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Chapter 1

I was online, buying myself a fortieth birthday present from my husband, when I discovered he was leaving me for a Latvian lap-dancer less than half my age.

Now, I like to think I’m an open-minded woman, but that definitely wasn’t on my wish list.

One minute I was sipping coffee, listening to the radio and trying to choose between a new Dyson and a course of Botox, and the next it all came apart at the seams. The rug was tugged from beneath my feet, and I was left lying on my almost middle-aged backside, wondering where I’d gone wrong. All while I was listening to a band called The Afterbirth, in an attempt to understand my Goth daughter’s tortured psyche.

The Internet wasn’t helping my mood either. I knew the Dyson was the sensible choice, but the Botox ad kept springing into evil cyber-life whenever my cursor brushed against it. Maybe it was God’s way of telling me I was an ugly old hag who desperately needed surgical intervention.

The fact that I was having to do it at all was depressing enough. As he’d left for work that morning, Simon had casually suggested I ‘just stick something on the credit card’. He might as well have added ‘because I really can’t be arsed…’

He may be my husband of seventeen years, but he is a truly lazy git sometimes. We’re not just talking the usual male traits – like putting empty milk cartons back in the fridge, or squashing seven metric tons of household waste into the kitchen bin to avoid emptying it – but real, hurtful laziness. Like, anniversary-forgetting, birthday-avoiding levels of hurtful.

Of course, it hadn’t always been like that. Once, it had been wonderful – flawed, but wonderful. Over the last few years, though, we’d been sliding more and more out of the wonderful column, and so far into flawed that it almost qualified as ‘fucked-up’.

It had happened so slowly, I’d barely noticed – a gradual widening of the cracks in the plasterwork of our marriage: different interests, different priorities. A failure on both our parts, perhaps, to see the fact that the other was changing.

With hindsight, he’d been especially switched off in recent months: spending more time at work, missing our son’s sports day, and not blowing even half a gasket when Lucy dyed her blond hair a deathly shade of black. I’d put it down to the male menopause and moved on. I was far too busy pairing lost socks to give his moods too much attention anyway. Tragic but true – I’d taken things for granted as much as he had.

As I flicked between Curry’s and Botox clinics, an e-mail landed. It was Simon – probably, I thought as I opened it, reminding me to iron five fresh work shirts for him. I don’t know why he bothers – it’s part of my raison d’être. If he opened that wardrobe on a Monday morning and five fresh work shirts weren’t hanging there, perfectly ironed, I think we’d both spontaneously combust.

‘Dear Sally,’ it started, ‘this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I need to take a break. I have some issues I need to sort out and I can’t do that at home. I won’t be coming back this weekend, but I’ll contact you soon so we can talk. Please don’t hate me – try to understand it’s not about you or anything you’ve done wrong, it’s about me making the time to find myself. I’d really appreciate it if you could pack me a bag – you know what I’ll need. And if you could explain to the children for me it would probably be for the best – you’re so much better at that kind of thing. With love, Simon. PS – please don’t forget to pack my work shirts.’

And at the bottom of the e-mail, rolling across the page in all its before-and-after glory, was an advert. For bloody Botox. I stared at it and gave some serious consideration to smashing the laptop to pieces with a sledgehammer.

Instead, I remained calm and in control of my senses. At least calm enough to not wreck the computer.

The only problem was what to do next. When you get news like that, especially in the deeply personal format of an e-mail, it renders you too stupefied to feel much at all. I think my brain shut down to protect itself from overload, and I did the logical thing – started making lunch. Lucy would be back from a trip to Oxford city centre soon with her friends Lucifer and Beelzebub. Well, that was my name for them. I think it was actually Tasha and Sophie, but they’d changed a lot since Reception, and I wasn’t sure if they were even human any more.

They’d left earlier that morning on some sort of adventure to mark the end of the school term. They were probably sticking it to the Man by shoplifting black nail varnish from Superdrug.

My son, Ollie, was out at Warhammer club at the local library, where he took a frightening amount of pleasure in painting small figures of trolls and demons various shades of silver. He still looked like a normal fourteen-year-old, at least – apart from the iPod devices that had now permanently replaced his ears. I’d got used to raising my voice slightly when talking to him, a bit like you do with an elderly aunt at a family do, and playing ad hoc games of charades to let him know dinner was ready or it was time for school.

They’d both be coming home soon, even if Simon wasn’t, and they’d be hungry, thirsty, possibly lazy, grumpy, and a variety of other dwarfs as well.

