Foetal Attraction (28 page)

She crossed into the park. Her only companions were a couple of mangy mutts pissing on the pedestals of the pigeon-shit-speckled busts of broken-nosed
monarchs
nobody remembered. Maybe that was the problem. Their preference for living in the past. Somebody needed to tell them that there was more to life than queuing to glimpse the pickled adenoids of St George, preserved in some diamond-encrusted reliquary.

A nanny! She laughed to herself. How appropriate. She could envisage Alex, nappy-clad, a dummy wedged into his cake-hole, abdicating all responsibility. Her lack of jealousy surprised her. But Maddy knew he didn’t love her
or
his wife
or
the nanny. The only person with whom he was capable of having a passionate love affair was himself. It was a love story to rival all love stories! They should make a film out of it. Alex was the sort of bloke who goes through the Tunnel of Love holding his own hand. He was the worst man in the whole of the habitable world. And England. Oh God. She stomped her feet to keep warm. What was she doing here? Nobody wanted to be in Britain. Not even Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Oh why, oh why had she come to this mingy, stingy armpit-odorous, dead-as-a-dodo, dull-as-ditch-water green and unpleasant little island?

The thing about Europe was that it was
all used up
. The horizon permanently stained in industrial skidmarks. The sea a sewage soup that wasn’t flushed often enough. The cobbled country lanes – all clogged with Volvos. Then why the calm superiority of Humphrey, Bryce, Harriet …? ‘Not for People Like
Us
,’ they were always saying, good Republicans that they were, or ‘she’s getting a bit above herself’.

‘Admit it,’ Humphrey had once lectured her, ‘you adore us. As does New Zealand, Singapore, India, West Indies and various bits of Africa. After all, we gave you your cricket!’ How Maddy loathed the bum-numbing tedium of cricket. It was Wagner – with wickets. ‘We gave you your civilization. We invented you!’

If the English were so intellectually superior, Maddy fumed, why did her tube station have a sign reading ‘The Underground is down the stairs’. Where else would it bloody well be, she wanted to graffiti, every time she passed. Why did they write ‘look left’ in large white letters on their street kerbs? If only they’d take that advice politically. Maddy was sure that in their eyes God was an Englishman, smoking a pipe, reading his copy of
The Times
and eating pud. She started humming the theme tune to
Dr Zhivago
as a flurry of late snow settled on to her shoulders. God’s dandruff. She blew on her hands. In truth, they were more his Frozen than his Chosen People.

Maddy let herself into Gillian’s flat. Her nesting instincts had set in. She never stopped washing – herself, her shelves, her tiles, her toes. She was the Lady Macbeth of Clapham. What a shock England had been. She’d expected lots of cosy four-posters and hand-crocheted doilies. She’d expected wit and warmth and Oscar Wilde wordplay … Instead of which she’d
found
clogged sinks, bad curries, footie hooligans, neo-fascist skinheads, bomb scares and stained porcelain toilet bowls with chains too high to reach.

Maddy curled on the bed and stared at the denuded walls. The heating was on the blink as usual. They’d be sleeping in gloves, beanies, balaclavas, scarves and ski socks again, dreaming they were members of Scott’s Antarctic team. But lying there, in the cold, she grudgingly admitted that no, it wasn’t England she hated. It was Alex. The vowel-rounding, the etiquette tips in restaurants … He was the colonial power she wanted to overthrow. He ruled her heart. He dominated her head. Alex, she now realized, had seen her as a Pacific atoll. A rough cut he was editing. Re-inventing. A country he had colonized.

It was partly, she confessed, her own fault. In Maddy’s mind they were to have been one of those handsome, sterling couples who called each other ‘darling’ and kept their upper lips stiff with ‘yes, my angel’s, before he flew off to bomb and strafe the Hun, until the night his number came up. Then she would stay forever faithful. Or pass away from grief, exactly twenty-four hours later.

She’d seen herself wearing Calvin Klein casuals, her legs free of stubble, with no spots plotting to corrupt her clear complexion. There was no room for snoring or boring or arguing over whose turn it was to change the loo roll on the spindle in Maddy’s fantasy. That sort of domestic drudgery would be left to the Toilet
Fairy
. Their romance was chimerical. She had conjured it up out of the thin, icy London air. She thought she’d known him. But, after all, he was a Pom. And you had to do open-heart surgery before knowing what went on inside an Englishman.

