Foetal Attraction (8 page)

‘So, he
is
real,’ Gillian megaphoned, when Maddy sat back in her seat, keeping calm and collected, not panicking. She nodded, a wobbly feeling in her belly. The disadvantage of live tennis was that there was no action replay. She’d been too stunned to clock Alex’s reaction properly. She wanted to see it again, in slow motion. Gillian looked him up and down, then slid her shrewd eyes along the row of his suave associates. ‘I see,’ she said finally. ‘So, he’s a House-in-the-South-of-France, Best-Seats-at-Wimbledon Socialist. For a working-class boy he does seem to be taking to the Good Life.’

Yes, meditated Maddy, coldly. Like champagne off a duck’s back.

She couldn’t stomach more than a few sets. Leaning forward again, she spoke into Alex’s ear. ‘Don’t stay too long. We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.’

‘We have?’ he whispered out of the side of his mouth.

‘Yes. I’m going to kill you, cut you into tiny pieces, then cash in on your life insurance.’

She was only half joking.

Maddy was aware of a tiny shift in her feelings for Alexander Drake. Nothing drastic. Put it this way. If it had been Christmas, it was now Boxing day.

Kangaroo Stew

ENGLISH DINNER PARTIES
are a form of S & M. Sadomastication. Until moving to London, Maddy’s only recipe for a dinner party was to drive over to one of her girlfriends’ houses around suppertime. Post-Prue Leith, she was still no better at interior decorating, continuing to line Alex’s tummy with fish fingers and creamed regurgitated-from-the-can corn. When Alex asked Maddy why she never cooked for their friends, she’d replied it was because she didn’t want to go down for manslaughter.

But people do weird things for love. Van Gogh lopped off his ear. There was that King who abdicated. And Maddy was cooking a dinner party for seven people she didn’t like, at short notice. As she pencil-chewed over the Placement From Hell, it did vaguely cross her mind that perhaps Ms Pankhurst had tied herself to the railings for more than this.

* * *

As soon as Alex left for his film première – a gala benefit the proceeds of which were to go to a fund to help elect more women to parliament – Maddy was on the phone to Gillian. ‘SOS,’ she said simply. ‘Burn rubber. Oh, and bring the garlic crusher.’

‘Well, Madeline, what gourmet treat are you concocting?’ Excavating a space on the kitchen counter, Gillian hoisted her posterior into position between the mustard and the mayonnaise.

‘God knows. Two of the couples are trying for babies. Bryce rang already to say they’re aiming for a girl this time, so Imogen can only eat, I forget … tofu and bats’ testes. Sonia and the Rock Star are no doubt trying for a boy, and will only eat Tibetan fennel and Maltesers.’

‘Just serve pink food to one and blue to the other.’

‘Yeah. And lemon for the first-time fatalists.’

‘Now you’re talking.’

‘Oh God, I feel sick already. Look what the butcher gave me. Budgies.’ The two of them looked dubiously at the tray of quails.

‘Relax. How bad can it be?’ Gillian languorously extracted a bottle of wine from her bag. ‘If they burn, we’ll call it Cajun.’ She clenched the bottle between both knees and twisted in the corkscrew. ‘And if they’re underdone, we’ll call it sushi,’ and yanked. The cork came away with a resonant plonk. ‘All right?’ Gillian rolled up her sleeves and slithered off the
counter
top to help Maddy with the stuffing. ‘I’ve brought you over my copy of
Who’s Who
by the way,’ she said with mock nonchalance.

‘Gillian, I told you. I’m
not
going on safari with you any more.’

‘Well, just glance through,’ she said sweetly. ‘After your experiences at Wimbledon, I think you may find it rather … interesting reading. I mean, you’ve got so much to learn about the delicacies of English convention,’ she lectured, shoving her forefinger up a bird’s bottom. ‘I’ve marked some relevant pages—’

‘Gillian, if I don’t get cracking now, it’s all going to be a disaster.’

Gillian thrummed her nails on the big book. ‘No, I think
this
will be the recipe for disaster,’ she said, ambiguously.

Gillian and Maddy were still up to their elbows in quail innards when Alex, fresh from his première, breezed in. He eyed Gillian with the same suspicion one gives a plate of monkey brains that has unexpectedly turned up on a set menu. Maddy introduced them.

‘Ah,’ Gillian extended a damp hand encrusted in tiny bird bones. ‘The knight in pin-striped armour.’

Alex blanched. ‘Ah, the Great White Husband Hunter.’

‘Um … let me get the door.’ Maddy, returning to fetch glasses, found her lover and best friend
glowering
silently at each other across the bowl of carcasses. ‘Everything okay?’ she enquired, casting little exploratory glances at them both.

