Courting Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘conferences’ requiring overnight stays . . .
    How long had it been going on? The note he’d left said ‘
I’m clearly having some kind of mid-life crisis. I know it’s clichéd. Especially given my profession.
[You’re right there, mate. Who did you train under? Dr Seuss?]
I just need some space.
[The space between Petronella’s thighs, obviously.]
Tell Portia I’m sorry. It’s not her fault. I’ll be in touch soon. Will pay you back when I can
.’
    Sifting through a flutter-click snapshot of our marriage – my accidental pregnancy, his grudging agreement to become a father, his slow drift away from us, I was well on the way to demolishing a fourth block of Lindt chocolate when Roxy arrived. I heard her before I saw her. My mother drives an MG Midget, which she bought at a bargain price because it doesn’t go in reverse and sometimes the soft top gets jammed halfway up or down. At five foot one, my mum is so short, oncoming drivers can’t see anything but her hands gripping the wheel. She careers around London’s streets like the headless horsewoman. I’ve tried to convince her to drive a sensible car. But nobody tells my mother what to do.
    ‘Did that mongrel really take all your money?’ she said, bursting through my door like a gun-slinger in a Wild West saloon, only vertically challenged and in lime-green leopardskin.
    ‘I inserted my card into the cash machine and it just laughed and spat it out.’
    ‘That mingy, stingy, two-faced dog turd. How can he have a mid-life crisis when he’s clearly never left puberty?’ Although she wasn’t really all that surprised. Roxy was burnt so badly by my father’s disappearance that her philosophy has always been: If everything’s going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Her immediate solution was to refloat our joint legal venture. ‘Your life’s going down the gurgler, love. How else are you going to pay your bills, Matilda?’
    ‘Something will turn up.’ I’ll say it again. I love my mother. But the chances of me setting up in practice with her were as likely as King Herod being asked to babysit.
    Diplock Chambers at Garden Court was expecting me to collect my belongings. The humiliation was so overwhelming I was tempted to call the clerks to explain that I wouldn’t be able to make it in today, due to the fact that I was deceased. But I fortified myself by eating my own body weight in brownies, then plodded out to my car. A chill wind burrowed into my skin like a worm. Teeth chattering, I drove on automatic pilot, down through Clerkenwell to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
    It was here, in 1586, that Babington, the man who tried to assassinate Elizabeth I, was hanged. (In those days, justice came with strings attached.) Babington’s body was then drawn and quartered, which involved extracting his entrails and burning them before his goggling eyes. The punishment proved so gruesome, the stench of burning bowels so overwhelming, that Elizabeth mercifully allowed Babington’s thirteen accomplices merely to be hanged. Well, today I knew just how old Babington must have felt.
    I slunk into Chambers unnoticed. I was knee deep in halffull cardboard boxes when I heard a knuckle rap on wood as the door snapped open.
    ‘Why do you bother knocking when you just barge right in anyway?’
    ‘I was hoping to catch you unawares, preferably changing into a bikini,’ said Jack Cassidy.
    ‘In the middle of an arctic London winter . . . Right.’
    ‘A boy can dream. There are many people I would pay money not to see naked. You are definitely not one of them. From what I remember from our student days, that is . . .’
    I felt a hot colour rising on my neck. Even though my mother walks around naked all the time – scaring neighbours, Jehovah’s Witnesses and pollsters – I am more the Loch Ness Monster of nudity, but there are
no
sightings. I haven’t even seen
myself
naked. Which made the memory of my first encounter with Jack Cassidy on the streets