Foetal Attraction (30 page)

I look at her steadily. ‘You mean … you’ve never had children?’

‘Good God, no!’

‘I don’t think she’s ever had
sex
,’ Gilliam surmises.

I’m gawping at her, gob-smacked. I’m getting the giggles. Oh God, don’t laugh. I’ll split my stitches. My womb contracts painfully with every guffaw but I can’t stop. I’m shattered with laughter. A bad attack of the ha-has. A bed-wetting, breath-winding laughter at the absurdity of it all. Yolanda, the virgin-birth
instructress
; Sonia, the politically correct anorexic rushing around Africa tying tusks back onto elephants; Harriet, the bad Feminist fairy from a Gothic horror tale; Bryce, the Intellectual with the low IQ baby; Humphrey, the humanitarian poet with an allergy to emotions; the Rock Star and his exploding bottom; Imogen, now more a surgical than a natural beauty; Felicity running off with the nanny; my love affair with Alex – the ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ – gone stale … I can’t stop, even though I recognize the lowlife who’s just appeared at the door and don’t want him to see me like this. ‘Hysterical with Grief’ will read the headline. ‘Mentally Unbalanced by Life as a Single Mum’. He flourishes his cheque book in the air.

‘Tell him’, I manage to wheeze, ‘I’m not for sale.’

‘Yolanda,’ Gillian orders imperiously, ‘get rid of him, there’s a dear.’

I hear the menacing shushing sound of Yo-Yo’s pantihose retreating. I can’t believe it. The bloody woman is finally coming in useful.

The afternoon slips into gloaming. Gillian prowls the cafeteria for good-looking doctors (‘Now that I only want sex, all I can find are men who want commitments,’ she complains in between excursions). Yolanda stalks the corridor for trespassing journos. Crowds of shrill visitors jostle around the beds of the other mothers in the ward. Champagne corks pop, kids squabble over tins of Quality Street and play
marbles
with green grapes down the linoleum aisle. First-time grandmothers weep with a melancholy joy and aunties flourish hideous pastel matinée jackets the size of handkerchiefs. All the bedridden women have the same dazed, ecstatic expression as I do – the look of lifers who’ve just tunnelled to freedom.

The curtains are open, the room bright. From the gloomy street, we must look as lit up as an aquarium. Occasionally, Alex appears at the glass porthole in the door, to blink amphibiously, before Yo-Yo sharks after him. Beyond the grimy windows, the cold snap continues. Rain drizzles through a slosh of fog. The stone gargoyles that so terrified me earlier are now wearing toupees of snow. I can hear the quiet swish of tyres on wet bitumen, their headlights illuminating the roadside scribble of trees. Commuters, shrouded in overcoats and soggy umbrellas, trudge by below.

But here inside the air is watery, filled with light. Babies, neatly packaged in pink and blue, are stacked side by side in plastic trolley cots. The central heating hums along with the Muzak. ‘Disco Inferno’ segues into Johnny Cash; appropriately, for the episiotomized, it’s ‘Burn, Burn, Burn, the Ring of Fire, the Ring of Fire’.

And my little baby sleeps. Dreams flicker across his face, soft as sunlight. Blond hair feathers on to his perfect forehead. Perched on my rubber ring, I cling to his little body, a cast-away, miraculously rescued. It all filters through my gills, like oxygen.

About the Author

Kathy Lette first achieved
succès de scandale
as a teenager with the novel
Puberty Blues
, which was made into a major film and a TV mini-series. After several years as a newspaper columnist and television sitcom writer in America and Australia, she wrote ten international bestsellers including
Mad Cows
(which was made into a film starring Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel),
How to Kill Your Husband and Other Handy Household Hints
(recently staged by the Victorian Opera, Australia), and
To Love, Honour and Betray
. Her novels have been published in fourteen languages around the world. Kathy appears regularly as a guest on the BBC and Sky News. She is also an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2004, she was the London Savoy Hotel’s Writer in Residence. In 2010 she recieved an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University.

Kathy lives in London with her husband and two children.

Visit her website at
www.kathylette.com
and on Twitter
@KathyLette
.

Also by Kathy Lette

The Boy Who Fell to Earth

Men : A User’s Guide

To Love, Honour and Betray (Till Divorce Us Do Part)

How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints)

Dead Sexy

Nip ‘n’ Tuck

Puberty Blues

Altar Ego

Foetal Attraction

Girls’ Night Out

Mad Cows

The Llama Parlour

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FOETAL ATTRACTION
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN: 9781409043218
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552775939

First publication in Great Britain
in 1993 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Black Swan edition published 2012

Copyright © Kathy Lette 1993

Kathy Lette has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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is available from the British Library.

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