On autopilot, I opened the fridge door and pulled out some ham, mayonnaise and half a leftover chocolate log, starting to assemble a sumptuous feast. Well, maybe not that sumptuous, but pretty good for a woman who’d just been cyber-dumped.

Simon was leaving me, I thought as I chopped and spread. Leaving us. My handsome husband: orthopaedic surgeon to the stars. Or at least a few C-listers who’d knackered their knees skiing, and one overweight comedian who snapped his wrist in a celebrity break-dancing contest.

It didn’t seem real. I couldn’t let it be real. Our marriage had survived way too much for it to fall to pieces now. Me getting pregnant when we were both student doctors working twenty-hour days. Lucy arriving, Ollie soon after; struggling to cope on one wage as Simon carried on with his residency. The miscarriage I’d had a few years ago, which devastated us both, even though we hadn’t planned any more…seventeen years of love and passion and anger and boredom and resentment couldn’t end with an e-mail, surely?

Except I knew marriages did end, all the time. At the school where I work as a teaching assistant, the deputy head’s husband had recently run off with a woman he met through an online betting website. Apparently they bonded over a game of Texas Hold ’Em and next thing she knew, he’d buggered off to Barrow-in-Furness to start a new life. And my sister-in-law Cheryl divorced my brother Davy after twenty-two years, once the kids had grown up and she realised he was only ten per cent tolerable, and ninety per cent tosser.

As you enter your forties, it feels like the bad news overtakes the good. More cheating spouses and tests on breast lumps, and a lot fewer mini-breaks to Paris. I’d seen enough marriages crumble to know the risks.

I suppose I’d always thought, maybe a bit smugly, that Simon and I were solid. Solid as a big, immovable, maybe not particularly inspiring, rock. More Scafell Pike than Kilimanjaro, but still solid.

‘Mum,’ shouted Ollie, having walked into the room without me so much as noticing his size ten feet stomping through the hallway, ‘stop!’

‘Stop what?’ I said, wiping my hands on the tea towel. My face was wet. I hadn’t even noticed I’d been crying. I wiped that with the tea towel too.

‘Stop spreading mayo on that chocolate log, because it’s going to taste like puke – are you going senile or what? And are you…crying?’

I glanced down. It looked a bit like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where everybody was trying to sculpt a big hill out of mashed potato. Except ruder – because a chocolate log covered in a white creamy substance does look kind of gross.

I scraped it all into the bin and took a deep breath. The tears were still flowing. Even if my brain wasn’t quite processing what was going on, my emotions had kicked in against my will. I swiped my fingers across my face to wipe the tears away, smearing my cheeks with chocolate mayo cake.

Should I tell the kids or not? Was there any point, if it wasn’t real? Perhaps I needed to read that e-mail again. He had said it wasn’t to do with me. That he just had some issues to work through. Maybe he’d go on a retreat to Tibet and fix himself, and all this emotion would have been for nothing.

Maybe I should wait and see what happened. What he had to say for himself. The Simon I knew, the Simon I’d loved for so long, wouldn’t do this. Maybe it was just a rough patch. Maybe he’d come round tomorrow, see me in my finest negligee and realise the error of his ways. He’d come crying into my arms, and bury his head in my heaving bosom…except I don’t own a negligee. Or anything more sexy than a T-shirt from the local garage that says ‘Honk here for service’ across the boobs.

When you’ve been married for seventeen years, have two teenaged children and are almost forty, you’re more likely to be shopping at Mother Malone’s Big Knicker Emporium than Ann Summers. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I should have been greeting Simon at the door every night dressed in garter belts and stockings, bearing a G&T with a blow-job chaser.

‘Come and sit down, Mum, I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ Ollie was saying, carefully taking the knife from my hands and putting it on top of the fridge. He gently placed his arm round my shoulders and guided me over to the sofa. He’s already much taller than my five foot five, and it’s disconcerting to have to look up at your own baby.

I realised then how seriously he was taking my newfound pallor and altered mental state – he’d actually taken his iPod earphones out, and they were dangling like silver tendrils down the front of his I Heart Tolkien T-shirt.

‘What’s up, Mum? You look terrible. Has there been an accident? Is it Lucy? Have you finally accepted you should have let that priest do the exorcism when you were up the duff?’

His lame attempt at humour both warmed my heart and made me feel even worse. I felt more tears welling up in my eyes, running down my face in big, fat, chocolaty drops, pooling under my chin and making my neck soggy.

