Any Way You Want Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

financial analytical thing that meant absolutely nothing to me. She might as well have been speaking in a foreign language. Stock market . . . data . . . FTSE 100 . . . I understood some of the individual words, but put all together, in sentences . . . Hmmm. She had me.
    When she finishes banging on about the Dow Jones, I thought to myself, I’ll twist the conversation into a more interesting direction. I’ll ask her . . . I’ll ask her . . . What will I ask her?
    I’ll ask her if she prefers Robbie Williams to Jeremy Paxman, I decided. No, I’ll ask what she thinks of Richard Madeley’s new haircut. I bit back a giggle and nodded knowledgeably as she told me about the inside info she had on the forthcoming budget. I’ll ask her what her favourite book is, I decided in the end, and then wondered what I would reply to the same question. Did Heat magazine count?
    Mark arrived with a couple of drinks at that moment – good, mine had long been emptied – and so I didn’t get the chance.
    ‘Dinner’s about ready,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come through?’
    Call me sad or call me a plain old middle-class snob if you want, but I do get a voyeuristic thrill from snooping around other people’s homes. Vicarious living, Alex reckons. Nosiness, my mum says disapprovingly. She says she simply can’t understand why I get triumphant about seeing a few fat, well-thumbed Jilly Cooper novels stashed away at the top of a bookcase that’s otherwise stuffed with the likes of Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. ‘So what if they like Jilly Cooper?’ she asks, looking puzzled. ‘ I like Jilly Cooper. What does that say about me?’
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with liking Jilly Cooper,’ I try to explain. ‘I like her too. It’s about the pseuds who think they’re above reading her, and who try to hide the fact by only putting their Booker nominees on display.’
    I was hoping that I could spot the fatal flaw in Julia and Mark’s house. The Barbara Cartland in the Martin Amises, if you will, or the tacky Tiffany lampshade. Hey, anything plastic would do, at a pinch. This was completely unfair of me when my own home was about as grubby and fluffy as they came, with plastic toys avalanching out of every cupboard, but that wasn’t the point. My game, my rules.
    We walked into the dining room, and damn it, there wasn’t a single fault visible. In fact, I had to double-check we hadn’t walked into the dining display area of Selfridges by mistake. The room was painted a warm plum, which might have ended up looking ghastly elsewhere. As it was, with wall lights softening up the colour, and flickering candles on every shelf of the walnut dresser, the room felt cosy and intimate. The table was laid with a spotless white linen tablecloth, silver cutlery and wine glasses that reflected the candlelight. We even had napkins, for God’s sake.
    It was about as far removed from dinner chez nous as possible. No one at the table was demanding chocolate biscuits and going ballistic with rage when told that they’d mysteriously vanished out of the cupboard. Nobody spat out their food or threw it, or splurged it over their own hair. Nobody had a tantrum about wanting to eat from a pink plate with a pink fork. Nobody . . . OK, enough. Leave it behind, I told myself. Vive la différence!
    Over plates of sweet chilli noodles wokked to plump perfection, the conversation quickly moved around from the hot gossip at Alex’s newspaper to the latest MP to get caught up in a sleaze scandal.
    ‘Did you see him on Newsnight last night?’ Chloe said, waving her fork animatedly. ‘He was so uncomfortable. You could almost smell the sweat coming off him, couldn’t you?’
    God, Newsnight . I hadn’t seen it for ages. Way past my usual bedtime. The only reason I ever watched it in the first place was for the Paxman factor.
    ‘He’ll brazen it out,’ Mark said. ‘He would have walked by now if he was going to.’
    ‘The implications are