31

Handbags At Dawn

GILLIAN, IN AN uncharacteristically papal gesture, flung herself horizontal and kissed the pavement of a side alley in Soho. ‘Somebody mug me! I can’t tell you how divine it is to be out of the suburbs.’

‘Gillian, for God’s sake,’ Maddy hissed, taut as a wire. At the loss of Jack, her maternal instincts had come tidal-waving back.

‘Maddy told me you love dat place.’ While Gillian and Maddy played ‘Spot the Cop’, Mamma Joy was threading a wire coat-hanger down the inside window of the passenger side of Rupert Peregrine’s decrepit XJ6.

‘A Milton Keynes shop assistant asked me if I was moving in permanently. “Can you get mangoes all year round?” I enquired. “Mangoes?” she queried. “precisely,” I replied.’

The light in Peregrine’s second-floor office was extinguished just as Mamma Joy eased the lock upwards.

‘Gillian! Get in.’

Maddy and Gillian shrunk down into the rancid darkness of the back seat filthy with fag ends and waited for the sound of the key in the lock. The news on the sour-grapevine was that one of the Holloway ‘lifers’ was pregnant. Rupert Peregrine was the prime sleazy suspect.

The car lurched as Maddy’s solicitor squeezed his waistline of Ordnance Survey dimensions behind the wheel. Mimicking the move she’d seen on endless TV cop dramas, Maddy held what she hoped felt like a gun (but was really one of Jack’s Tommee Tippee trainer cups) up against the base of Peregrine’s dandruffy skull. Gillian leaned over and extracted the keys from the ignition.

‘Dwina has taken Jack.’ Maddy’s throat was so constricted with grief that her voice came out in grave, low tones she didn’t recognize.

‘Well, well, well,’ Peregrine said, snidely contemptuous. ‘Isn’t life bedevilled with perplexing little conundrums.’

Maddy thrust the baby’s beaker harder into the blubbery folds of his neck. ‘If you don’t help me, I’ll testify against you. Oh, yes. It was a pleasure working under him, your honour. Very laid-back attitude.’

‘Really? I would have thought absconding from Ye Olde Women’s Prison could perhaps put a small indentation in one’s credibility . . . but what would I know, a humble lawyer?’ Peregrine shrugged, not a dent in his scabrous charisma.

‘Listen, you swivel-eyed, impotent inebriate—’

‘I see that your grasp of the Mother Tongue has not improved. There is no such thing as an impotent man,’ he replied, scathingly, ‘only blemished women.’

This called for female reinforcements. Maddy gave the nod and Mamma Joy thundered out of the shadows and origamied herself in beside the truculent solicitor. With scornful nonchalance, Peregrine made a sluggish move to open his door.

‘Oooh, I tink you is in too much of a hurry.’ Mamma Joy’s chin rolls quivered with mirth.

‘Especially when she’s got a loaded cat in her pocket,’ Maddy added triumphantly.

The fleshy acreage of Peregrine’s face fell. ‘You’ve got Butter Truffles?’ he asked in a clammy voice.

Mamma Joy produced the over-fed fur ball and held it just out of Peregrine’s reach. The cat whined harrowingly. Butter Truffle’s owner twitched, perspired, fidgeted. ‘Well?’ she asked, stretching the feline’s neck to a wringable length.

‘I didn’t want to do it,’ he bleated.

‘Do what?’ demanded Maddy.

‘It’s genetic. A primitive instinct for survival . . .’

Mamma Joy tightened her lock on the cat’s larynx.

‘But various psychological nooses seemed to be drawing closer . . . and a career change appeared suddenly desirable.’ He spluttered, catching his carbolic breath. ‘Somewhere humid which involved cocktails with pastel parasols in them . . . Ms Phelps is helping me finance my . . . early retirement. All I had to do was draw up some fake adoption papers.’

A cry of anguish unrolled down Maddy’s face like a window blind. ‘Who for?’ her voice grated in her dry throat. It hurt her to spit out the words. ‘When?

Where?’

‘Her niece picked them up this evening. New Zealand lass. On the traditional trek to Europe. The transaction, I believe, is to take place tomorrow. A vested interest, masquerading as magnanimity.’

