Foetal Attraction (22 page)

‘From a broken heart?’

‘From liposuction. I’m having the tummy done.’

‘The only bit of you that needs operating on is your brain! It’s not just your
body
that’s going numb. Emotional liposuction, that’s what you’re doing to yourself!’

Gillian’s face was drawn and lined. ‘I’m getting old, Maddy. I have no training. No skills. My upbringing has crippled me. Growing up rich is the English equivalent of having bound feet. Oh, I know how much people hate us. But imagine what it’s like Being Us. Sometimes, my dear, I feel my buttocks clenching and I hear those strangled vowels coming out of my mouth – oh yar, yar – and I want to throw up. Every time I meet a man, no matter how much I like him, I’m doing little checklists. How much money does he earn, what car does he drive, does he use the right fork for the fish? To tell you the truth, my dear, a spiritual crepuscularity has overtaken me.’

Maddy bit her lip. What could she say? Gillian Cassells was living proof that you could be too rich and too thin. ‘Don’t be so pathetic. You’ve got to stop pinning your hopes on some man, that’s all. All the men you meet are the same. If they didn’t have penises, you couldn’t tell them apart!’

‘This is my last chance,’ Gillian interrupted dismissively. ‘The only thing I’m worried about is who’s going to be around to take care of you?’

Maddy gave a haughty sniff. ‘Gillian, you’re talking to a woman who’s bunjy-jumped. Dated a Hell’s Angel. Had root-canal work! I don’t need taking care of!’ The baby chose that moment to execute her daily gymnastics. ‘Alex will come round,’ she panted, less assuredly.

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘Then the kid will have to pay her own way … I’m going to lean over the cot and whisper repeatedly, “paper round”, “baby-sitting”, “late-night shopping cash-register operator”.’

‘Here. Take this for now.’ Gillian coiled Maddy’s fingers around a wad of money.

‘Where did you get
that
?’ she asked incredulously.

Gillian brightened. ‘I’ve devised a brilliant little earner. We English are so guilty and repressed; I just sent letters to every politician threatening to expose him. They all have something to hide. At least half paid up!’ she ad-libbed.

But it was clear, later that night, when Gillian managed to pack all her possessions into a swag no bigger than a handbag, that she had sold her final wardrobe full of clothes and pawned her precious jewellery.

‘Will miss you, old thing.’

‘You too,’ Maddy admitted, surprised by Gillian’s uncharacteristic burst of sentimentality. Tears welled up in Gillian’s eyes. ‘Hey,’ Maddy soothed, ‘we’re not the crying types, remember?’

As she headed out the door, Gillian smiled stoically. ‘America … maybe I’ll have a black man. Never done that before. Yes, it’s time I opted for a bit of cocoa.’ She shouldered her bag and made for the stairs. ‘Or maybe I’ll join a tennis club. One with at least ten courts lit for night play and lots of Jewish men interested in making a commitment.’ She paused on the landing to check her lipstick in her purse mirror and blow a farewell kiss. ‘I’m taking optimism pills.’ And she was off on the long trek to the tube.

But it wasn’t until after her midnight flit that Maddy realized the true cause of Gillian’s anxiety. The week before Christmas, Gillian’s flat was repossessed by the Building Society. She had also left behind fifteen thousand pounds in debts to the bank and store cards and a swatch of rubber cheques. Creditors were threatening court action. Some had gone to tracing agencies. Gillian was what the police classified as a ‘bolter’, a ‘runaway’. And Maddy was out on the street. A letter in Gillian’s handwriting arrived the day she was booted out.

‘Sorry, old duck. As a potential client of the correctional system, I felt it was best to leave the country. It’s not really cost-effective for them to trace me. Pursuing the debt will be more expensive than the debt itself. It’s never worth chasing a determined defaulter. And, believe me, until I get a husband, I am determined. I just need to become a non-person for a while. PS: Statistically there are more twenty-five to
fifty-four-year-old
men in the world than women.
Ciao!
’

Maddy had a hospital appointment that morning. On the way, she got hold of the tourist board’s
Where to Stay
guide. This included symbols showing which hotels catered for pets. ‘Animals welcome. Children discouraged’ read most of the entries.

