Free Mad Cows by Kathy Lette

radio?’
    The hostile silence finally persuaded this representative of the Sheer Blouse, Blank Brain Battalion to abandon her appalling, ready-made patter. She then got all Sincere, confiding that she was donating her time because she didn’t see the assembled inmates as social outcasts but as victims of circumstance . . . she also just happened to have along with her a BBC documentary crew intent on filming her humanitarian gesture for an
Everyman
programme on selflessness.
    Petronella’s breathy request that they all sing ‘Kum By Yah’ as a little ‘ice-breaker’ (you’d need an arctic frigate to break
this
ice) lost any remaining potential audience.
    Mamma Joy closed her eyes. ‘Me goin’ to say me prayers, now. Anyone want anyting?’
    â€˜Mel Gibson,’ a woman called from the back row.
    â€˜Yeah, he’s perfect.’ Chanel’s hot-pink, Lycraed buttocks pivoted past Maddy. She stretched out on the lino, revealing flanks so dimpled they looked as though they’d been hit in a hailstorm. ‘If I ever stop hatin’ men, he’s the one I’m gunna stop hatin’ first.’
    Maddy scoffed. She’d once thought Alex was perfect, until she’d discovered he had the emotions of a Klingon. The guy probably went home at night and peeled his face off. ‘There’s no such thing as the perfect man.’
    â€˜Unless you find me a fella wiv a twelve-inch tongue who can breathe through his ears,’ barked Mamma Joy.
    â€˜Men,’ Maddy continued bitterly, thinking of her ex, ‘are the reason God invented cake.’
    â€˜Sure. You say that
now
,’ Chanel groaned between sit-ups, ‘but as soon as you get out? You’ll be after that sperm liqueur faster than you can say
swallow
. Truth is, I’ve been on remand so long, whenever I see a man,
any
man, I just leave a snail-trail a mile long,’ she lamented, scissoring her hailstorm thighs. ‘The chicks in this nick are so horny, you can
ski
on all that love-juice. You can sit on your fanny and slide.’
    The whole row erupted into hoarse cackles. With a twitch of embarrassment, Maddy readjusted her creeping underpants.
    â€˜Watch it, girl!’ Chanel mocked. ‘More than three adjustments in a row qualifies as a wank, ya know.’
    Blushing, Maddy submerged her hands into her pockets. It was then she found the chocolate. ‘Ah, the sort of happiness money can’t buy,’ she said to Mamma Joy, facetiously. ‘Freedom may be fun, but does it have this ecstasy?’ Half-masting the white flag of surrender she’d been running up to fate, Maddy mainlined that Malteser.
    â€˜Atta girl!’ Mamma Joy enthused. ‘Anudder day up de Judge’s arse, eh?’
    It seemed to Maddy that the reality of prison was not a rampaging throng of Patty Hearsts and Ulrike Meinhofs, but a flotsam and jetsam of sad little junkies, fine defaulters, the homeless, the jobless, people who couldn’t afford to pay for a television licence or who’d fiddled the electricity meter . . . people who belonged in prison the way a Mormon belongs in the Addams Family. Except for Sputnik, of course. Maddy was convinced that this was a woman who ’d missed her calling, say as Medical Researcher at Auschtwitz.
    â€˜What’s all the farkin’ noise in ’ere. It’s a farkin’ loony bin, innit?’ Wearing a knicker-skimming miniskirt – what Gillian called a pussy-pelmet – and white stilettos, Sputnik swaggered through the gymnasium doors and across to Maddy’s row. ‘Some old slag’s stolen me Maltesers.’
    Inmates in the near vicinity lost the will to talk. Hell, they lost the will to
live
.
    â€˜Which one of you fat cows is the poxy wossit what’s nicked ’em?’ Come on then – breave out – so as I can find the slag.’ Sputnik shoved her nose into Chanel’s face. She exhaled