‘Oh yes, fine,’ Alex lied. ‘We’re getting on like a stove on fire.’

‘Why did you have to invite
her
?’ he snapped, once all the guests were esconced out of earshot in the living room. ‘She’s just totally out of place.’ The trendy kitchen in their flat was so small that if you stood in the middle it was nearly possible to touch all four walls at once.

‘Why? Wrong
class
?’

‘Maddy, your friend Gillian is made from totally inferior substances. You, my love, are silk …’ Alex ducked the deadly arsenal of cooking utensils which dangled from the ceiling ‘… albeit
raw. She
is one hundred per cent man-made fabric. Her father was an arms dealer, for God’s sake!’

‘What’s her old man got to do with it?’ Maddy wielded the chopping knife with subdued violence. ‘I take people at face value.’ She manoeuvred around Alex to the sink. ‘At least she’s honest. At least she
knows
she’s vain and shallow and self-interested.’

‘What’s
that
supposed to mean?’ Alex tried to follow, howling as the imported chopping block on wheels thudded into his shin.

‘I just hate the Mother Teresa act your friends bung on. A donation to Oxfam here, a dedication to Vaclav
Havel
there, and they think they’ve cornered the market on Human Tragedy.’

‘At least they make an effort. For Gillian Cassells, a tragedy would be going out with, I don’t know … lipstick on her eye tooth.’

Maddy slurped the diminutive livers, hearts and other disembowelled vital organs left over from the stuffing, into the blender. ‘That Humphrey creature, griping on about being a Progressive Socialist … All
he
cares about is the wider distribution of wine and women around the dinner table.’ Maddy flicked a switch and Alex’s protestations were drowned out by the munching and crunching of bone on blade. ‘Here,’ she said, extending a pinky plastered in grey grime. ‘Taste.’

‘It’s not cooked!’

‘I thought you liked things
raw
.’ Alex was about to speak when he was garrotted by the garlic and shallot strings suspended from the elevated pan rack. ‘Not to mention old Harriet. She’s in there now, whining on about the unemployed. What the fuck would
she
know about the unemployed? She’s got tenure.’

‘Oh, it’s about the
job
,’ Alex decrypted, disentangling himself from his vegetable necklace.

‘The only thing she ever gets fired with is enthusiasm … Mainly for
you
.’

‘I know I said I’d take you on the next expedition, but we’re talking cannibals. You’ve heard of
vegetarians
, well these people are
humani
tarians. They eat humans.’

‘Taste.’ Maddy’s little finger, glistening in grey globules, was still outstretched towards him. ‘Does it need salt?’

‘I can’t,’ Alex cringed. ‘It looks like something a Rottweiler threw up.

Maddy felt sweat pricking in the small of her back. She eyed him grimly. ‘Listen, buster, it wasn’t my idea to spend the entire afternoon blanching grapefruit peel. You’re supposed to be the New Man.
You’re
the one supposed to be able to do sensitive things with mange-tout.’

‘Mange what?’

‘Oh Christ.’ The lids of the boiling saucepans rattled angrily. Tiny tornadoes of steam spumed from the stove. They were having, Maddy realized, their first fight. ‘Why is it that once you move in with a man, his arms mysteriously atrophy whenever he’s in the vague vicinity of the kitchen?’

Harriet’s cropped head bobbed into view. Her serrated sneer ran from ear to ear. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Fine,’ the lovers said in unison, smiling sapidly.

‘Anything to drink?’ Harriet waved her empty wineglass in the air. She drank as though she carried a spare liver around in her pocket at all times.

‘Be right there, H.’ Once she’d withdrawn, Alex cupped his hands over his mouth and nose, like an oxygen mask. He breathed deeply, then turned to face
her
, wreathed in conciliatory smiles. ‘You’re right, darling. I’m sorry. You see how poisoned we are by “class”?’ He squatted down to rummage through the wine rack. ‘Think about it. I mean, even our mail travels first and second class.’

‘I’ve noticed. Do first-class letters get a little in-flight movie and a paper-parasoled cocktail on the way or what?’

‘It’s not funny, my love. We’re living in a sick society.’ Placing the bottle on the counter, Alex entwined his arms around her waist. ‘You’ll be so relieved to get back to Oz.’ He kissed her hair. ‘When
are
you going back by the way?’ he asked casually.

Though her whole body sparked at his touch, Maddy pushed him away. ‘My visa doesn’t run out for four more months, you drongo.’ She clouted him good-naturedly. ‘Besides, glum bum, once I get residency I’ll be okay.’ She ruffled his hair and broadened her accent. ‘Once you make an honest sheila out of me.’

