Foetal Attraction Read Free

sent Alex a comprehensive list of her faults and foibles, with a request that he reciprocate. Maddy’s list detailed her immature attachment to Alex’s puns (punnilingus, she called it). Her accent (it was as broad as the space you’d give her if she were swinging a chair). And her hotch-potch of careers: she was a Jill-of-all-trades – ranging from a stint down a Cobar mine driving a front-end loader (the only woman with five hundred men); a swimsuit model; the first mate on a prawn fishing boat off Darwin, hoovering up silver shoals off shore; a trapeze artist in Circus Oz; driving a road grader for the Department of Main Roads – a hole gouged in her hard hat to emit a plume of red ponytail; a roust-about in a shearing shed; a surf life-saver and most recently, a scuba-diving instructor in the Whitsunday Passage. Rattling on through various disgusting personal habits, chief among these being a penchant for oyster sandwiches, she concluded on what she called her Bar-Room Brawler streak. ‘Occasionally,’ she’d confessed, ‘I have a habit of telling blokes I’m going to kick their balls through their brains – if they’ve got either.’
    Alex had written back to remind her that if it hadn’t been for Maddy’s incendiary nature, they would never have met. He loved to tell people how it all began on a Sydney Street when Maddy slammed out of her ute at the traffic lights to chase him after he’d bad-temperedly bashed her protruding bonnet as he was crossing the road. Having ‘put the wind up him good and proper’, her moment of triumph was shortlived when she realized that she’d locked herself out in the process, with the engine idling and the pedestrians laughing and the culprit leering and the lights turning green and the peak-hour traffic honking and her petrol low. By the time she’d extracted a wire coat hanger from the cursing Chinese restaurateur on the corner, broken into her own car, pushed it to a service station and tanked up, she was too wrung out to refuse his apology and placatory offer of a drink.
    It was, as Alex said later, over a can of cold Foster’s in the Sea Breeze Hotel that they fell in love.
    He had a crooked smile, a coronet of black, highly glossed hair spiked with grey and dancing, kiwi-fruit-coloured eyes behind tortoiseshell specs. He used wonderful words like ‘somnolence’ and ‘perspicacity’. Words which shimmered. He possessed secrets about world leaders and rare invertebrates. He’d roamed the high seas, pirate-fashion, engaging in skirmishes with nuclear-armed navies. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of 1960s pop music. He’d eaten forest crocodile with the Babinga warrior pygmies of the Congo. He could translate the foreign quotations in novels. He had a working knowledge of Schopenhauer, whoever he was. The wings of his designer shirt-collar pointed straight to heaven. He looked into her eyes and spoke her name slowly, as though rolling some priceless vintage claret around his mouth: ‘Mad-el-line’.
    He was Down Under at the time, filming the sex change strategies of the giant cleaner wrasse. It was a eucalyptus and frangipani-soaked evening. The wind off the harbour was warm. It blow-waved their hair into curious coiffures. As they kissed, sweat trickled down their backs sticky as honey. Maddy’s list left out her greatest weakness. Alex. In what her girlfriends called delusions of glandeur, she fell for him. He just sat back and reeled her in like a yo-yo.
    ‘In
love
? Oh my God. Don’t be so Shakes
pear
ian. He only wants you for your bod.’
    ‘An Englishman? My commiserations.’
    ‘What do cold beer and cunnilingus have in common? You can’t get either of them in London.’
    To Maddy’s girlfriends, overseas travel had only one purpose – duty-free shopping.
    ‘Well, if you’re determined to go, despite the fact that he’s far too old for you, for God’s sake take your own
food
.’
    ‘No, it doesn’t shock me that you’ve fallen for a