Chosen Read Online Free PDF Page B

laburnum. She blows her nose, looks round at Jake – fast asleep. Rod can switch off the fire, no need for her to go in there again. Not today. Enough today.
    A huge glass of wine, soon as she gets home. And once Jake’s in bed she will get systematically off her face. It you can’t get legless the day your mother goes up in smoke . . .
    â€˜Hey!’ Rod stops the car and switches off the engine. An estate agent’s sign has appeared in the front garden. Bannerman’s. FOR SALE .
    â€˜What?’ she says. They sit dumbly, staring at the sign. ‘It wasn’t here this morning,’ she says. ‘We couldn’t have missed it, could we?’ She gets out of the car. Someone has chopped off some privet to make it possible to display the sign. The smell of severed twigs is bitter in the sunshine.
    â€˜Must be a mistake,’ Rod says. ‘Some wanker’s put it in the wrong garden. I’ll ring them.’ He gets out his phone.
    â€˜I’ll turn the fire off,’ she says. She puts the key in the lock – but it won’t work. She tries again. It
won’t
. She holds the key up and squints at it. Definitely the right one. She frowns at the door. There are new scratches in the paint. She tries again.
    â€˜The lock’s been changed,’ she calls, but Rod is standing with his back to her beside the car, talking into his phone. She goes round the back, avoiding the pebbledash. The back-door lock has been changed too. She looks through the window. Someone else has been in and turned the fire off. She folds down onto the back doorstep. Someone’s been here since this morning and done this. The sun is hot. The jungly garden is prowled by feral cats; a pair of yellow eyes glare out between the stalks of a rampant bamboo.
    Rod comes and stands looking down at her, scratching his head.
    â€˜There’s no mistake,’ he says. ‘Someone’s put it up for sale.’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜The lassie didn’t know.’ He sits down beside her and rolls himself a cigarette. He breathes in and then out on a plume of smoke. ‘Said you need to speak to the lawyer. Mr Riddle.’
    â€˜But I don’t know –’
    â€˜She gave me the number, you have to ring.’
    â€˜Better go, Jake might wake up,’ she says, but they continue to sit there. She can see three cats now: young, ginger-striped, a half-grown litter.
    â€˜When are you leaving?’ She looks at her black knees. A spot of grease fallen from her sandwich, the usual smudges from Jake’s fingers.
    â€˜Flight’s Monday,’ he says. There’s a long silence into which a magpie interjects its rattle. ‘Do you want me to change it?’
    I want you not to go
.
    â€˜I mean, will you be OK?’ he says. He, too, is looking at his knees. He sucks at his cigarette and a slant of sunshine reveals the smoke as hazy yellow, carcinogenic.
    â€˜I’ll have to be, won’t I?’
    â€˜S’pose I
could
try the airline,’ he says, grudgingly, ‘see if I can put if off a couple
more
weeks, but it’ll cost.’ He stands up and grinds out his cigarette. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘we’ll go to Bannerman’s now and get this sorted.’
    He drives with a set jaw.
    â€˜Don’t give them a bollocking,’ she says. He flicks her a look. ‘I mean, they’re only doing their job.’
    â€˜Selling your fucking house from under you?’
    â€˜I wasn’t in it,’ she points out.
    He speeds up as they approach a changing light. She flinches down in her seat, sees the tension in his knee, unfamiliar in suit trousers, the terrible charity shop suit he’d come back with so proudly: ‘Only a tenner!’ The trousers are too short, the lapels too big and there’s an awful naff sort of shine to the fabric. But it’s only for today.
    â€˜Are you really going?’ she says, so quiet it