Alex placed his hands around the slender throat of the wine bottle as if to throttle it. He extracted the cork. ‘Of course, of course …’ he muttered, retreating hastily into the living room. ‘Some rather tricky whatnots to negotiate first. You know … few loose ends to tie up …’

His words stuck in her guts. Maddy scraped the charnel house of small bird bones into the pan. Their
wings
appeared to flap as they hit the hot peanut oil. She knew just how they felt.

Ignoring her carefully interleaved male-female placement, Britain’s Greatest Living Writer – Humphrey, Sonia the Eco-fascist extraordinaire, and her SAP (Socially Aware Popstar), Bryce and Imogen, designer baby attached to photogenic nipple, the exiled opposition leader of some African state (Alex had insisted on a token black), Harriet, Gillian and Maddy’s knight in pin-striped armour seated themselves pell-mell round the table and started conversing simultaneously. Alex’s friends didn’t have conversations, but interrupted monologues. It was like wading through conversational tapioca pudding. Whining and Dining, Maddy christened it. They whined about the Tory Government, the lack of good Saab mechanics south of the river, how hard it was to get a nanny who would ‘muck in’ and how sending your offspring to a private school did not make you a snob. ‘They don’t have public Montessori,’ Bryce elaborated. ‘Otherwise I’d send him there.’ It was all the fault of their wretched helipad. It would make their child so discriminated against, in
state
schools.

Bryce then settled into some serious name-dropping. Maddy counted thirty-five names, and BIG names too – Gore VIDAL, Al GORE, Vanessa REDGRAVE, Woody ALLEN – in the first 8.3 minutes.

‘Gee, Bryce,’ she interjected, ‘you should get
your
jaw rewired to allow even bigger names out.’

‘Can I help it,’ he yawped, ‘if all my friends are famous?’

Alex shot Maddy a reprimanding look.

‘Actually, nobody realizes just how hard it is being famous,’ Imogen sulked, readjusting her split skirt to reveal a taut thigh. ‘I’m going to hire a zoom lens and take topless and bottomless shots of some of those tabloid editors on holiday and see how
they
like it.’ Having achieved maximum attention, she slowly transplanted the suckling baby from one pouting breast to the other.

In an effort to distract the Exiled Opposition Leader’s eyes away from Imogen’s exposed mammaries, the Socially Aware Popstar (SAP) actually spoke. Maddy couldn’t believe her ears. He might be The Most Famous Rock Star in the World, but he had the personality of a dead gas-meter reader. Still, he was preferable to the Exiled Opposition Leader, who prefaced every comment with ‘as a black person …’

‘Nice day, wasn’t it?’ ventured the SAP.

‘Well, as a black person …’

‘Good drop of wine, isn’t it?’

‘Well, as a black person …’

‘I wish I’d been abused as a child,’ Humphrey was blathering to the water jug. ‘Then I’d have something to tell the Press.’

‘I don’t remember being abused as a child,’ Sonia
revealed
earnestly, ‘but I’m sure I
was
… I’ve just blanked it out.’

‘It’s related, of course, to eating disorders. Bulimia and the like,’ Gillian contributed.

In an effort to be sociable, Maddy volunteered that bulimia seemed quite a good idea. ‘I mean, if you do it fast enough, you can enjoy the food twice. Once on the way down and once on the way up. You can have your cake and throw it up too!’

The women in the room looked at her as though she’d just flayed them alive with barbed wire.

‘I’ve been bulimic for three months,’ bragged Imogen finally.

‘Three months?’ Sonia scoffed. ‘
I’ve
been bulimic for three
years
.’

Maddy had forgotten that whatever Princess Di was alleged to have done became trendy, from adultery and holidays on Necker to bulimia nervosa. No wonder she was having trouble finding her feet in London – they were wedged permanently in her mouth. Beating a tactful retreat to the kitchen, Gillian followed, clutching her copy of
Who’s Who
.

‘This book really is full of the most riveting information. Things you
need to know
… Maddy, my dear, take it from me. Where there’s smoke, there’s—’

‘Toast,’ Maddy said dismissively, as the croutons went up in flames. Dashing in and out of the dining room, the conversation, to Maddy’s ears, was strangely syncopated. ‘Good body.’ ‘Little tart.’ It took
her
three trips before she realized they were talking about the wine and not the MTA. Loading plates, carting pots and pans, fetching designer water, wine, napkins and soup ladles, she began to feel like a wife with not just one, but
seven
ravenous, raucous and totally tipsy husbands. It didn’t take much to galvanize the wealthy English into Raj Mode. ‘Put my jacket somewhere. There’s a dear.’ ‘Top me up, would you?’ The only time any of them paid her any attention, was when the gravy solidified. Voices stopped, mid-sentence. The atmosphere became icy. The situation was only redeemed by Alex’s quip that Maddy would be arrested for carrying a congealed weapon.