Despondent, she made her way to the antenatal ward. It was bursting with big-bellied women and bored, squealing children, the air bloated with the stench of fetid armpits and Vicks-impregnated hankies. As she waited for her name to be called, Maddy went through the paper in search of a flat. Landlords and flat agencies wanted credentials – copies of pay slips, references from banks, bosses, ex-landlords … None of which Maddy had. She registered over the pay phone with Flat Link and Streets Ahead, central London agencies which specialized in matchmaking prospective tenants. They used a computer to make the most suitable matches. But it seemed that nobody wanted a six months’ pregnant, unemployed, broken-hearted, love-lorn, six-foot, suicidally depressed antipodean.

Maddy couldn’t for the life of her work out why.

After waiting four hours for a blood test (she should have brought some light reading, say
The History of the World in Twenty Volumes
) she was so depleted that she fainted. Breakfast, she figured, could be
the
traditional biccie and ‘bring round’ cup of tea.

‘Sorry, love. No tea. There’s a recession, you know.’

‘Where? In
Ceylon
?’

‘Cut-backs. Can’t afford the stuff.’

Starving, Maddy met up with the rest of her grunting class for the official hospital tour. With unemptied garbage, blood smears on the walls and a pool of congealed sick left over from night shift, you could say the hospital lacked charm. Shambling forms in pink fluffy slippers, bent double with pain and smelling of sour milk, shuffled past them. Yolanda shooed her class of women along the corridor like chooks with hen-pecked husbands in tow.

Cheryl slipped Maddy a brochure advertising elective Caesareans. ‘Keep your passage honeymoon fresh,’ it read. ‘That’s what I’m havin’,’ she boasted.

Maddy, however, went cool on the idea when she looked up to see a nurse scratching her armpit with a sterilized surgical instrument. She felt a labour-ward tour should be mandatory for every post-pubescent as part of their school curriculum. It was the most effective means of contraception she had ever come across.

Mr and Mrs NW3 dropped her off near King’s Cross. Maddy studied the pregnant women on the hospital brochure she was still clutching, entitled
So You’re Going to Be a Mother
, and felt more and more depressed at their glowing good health and radiant smiles, surrounded by fields of flowers dappled in
sunlight
. She was slumped on to her suitcase underneath the Goods Way overpass, half asphyxiated by car exhaust fumes, with the monolithic Meccano construction of the gas works towering on either side of her. Empty parking meters, like exclamation marks, punctuated the dreary street. There was nothing much to get excited about. A bit of half-hearted graffiti – ‘THE DPP CRAWLED HERE’ and ‘MEN SUCK’. A few tumbleweeds of barbed wire. The occasional prostitute. Maddy watched them, their stockingless legs blue with cold, slave-anklets glistening as they slunk in and out of cruising Ford Escorts.

Sitting there, Maddy started to suspect that the idea of carefree and capable motherhood was nothing more than a vicious rumour. She drew her coat around her. It was so cold, passers-by seemed to be puffing on invisible cigarettes. Maddy blew a smoke ring or two. As the baby set about busily rearranging her vital organs with its feet, she tried not to give in to despair. After all, Mary and Joseph had been in exactly the same position. Except for the fact that they had a stable relationship. Literally. It was time, Maddy decided, for Alex to come through with the donkey.

For someone with such a high profile, Alexander Drake seemed to have dropped off the radar screen of life. Leaving her suitcase in a station locker, Maddy swallowed her pride (it was the only thing she’d eaten all day) and set off to find him. A television executive explained that he was away at present on
‘compassionate
leave’. Maddy tried to remain sym pathetic. The guy was in mid-life crisis. His gums were receding. His car was constantly clamped. His ratings were falling. He needed caring, nurturing … Or maybe a hit-and-run accident with a motorcade.

Maddy caught the bus to Islington. But their old flat was now rented to a stress consultant, offering ‘Genital Balancing Weekend Workshops’ for Iron John groups at seventy-five pounds a shot. She trekked to his favourite watering hole, the Groucho Club in Soho. Here the Terminally Trendy gathered to review each other’s books and write each other’s blurbs. It was totally incestuous. The Media version of Tasmania.

Weaving her way through the cut-lunch-commandos in the bar, she tackled the steep and rickety stairs to the dining room. Able to take only small, breathless steps, waddling from one foot to the other, she felt like some little wind-up toy in a department store. As she burst, breathless, into the dining room, all eyes swivelled in her direction.

‘Sorry, I was looking for …’

‘Madge, isn’t it?’ It was Humphrey.

‘Madeline.’

‘Of course. I didn’t recognize you. You’ve “cut”, and I use that word euphemistically, your hair.’ He put down his bread-and-butter pudding. He was dining on nursery food. You could always tell a Public School boy by his penchant for neon-coloured
Andy
Warhol pop-art desserts awash with custard.

