Foetal Attraction Read Online Free Page A

their
dogs
.
    Later, as she and Alex lay post-coitally coiled beneath the covers, the dog growling in the yard below, Maddy confessed a preference for cats.
    ‘Cats?’ Alex fumbled for the remote control and zapped the television into life. ‘Cats are the original yuppies. They’re upwardly mobile,’ he said dismissively. The television tuned into a close-up of his own face. ‘Not to mention vain.’ He pressed his thumb repeatedly into the volume pad. ‘And unashamedly selfish.’
    ‘… Chief Inspector Giscard …’ the sibilant tones of Alex’s presenter’s voice drowned out his own … ‘you have denied that the Greenpeace protestor was physically assaulted whilst in custody. Then how, sir, do you explain that ebony shoe polish found on the crutch of the suspect’s trousers matched the expensive brand you use on your ebony boots?’
    ‘That got him.’ Alex hit the volume button once more. ‘The Frog bastard!’ He lay back, preening.
    It suddenly struck Maddy that Alex had never sent her his list of faults and foibles.
    If she hadn’t been so lost in the Tunnel of Love, this would have been the first clue to the emotional white-knuckle ride that was about to begin.

A New Taste Sensation
    MADDY’S MOTHER INSISTED that the way to a man’s heart was through his belly. Despite her daughter maintaining that this was aiming a tad too high, every birthday brought another deposit of gift-wrapped garlic crushers and crock-pots. But Maddy had steadfastly refused to be trapped into domesticity. As far as she was concerned, ‘home cooking’ was the place where a bloke thought his girlfriend was. Which is why the Monday morning that Maddy began her tuition, she slunk to the Prue Leith School of Cookery in heavy disguise. If word leaked back to Sydney, she’d be a laughing stock. This was the 1990s. The only thing a woman worth her salt brewed these days was trouble.
    Re-reading, for the hundredth time, Alex’s latest postcard – ‘Greetings from Poacher’s Paradise. Local police jumping to the usual
contusions
. A case of don’t cull us, we’ll cull you. How’s the cooking? Can’t wait to have you on my menu’ – she tucked it down her tasselled bustier and entered class. Maddy had dressed down for the cooking course, in a cropped, fake leopardskin jacket, red leather mini and elasticated riding boots. The others wore pearls with their cooking aprons. The floral ‘get to know each other’ name-tags, like something kindergarten pupils wear, read ‘Clarissa’, ‘Octavia’, ‘Saskia’. Those with triple-barrelled names sported two cards to fit it all in. They were busy chatting about their mummies and their ponies and their pre-masticated ideas of love and marriage.
    ‘Hi,’ Maddy ventured, sitting at her assigned desk. The women nodded curtly and smoothed their starched white aprons as though they were ball gowns. The walls glinted with an armoury of copper pots and flan pans. The ingredients for the day’s cooking were set out on trays, weighed, neatly wrapped and ready for use. The cooking instructress, Priscilla (call me Plum) proceeded to list, with a missionary zeal, the day’s culinary objectives. Haggis, tripe, steak and kidney pud, black sausage casings and Kidneys Robért. The top bench, flanked by a central bank of ovens and gas rings, was littered in slaughtered and quartered members of the animal kingdom. Plum was up to her elbows in their most intimate anatomy. Maddy looked away as she held aloft what resembled a tangle of bicycle inner tubes. A life of Indian take-away was looking more and more appealing.
    Maddy was mentally immersed in X-rated reruns of Alex’s greatest bedroom hits, when the door rasped and twanged and a woman entered. Her dark head emerged from her fur coat, like a bandicoot from its burrow.
    ‘The name, for those of you who don’t know,’ said the interloper, ‘is Gillian Cassells.’ She was dressed loudly with a voice to match. Once Gillian had shed