Foetal Attraction (2 page)

‘You’re three centimetres,’ the midwife tells me, peeling off her plastic glove. ‘You’ve got a long way to go yet, dear.’

‘Drugs!’ It’s Stone Age what’s happening to me. It’s prehistoric. How can this happen to women in the twentieth century? To women who have car phones and compact discs and attend seminars on ‘Sexual Harassment in the Workplace’.

Yolanda is squeezing my hand. ‘This is the first stage, dear. The easy part.’

I snatch my hand back. ‘I need drugs! Drugs!’ I remember the class Yolanda gave on the actual birth. As the demonstration doll passed through the plastic
cervix
, it dislocated. That’s what I need. A trick pelvis. Now.

‘Any drugs you take, Maddy, will cross the placenta and go into the baby’s circulation.’

All those pre-natal classes of Yolanda’s I attended. All those books and hospital tours and videos and yet no one has told me the truth about childbirth. They give you not the facts but the
fiction
of Life. ‘DRUGS!’

‘The baby will be drowsy and won’t feed well … You are at least
feeding
naturally, aren’t you, Maddy? It’s important to pass on your immunities.’

You bloody betcha I will pass on my immunities. My immunities to English men. No daughter of mine will ever be susceptible to a bad-punning Pom with straight teeth, ball-bearing hips and a pert bum.

‘They want to give you Valium.’ Yolanda’s voice oozes with panic. ‘It will affect your memory …’

Good, then maybe I’ll be able to forget him. Alex had said he wanted to be the kind of father who could tell the difference between a hungry cry and a sad cry, a tired cry and an ‘I need a cuddle’ cry. He said he wanted to know which child would rather eat slugs than spinach. Which bit they’ve forgotten to wash. Where they were most likely to have left the other glove. He said that they should remake all those American shows like
Father Knows Best
and call it ‘Father Knows Nothing. Zilch. Absolutely No Damn Thing At All’. He said that he would make us very, very happy. And that was one of the reasons I fell in
love
with him. Having kids together was part of the package.

But the trouble with Born Again New Men, is that they’re an even bigger pain in the bum the second time round.

Maybe I can initiate proceedings under the Trade Descriptions Act? Bought in good faith, one charismatic, sexy hunk of available English hetero-sexuality … How could I have left one of the world’s most exotic erogenous zones, a hedonistic haven of sun and sex and bubbling waves bristling with body surfers, hurtling shoreward like human hydrofoils, to be lying here in the land of warm beer and cold baths, bloke-less, in excruciating pain with my feet in stirrups?

I really did a runner for
this
?

The Lovers’ Dimension

THE VALIUM PROVIDED
a little periscope above the pain. Through it Madeline Wolfe could see herself boarding the pot-bellied jumbo; the aeroplane version of the man for whom she was giving up her life, her home, her hemisphere. Maddy had been amazed, when the crunch came, at what she’d been able to discard. A Holden 1-tonner 308 utility truck with double mufflers, roo bar and detachable surfboard racks, her electric wok (Teflon coated), her windsurfer, a parakeet, two tame ring-tailed possums, her herb garden, treasured parrot peas and lillypillies, a well-paid job as a dive master, ten-speed racing bike, boogie board and a brace of boyfriends. She was travelling light. She was in love.

Maddy looked down at her new purple pumps; not the most sensible in-flight wear. But then again, nothing about what she was doing was what you’d call sensible. Alexander Drake was a zoologist. When
not
clinging to the side of ice floes in Antarctica, dangling over percolating volcanoes in the Philippines, crawling on his belly through bat droppings in the rain forests of Borneo, the television screen was his natural habitat. With his blockbuster internationally televised nature series, Alex was the missing link between animal and licence-payer. Basically, Alex had done for nature what Placido Domingo had done for opera, Profumo for sex scandals, Madonna for rubber bustiers. His many awards for programmes confronting illegal Japanese whalers or Brazilian cattle ranchers gave him just the right mix of glamour and gravitas. He was the darling of the London glitterati.

Three thousand, five hundred million years of evolution must eventually throw up the ultimate end product. And as far as Maddy was concerned, Drakecus q.v. (Alexander), undisputed king of the TV jungle and multi-purpose biped of the species
Video Sapiens
, was it.

