Going Loco Read Free

spot-on. Mags was right: even this short conversation now required to be added to the day’s total of sadly unavoided interruptions.
    The first thing she’d noticed about Stefan was that he smiled a lot, especially for a Scandinavian. He was solemn, and said rather peculiar things, like ‘A nod is as good as a wink’ and ‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’, when first introduced, but he smiled even at jokes about animals in bars, which was encouraging. They had met three years ago in Putney at her friend Viv’s, at a Sunday lunch, where they had been seated adjacently by their hostess, with an obvious match-making intent. Belinda resented this at first, and almost changed places. Viv had an intolerable weakness for match-making. In a world ruled by Vivs, happy single people would be rounded up and shot.
    But she took to Stefan. He was recently divorced, and recently arrived in London to teach genetics at Imperial College. He was solvent, which counted for a lot more than it ought to. Tall, blond, slender and a bit vain, he wore surprisingly fashionable spectacles for a man of his age (forty-eight at the time). Of course, he wasn’t perfect. For a start, middle-of-the-road music was a passion of his life, and he would not hear a word spoken against Abba. He idolized
Monty Python,
played golf as if it were a respectable thing to talk about, and was proud of driving a fast car. A couple of times he told stories about his mentally ill first wife, which struck Belinda as cruel. Also, he was condescending when he explained his work on pseudogenes. Like most specialists, she decided, he muddled reasonable ignorance with stupidity.
    But basically, Belinda fancied him straight away, and had an unprecedented urge to get him outside and push him against a wall. In the one truly Lawrentian moment of her life, she felt her bowel leap, her thighs sing and her bra-straps strain to snapping. Having been single for seven years at this point,she knew all too well that she must act quickly – a specimen of unattached manhood as exotic and presentable as Stefan Johansson would have an availability period in 1990s SW15 of just under two and a half weeks. Her biological clock, long reduced to a muffled tick, started making urgent ‘Parp! Parp!’ noises, so loud and insistent that she had to resist the impulse to evacuate the building.
    The lunch was half bliss, half agony, with Stefan dividing his attention between Maggie and Belinda, and finding out whose biological clock could ‘Parp’ the loudest. Perhaps his understanding of natural selection contributed to this ploy. Either way, Belinda – who had never competed for a man – was so overwhelmed by the physical attraction that she contrived to get drunk, make eyes at him, and (the clincher) ruthlessly outdo Maggie at remembering every single word of ‘Thank You for the Music’ and the Pet Shop Sketch.
    ‘Lift home, Miss Patch?’ he’d asked her breezily, when this long repast finally ended at four thirty. She’d known him only four hours, and already he’d given her a nickname – something no one had done before. True, he called her ‘Patch’ for the unromantic reason of her nicotine plasters; and true, it made her sound like a collie. But she loved it. ‘Miss Patch’ made her feel young and adorable, like Audrey Hepburn; it made her feel (even more unaccountably) like she’d never heard of sexual politics. ‘Lift home, Miss Patch?’ was, to Belinda, the most exciting question in the language. Soon after it, she’d had her tongue down his throat, and his hands up her jumper, with her nipples strenuously erect precisely in the manner of chapel hat-pegs – as Stefan had whispered in her ear so astonishingly at the time.
    And now here they were, married, and Belinda was having this silly problem with the El Ratto indoor circus; and Maggie could decipher plainly all the selfish secrets of her soul, and she’d burst into tears like a madwoman talking to a