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Authors: Kathy Lette

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BOOK: Foetal Attraction
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Is that woman drugged? Yes, by the hair. All the way up the street. I’m a groan woman. Being taken for grunted. God. He should be put in a penitentiary. I will find him a punpal … Am I talking or thinking these things? Oh, Christ. I’m going from bad to worse. From bed to nurse. Who goes there? Friend or enema? How ever did I end up here? It was a foetal error. Natural childbirth is a myth. A myth is a female moth. A penis is a guided muscle. If only I’d chopped off his cock. Now there’s a eunuch experience.

I’m half into my clothes before the orderlies get me. Yolanda cranks up the bed until I’m sitting upright. The midwife opens my legs. A nurse is taking my blood pressure. The doctor is here, masked in green, hauling on a rubber glove and poking at my groin. I suddenly remember that I’m supposed to get a crush on my obstetrician. Gee, I’ve been looking for a chance to ask him out, but the right moment just hasn’t seemed to arrive. ‘Move back,’ he orders Yolanda.

‘I like the olden days,’ she scoffs, trying to elbow him out of the way, ‘say 1700
BC
. If a doctor cocked up, his hand got amputated.’

I’m dimly aware of the doctor tapping the side of his head. ‘Smaller muscle,’ he says curtly.

Now I recognise him. It’s the Harley Street Doctor From Hell. If I had the energy, I’d tell Doctor Etherington-Stoppford, Feminist-hater, that we’ll only be within a cooee of equality when in competent women get appointed to positions of great responsibility. Like
consultant obstetrician
. Begin to wish I’d brought along a little light bedside reading; something to leave prominently on the covers. Say, ‘Medical Malpractice. You Too Can Sue.’

Yolanda appears between my legs, holding a mirror. I catch sight of my face. I’m haggard, pale, like the photos of aeroplane hostages after five days of no food, no water and constant fear of death. And I am a hostage too. With an unbreakable appointment on this birthing table.

The contraction monitor, inking on to graph paper, looks like a lie detector. I have lied about so much. That I want the baby, when I don’t. That I’ll be a good mother, when I won’t. That I’m still in love with a man who’s lower than shark shit.

‘It’s time, love,’ I hear the midwife say, ‘to push.’

Flesh-Coloured Flares and Feeding Frenzies

FOR AN AUSSIE
Sheila, twelve thousand miles from home, abandoned by her bloke, her visa about to expire, with no place to live and no income, being pregnant in London is about as much fun as hunting season is for a pheasant in an English field.

By the second trimester, Maddy’s body was going through more mutations than Jekyll and Hyde. Warning. Dangerous Mutant at large. She was seriously considering joining the Moscow State Circus. Her belly gave the impression that someone had taken to it with a bicycle pump. Her ankles were so swollen, it looked as though she was wearing flesh-coloured bell-bottoms. Silver stretch marks were surfacing all over her body like runs in stockings. Her distended breasts, cased in an industrial-strength, steel-capped bra, put her seriously off balance. She was forever listing forward into her lasagne. When people asked why she only wore black,
she
said that she was in mourning for her body.

But her body was shipshape compared to her brain. Everything made her cry. The afternoon movies with happy endings. The afternoon movies with sad endings. The arty French movies with no endings at all. It was time to face facts. She was brain dead. The symptoms? She’d started to find
Neighbours
a thought-provoking programme.

Even if
she
wasn’t mentally malnourished, the baby definitely would be. Maddy was convinced she’d crushed its skull from wearing tights with ‘control panty girdles’ in the hope of fooling potential employers that she wasn’t pregnant.

While Maddy held in her stomach and waddled the streets looking for a job, Gillian continued her own form of vocational fulfilment. Ms Cassells had initially resisted the idea of Maddy moving into her Fulham flat. Her husband-hunting had reached a new level of intensity. This woman was using everything bar a net and a tranquillizer gun. She’d recently run to earth a man called Maurice, undisputed Mono-Fibre-Hair-Extension-King. He was the toupé tycoon. So rich, Gillian trilled, that he’d hired one hundred and twenty people to flush the toilets of his mansion continually for a week during that cold snap last winter, to stop the water-pipes from freezing over. The poor bloke was sexually besotted. Therefore Gillian was adamant. ‘Until he proposes,’ she vowed, ‘the thigh’s the limit.’

‘Look, I’ll just stay until you snare him,’ Maddy had pleaded the day she’d terminated her termination.

‘House guests are like fish,’ Gillian had replied down the phone. ‘They go off after twenty-four hours.’


Please
, Gill.’ Maddy was standing in a urine-soaked phone booth at King’s Cross watching a half-starved punk savage a beef burger he’d retrieved from a garbage bin.