‘You’re the one whose English hasn’t improved,’ Maddy yowled.

‘Talk proper so’s I can understand what youse say-in’.’ The cat’s Pernod coloured eyes bulged balefully as Mamma Joy tightened her grip.

‘Ten thousand pounds, I believe, was the payment.’

The women gasped, as a trio.

‘Nice couple, though. He’s in advertising.’

Maddy fought back a debilitating fit of crying.

‘What we goin’ to do wid you now?’ Mamma Joy tweaked his flabby cheek. ‘Maybe I should just rape you?’

‘No!’ Peregrine mewled with febrile anxiety.

‘You say no,’ Gillian teased disdainfully, ‘but do you really mean no?’

‘Please don’t labour under the misconception that this little contretemps of ours will not remain strictly entre nous,’ he Uriah Heaped. ‘Butter Truffles and I were going to satiate our hacienda hankering in a week or two, but we could depart earlier. Today perhaps. Hey, why be a slave to self-control?’

Maddy wailed. Why indeed? Her fist had come down on Peregrine’s head before she realized it was raised.

Their rushed plan had to be simple. It was hatched over hot chocolate huddled together in Mamma Joy’s fetid living room. Gillian fought recruitment. As far as she was concerned, breaking and entering was a much more terrifying, nail-nibbling experience for the break and enterer, than the person being broken in to. The person being broken in to only had to worry that you might forget to take the family heirlooms they hate and have over-insured. The breaker-in, on the other hand, had to worry about being skewered on gate railings, barbecued on electric fences, gnawed by Rottweilers and caught on closed-circuit security cameras whilst having a bad hair day. (A ‘Lockerbie’, she called it. A Hair Disaster.)

Then there was the trauma of finding a ladder in your stocking, once you’ve got it on over your face.

Gillian was saved the ordeal by the arrival of Sputnik. As Mamma Joy ushered her into the flat, Maddy was surprised to detect a meek look in her eyes; defeat in her rounded shoulders. Removed from the prison environment, she was like a bat in daylight – dazed and disorientated. Her predatory expression had collapsed into one of troubling humility. Her once purple hair had grown long and lank. The slave bracelet around her scrawny ankle made her look like a plucked chicken.

‘What the hell is she doing here?’ Maddy shrilled. As the hours ticked by, she’d become more wound up than a Taiwanese watch.

‘She goin’ to set de fire for us.’ Mamma Joy had a burning desire to smoke Dwina out of her house by the means of a spot of arson at her office. Maddy, using forged social service documents (Mamma Joy’s recipe for Cat Creole had proved an excellent Peregrine motivator) would then steal back her baby from the dim New Zealander.

‘Why?’ Maddy asked suspiciously. ‘Friggin’ hell! You’re not still trying to take up residency in my undies, are you?’

‘Wassat? I wanted ya to get it down, that’s all . . .’

‘Go down is the expression I think you’re looking for.’

‘On paper. Me life story,’ Sputnik said, declining her stereotype. ‘I can’t write, see.’

‘Wait. You wanted me to write your memoirs?’

‘That Tonya Harding cow, Amy Fisher and Joey Bottafuoco, those Menendez Bruvers – the ones that murdered their parents. All them geezers got movie deals an’ that. Who said crime don’t pay, eh? That’s why I planted the Malteser. To have somefink over ya.’

Prisoners used to dream of escape, thought Maddy. Now they dreamed of feature films and book rights – How to Kill Friends and Influence Morons. ‘You mean, you didn’t want to have sex with me?’

‘Shit, no. Wiv a skinny-arsed bitch like you?’

‘But why do you want to help me now?’ interrogated Maddy, with more hostility than she felt.

Sputnik picked at the hole in the sole of her tennis shoe.

‘You could end up back inside.’ Maddy watched her nibble at the skin on the side of her nails. They were fairly well gnawed already and she drew blood quickly. Her glazed eyes darted to and fro.

‘Everybody knows me Inside,’ she appealed softly. ‘I’m a Somebody in there. Out ’ere, well, it does me ’ed in.’

There was a sad silence while this wretched information was absorbed. A life of children’s homes and detention centres and ‘giving up’ was all she could succeed in.

