Always and Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

patterns when she was tired and fed up.

    Mel knew she should have come up with some better explanation as to why she wouldn’t be at the zoo but she just couldn’t. Her energy had drained away.
    ‘Sarah, I can’t go with you. Dawna is going and you love Dawna.’

    For a brief second, mother and daughter’s eyes met, the same candid blue with glints of darkest violet near the irises giving them remarkable depth. In that moment, Mel thought her daughter looked old and knowing, as if she could see the exhaustion and guilt in her mother’s eyes, and knew that Mel would have done anything to be in two places at the one time if it would make Sarah happy. Then it was gone, replaced by the childish incomprehension that Mummy was once again choosing work over Sarah’s world.
    Mel wondered why Adrian told the children she was a super mum. She was a crap mum.

    ‘You were a long time,’ Adrian remarked when she final y arrived downstairs at ten past eight, carrying dirty clothes, wet towels and a half-eaten baby rusk that she’d found squashed into the landing carpet.

    ‘Sarah didn’t want to go to sleep,’ muttered Mel. She dumped the laundry in the basket, which managed to look horribly ful again, and headed for the fridge and a glass of wine. There was none. Hadn’t that been last week’s plan?
    No wine was to be opened during the week because then she had a glass every evening and surely it was bad for her. Bad, schmad. Where was the corkscrew?
    The booze was locked in a cupboard in the dining room.
    Mel took out a bottle of the expensive Chablis that Adrian loved. She handed him a glass, which he took without looking up from his books. A plate of half-finished beans on toast lay beside him. His exams were in May and he was studying hard. ‘Lovely wine,’ he muttered, head back in his coursework. ‘Mm,’ she said, taking a deep gulp. Better than the old screw top bottles they used to drink before they both had good jobs. There had to be some compensations for work. A thought drifted into Mel’s mind: was that what her job was al about - making money? She went out to work and paid someone else to bring up her children so that she and Adrian could afford good wine? Mel had eaten her beans on toast and was half reading the paper and half waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle so she could put on another load, when Adrian said,
    ‘Oh, forgot to tel you but Caroline phoned when you were doing the baths to remind you that you’re al meeting up in Pedro’s Wine Bar at half-eight on Thursday night, and if you’re driving can you pick her up?’
    ‘Oh, damn,’ muttered Mel. ‘It’s the last thing I feel like this week. And she should know I don’t drive to work.’ Caroline was a very old friend who lived in Dublin’s suburbia, and the party was their delayed Christmas get-together with a group of other old friends - cancel ed so many times that they’d final y decided to have it in January. Once, Caroline and Mel had shared an apartment and worked in the same company, going on wild nights out, comparing notes on unsuitable men and planning how they’d run the world when their time came. Now Caroline was a ful -time mother of three and dedicated herself to the job.
    She was, as Mel and everyone else recognised, fabulous at it. Being a mother was her true vocation, and not drinking triple vodkas in shady clubs, as Mel loved to tease her.
    Mel knew that her friend’s three smal sons had never eaten a single thing out of a jar when they were babies. If this had been anyone else but the tactful Caroline, Mel would have been made to feel hideously guilty. Her plans to mush up organic carrots had fal en by the wayside when she went back to work and discovered that huge organisation was involved in buying and mushing organic stuff, when it was easier to just buy cute baby jars with nice pictures on the outside. Anyway, the kids liked the jars more than they’d ever liked any of her painstakingly