Foetal Attraction (17 page)

‘You’ve cracked!’ Maddy darted after him, snatching the felt pen from his hand, but not before he’d traced some neon hieroglyphics on to Mr Tongue’s designer wallpaper.

‘You’ve cracked. You’ve cracked. Repeat everything you say twice. Twice. And keep singing. Keep walking. Keep watching. Kids can find a razor-blade in a football field. They’ll be into any power-point or nuclear-waste dumping ground within a ten-mile radius. Kids make Stanley and Livingstone look like the stay-at-home types.’ He leapfrogged over the coffee table and thrust a newspaper into her face. ‘Here, read this paper for the last time. Because you never will again. Here …’ He produced a mask from
the
hospitality flight pack in his briefcase and snapped it over her eyes. ‘Sleep for the last time. ’Cos you never will again. Here …’ He flipped her over like a pancake and hiked up her skirt. ‘Play “hide the pork sword”, or whatever you so charmingly call it in your country, for the last time ’cos—’

Maddy shoved him away roughly. The worst thing about being tall was that she couldn’t ever say ‘Pick on someone your own size’. ‘If you feel that way, face-ache, then why didn’t you get a vasectomy?’

Alex smoothed down his highly glossed hair. ‘A man must leave open his options. What if I were to meet the childless billionairess of my dreams?’ Maddy scowled at him. ‘It’s a joke,’ he clarified. ‘But of course you don’t remember how we used to laugh and have fun, because you’re pregnant and have memory loss—’

‘Yeah, you’re right. I keep forgetting what a bastard you are!’ Gusts of rage took hold of Maddy. She scrambled to her feet, untwisting her skew-whiff skirt, and faced him full on. ‘Besides,
you’re
the one who seems to be forgetting things. We talked about children. You talked about buying anatomically correct dolls, for God’s sake. About trading in your classic for a foreign car of sturdy build with a large boot.’

Alex smiled his ‘thanks for watching and join me again next week’ smile. ‘And we will, we will …’ His voice softened melodiously. ‘But now is not the right
time
. Think about it … Don’t you want to give the baby the best start in life? Specialists now say that both the woman and the man must be as healthy as possible before conception. Did you abstain from alcohol for three months beforehand? I didn’t. Did you take precautions against pollutants? I didn’t. Drugs? No. Did either of us have any viral or bacterial infections?’

Maddy’s insides flopped like a fish. Her jaw was throbbing. The central heating was making her eyes ache. She pressed the backs of her hands into the sockets and sank, overcome with sudden inertia, into the sofa. ‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said reasonably. Straddling the back of the sofa, he gently kneaded her shoulders. ‘The critical moments are the first few weeks. That’s when the organs are being formed. These windows of opportunity, once missed, well, they can’t be reopened. The number of babies born blind, deaf or with mental handicaps, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism …’ came his bleak oration, ‘… all a result of adverse nutrition in the womb, could be reduced by fifty per cent if
both
parents switched to a good diet
pre
conceptually. Ask Bryce. They checked into a health farm for three months when they decided to have a baby. Gave up coffee, tea, alcohol, only ate organic food, drank filtered water and took vitamin and mineral supplements—’ He paused, dramatically. ‘What were
you
eating?’

‘I don’t know,’ she confessed, tourniqueting her emotions.

‘How much Château Thames, laced with lead, have you drunk?’

Alex had the exultant look of a punter whose horse is galloping down the home stretch, a mile ahead of the competition. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to do it when we’re ready, darling? And to do it well?’ Without leaving his massage post, Alex leant over to the phone and dialled a number. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pick up the tab … Women fought hard to get you this right … Hello, yes, Doctor Etherington-Stoppford, please. Alexander Drake calling … If men got pregnant, abortion would be sacred. Remember that.’

Maddy signed and rubbed her lacerated gums. Of course she would have the abortion. What had she been thinking of?

The Kybosh

AN ABORTION? MY
God, what had she been thinking of? As soon as she heard Gillian’s voice, Maddy shattered. Sobs assailed her throat.

‘What?’ Gillian’s voice was curt with alarm. ‘What!’

Try as she might, Maddy still couldn’t form any words, just loud, strangulated, extra-terrestrial noises.

‘You’ve killed That Man,’ Gillian deduced matter-of-factly.

The absurdity of this accusation wrung a guffaw out of her. ‘No. Of course I haven’t killed him!’

‘Well, then, my dear, what in the hell are you getting hysterical about? We’re not the teary types, you and I. A prison sentence is the only thing which could make me cry like that.’