‘Sweet Lord, gal!’ Mamma Joy slapped her herculean thighs. ‘Let her do it.’

Sputnik, taking Maddy’s silence as a yes, was suddenly possessed with the radiance and energy of a girl in a tampon ad. Like a warrior into battle, the first thing she did was shave her head.

As she watched Sputnik assembling her incendiary calling card, Maddy willed herself to stay calm. She had to bluff her way into Edwina Phelps’ house, be convinced as a Scarf Draper and rescue Jack. She must not take to Dwina’s furnishings with a chainsaw. Nor should she wait and strafe her with a machine gun. She might just put some Nair Hair Remover in her enemy’s shampoo if there was time, but that was all.

‘What the hell’s happened to your tooth?’ Maddy asked when they rendezvoused with Mamma Joy a few hours later in the estate’s car park. The sparkle was missing from her smile.

‘Dat nutin’, gal. I soon get anudder one when tings back up.’ A majestic sweep of her arms revealed the proceeds of the diamond sale – a hot yellow VW Beetle holed up behind a graffitied lamp-post. The car was so dilapidated, no one would insure it – they’d just give you a survival kit. The stickers covering the chassis read ‘My other husband’s a stud muffin’, ‘We’re staying together for the sake of the cats’ and ‘Smile, it’s the second best thing you can do with your lips’.

It seemed to Maddy that the stickers were the only thing holding the rust-bucket together.

‘De get-away car,’ Mamma Joy grinned.

‘Did you have to purchase a vehicle with red flames licking their way up the bonnet?’ asked Gillian, mortified. She was not having a good day. The grot and grime of Mamma Joy’s flat (‘that’s not dust,’ she had said, running finger along a shelf, ‘that’s topsoil!’) was bad enough, but she was now expected to get into a car whose bumper stickers she didn’t agree with. ‘What is left of my reputation will be ruined, you understand.’

‘Your reputation is like your virginity, gal; just sometin’ extra to carry around. It’s de first time me have intermittent wipers!’ Mamma Joy trilled. ‘Hmm, yes! I is comin’ up in de world.’

With Mamma Joy driving and Gillian navigating (using the map-reading technique made famous by millions of finishing-school females before her – it’s one fingernail’s length further towards the red dot and then veer left.) they deposited Sputnik, beaming like a demented cherub, outside Dwina’s office. Maddy disembarked near the Highgate address Peregrine had given them.

The freezing air punched into her like a fist; it was colder than a polar-bear’s bum. Maddy couldn’t believe the Gothic twist to the plot – plot being the operative word. The best position for Dwina-surveillance was from the shrubbery of Highgate cemetery. Maddy, dodging frozen blobs of dog shit, crouched amid the skewed tombstones – it was like being inside the dank mouth of someone dentally challenged – and strained to see through the ten-denier fog until her eyes ached. Branches scrabbled at the air above her. A feeble dawn tinged leaden clouds. In the livid light, London stretched out below, bleak and desolate. Something touched her in the dark. Her heart pogoed into her mouth. Before she could scream, the shape purred. Maddy looked down at a half-starved cat performing a minuet around her trembling legs.

At cock-crow, as planned, Maddy, willing her teeth to stop castanetting, detected a smudge of light in Dwina’s house. An eternity of minutes later, the front door of the gaunt terrace wheezed open. A spoke of light fell on the path. Dwina, still stabbing her arms into her coat, scuffled out from the dimly lit hall and hurled herself behind the wheel of her maroon Montego.

At first it wouldn’t start. In an agony of dread, she waited and watched as Dwina tried to fire the ignition. The emphysemic engine strained. Maddy held her breath. Finally, the yolk-yellow headlights reflected in the wet bitumen wavered in the rain and she was gone.

Layered in coats and cardigans, Maddy the Michelin woman levered herself down from her eerie perch and, clutching her fake papers, rolled across the deserted road and punched the bell. She was so psyched up that when the door eventually opened to reveal a young woman with an eyelash curler clamped to one eye-socket and a mascara wand hovering near the other, the ordinariness, the indifference made her gasp. ‘Yiss?’

Maddy extended the papers. ‘Social Services.’