It was then Maddy opened the packet of Jaffa cakes and, spreading out some old
Sunday Times
colour supplement to catch the crumbs, saw the article. ‘A Life in the Day of Alexander Drake’. It was a breathtaking itinerary of waking at 6 a.m. for juice and bran and cups of unsweetened tea. Followed by a twenty-minute jog, half an hour static cycling, yoga, meditation, bread-baking and child ferrying to school, before saving a rare creature from extinction and picking up a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society. After lunch with various famous authors, actors and captains of industry – all of whom were forming a group of Concerned Dads, to speak out against ecological and nuclear disasters for the sake of their children … the rest of Alex’s ‘typical’ day seemed to consist of a hurdy-gurdy of high-profile book launches, reading bedtime stories to his adoring children, co-cooking a meal with his beloved spouse – a delicious dinner over which they discussed world politics. Then at midnight, resting his head on the shoulder of the woman he loved, he quoted a fair whack of love poetry to her, before executing chapters six through nine of the
Kama Sutra
.

A volt of fury surged through Maddy. She would
send
him a gift voucher … for a lobotomy. She would send off an application to a computer dating agency in his name, citing his preference for geriatric, kinky amputees whose hobbies included penis-piercing. She wanted to kill him. The psychopath in the movie
Fatal Attraction
had nothing on her. She wanted to run him over … Well, maybe not kill him. But definitely dent him a little bit. OK, she’d just garrotte him with the underwire of her D-cup maternity bra. This was a man with no redeemable features. At least Hitler could paint. Oh! She thought to herself. What a sham. What a Havisham. But Miss Havisham was better off. She wasn’t up the duff when he ditched her.

Maddy was pacing now, hurling books and crockery and whatever she could find at the walls. ‘My Day,’ she parodied aloud, ‘by Madeline Wolfe.’ Sleep through first twelve hours of it. Wake early afternoon with headache and excruciating back pain. Baby conducted a mariachi band in her belly. Remember being abandoned by father of child. Feel suicidal. Rummage through bathroom cabinet. Ironically, only packet of pills available, Noradine. Contemplate contracepting myself to death. Stagger to fridge. Inhale entire contents. Feel more depressed than ever. Go back to bed.

Her backache was worse now. A nagging, intermittent throb. She had a pain in her stomach from devouring all those Jaffa cakes. Her body was gripped
by
a spasm of anger. She was also angry at all the months she hadn’t been angry. Maddy flung herself on the bed and thrashed about like a hooked marlin. Then, to top it all off, the water-bed sprung a leak. Only they didn’t have a water-bed. ‘Waters breaking’ did not quite capture the total tidal-wave effect. A more accurate description, Maddy felt, would be ‘surf’s up’. Jolts were ringing through her body. She was chewing the carpet.

When Maddy finally realized she was in labour, her scream was as loud as her lipstick.

Part Four: Second Stage

The Birth

IN CLASSIC NOVELS
birth is always done in brackets. Women don’t have babies, they have a row of dots. In books, a woman moans, the doctor comes, somebody boils water, there are six asterisks and there she is, with a bonny wee laddie or lass in her arms and smiles all round. That’s it. That’s all.

I’m sitting up, supported by pillows, I’m grasping my thighs, I’m panting, I have an unstoppable urge to push.

‘Bear down, bear down!’ the midwife enthuses.

All those bloody classes I went to. All that time I spent learning really useful things like why tequila slammers and chilli concarne are not the ideal meal for your baby, minerals wise. WHAT FUCKING GOOD IS THAT GOING TO DO ME NOW?

I gulp a huge breath, and hold it. I’m squeezing down with all my might. I feel a tearing sensation. I’m splitting open. Oh God, I need to crap. I can see the
bedpan
, its lid a battered steel beret set jauntily at an angle. I don’t ask for it. Let the doctor be the butt of the joke for a change.

Pant. Squeeze. Quiver with effort, palsied. ‘Mother courage’ and ‘labour of love’, now I know where those expressions come from. And now I’m pushing again, grunting hard with the strain. I seem to be giving birth to Belgium.

‘What have I missed?’

As I collapse between two mountainous contractions, a crumpled face looms over me. There’s three inches of face fungus on his chin, a Band-aid peeling off one cheek and more bags under his eyes than Fergie takes on vacation. ‘Perfect timing, eh?’ He beams at me, elbowing others out of the way. To Alex, the world is one long queue, which he is entitled to jump. ‘How are you feeling, my love?’

‘Oh, you mean, apart from the intense and excruciating ag—’ I brace myself for another push.

‘Darling, darling … what can I do to help?’

I catch my breath. ‘A holiday. A holiday in Tahiti would help. A Chanel suit, your testicles on a platter—’

A huge contraction torpedoes through my body. Alex is there, squeezing my hand. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do for the pain?’