‘He doesn’t want the baby.’

Gillian let out a relieved sigh. ‘Oh, is that all. Well, Maddy. I did warn you. Projectile poo does tend to have an alienating effect.’

‘He’s booked me in for a termination.’

‘It’s probably for the best. I mean, think of all the things you would have lost …’

‘Oh, don’t start with all that crap. Alex’s been on and on at me about losing my independence, my freedom—’

‘I was talking about your lap,’ she cut in abruptly.

‘Ha, bloody ha.’ Maddy licked the salt from the corner of her mouth and swabbed at her nose with a shirt-cuff. The priceless carpet around her feet was dotted with soggy balls of loo roll – the tissues having run out hours ago. It was true. She wasn’t the crying type. It was time to face facts. She hadn’t just built a castle in the air, she had moved in, lock, stock and barrel. Well, she now had her eviction notice. So that put the kybosh on that. ‘Anyway,’ she interrogated, thick-throated from crying. ‘what are you doing home on a Saturday night?’

Gillian’s voice lowered. ‘I’m entertaining.’

‘Who?’

‘The British consul in Mexico. The one who handled my recent foreign
faux pas
. Harold. Very grey cardie.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you. I thought you went for the Aged Millionaires with Heart Murmurs?’

‘Been there,’ Gillian said brusquely. ‘Done that. I’ve decided to opt for a DDT – Dreary, Dependable Type. Though, so far, he’s resisted all my advances. No doubt he has some trite sensual secret to be revealed after the Cognac. Probably wants me to grind my
stiletto
up his nostril. Probably subscribes to
Eels for Pleasure
.’

Maddy snorted with laughter. ‘Stop it, for God’s sake. He’ll hear you. Listen, sorry I chucked a wobbly. God. And now I’ve interrupted your dinner.’

‘Yes, must go. I’ve got a lukewarm diplomat to heat up.’

‘Gillian,’ Maddy enquired curiously, before ringing off, ‘what would you have done if I
had
killed Alex?’

Gillian didn’t hesitate. ‘Helped you dispose of the body.’

Maddy laughed out loud. That, she realized, was the true definition of friendship. She would put up with a lot – Gillian’s gold-digging, her toffee-nosed snobberies, bone-idle boofhead boyfriends and sexual shenanigans – for such a show of mateship.

Songs ran darkly through her mind, ‘Bye, Bye Baby’ and ‘Baby it’s Oh-Oh-Oh-ver’, as she shaved her legs in readiness for Monday’s appointment with Doctor Etherington-Stoppford.

The Surgery

‘WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE
between a pregnant woman and a light bulb? You can unscrew a light bulb.’ All the way to the gynaecologist’s surgery in Harley Street, Alex attempted to be expansive and agreeable. He made asides about dropping into the cervix station. ‘Dilated to meet you,’ he joked heartily. Although Alex had assured Maddy of the doctor’s discretion, the man who’d received an industry award for the bravery he’d shown by swimming with pelicans in the skin-scalding soda lakes of the Ethiopian Rift Valley elected to wait in the car.

Maddy climbed the plushly carpeted steps into the waiting room, luxuriously decorated with oriental religious art. The place dripped money. As the doctor escorted a client to the secretary’s desk, Maddy got a good chance to study him. He was a bloated man, with a sullen, cruel mouth and piggy eyes. She could see him as a boy, torturing insects. It didn’t surprise her
that
the sort of guy who pulled wings off flies at school would turn into the sort of person who added wings on to mansions as an adult. An entrepreneur with two country estates, a brace of buildings down town, a helipad and a hair transplant, he had no need to be polite to his patients.

The doctor called her name. ‘Well,’ he boomed, before the door was half-closed behind them, ‘who’s been a naughty girl, then?’

She felt every eye in the muffled waiting room, including those of the jade Buddhas and elephant gods, searing into her back. She felt translucent; X-rayed. She sat down, the doctor’s desk awesomely symbolic between them.

‘Urine sample?’ he demanded without looking up.

Maddy extracted the leaking jam jar from her bag. ‘Do you charge corkage?’

The doctor peered imperiously over the top of his glasses. He regarded her with a paralysing aloofness. ‘I strongly advise against using abortion as a contraceptive method,
Miss
Wolfe. Abortions can result in tearing or splitting of the cervix, which would not then be able to return to normal for subsequent planned pregnancies. This can result in an incompetent cervix.’

Maddy interpreted the disdainful look he gave her. She knew what he was thinking. Why should her cervix be any different from the rest of her?