In what Maddy saw as a case of mistaken non-entity, this high-flyer had fallen for
her
: a mutinous, mischievous, high-rise (the shortest she’d ever been was ‘tall for her age’) auto-didactic (it was a word she’d taught herself, it meant self-taught) outspoken Aussie redhead.

Something to do with cabin pressure was causing her ankles to balloon out over the leather straps. She envisaged her arrival at Heathrow, pushing through
the
terminal in her short, tightly tailored dress and luminous ear-rings … charmingly set off by fluffy grey airline socks. Scoffing her vacu-packed peanuts, it didn’t cross her mind that this might be symbolic of their relationship getting off on the wrong foot.

Looking back, Maddy thought of this time as the first stage of their love affair.
The easy part
.

As living together seemed to be the chief cause of breaking up Maddy, in an effort to avoid post-cohabitational shock, had sent Alex a comprehensive list of her faults and foibles, with a request that he reciprocate. Maddy’s list detailed her immature attachment to Alex’s puns (punnilingus, she called it). Her accent (it was as broad as the space you’d give her if she were swinging a chair). And her hotch-potch of careers: she was a Jill-of-all-trades – ranging from a stint down a Cobar mine driving a front-end loader (the only woman with five hundred men); a swimsuit model; the first mate on a prawn fishing boat off Darwin, hoovering up silver shoals off shore; a trapeze artist in Circus Oz; driving a road grader for the Department of Main Roads – a hole gouged in her hard hat to emit a plume of red ponytail; a roust-about in a shearing shed; a surf life-saver and most recently, a scuba-diving instructor in the Whitsunday Passage. Rattling on through various disgusting personal habits, chief among these being a penchant for oyster sandwiches, she concluded on what she called her Bar-Room Brawler streak. ‘Occasionally,’ she’d confessed,
‘I
have a habit of telling blokes I’m going to kick their balls through their brains – if they’ve got either.’

Alex had written back to remind her that if it hadn’t been for Maddy’s incendiary nature, they would never have met. He loved to tell people how it all began on a Sydney Street when Maddy slammed out of her ute at the traffic lights to chase him after he’d bad-temperedly bashed her protruding bonnet as he was crossing the road. Having ‘put the wind up him good and proper’, her moment of triumph was shortlived when she realized that she’d locked herself out in the process, with the engine idling and the pedestrians laughing and the culprit leering and the lights turning green and the peak-hour traffic honking and her petrol low. By the time she’d extracted a wire coat hanger from the cursing Chinese restaurateur on the corner, broken into her own car, pushed it to a service station and tanked up, she was too wrung out to refuse his apology and placatory offer of a drink.

It was, as Alex said later, over a can of cold Foster’s in the Sea Breeze Hotel that they fell in love.

He had a crooked smile, a coronet of black, highly glossed hair spiked with grey and dancing, kiwi-fruit-coloured eyes behind tortoiseshell specs. He used wonderful words like ‘somnolence’ and ‘perspicacity’. Words which shimmered. He possessed secrets about world leaders and rare invertebrates. He’d roamed the high seas, pirate-fashion, engaging in skirmishes with nuclear-armed navies. He had an encyclopaedic
knowledge
of 1960s pop music. He’d eaten forest crocodile with the Babinga warrior pygmies of the Congo. He could translate the foreign quotations in novels. He had a working knowledge of Schopenhauer, whoever he was. The wings of his designer shirt-collar pointed straight to heaven. He looked into her eyes and spoke her name slowly, as though rolling some priceless vintage claret around his mouth: ‘Mad-el-line’.

He was Down Under at the time, filming the sex change strategies of the giant cleaner wrasse. It was a eucalyptus and frangipani-soaked evening. The wind off the harbour was warm. It blow-waved their hair into curious coiffures. As they kissed, sweat trickled down their backs sticky as honey. Maddy’s list left out her greatest weakness. Alex. In what her girlfriends called delusions of glandeur, she fell for him. He just sat back and reeled her in like a yo-yo.

‘In
love
? Oh my God. Don’t be so Shakes
pear
ian. He only wants you for your bod.’

‘An Englishman? My commiserations.’

‘What do cold beer and cunnilingus have in common? You can’t get either of them in London.’

To Maddy’s girlfriends, overseas travel had only one purpose – duty-free shopping.

‘Well, if you’re determined to go, despite the fact that he’s far too old for you, for God’s sake take your own
food
.’