Sonia was at the same table, pushing her food around and around her plate decoratively. She sized up Maddy’s rotund figure, swathed in a burgundy angora tent dress which made her look a lot like a hirsute and very sunburnt abominable snowwoman. ‘My, don’t you look
well
. I wish I could put on weight as easily as you do. I just can’t seem to keep a pound on me. Whereas you look as though you’re expecting a baby!’

‘I am actually,’ Maddy replied steadily. ‘Alex’s.’

There was a case of social whiplash as the entire table did a collective double-take.

Humphrey surveyed her with a rheumy eye. ‘Couldn’t you think of any more creative way of getting on to the housing list?’

Keep calm, Maddy thought. That bloke who’d crossed the River Styx … He’d met a lot of wierdos too.

‘Look,’ she shuffled her weight from one aching foot to the other, ‘I don’t mean to play the part of the pregnant bimbo, but—’

The Socially Aware Popstar gave a discordant whoop and cocked his elbow on the back of Imogen’s chair. ‘Bimbo? You could never be a bimbo. You’re too fuckin’ ugly,’ he informed her and the rest of London.

Maddy felt a flush of pure anger. Of course she wouldn’t appeal to him in her current state. He liked his women thin to the point of death-by-malnutrition.
English
men were so much more lethal than they appeared. They should be stamped, she decided, with a surgeon general’s warning – ‘Dangerous to Your Health’.

The dining room was lined in mirrors. This offered the megalomaniacal rock star a perfect view of himself in flight. Maddy held him aloft by the scruff of his collar, his legs a denim pendulum. Like a slapstick sequence in some silent movie, he spluttered noiselessly, arms semaphoring. ‘Just tell Alex that I’m looking for him. I’ll leave my number, when I get one, at the desk.’

There was a muffled crash as the Socially Aware Popstar tumbled back into his chair with all the grace of a delivery of land fill.

The crutch of Maddy’s support hose had slipped, giving her a geisha-girl mince. Waddling down the stairs, she vowed to write to
Watchdog
, and complain about the faulty design of the pregnant female. She would set the Trade Practices people on to God right away. She stopped at a pub for a well-earned whisky. The sign on the till read ‘Ladies are requested not to have children at the bar’. The way she was feeling, she couldn’t promise anything.

The Covent Garden tube station lift lurched, after a preparatory convulsion, into the bowels of the earth. All the way down the damp shaft and along the cold tunnels, tiled like a lavatory, Maddy read the small print of advertisements for products she couldn’t
afford
to purchase. On the tube, she stood, dangling from the strap, sticking out her bulge in the hope that someone would give her their seat. Nobody moved. Not one. One of life’s mysteries, thought Maddy, was why everyone with TB, pleurisy, uncontrollable sneezing, rare incurable skin rashes and psychotic anti-social tendencies catches the tube and all the healthy, nice people stay at home. She decided to give up tube travel. As a masochist she was enjoying it far too much. She was so desperate, she even addressed the passengers in her carriage – did any of them know of a room to rent? But this was a breach of tube etiquette. Silence is the only art of conversation on the London Underground.

At King’s Cross station, women weighed down with shopping bags herringboned up the steep steps in vinyl shoes too small for them. Skinheads sniffed glue, alkies pissed up against protected buildings, girls on the nod from smack serviced men behind the recycling bins. The old well of loneliness sure was chock-a-block these days, Maddy observed.

Crack dealers, sporting leather jackets and lurid tattoos, shuffled through the tight-lipped clusters of commuters, who writhed in the rush hour like maggots in a jam jar, all racing home to somewhere they belonged. London constantly gave Maddy the feeling that somewhere just around the corner, behind those tall, wooden Victorian shutters, some mysterious, richly exciting life was in progress. If only she had the address.

It was getting late. She rang the hospital for her blood test result. They regretted to say they’d lost it in the laboratory. Could you please come in and do it again? Was she really going to trust these people with her womb? After all, she only had one.

Maddy retrieved her bag from the railway locker and dragged it into the ladies’ toilets. She scribbled a letter. Then screwed it up. Later she would tell people that it was a lack of good writing paper which had saved her life. Leaving a suicide note on a sanitary towel wrapper was a little too tacky, even for her. Besides, how would she go about it? No doctor would give a pregnant woman a pill prescription. She didn’t even have an oven to call her own. Maybe she should just get back on the tube and inhale. That would definitely do it.