Free Mad Cows by Kathy Lette Page A

in mute supplication. Maddy’s throat dried. She was next in line.
    Mamma Joy sat up straight. ‘It was me, gal. All right?’
    â€˜Wassat?’
    â€˜I have a size twenty body to maintain here.’
    â€˜I ’eard, right, that you, right, have got such a fat arse, right, that they ’ad to drop you in to the nick with a crane.’ Stacey killed herself laughing at this bit of, no doubt, vintage crim humour. ‘But it weren’t you.’ Sputnik’s pupils contracted, dulled, then bore into Maddy.
    Back on stage, Petronella, struggling to be heard above the din of metal chair legs scraping over cement floors and women jabbering in Gujerati, was gushing about the fact that her famous director had just been nominated for a Bafta Award for Best Documentary of the Year. She made a feeble aside into the mike about all his programmes being ‘cell outs’, before, in desperation, diving into the desultory audience and seizing Sputnik’s arm for a soprano rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’.
    Maddy felt an appreciative silence was the best policy to adopt at this point. On the pretext of a pee, she made for the door at a trot, stumbling over the tripod being set up by a lighting cameraman. That is why she heard him before she saw him; jerking at the sound of his melodious voice like a fish on the end of a line. When Maddy did finally focus on Alex, it was to register the fact that her little baby boy looked just like him. Her eyes were too hot, too sore to cry.
    Alex stood open-mouthed, mid-Bafta-nominated-direction, as petrified as a Pompeii dog.
    â€˜Thank God you’re here!’ Maddy peered around for the ventriloquist who was uttering these words in
her
voice. This was not what she
wanted
to say. What she wanted to say was go juggle with chainsaws, dingo-dick. Much to her astonishment, she then flung herself at him, clung to his neck, gazed up into his handsome face and broke into a smile which wasn’t reciprocated. She tweaked his freeze-framed cheek. ‘Um, it is customary when you’re feeling pleased, to like, notify your face.’
    For God’s sake, Maddy thought. Was that
me
flirting? It can’t be me. It’s someone else. Someone who doesn’t have a purple vagina and cracked nipples; someone who hasn’t dreamt every night since the birth of stringing this man up by
his
nipples.
    Steeling herself, she stood back and appraised Jack’s dumb-struck father. He looked tanned, taut, edible – it had to be said – in his black Levis and white, buttoned-down Oxford-cotton shirt. A shirt so crisp she could imagine him skiing down it at Klosters (the holiday resort he usually took his wife to, mid-winter). ‘You’re growing a beard?’ She tucked her fingers into her palms, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to touch him.
    â€˜What?’ Alex tugged Hasidically at his jaw. ‘Oh, yes . . .’
    â€˜Why? As a substitute for your masculinity?’ That was better. That nailed the bastard. If only she could also now stop fantasizing about him dining alfresco on her nether regions.
    â€˜Maddy, look, about the police station . . .’ He ran his hands through his luxuriant hair as though tossing a wilted salad. ‘I’m so sorry . . . I had no idea they were going to incarcerate you. My God. It’s just . . . I was about to announce my intention of going into politics. The publicity would have been . . . How can I expect people to vote for me to help save the environment, when I can’t even clean up my own act?’
    It was Maddy’s turn to imitate Harpo Marx. ‘
You’re going into politics?
’ she queried, finally relocating her voice.
    â€˜Liberal Democrats.’
    Maddy ruptured into an unoiled motor gear-cruncher of a laugh. Alex was the sort of Liberal who had copies of the
Big Issue
home-delivered. So democratic, he’d voted not to tell her about his