Read Online Mad Cows by Kathy Lette - Free Book Online

arrived with the writhing handbag.
    â€˜Shit!’ said Gillian, eloquently. Responding to her voice, the handbag emitted a high-pitched wail which seemed to be imitating a backed-up insinkerator.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ Simon retreated. ‘You didn’t mention a child.’
    â€˜It’s not
my
baby,’ Gillian jabbered. ‘His mother’s off stamping due dates for the prison library.’ Her employer’s eyes bugged out. ‘Not that I make a habit of fraternizing with felons, but . . .’
    â€˜This job, Miss Cassells, requires long hours and late nights.’
    â€˜I need to fit him with a silencer, that’s all.’ Gillian groped urgently through her bag, excavating the contents – a half-chewed rusk, a rattle, a musical frog, one soiled diaper and a tube of iridescent pink nappy-rash cream – on to Simon’s desk. ‘He needs the Betty Ford clinic for dummy addicts,’ Gillian said, above the howling. ‘A dummy detox unit. Do it cold turkey, no-neck,’ she snapped at the child,
sotto voce
.
    Her employer winced with alarm.
    â€˜I mean, one must be cruel to be kind, correct?’ Gillian gave a fake laugh in an effort to salvage the situation. ‘After all, boys will be boys. Mind you, so will a lot of octogenarian business men I know.’ The look on Simon’s face alerted Gillian to the fact that this may not have been the most tactful comment. ‘Though obviously not
you
.’ It was the sleep deprivation, that’s what it was. She’d been taking lobotomy pills.
    Later that day, Gillian invested in a play pen and incarcerated the baby without trial. Like mother, like son, she thought dismally. ‘Call Amnesty International. See if I care.’ She would add a sign – ‘DANGER. Put Fingers Inside Bars At Own Risk.’ She dropped a bottle into the baby’s mouth. ‘Drink it,’ she demanded, delivering her version of the starving millions in Africa spiel. ‘You know,
there are children in Knightsbridge with eating disorders!
’ It was only then that it struck her that she was actually conversing with an infant.
    Pouring a large gin and tonic, she tried to talk herself off the psychological windowledge where Maddy had pushed her. Failing, she put her hennaed head in her hands and sucked morosely on the plastic pacifier.

7
    The Clit-Lick Hilton
    MADDY’S EYES HAD not adjusted to the dimly lit corridor of the remand wing. She had a distinct sensation that she was being watched. Not particularly perceptive of her, as the surrounding gloomy shapes were breathing adenoidally. The hairs pricked up on her arms. She backed instinctively towards the wall. She thought of those air fresheners people have on toilet cisterns and the backs of car seats which exude alpine and eucalyptus aromas. In prison, there’s an invisible scent-tree too, only it impregnates the atmosphere with paranoia and fear of imminent death.
    â€˜H-h-hello?’ Like a bat, Maddy sent off conversational sonar bleeps to gauge the positions of the oglers.
    A thin, wiry shape with the dress sense of Liberace stepped out of the shadows and prodded Maddy in the throat with a scalpel nail. ‘What choo lookin’ at?’
    Shaved into this woman’s dyed purple hair were the words ‘Made in London’. Maddy wondered if the charges against her were ‘Assault with intent to kill a hair colourist’. Her adversary’s footware, the sort which could crush light aircraft, propelled her to the daunting height of six foot two. She launched into a ‘you slag this’ and ‘you slag that’ diatribe, punctuated by an oyster of phlegm which hit Maddy full in the face before beginning it’s slow, gruesome descent down her chin. She told herself that she wasn’t frightened. She told herself that she’d been in scarier situations – lip electrolysis, labour without an epidural, dinner