It was easier than Maddy had ever imagined. Jack was sitting on the living-room couch in front of a Disney video, flinging food in his renowned imitation of a lid-less blender. He squealed with joy, put out his arms and, much to her astonishment, stepped towards her, legs wide apart like a gunslinger.

Maddy’s heart beat gave a ragged thud. ‘He walked!’ In a daze of joy, she lavished him with loud kisses, even on his creamy, dreamy eyelids.

The niece picked black globules off the tips of her lashes. ‘So what?’ she shrugged, eyeing Maddy narrowly. ‘You’d bitter hand round till my Aunty gits back. I’m jist babysitting.’

Maddy looked at her tangle-toed darling, his plump, pink mouth gurgling, his eyes glittering with glee, and tried hard to swallow her elation. ‘No time. It’s all official.’ She made a dart for the door.

‘Hey, what’s goan on?’

The niece’s question was answered by the chilling voice of Edwina Phelps. Maddy hadn’t heard the key clicking in the lock but, rounding into the hall, there was her enemy, blocking the exit in a paisley dress disconcertingly similar to her living-room curtains.

‘Hello, Madeline,’ Dwina said with greeting-card courtesy. ‘How are you? In all the chaos I forgot my office keys.’

‘Oh, thank you, Fate Fairy.’ Maddy cursed inwardly. This was the same Fate Fairy who’d given her a mother who knew the difference between marjoram and marijuana. The same Fate Fairy who’d sent Maddy into Harrods to buy a packet of prunes.

‘A patient,’ Dwina explained to her niece, in a voice of unfathomable composure. ‘I’m her psychotherapist.’

‘With the emphasis on psycho.’ Maddy cleaved Jack tightly to her. ‘Think “social worker” by day . . . Norman Bates by night.’

‘You’re projecting again, Maddy! Now, give me the baby.’

‘No! You stole him and now you’re going to sell him to the highest bidder!’

The niece poked absentmindedly at a pimple.

‘These women. They’ll say anything.’ Dwina’s voice was even, conversational, as though discussing a bus timetable. ‘As if I could ever do such a thing. I adore children.’

‘Yeah, I bet that’s what it says on your charge sheet.’

‘Now, come on, lovey. Give me the baby.’ She made a move towards Maddy.

‘Why?’ Maddy shoved her backwards with one hand, into an armchair. ‘Why the hell are you doing this to me?’

‘Good! Vent! Vent! Let go!’

‘What have Jack and I ever done to you?’

‘She thinks all babies are hers,’ Dwina explained with quiet lucidity. She was breathtakingly plausible. ‘The trouble is, she hasn’t found her inner child.’

‘No, but you’ve obviously found your inner arsehole . . . If she’s not lying,’ Maddy implored the girl, ‘why doesn’t she call the cops?’

The niece, holding her eyelash curler like a handgun, turned on her relation. ‘You did say you’d take me to a restaurant which revolves, Aunt Dwee, for my twinny-first,’ she said, sincere with petulance. ‘And all you gave me was that bloody salad dryer. I hate salad!’

‘Sweetie,’ Dwina said, placing her hands just so on her panty-hosed knees. ‘Why don’t you take my car to work? You’re always pestering me about it. I won’t be needing it today,’ came her clotted cream consonants, ‘except to take you to a,’ – she raised her index finger ceilingwards and twirled it – ‘certain restaurant for dinner.’

The New Zealand niece’s plain, impudent face lit up. ‘Brill.’ In a wave of her mascara wand, she was gone.

With bolt of lightning speed, Dwina’s five foot three inch body flew across the room as though propelled by a poltergeist. Grasping Jack under her left arm, Maddy lashed out with her right. She felt like King Kong, swatting planes with one paw, whilst maintaining her precarious perch atop the Empire State Building with the other. Dwina yanked Jack’s arm. He yelped. Maddy got a retaliatory hold on Dwina’s hair. Dwina tugged harder on Jack. He screamed in pain.

‘Stop!’ Maddy begged. ‘You’ll break his arm!’

‘Let him go then!’ Dwina spat, looking at her murderously.

Maddy, her nose bleeding, scratch marks down her face, her heart drilling against her ribs, did the only thing she could. She let go of her darling.

