Are You My Mother? Read Online Free PDF

with Stella making puking faces behind Gavin’s back. His hands smelled so masculine, a mingled memory of slapped-on aftershave and engine oil.
    ‘ They used to call me Elephant Girl at school,’ I muttered, immediately worrying that he’d think this was because I had a weight problem, or a thick skin, instead of being a reference to my implausible lashes.
    Gavin laughed. ‘You’re far too sexy to be even remotely elephantine, even with those eyelashes.’
    Notwithstanding the dodgy Barbours, he was by far the nicest bloke that I’d met in a long time. After that butterfly kiss, he gradually turned his attention away from Stella and began to concentrate on me. The conversation wasn’t just empty flirting, either, but turned into interesting discussions which began with politics - at least as far as my wobbly political opinions allowed - and traced a winding path around to music, books, and films, ending up with a lively debate about whether Four Weddings and a Funeral was any good or not. Gavin dismissed it as ‘girly crap’ and said that Pulp Fiction was an infinitely better movie, but for a change I stuck to my guns and didn’t back down.
    ‘ I like girly crap,’ I said proudly.
    It was the best conversation I’d had in months; best of all because it concluded with a long, luxurious, open-mouthed kiss, pressed up against the coat cupboard in the hall. Stella, disgusted, had wandered off to find someone else to dance with and, for once, I didn’t worry about who.
    I naively assumed that because Gavin had mentioned the Barbours in the boot, he’d be able to give us a lift home, and I could pick up my car in the morning; but around midnight he’d looked at his watch, like Cinderella, and muttered about having ‘a bit of business’ to see to. He took my phone number and gave me his, produced a large motorcycle helmet, kissed me effusively on the mouth again, and vanished into the night. By which time I was three glasses over the limit.
    I’d repaired back to the dance floor to find Stella, bliss floating around me like a chiffon scarf, and told her we’d get a cab home later. At 3am, however, to my horror, I realised I had left my wallet at home. With a view to finding somewhere to crash out, we conducted a thorough recce of the flat, but by that time not one single vaguely soft surface remained unclaimed. Beds, sofas, chairs, even the rugs on the dusty wooden floors were taken by semi-comatose bodies.
    So we’d clattered off down the many flights of stairs in our party sandals, Stella so tired that I could tell she was fighting an urge to hold my hand. I remembered trying to get comfortable in the car; then peering over the passenger seat to say goodnight to Stella, who was already asleep, stretched out in the back. The sight of her made me feel horribly guilty at my lapse of responsibility, so I turned back again. Removing my contact lenses, I sat them neatly in front of me on the dashboard, reclined my seat and snuggled down under my spread-out cardigan.
    As the tiny transparent blue bowls glinted wetly in the night, caught in the light of a street lamp above, I thought of Gavin’s smile, and the way my insides had turned liquid when he kissed me.
     

 
    Chapter 5
     
    Six years down the line, I still went weak at the knees when Gavin kissed me. I soon discovered that he was by no means a settling-down, 2.4 kids kind of a guy, but I think I probably intuited that, right from when he first offered me a knock-off Barbour at that party. I did sometimes wish that he would come to the garden centre on a Sunday with me, or even perhaps offer to cook for me once in a while, but a spark of some sort was still there between us. That was the main thing, I told myself.
    For ages, I had no idea at all what he saw in me - he was an ex-hardcore skinhead punk, a Bristol boot-boy, all shady dealings and brushes with the law; whereas I was nicely brought up, quiet, and utterly law-abiding, having never even so much as