Mad Cows Read Online Free

she’d broken up with him, that she was pregnant.
    An entire squadron of John Player cigarette air-ships were dispatched ceiling-wards before the detective spoke again. ‘Well?’
    â€˜The fact that he has a sequoia-sized penis helped . . .’ Maddy teased, dangerously. ‘Amazing. A sequoia tree takes two hundred years to attain the same girth it took him 2.6 seconds to achieve at the merest glimpse of a fishnet stocking.’
    Slynne’s face contorted into a gargoyle grimace.‘Cut the bollocks. I want his name and his fucking number. If you don’t co-operate I’ll have you on remand faster than you can say “legal aid”.’
    Maddy breastfed while she waited. The frozen peas she’d stuffed down her bra had cooked from the heat. She took out the packet, tore it open with her teeth and ate them with a plastic coffee spoon. The policewoman guarding her dutifully added a packet of peas to Maddy’s charge sheet.
    At the thought of Alex’s imminent arrival, a wave of relief washed over her – the sort of relief you feel when you think you’re up the duff and it turns out to be a twenty-four-hour flu bug. The truth was, Maddy had said ‘No’ to love . . . but it hadn’t listened. In the past month, she’d shown more self-restraint than Pavarotti’s panty girdle . . . while all the time secretly hoping to see more of him . . . and even perhaps his perfectly symmetrical tool. Alex’s trouble was that he suffered from F.O.C. (Fear of Commitment). When it came to committing to anyone, he was as cautious as a naked bloke climbing a barbed-wire fence. But Maddy had since discovered a sure-fire cure for F.O.C. – the tiny token of their affection nestled beside her. Her spirits rose irrationally.
    The Detective Sergeant returned shortly afterwards wearing an ersatz smile. ‘The renowned Alexander Drake, British naturalist, host of own BBC nature series, denies any knowledge of you or your bastard.’
    It was a simple sentence, said perfunctorily, and it immediately changed everything. Reality slapped Maddy in the face like a car-salesman’s cologne. The selfish mongrel! But – she reasoned – calling Alex selfish was like calling a dwarf short. Somehow she’d overlooked her ex-lover’s ego. We’re not just talking
BIG
, she fumed to herself. We’re talking Visible From Outer Space. She bet it was sodding well there on the satellite photos, along with the Great Wall of China and the Barrier-bloody-Reef.
    She filed her hurt away under ‘Revenge’ – cross-referenced in ‘You’ll Keep, You Bastard.’
    â€˜That’s the other thing I forgot to tell you,’ Maddy said, camouflaging her shock. ‘He’s also a founding member of Assholes Anonymous.’
    In that nanosecond, Maddy plumbed the depths of the crapola. ‘I want a lawyer,’ she announced, with all the confidence of a beehive hair-do in the rain.
    Ostentatiously reaching for the list of duty solicitors, the Detective Sergeant suggested a firm. Maddy was escorted to the ‘rape suite’. It was just like a normal cell, only painted pink to enable the vermin to stand out more. A woman lay on a bunk, weeping.
    â€˜We’re letting you wait in here ’cause of baba,’ the policewoman announced, as though doing Maddy a great favour.
    â€˜Oh! A dream come true!’ Maddy was having trouble disguising her trepidation. After the waterlogged woman was led away, the three of them lay on the bed – Jack, Maddy . . . and Maddy’s stomach. She looked at her baby, his arms and legs flexed like a dead beetle. Unperturbed by light or noise, his eyelids moved in his sleep, as though experiencing the happiest Technicolor dreams.
    Maddy tried to sleep but couldn’t. She counted flocks of woolly sheep, shorn sheep, lamb cutlets . . . She tried counting other boring and inane creatures – Liberal