on the radio … and there he’d be, being erudite on a quiz programme. Every magazine she opened featured a revelation of his favourite stuffing for capsicums or least favourite violation of animal rights.