‘Put me to sleep … Anaesthetize me. Tell me where you’ve been for the last three and a half bloody months!’

Alex, the closest friend I never had, winks, then hoists a video camera up to shoulder-height.

‘Get that fucking thing out of here.’

‘But, Maddy, all the guys film the birth. That’s what guys
do
…’

I want to tell him that it would have been more interesting to film the conception, but I can’t talk. Can’t breathe. Can’t think.

‘Can we remove this man?’ the doctor demands, lifting his head from the coalface. ‘There’s signs of maternal distress. She’s stopped pushing. Baby’s head is not descending.’

One of the student nurses smiles the autograph-hunter’s smile. ‘Aren’t you Alex thingo, from what’s-it?’ she says.

Yo-Yo is scrutinizing the Harley Street Doctor from Hell. ‘Ethrington-Stoppford!’ she exclaims victoriously. ‘I knew I’d heard that name. You’re the doctor they’re prosecuting for illegal female circumcision, aren’t you?’

‘Get that woman out of here!’ he blusters.

‘Doctor,’ the midwife is urgent, insistent, ‘the baby has passed meconium.’

Suddenly it’s all green, backwards hospital-gowns and gloves. My legs are being lifted into stirrups. ‘Miss …’ the doctor’s eyes dart towards the midwife.

‘Wolfe,’ she whispers. It’s so personalized, this service. ‘The doctor’s going to have to use forceps.’ She speaks for him. ‘Do you mind forceps?’

Gee, I don’t know, doc, I want to say. It’s been so long since I was split in two by an icy-cold steel contraption that I can’t remember. But all I can manage is a vigorous nod of my head.

‘Ventouse, doctor?’ the midwife suggests.

Alex jitterbugs by the bed. ‘Christ! There must be something I can do.’

I can see Yolanda setting him in her sights. ‘There’s a very civilized tribe in New Guinea,’ she informs him, ‘where the husband lies on the rafters of the birthing hut with a rope tied around his testes. Every time the woman gets a birthing pain, she tugs on the rope. Personally, I feel they should introduce it on the NHS. Perhaps you’d like to test pilot the practice?’

‘Who the bloody hell are
you
?’ Alex wants to know.

The midwife is telling me that a small suction cap is being applied to the baby’s head. ‘Gentle traction exerted upon the cup will cause the baby’s head to descend into the pelvis.’ Jesus. What a greeting for a little girl. To be hoovered into life. Can’t they just tempt her out with some bait? A slice of Vegemite on toast? Or maybe I can just lie with my legs open in front of
Sesame Street
. Kids love that show. The midwife takes my hand and places it between my legs. I can feel the baby’s hot, wet head. ‘This baby is about to be delivered.’ They make her sound like a letter. I only hope she’s marked ‘Return to Sender’, because Alex is backing towards the door.

‘Look! Look!’ I look and there she is in the mirror.
Her
head extends over my pelvic bone. I can see her brow, then her nose, then her whole face.

‘Pant, pant,’ the midwife instructs me.

‘Bugger off!’

‘You’ll tear!’

First they tell you to push, then they tell you to stop. This is like trying to hold back an erupting volcano with a champagne cork. To simulate the birth experience, take one car jack, insert in rectum, pump to maximum height, replace with jack hammer. I can’t feel the skin rip, but the doctor is bending down there with a scalpel. Then I see the whole head. The contractions cease. The doctor gives my thigh a perfunctory pat. ‘Come on, you can do it.’ The whole labour ward is rallying round, shouting encouragement. My bed is crowded with rowdy spectators. I feel like a football match. ‘You’re not giving me all you’ve got!’ The baby’s shoulders rotate. She’s looking at my right thigh. Oh God, will she be disappointed? Will I live up to her expectations? Everyone in the damn hospital, including the tea lady, seems to be gawking up my fanny.

‘Come on! Come on!’ I bear down again and one shoulder emerges. One more push and the other shoulder appears. It’s the Olympic Games and I’m going for gold. The rest of the baby slides out spontaneously. I see her hands, then her trunk. The doctor lifts her up towards my belly. The baby is warm as bath water. She is solidified light. I feel translucent.
I
look down, expecting to see blue veins pulsating through my skin. She cries, loud and raucous, like little wheels crunching over gravel. They lift her up on to my breast – a wet slippery eel, with no Owner’s Manual. Except it’s not a her. The little bubble on the scalp caused by the vacuum cleaner is not the only added appendage. Well, I’ll be buggered. I’ve given birth to my own little Englishman.