I stared into space while the deluge continued, barely able to breathe between sobs, lovely Ollie patting my hand and looking slightly more hysterical with every passing moment.

He jumped up as he heard the front door slam – I don’t think he’d have cared if it was a gas salesman, or a hooded figure carrying a scythe. It was the cavalry as far as he was concerned.

My own heart did an equally big jig – was it him? Was it Simon, coming home to tell me it had all been a mistake? Telling me he was sorry? Telling me to forget all about it? I felt so impossibly weak, so impossibly broken by his proposed absence, that the thought of him walking back through that door was like being zapped by a defibrillator.

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ Lucy shrilled at us as she stormed into the living room. Not Simon after all. Someone much scarier.

Lucy is five foot eight, most of it legs, and does a very good storm. Hands on hips, she stared down at her weeping mother, fidgeting brother, and the tea towel smeared with the remains of mayo-on-sponge. She narrowed her eyes and threw her head back. Her hair didn’t budge – probably because it was dyed midnight blue-black, straightened, and glued to her head with industrial-strength hairspray.

‘Tash, Soph!’ she yelled. ‘Bugger off, will you? Mommy dearest is having some kind of spaz attack and I need to deal with the dramatics…’

I heard a very impolite sniggering from the hallway, and a slight creak of the door as the Devil’s Daughters sneaked a peek at the crazy woman.

They might listen to a lot of songs about the unbearable agonies of stubbing your toe on a guitar amp, but they had no empathy with a real-life human being at all. They’d be more upset at missing an episode of The Vampire Diaries than seeing me in tears, and I’d known them since they were four. They departed in a fit of giggles.

Lucy looked down at me, not knowing quite how to behave for a change. Her usual loving approach – verbal abuse combined with facial representations of complete contempt – normally served her well, but she was clearly a bit unsettled by all the tears.

‘Okay, Mother, what’s the big deal? I know this is probably just some stupid retarded midlife crisis, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt – have you got cancer?’

Momentarily thrown by a worldview where having cancer was preferable to a midlife crisis, I managed to stop my sniffling and stem the torrential waterworks. Attagirl, Lucy.

‘No, I haven’t got cancer,’ I said, feeling poor Ollie deflate slightly beside me with relief – he’d obviously feared something similar. But, unlike my darling daughter, he’d actually given a shit.

‘It’s your dad…’

‘Has he got cancer?’ interrupted Lucy, kicking her Converse-clad feet impatiently against the coffee table. She was dressed in leggings with black and purple hoops, and could have passed for the Wicked Witch of the West.

‘And if he has got cancer, is it in some disgusting place like his testicles? Because I’m telling you now there is no way I am going to sit around listening to people discuss my dad’s balls—’

‘No, no, your dad’s balls are fine…well, I suppose they are, I haven’t seen them up close recently…’

‘Oh, gross, Mum!’ cried Ollie, making gagging gestures with his fingers in his throat and pretending to vomit. Lucy looked similarly disgusted at the mere mention of me in close proximity to her father’s genitals. Clearly she preferred the theory that she had been hand-delivered by Satan’s stork.

‘Oh, just shut up, both of you!’ I said. ‘Your dad, and his testicles, are okay – but he’s leaving us. No, that’s not right. Not us – me. He’s leaving me. For a while. Just for a bit, while he gets his head together. I’m probably being dramatic for no reason. But…well, I only just found out. He told me today. Kind of. He e-mailed me today, actually—’

‘Hang on a minute – did you say e-mail? Are you telling me he frigging e-mailed you to say he was doing a runner?’ asked Lucy, incredulously.

‘Yes, well, you know how busy he gets at work…’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Mum, you,’ she replied, leaning down over the sofa and poking one of her fingers in my face so hard that I went cross-eyed, ‘are such a loser! He e-mails you to say he’s walking out and you justify it because he’s busy? This isn’t about him, it’s about you. You’re a doormat. You’ve got no backbone. You’re just a human being made of fucking jelly. No wonder he left you – you probably bored him to death!’

Exit Lucy, stage left, in a cloud of sulphurous smoke. I could practically feel the ceiling shake as she stomped up the stairs to her room, slammed the door, and started blasting music so loudly through her speakers that nomadic tribespeople in Uzbekistan would be wondering where the party was and if they should bring a bottle.

Oh good. The Afterbirth again. My favourites.