Read Going Loco for Free Online Page B

say that Maggie had her own agenda. In fact, Maggie’s agenda was about as well disguised as a Centurion tank in a hairnet. Thus, when she told her oldest friend Belinda, ‘You work too hard’, what she really meant was ‘You don’t spend enough time listening to my problems’. When she said to Stefan, ‘Belinda cares only about her work,’ what was clearly imported by this treachery was ‘I’ll always love you, Stefan, I want to have your babies, and it’s not too late’. Telling Leon she thought Villeneuve was a bridge in Paris translated as ‘You’re a dreadful motor-racing bore and I can’t believe I’m listening to this.’ Indeed, the paradox of Maggie’s life was that the more rudely she semaphored her real message, the more her friends felt it polite to take her words at face value.
    When she woke on Wednesday in her Clapham flat, the morning after the dinner party, it surprised her to find that Leon was still there. She assumed it was Leon, anyway. An enormous naked male body was sleeping face down diagonally in her four-foot bed, which was as unprecedented as it was uncomfortable. Blokes who went to bed with Maggie were, of course, not literally ‘all the same’, as she would sometimes complain, but they certainly shared many tendencies, and one of these was the quite strenuous avoidance of sleep.As if obeying house rules pinned to the door, they would resolutely roll out of Maggie’s bed and breast the cold night air without so much as a cup of tea or a post-coital cuddle. It was a strange, inexplicable nocturnal-urgency syndrome she had often remarked on.
    ‘Gotta go,’ they’d say, hopping about zipping their trousers and cleaning their teeth at the same time, like characters in a bedroom farce. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve got a very, very early appointment in the morning. Is this soap scented? It’s not bluebell or something?’
    ‘All my conquests are either undead or office cleaners,’ she would tell her mates, by way of brave humour. But in fact her conquests were fathers of small children, of course; fulfilling some sort of universal genetic imperative to cheat on the wife during the first year of parenthood. Maggie made a point of meeting the wives of her Undead Office Cleaners as soon as possible – not to cause trouble but simply to prevent her from becoming ‘the other woman’. Meeting the wife had this curious way of dispelling any self-deluding fantasies about adultery. Before you met the wife in the living flesh, you could imagine you were the real person and the wife was the anonymous incorporeal phantom. Whereas after you met her, the mirror swivelled to offer a truer perspective, in which the wife was the real person and you were the lump of garbage.
    Anyway, ask any of her friends, and they could tell you Maggie’s exact emotional pattern on these wham-bam occasions, because she’d described them often. As the taxi roared off at two a.m., she would wave gaily from the doorway in her dressing-gown, feeling all jelly-legged and warm. Then she’d go back to her tousled bed with Ariel and Miranda (the cats),
Hello!
magazine and a hot cup of something brown and chocolatey called Options (nice touch), and as she brushed the condom wrapper from the sheet, she’d tell herself that no scene could better sum up the freedom of modern womanhood.
    Oh yes, Simone de Beauvoir would be so proud. Look, all that money, yet Barbra Streisand still had a hideous home! On the verge of sleep, she might decide it was high time a sexy woman of her calibre had her navel pierced. And then, seemingly a minute later, she woke alone in broad daylight. The room looked dusty; her pillow was caked in dribble and cat hair; she felt ravaged and cheap. The man in question was by now several miles away playing with baby in the bath, and would doubtless ignore her the next time they met, making her feel she’d been punched in the stomach. ‘What have I done?’ she would wail, then burst into tears and