‘No, it doesn’t shock me that you’ve fallen for a
Pom:
what shocks me is that you’re admitting it out loud, openly, within earshot of
others
. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Maddy,
why
?’

Why? A
News of the World
journalist was to ask her the exact same question a year later. Gazing into her cappuccino, Maddy had toyed with ways to explain it to them. Because since they’d met, poems had suddenly started making sense? Because of his biteable buttocks? Because of his loud and resonant orgasm, like a bow being drawn across a cello? Because they laughed at the same things? Because he was her knight in pinstriped armour; a renaissance man in Reeboks? Because she was passionately, profoundly in love with him? Because, as Alex said, love was a state of grace, so rare that the mere whiff of it justified setting off in hot pursuit? Because, as Alex said, one might as well be dead, if one did not drink from the cup of life? Because of the wonders of the world he was going to reveal to her? The Panamanian army ants bivouacking through the rain forest. The all-female elephant crèches of East Africa. Mating rituals, from cheetahs to chooks, hunting habits, from llamas to lobsters, birthing techniques, from yapocks and piddocks to the electric eels of the Amazon. All this would be hers.

Maddy looked up at the inquisitive, sun-scorched faces of her female friends and shrugged. ‘Put it this way. When I have a wet dream, he stars.’

Shoving her pigeon-toed trolley into the terminal,
Alex
didn’t mention Maddy’s airline socks. Just as he never mentioned how tall she was. She often wondered if the real reason she fell for him was because he was the only lover she’d never had to look down on. Literally. They were iris to iris. With most men, she knew all about their dandruff, undetectable toupees or combed-over bald patches, before anything else. Having found her vertical match, Maddy planned to get horizontal as often as possible.

‘You’re crackers! We can’t go in there, Alex – what if someone’s look—’

‘It’s empty. Come on. I can’t wait any longer.’

‘You’re
English
. You’re not supposed to be spontaneous! It goes against your national character.’

‘Come on.’

‘I haven’t had a shower.’

‘Come
on
.’

Maddy found that she had to renavigate his body. Their kisses mis-aimed, their noses collided, their teeth clashed. Fingers fumbled over buttons, snagged on zips and collars and cuffs. Her head got wedged in the neck of her shirt and she had to execute a faltering rumba, with Alex tugging, to free her shoulders. His underpants slid down pallid calves and came to rest atop his pot-holed brogues. ‘Sssh,’ she kept saying and, ‘You’re squishing me!’

The paraplegic toilet cubicle at Heathrow, terminal four, ground floor, read ‘occupied’ for well over an hour. The ‘One-Foot High Club’ Alex called it.

* * *

‘I can’t believe how quickly you organized everything to get over here, my love.’ Maddy, hanging on Alex’s every word, thought that he should have his voice insured by Lloyd’s. It was as rich as fig jam, moreish as chocolate mousse.

Oh, yeah, she thought. Like, I had a choice! Every pore, every cell, every hair follicle in her body had screamed, Be With That Person. ‘Lust at first sight,’ she replied with cool facetiousness. ‘Quite a labour-saving device, eh?’ She looked out of the window of Alex’s classic 1960s Saab Lotus Élan original. Hyde Park rolled away on her left, a giant billiard table. Flowers rioted along every pavement. The whole of London looked warm and yielding. The motorized bowler hats reading ‘taxi’ bobbed past them. All the buildings, with their frosted glass, pudgy domes, curves, cupolas and crenellations, reminded her of cake decorations. ‘Those hotels look just like puddings.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Big, solid school puddings.’

‘So,
that’s
what happened to you.’ She slapped playfully at his check-shirted abdomen. ‘I’ve got news for you, Buster. “Working out” is
not
something you do on the back of an envelope.’

This startled a laugh out of him. She gave him lip. Maddy knew that was what he liked about her. There were no kid gloves in this girl’s wardrobe.

‘We’re going to work on that gut, mate. It’s daily aerobics or a promise to have your heart attack while
I’m
still young enough to find some other bloke to marry. Got it?’

Alex ran a red light and kerb-hugged right, tyres squealing. A smile flickered at the corner of his mouth in time with the tick-tick of the indicator. She couldn’t quite tell what it was signalling.

Maddy squinted up at the row of Georgian houses standing to attention, elbows tucked tightly into their whitewashed sides. She knew of Islington. It was cheap and blue on the Monopoly board and nobody ever wanted it. ‘I thought you lived in Maida Vale?’