All That Mullarkey Read Online Free PDF Page A

“separated”. That’s just a barney, an argument, a tiff! You scream at each other then you make up!’ He hesitated. ‘You spent the night with me … to punish him?’
    It was so close to the truth that her voice refused to let her deny it.
    ‘So it wasn’t an attraction, a wild thing, an affair – I was just convenient ! You somehow fouled up meeting your sister and needed a place to stay!’
    She winced.
    Her eyes burned with tears as she scrabbled for the door handle and bolted, abandoning the warmth of both him and his smelly old jacket in the car.
    Trembling with cold and nerves she drove home badly, forgetting to use her mirrors, driving straight over at a crossroads, hearing a scream of brakes.
    What had she done ?
    What about Gav? She felt sick. Clouds like battleships rolled up to obscure the sun; she turned her heaters up high, yet still shivered.
    When she reached home and saw Gav’s car drawn up outside, she seriously thought she’d faint.
    Gav was back.
    For what? For ever? For something he’d left? For another row?
    Her brain began feverishly to concoct a plausible excuse for why she was soaked with lake water. Her guilty heart beat so hard that it seemed to rattle behind her eyes.
    Relief though, he wasn’t actually in the house. She called his name into the empty air, voice stretched to cracking in the answering silence. Gratefully, she hurled her sodden clothes into the washing machine and raced for the shower to scrub urgently at the lake water on her skin and hair with shower gel and shampoo, to obliterate the vegetable smell. As well as any traces of extra-marital sex.
    In the bedroom the writing on the wall remained. THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav.
    When Gav burst through the front door, pounding up the stairs – ‘Cleo?’ – she was standing looking at it, in her yellow towelling robe.
    He skidded to a halt. Somehow he looked gaunt, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. They stared at each other. His voice was disbelieving and exultant. ‘You’re back!’
    She nodded. Watched his eyes flick to the marker pen message and back to her, his face flush and then pale.
    ‘Cleo …’ His eyes were red at the lower rim. His Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘I am so sorry.’ He walked slowly towards her, hands out, palms up, rushing his sentences, falling over his apologies. ‘Can you forgive me? I don’t deserve it, but when I came home and you’d gone …!’ He bit his lip and shut his eyes for an instant. ‘You must’ve thought I’d gone mad.’
    Mad. She flinched. Crazy madwoman. Justin, laughing, hugging her tightly with delight. The smell of lake water, his hot mouth taking her cold lips. She pushed the image away.
    Gav lowered his beseeching hands. ‘I don’t know what came over me, Cleo, I just went off on one.’
    She studied his desperate face as if she’d never seen it: sandy eyebrows, fair skin lightly freckled, softly lined. Not a sunburst of laughter lines radiating white in a tanned skin, not a sharp nose above curving, laughing lips. As if in a visualisation exercise, she brought a picture of Justin deliberately into her mind’s eye – and set a flame to it. Watched it catch, balloon, shrivel and collapse like a photograph in an ashtray. He must be gone.
    Gav was her husband. Her guilt reared up like a serpent and speared her heart with its forked tongue. He was obviously waiting for a flurry of questions from poor wronged little wifey. She supposed that, if she wanted to save her marriage – she did, didn’t she? – she must discover what had happened to make Gav ‘go off on one’. And make certain that he never found out that she’d been off on one of her own.
    Her anger, so sustaining till now, wouldn’t creak into action. She pointed to THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav and her hand shook.
    His eyes were huge. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
    Her emotions seemed to have iced over. ‘Something certainly wound you up. Something at work?’
    His eyes flickered to