She lay on the examining slab. He parted her legs indifferently. Inserting the icy tongue of the speculum,
he
jacked her up like a car chassis and proceeded to take a Pap test.

‘Don’t know what you young women are trying to prove. I blame it all on the pill. Promiscuity, I’ll have you know, is not liberation.’ Naked from the waist down, legs akimbo, Maddy felt faintly ridiculous. ‘There is only one one-hundred-per-cent-safe oral contraceptive. The word “No”.’

‘Yeah. Unless you’re with Mike Tyson.’ That got him, the bastard.

Removing the speculum, the doctor snapped on his other rubber glove. It came up past his elbow. It was practically a wetsuit. He plunged it into her fathomless depths. ‘Gynaecologist’, she realized, was nothing more than a fancy Latin word for someone licensed to grope. ‘Aren’t you even going to say you love me?’ She asked facetiously.

The doctor blinked. ‘I take it you’re one of those …’ he could hardly bear to put the word in his mouth, for fear of where it had been, ‘… feminists? It is my professional opinion that the female of the species is a masochist.’

‘Ouch!’ Maddy winced. Doctor Etherington-Stoppford was so miserly, he’d even stinged on the lubrication jelly.

‘And not all that bright. I mean, look at the predicaments you get yourselves into,’ he moralized. ‘Let’s examine it medically, shall we? Why aren’t there women baseball and football stars? Because women
have
smaller muscles.’ He flicked off his plastic gloves and dumped them in a pedal bin. ‘The brain is a muscle, Miss Wolfe. Get dressed.’

Maddy felt tears of rage welling up. A torrent of emotion was lurking just behind her tonsils. But the thought of breaking down in front of this doctor repulsed her.

‘No food or liquids the morning of. And no histrionics. It’s only a simple operation,’ he decreed.

Maddy summoned up every ounce of grit. ‘Yeah, for
you
. You’re not the one who has to have a knitting needle stuck up her twat.’ But her heart wasn’t in it.

The Harley Street Doctor From Hell ignored her anyway. ‘Copulation means population,’ he drawled condescendingly, proffering her a packet of condoms as she dressed. ‘I’ll organize for another doctor to sign the form saying you’re not mentally fit for motherhood. Just a formality, you understand, then we’ll see you next – let me see: Tuesday.’

Maddy fought angrily with an inside-out sleeve. She stabbed at it with her hand, missed, then stabbed again. The whole situation outraged her. If a woman decided to
have
a child, did she need to seek the approval of
two
lousy, low-down men to determine whether motherhood would affect her mental or physical well-being? She stalked out of the surgery, tripping over the legs of waiting patients, who glanced up from their
National Geographics
inquisitorially, her jacket arm flapping forlornly behind her.

* * *

Back in Arnold Tongue’s bedroom, Alex kissed her for a long, long time. Working his way down her body, he confided to her nipples that he’d never felt this way about anyone before, never, ever, ever. To her naval, what a lifetime of love and laughter they would have together. His portable phone rang. He answered it with one hand, held it up to his ear and continued his delicious descent. ‘Ah-hu, ah-huh … earthworms? … Yes … Competitors have to coax out as many worms as possible, don’t they? … Really? Detergent? Down the holes? That would make them surface in a hurry … I never want to be separated again,’ he whispered to her clitoris, ‘never, ever, ever … Yes,’ he said into the mouthpiece. ‘Right away.’ And left to cover a story on the rigging of the National Worm-Charming Championships.

As Maddy packed her bag for the clinic, she reminded herself of the past fate of women such as herself. In any other century she would have been drowned as a witch, committed to an institution for the mentally deranged or died from a back-alley butchering job. How good it was to be a strong and independent woman in the 1990s, able to make her own decisions.

To Breed or Not to Breed, That is the Question

THE MORNING OF
the abortion, Maddy’s indecision was final.

Gillian maintained that the torture of not being able to eat or drink anything required drastic action. Drugs? thought Maddy. Two tall black toy boys? But shopping was Gillian’s favourite form of penicillin. Parched of throat and tummy rumbling, Maddy trailed after her around Harrods and Harvey Nichols. Gillian had decided that it was time to get wired. Not as she had done in the eighties on cocaine, but by investing in a ‘Wonder Bra’. This was a heavily cantilevered undergarment, guaranteed to give maximum oomph. From the vehemence with which Gillian was attacking this shopping spree, Maddy presumed things had not worked out happily with Harold. She could always tell how badly her friend’s love life was going, by the amount of carrier bags in her hall.