‘I never live with other women. I do so hate all that menstrual synchronicity.’

When Maddy pointed out that in her current state this wasn’t exactly going to be a problem, Gillian finally confessed the real reason for her hesitation. She’d pawned her furniture. Which explained the desperation on the safari front.

Maddy fed another ten-p piece into the greedy chrome slit on the face of the phone. A charming piece of graffiti caught her eye: ‘Never mind the love and passion, whack it up her doggy-fashion’.

‘But if you’re going hunting, you need me. Teeth, tits, nose, hose, remember?’

It was this which finally persuaded Gillian. Even though she’d set her traps for Maurice, this time she was not simply going to lie in wait for her prey. With her thirty-sixth birthday fast approaching, she was in a feeding frenzy. She was sniffing for trouser and taking no prisoners.

The first creature she ensnared was a wealthy, ageing movie star.

‘An
actor
?’ Maddy grimaced during their regular morning-after autopsy. ‘He won’t have two brain cells to rub together.’

Gillian professed that he was big for his brain. Like a dinosaur. ‘What a body. You could bivouac in the shade of this man’s penis.’

It all ended shortly afterwards over cunnilingus. The lack of. ‘He came up dry retching. He said, my dear, that it was the place seals went to die.’

The next man she took captive was a romantic novelist who wrote under the name of Candice Love and was really a sixteen-stone Yorkshireman with an ailing prostate and a drink problem.

But, alas, she had to set him free as well. Put it this way: the book royalties were attractive but the wine enemas were not.

Much to Maddy’s horror, she even briefly entrapped Humphrey. His favourite venue turned out to be a rubber club in Soho. At first Gillian was open-minded. Wearing rubber, she asserted, was good for weight loss. ‘If one wears rubber stockings as well, one’s shoes fill up with water in no time. My dear, it’s better than a sauna.’

But that, too, bit the romantic dust. ‘The trouble with Englishmen, my dear, is that they’ve all got corrugated bottoms from being beaten so much at boarding school,’ Gillian volunteered by way of an explanation.

‘Oh, don’t tell me he was into school uniforms and
spanking
and all that?’ Maddy shrieked, guzzling another croissant. ‘How trite.’

‘Put it this way. He made an impression on my mind … from the bottom up.’

‘Get out of here.’

‘Oh yes. Closet gay. I should have guessed when he got into bed with the jar of Vaseline. “What?” I said to him. “Planning to swim the English Channel?” ’

But finally things started to look up on the Mono-Fibre-Hair-Extension-Front. Having played hard to get for weeks, Gillian was now, in her words, being ‘stalked by a penis’. ‘He’ll succumb any night now,’ was her morning boast over toast. ‘I should get the bended knee. The lot! Which means, my dear, that you simply must find employment.’

But finding a job was proving even harder than Maddy had feared. The worst thing about being pregnant was that as soon as people knew, they instantly deducted twenty points from her IQ. She felt that these were twenty points which she could not afford to lose. Not only did maternity shops insist on dressing her like a little girl in pinks and pastels, frills and florals, but to people on the street she was becoming invisible. Maddy did everything she could
not
to look pregnant. She razored her red hair short. She got a rose tattoo. She pierced her left nostril. The overall effect failed to render her inconspicuous … but nor did it seem to impress potential employers.

There was nothing left to do but eat. Maddy set
about
devouring everything within mouth-radius. She was definitely exceeding the feed limit.

Oh, God. Fat City.’ She draped a tea towel over the window pane to obscure her reflection. ‘Nobody told me,’ she blurted between mouthfuls of cheesecake and whipped cream, ‘that IT would want three-course meals in the middle of the night.’

‘Well, what do you expect?’ Gillian sat side-saddle on the fruit-box they used as a chair. ‘You’re eating for two.’

‘Two? I’m eating for ten. The entire population of north London. The northern hemisphere. The planet …’

‘I don’t know what you’re worried about, my dear. You look extremely well.’

‘I look like a sumo wrestler. In fact, I make a sumo wrestler look anorexic. I have had to let out my clothes a kilometre on each side. My birthday covers two days. My fingers feel fat. My eyelids feel fat. I don’t just have double chins, but double thighs, eyes, toes … I can no longer get in or out of a car without the aid of a crowbar. I can no longer do up my shoes. I’ve forgotten what my pubes look like …’

‘Oh, well,’ Gillian patted Maddy’s paunch, ‘at least you now know what it must feel like to be a middle-aged Aussie male.’ She watched Maddy hoover up an entire pantry of food. ‘One would presume’, she analysed cautiously, ‘that it is something else for which you are famished.’

‘No!
Really?
’ Maddy grated sarcastically. ‘Thank you,
Freud
.’

