Foetal Attraction Read Free Page B

out” is
not
something you do on the back of an envelope.’
    This startled a laugh out of him. She gave him lip. Maddy knew that was what he liked about her. There were no kid gloves in this girl’s wardrobe.
    ‘We’re going to work on that gut, mate. It’s daily aerobics or a promise to have your heart attack while I’m still young enough to find some other bloke to marry. Got it?’
    Alex ran a red light and kerb-hugged right, tyres squealing. A smile flickered at the corner of his mouth in time with the tick-tick of the indicator. She couldn’t quite tell what it was signalling.
    Maddy squinted up at the row of Georgian houses standing to attention, elbows tucked tightly into their whitewashed sides. She knew of Islington. It was cheap and blue on the Monopoly board and nobody ever wanted it. ‘I thought you lived in Maida Vale?’
    ‘I’ve rented us something new. My old flat was so dark and dingy. I wanted a place like you – fresh and full of light.’ Alex leant across and kissed her full on the mouth. ‘All I can offer you, my love, is a lifetime of lubricious encounters in the water closets of the world, a place in the dole queue in the mean streets of Tory Britain and an unmarked grave in our feminist council’s Women Only cemetery.’
    ‘Really? Women who’ve had to lie underneath men they hate all their lives, but refuse to lie next to them in death? I like it.’ She kissed him back, slithering her tongue down his throat. ‘I’ll take it.’
    ‘It’s bloody freezing.’ Maddy swiped a blanket from the bed and swathed herself against the draught. ‘Oh, well. At least we won’t have to go outside for a breath of fresh air.’
    Alex cloaked her in his arms, his breath warm on her neck. ‘It’s just my subtle little way of keeping you under the duvet.’
    For the first few days, Maddy’s London sightseeing was limited to the pastel floral landscape of the bedspread. Immune to the outside world, they had entered the Lovers’ Dimension, only aware of a tangle of legs and tongues and toes. They kissed so much their lips got chafed. ‘Lip-lag,’ Maddy called it. Phone calls went unmade, as did beds. Newspapers went unopened, headlines unread. They developed a gluttonous appreciation for each other’s body, memorizing whole constellations of moles and birthmarks, freckles and scars. They stayed up all night and slept all day. They ate straight from the bowl with greasy fingers and licked each other’s faces clean. They were in the Lovers’ Dimension, where you make up limericks about each other and sing them to the tune of Bach cantatas. They used words like ‘longing’ and ‘languish’ and ‘ravage’ without embarrassment. He called her Schnookums, Lambikins, Snuggles, Didims, his boodiful baby. She would call him Hunk, Hot to Trot, Hannibal (the Cannibal) or Horace, after the blue-tongued lizard she’d had as a kid. They had entered the Lovers’ Dimension, where you have bubblebaths at 4 a.m. then make love in every room in the house, in every position, despite slipped discs and frostbite.
    When blue balls or lovers’ nuts, as Maddy referred to them, forced them to resurface, they sat entwined in the back rows of theatres, the words washing over them, the heat of their scrutiny reserved for each other only. They had entered the Lovers’ Dimension, which allowed Alex to whisper during
King Lear
that he loved her ‘No holes Bard’. And for Maddy not only to think that witty, but to fire back at warp-speed that ‘punning was fecund nature to Shakespeare’. The Lovers’ Dimension is a place where you do all the things which make you puke when you see other couples doing them. The Lovers’ Dimension, if you haven’t been there, makes alien-infested planets visited by the
Starship Enterprise
seem ordinary.
    ‘I’ll be back by the time you’re over your jet-lag,’ Alex promised, the second week into their hormonal honeymoon.
    Maddy stopped licking his armpit and looked up.