26

Missing Persons Bureau

BY NOVEMBER, MADDY was seriously considering going to the Missing Persons Bureau.

‘And who’s missing?’ they would ask.

‘The person I was B.C. . . . Before Childbirth.’

It was a strange combination – never a nanosecond alone, yet constantly lonely. When pushing a pram, you might as well be swaddled in the Invisible Man’s bandages. Society had handed Maddy her eviction notice. She was a runner-up in the Human Race.

Forget her ‘chequered past’. What Maddy desperately wanted was a chequered present. She found herself yearning for someone with whom she could be intimate. Someone to tell her that her bum didn’t look fat in ski pants and to remind her she was due for a pap smear. Bloody hell. It was just as well she didn’t have enough money to go out to restaurants. The lovey-dovey couples would be a torture too great to bear. They should be in a segregated section: she would rather breathe in cigarette smoke than poison herself with images of smoochie goochie, kissy wissy.

Even if Maddy did have a god-damned social life, which she didn’t, she had turned into one of those women who are always seated down-table at dinner parties. And who could blame the hosts? She was now a mother: more worried about teething rash than Tehran; breast engorgement than Belfast. The Government may be involved in yet another scandal, yet what did Maddy lie awake at night worrying about? Whether the light in the fridge was going off properly when she closed the door.

She floated in the bath, surrounded by wind-up turtles, rubber whales and Postman Pat sponges, turning the hot and cold taps on and off with her toes, for what felt like three days at a time, dreaming of when she’d be able to eat her way down through the cereal packet and not break a crown on a grinning plastic Disney character.

Her first sign of impending insanity was finding herself playing with the playdough . . . with the baby nowhere in sight.

She thought about taking anti-depressants to shut out her feelings of inadequacy and bereavement, but they’d cross over into the breast milk. And eight-month-old Jack, scooting around on his bottom in a circular direction, was already resembling a mal-functioning sputnik. Besides, motherhood was a slower and quieter means of self-destruction. Quieter than, say, a suicide bombing of Pet and Lex’s apartment and less messy than a small handgun.

Maddy loved her son desperately, but felt duped by the Motherhood Myth – the way you feel duped after a facial when the beautician has talked you into £100-worth of Swiss rehydration cream and pore-pampering gel you can’t afford.

And yet the women’s magazines she picked up at the laundromat were full of slick articles on how to increase your baby’s wordpower whilst simultaneously fellating your lover, filleting fish, and stir-frying a Thai extravaganza; pausing only to swallow. The articles were outnumbered by the books. ‘Fair, Firm and Fun! Bring Out the Perfect Mum in You.’ ‘Mothering, not Smothering,’ invisibly subtitled, ‘Babies, the Bushel You’ll Forever More Be Hiding Your Light Under.’

Maddy’s problem was that these publications had led her to believe that parenthood would be like getting a goldfish. Now she knew such books could lie. Something she should have realized after reading Sheila Kitzinger’s infamous claim that giving birth is the ultimate orgasm. Hel-lo?

The second sign that she was loose in her top storey was that if someone offered her a night of earth-shattering orgasms or a full night’s sleep, she’d take the zeds. It was tragic, but true.

The only thing on offer, however, was Fin. His interest rates for what he called ‘petty cash clients’ had suddenly, on a whim, gone up to 140 per cent. He suggested that Maddy work off her payment by acting as a drug courier or by lending a hand, literally, in his brother’s massage parlour.

‘So tell me, how long have you known about your third chromosome?’ Maddy felt that this was a fairly good retort, seeing as she was in the middle of a nervous bloody breakdown.

Fin’s Formica table-top complexion, greyish white, flecked with freckles, turned puce. ‘Enjoy bein’ involuntarily undomiciled, do ya?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Let’s call it’ – he placed his foot on Maddy’s doorstep like a conquistador – ‘underhoused.’

‘Come again?’ Maddy drew Mamma Joy’s voluminous dressing gown more tightly around her.

‘Pay me or I’ll torch ya fuckin’ flat.’

That kind of brute vocabulary even Maddy could understand.

Like all mothers, Maddy wanted Jack to warm his hands before the fire of life (only she didn’t have the pound coin for the meter), but torching Mamma Joy’s flat she felt was going just a tad too far.

Maddy was busy incorporating every obscene term for the male reproductive organs into their cosy little chat when Fin thrust a newspaper clipping under her nostrils. Maddy found herself looking at her own mugshot, under the headline – ‘Unlawfully At Large’. It was part of a colour-supplement article on the number of escapees currently roaming British streets.

From then on, whenever Maddy ventured on to the estate, she felt as though she was wearing pork chop jeans in a dog pound. She took to not looking back, in case something was gaining on her. In the supermarket, as the groceries belched down the conveyor belt, the cashier surveyed her with mild curiosity – a scientist examining a microbe. She bought a balaclava. Now, there was a fashion statement. Especially indoors. But at least people couldn’t read between the worry-lines on her face.

Oh, it was bad enough England being an island . . . but it was now entirely surrounded by hot water. Without passports, she would never get back to Australia with Jack, no matter how much she longed to be shipwrecked on the shore of that uninhibited island.

‘Oh, beam me back to the mother ship,’ begged Maddy. ‘Mission on earth aborted.’