Mad Cows by Kathy Lette Page A

wallet with painstaking care, ‘the silver spoon one was born with has somewhat tarnished. We’ve got just enough money to keep us until your mother gets back, unless I feel the urge to buy anything. Like
food
, for example.’ Gillian thought of the money she’d squandered when she’d been solvent; if only she’d known its worth.
    There wasn’t much in life that the worldly Ms Cassells hadn’t sampled. She’d hot-air-ballooned with Richard Branson. She’d Glydnebourned with more Royals than you could shake a corgi at. She’d joined the Mile High Club on Concorde (no crew, someone new and not in the loo). She’d lain on private yachts, in Parisian hotel suites and under the knives of Hollywood plastic surgeons.
    But work was an unknown phenomenon.
    â€˜It’s not just the grey pube,’ Gillian confided to her handbag, as she sashayed up Regent Street. ‘The other night, during a romantic encounter, I remarked to my partner that he was skilled enough to do it professionally and, dah-ling, do you know what he said?’ She didn’t wait for Jack’s reply. ‘He said that he was. And that the payment would be fifty quid. It was then I noticed the V.F.M. tattooed on his penis. Value For Money.’
    She paused to examine a bikini she was far too old for in the windows of Liberty’s. ‘You see, Jack – one thought one would be on to one’s third or fourth hubby by now, getting richer by decrees, dah-ling.’ It was an exquisite bikini. Perhaps with a little cosmetic enhancement? Gillian signed, pulled in her stomach muscles and marched onwards. The only plastic surgery Gillian Cassells was now likely to experience involved banks cutting up her credit cards.
    At Oxford Circus tube station, she bought a newspaper. Tight-lipped with embarrassment, she flicked to the employment section.
    â€˜From queen bee to drone, dah-ling.’ She despaired to her hidden kiddie contraband. ‘It just ain’t natural.’
    As inexperienced as she was, Gillian suspected that arriving one hour late for her job interview was perhaps not the best way to impress a prospective employer. It was not her fault. Despite inflating condom balloons to amuse him, Jack had howled the whole night. Once he
did
go to sleep, he became a capricious clock radio, going off unpredictably and tuned into long-wave static. But when she
needed
a wake-up call, he’d slept right through. Hence her flustered arrival on the threshold of ‘Ronald La Roux Fine Art’. An ice-cream van inched along the pavement, the syrupy music dripping out on to the street. ‘Listen,’ Gillian pleaded desperately to her small, whimpering ward, ‘they’re playing your song!’
    Gillian was in the middle of her pitch on depersonalized perceptions of abstract dichotomies when the ice-cream cone propped in the pram lost its sloppy sanctuary and slid in slow motion on to the work of a primitive (not so Naïve, to judge by the number of zeros on her price tag) Fauvistic Impressionist.
    â€˜Kid loves art,’ Gillian gushed on the brink of her own Premenstrual-Tension Nervous Breakdown Blue Period. ‘His first words were Mama and Dada,’ she added pathetically, then left before Roland La Roux was tempted to break Jack down to his most basic geometric form.
    Her foray into exotic kitchenware fared no better. Despite Gillian’s limited culinary credentials – as far as she was concerned capers were things you got up to, preferably with recently divorced shipping magnates – she was busily bluffing her way into the earthenware traditional peasant cooking implements department of Selfridges, when the sales assistant she had paid to mind Jack, appeared, grimacing.
    â€˜I think,’ the nineteen-year-old (nose pinched between acrylic nails) informed the job applicant, ‘he needs changing.’
    â€˜Yes,’ hissed Gillian, resentfully.