‘Make one move and I’ll hurt him.’ A rictus smile spread over Edwina’s face. ‘Women like you shouldn’t have babies,’ she said with cold-blooded complacency. ‘You should be forced to wear contraceptive patches. With an IQ test required before removal. Women like you should be spayed.’

Maddy stood still, mesmerized with horror. She tried not to hyperventilate. She told herself this wasn’t happening. She told herself that Life was probably just a strange experiment being carried out on a lesser planet.

‘Meanwhile, it’s a simple equation. Too many single mothers parasitically oppressing the welfare system, and married, intellectually elite couples, who can afford babies – unable to conceive.’ She gave Maddy a shrivelling look. ‘We simply take from the poor . . . and give to the rich.’

Jack was whimpering: his angelic face streaked with dirty tears. Maddy’s arms ached for him. ‘And you get to make a heap of dough on the way.’

‘Citizen’s arrest.’ Dwina snatched the key from the utility cupboard and gestured for Maddy to climb inside. ‘I’ll hand you over to Detective Sergeant Slynne, just as soon as I’ve handed over my other little delivery.’

Maddy’s blood curdled. ‘No!’

Dwina pinched Jack, hard enough to make him gasp. ‘Well?’

Maddy’s desperate wail was drowned out by the baby’s sonic apocalypse. Numb with terror, Maddy was just inserting herself into the cupboard’s musty maw when Mamma Joy and Sputnik moved into the living room in tandem.

‘It’s Cagney and fucking Lacey,’ announced Sputnik, cheerfully.

In Maddy’s fight with Dwina, exhaustion, poor nutrition and breastfeeding had taken their toll. All Mamma Joy had to do however, was launch herself at the social worker – a whale in flummery – and simply sit on her. Oh, thank you, Fate Fairy. All is forgiven, pledged Maddy, sweeping Jack into her arms and pressing him to her heart.

‘I’m finkin’ of getting anuver tattoo – a phoenix risin’ from the ashes,’ announced Sputnik, tethering the arms of the psychotherapist with a dressing-gown cord. Dwina twitched and fidgeted; a wasp in a jar.

‘Lord have mercy! Gal, on your arm’s it’s goin’ to look more like a budgie over a Bunsen burner. Come on, now, move your arse.’

Esconced in the back of the Yellow VW, Maddy marvelled at Jack afresh. She inhaled his small cinnamon sigh and held him close. As Mamma Joy gunned the motor, Maddy’s euphoric smile frosted. Coming down the street towards them was a blue Vauxall Astra with an aerial mid-roof: the unmistakable mark of an “unmarked” police-car – Detective Sergeant Slynne behind the wheel.

‘OK, okay. Let’s not panic,’ stipulated Sputnik.

‘Christ!’ Maddy panicked. Well, why not stick with what she was good at? ‘Ram him!’

‘Lord have mercy! An’ mess wid me nice white wall tyres?’

Sputnik lunged sideways and hijacked the wheel. The beetle lurched to the right, buffeting the copper’s car off the road and smack bang into a red post-box. A cheeky grin split Sputnik’s face. Slynne arabesqued in slow motion out of his vehicle, his springy ruff of hair squashed back on his skull like an Indian Headdress. Mamma Joy waved him away with regal indifference and flattened her elephantine foot to the flimsy floor. Slynne tried pursuit. With one headlight smashed, he swerved through the grey drizzle, a Cyclops shaft of light leaping in front of him.

As the getaway car founded the corner under protest, Sputnik, trumpeting that she wasn’t ’alf fond of you daft bitches’ and reminded them to crutch some dope on visiting day, jettisoned herself from the passenger seat and rolled into the policeman’s path. The last Maddy ever heard of her was a jubilant whoop as Slynne’s car was forced into a rubber-burning, metal-crunching tailspin.

Beyond Sputnik, Maddy glimpsed a gleaming Saab pulling up sedately in front of Dwina’s terrace. She knew, with a sickening stomach, that it held Jack’s adoptive parents. Her baby boy flung his podgy little arms around his mother’s neck, as passionate as Rhett Butler. His fingers rigamortized on to hers. Maddy couldn’t prise them free. Her heart soared in her body. She smiled a smile big enough to admit a banana, sideways.