Foetal Attraction Read Free Page A

Pom: what shocks me is that you’re admitting it out loud, openly, within earshot of
others
. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Maddy,
why
?’
    Why? A
News of the World
journalist was to ask her the exact same question a year later. Gazing into her cappuccino, Maddy had toyed with ways to explain it to them. Because since they’d met, poems had suddenly started making sense? Because of his biteable buttocks? Because of his loud and resonant orgasm, like a bow being drawn across a cello? Because they laughed at the same things? Because he was her knight in pinstriped armour; a renaissance man in Reeboks? Because she was passionately, profoundly in love with him? Because, as Alex said, love was a state of grace, so rare that the mere whiff of it justified setting off in hot pursuit? Because, as Alex said, one might as well be dead, if one did not drink from the cup of life? Because of the wonders of the world he was going to reveal to her? The Panamanian army ants bivouacking through the rain forest. The all-female elephant crèches of East Africa. Mating rituals, from cheetahs to chooks, hunting habits, from llamas to lobsters, birthing techniques, from yapocks and piddocks to the electric eels of the Amazon. All this would be hers.
    Maddy looked up at the inquisitive, sun-scorched faces of her female friends and shrugged. ‘Put it this way. When I have a wet dream, he stars.’
    Shoving her pigeon-toed trolley into the terminal, Alex didn’t mention Maddy’s airline socks. Just as he never mentioned how tall she was. She often wondered if the real reason she fell for him was because he was the only lover she’d never had to look down on. Literally. They were iris to iris. With most men, she knew all about their dandruff, undetectable toupees or combed-over bald patches, before anything else. Having found her vertical match, Maddy planned to get horizontal as often as possible.
    ‘You’re crackers! We can’t go in there, Alex – what if someone’s look—’
    ‘It’s empty. Come on. I can’t wait any longer.’
    ‘You’re
English
. You’re not supposed to be spontaneous! It goes against your national character.’
    ‘Come on.’
    ‘I haven’t had a shower.’
    ‘Come
on
.’
    Maddy found that she had to renavigate his body. Their kisses mis-aimed, their noses collided, their teeth clashed. Fingers fumbled over buttons, snagged on zips and collars and cuffs. Her head got wedged in the neck of her shirt and she had to execute a faltering rumba, with Alex tugging, to free her shoulders. His underpants slid down pallid calves and came to rest atop his pot-holed brogues. ‘Sssh,’ she kept saying and, ‘You’re squishing me!’
    The paraplegic toilet cubicle at Heathrow, terminal four, ground floor, read ‘occupied’ for well over an hour. The ‘One-Foot High Club’ Alex called it.
    * * *
    ‘I can’t believe how quickly you organized everything to get over here, my love.’ Maddy, hanging on Alex’s every word, thought that he should have his voice insured by Lloyd’s. It was as rich as fig jam, moreish as chocolate mousse.
    Oh, yeah, she thought. Like, I had a choice! Every pore, every cell, every hair follicle in her body had screamed, Be With That Person. ‘Lust at first sight,’ she replied with cool facetiousness. ‘Quite a labour-saving device, eh?’ She looked out of the window of Alex’s classic 1960s Saab Lotus Élan original. Hyde Park rolled away on her left, a giant billiard table. Flowers rioted along every pavement. The whole of London looked warm and yielding. The motorized bowler hats reading ‘taxi’ bobbed past them. All the buildings, with their frosted glass, pudgy domes, curves, cupolas and crenellations, reminded her of cake decorations. ‘Those hotels look just like puddings.’
    ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Big, solid school puddings.’
    ‘So,
that’s
what happened to you.’ She slapped playfully at his check-shirted abdomen. ‘I’ve got news for you, Buster. “Working