Gillian was convinced that the baby was going to be born with a birthmark in the shape of a television set. In the chance of catching a glimpse of Alex, Maddy watched anything and everything. ‘He’s just got a whole lot of unresolved guilt about leaving his kids, that’s all,’ she told Gillian one night after they’d sat through a hideously dull ceremony commemorating the opening of a new aquarium. For most of us, plaque is something you get on your teeth. For Alex, they were things to unveil. ‘He has to prepare them slowly. Imagine how displaced they’re going to feel by the arrival of a new little sprog!’ Maddy was busy blue-tacking Velcro down the zippers of her skirts to give her more waist space.

‘Ah-huh,’ Gillian grunted sceptically.

‘It’s the decade of the Dad, you know,’ Maddy claimed. ‘Pick up any celebrity profile and all they do is rave about their babies. Sting, Schwarzenegger, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beattie …’

‘Maddy, do you see this Velcro? The only way you’re going to get That Man to stay close to you is to coat him in it. Neck to knee. That Man is congenitally polygamous.’

Sure, Maddy conceded, they had their differences. While she had her heart set on marriage, a mortgage, two holidays a year somewhere hot and happy-ever-afters, Alex wanted a termination and a one-way ticket
to
Australia in her name, pronto. But she’d convinced herself that once the baby was born, he wouldn’t be able to resist the irresistible mother of his irresistible child … At least that was the theory.

In reality, Maddy was feeling pretty bloody resistible. It wasn’t just the fact that the doctor insisted on referring to her as an ‘elderly primigravida’, but her body wasn’t doing well in the ‘glow’ stakes. Every morning she leapt out of bed and raced to the mirror to see if she’d ‘bloomed’. But it never happened. She just got fatter and fatter. At the hospital for the dreaded ‘weigh in’, Maddy refused to climb on to the scales until she’d removed her ear studs, eye-shadow, deodorant … But still the needle crept disconcertingly upwards. She’d lean forward, balance on one leg, breathe out and think of bubbles … but it stayed stubbornly put. ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind, Doc,’ she’d bluster finally, leaping off to remove her nail varnish.

Convinced that her body had been taken over by aliens, she was vastly relieved when The Thing turned out to be a grainy, sepia-grey baby girl on the ultrasound monitor.

‘How do you know it’s a girl?’ Gillian asked, squinting dubiously at the screen to catch a glimpse of the coming attraction. ‘Is she carrying a handbag?’ Gillian felt that ultrasounds would be more useful if they could determine whether the child was the stuff of which billionaire oil barons were made.

Maddy thrilled as the baby executed a repertoire of back flips and tumble turns – performing for the camera. ‘Her father’s daughter,’ she laughed, delighted. As she watched the little darling creature doing laps up and down her uterus, she longed to be able similarly to X-ray her relationship with Alex. It was two months since she’d heard from him. What she desperately needed was a Romance Ultrasound, to check if its heart was still beating.

It wasn’t till Maddy cheered herself up with a honey and wheatgerm face pack, and
ate it
, that she finally admitted something had to be done. It was Operation Take Your Mind Off Alex.

Although nervous that someone might harpoon her, she started swimming in the local council pool. It was chlorinated phlegm. ‘For once in your life,’ Maddy advised Gillian before they plunged, ‘don’t swallow.’

‘I told you. I never do, darling.’

Despite her dirigible shape, she was still the fastest in the pool. Gillian, adorned in a petalled swimming-cap, emitted a few poignant bubbles before disappearing in Maddy’s wake.

She went to a hypnotist, to ‘plant a positive image of birth in her subconscious’. Maddy was extremely disappointed. Not only did he not use a watch, but she didn’t once feel like Cleopatra.

‘Umm, that’s reincarnation, dear,’ Gillian explained patiently.

Meals were now taking A level maths, as Maddy
weighed
helpings and calculated calories. To fill any time left over, she joined an antenatal class. Having enlisted Gillian as standby ‘support person’, in the remote possibility that Alex remained intractable, Maddy insisted on dragging her to grunting class. She was far from keen. The closest she had ever got to a baby was Norman. Decked out in a nanny outfit, she’d put him over her knee and spank him. In the end, she cancelled at the last minute. Maurice had swallowed the bait. He was trapped. His chauffeur had delivered a wedding album which played ‘Here Comes the Bride’ when opened. Now that Gillian had her man, she no longer had to keep up a pretence of tastefulness. Going totally Golders Green, she immediately ordered a seven-hundred-and-eighty-pound wedding cake, the iced tiers of which were linked by stairways on which stood figures of men in liquorice dinner jackets and marzipan bridesmaids clustered about a fountain which spouted champagne.

BOOK: Foetal Attraction
5.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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