Marian Keyes - Watermelon Read Online Free PDF Page B

everything yourself."

    Judy was hoisting everything into the taxi when I saw, with horror, Denise's husband coming up the sidewalk. He must have been on his way home from work.

    "Oh Christ," I said ominously.

    "What?" asked Judy in alarm, her face red and sweaty from her exertions.

    "Denise's husband," I muttered.

    "So what?" she said loudly.

    I was expecting some kind of terrible emotional scene from him. As I said, he was Italian. Or I was afraid that he would suggest some kind of alliance between me and him. Something along the lines of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." I certainly didn't want that.

    My eyes locked with his and I felt, in my guilty and fearful state, that I knew exactly what he was thinking. "It's all your fault. If only you had been as attractive as my Denise, your husband might have stayed with you and I would still be happily married. But no, you had to go and ruin everything, you fat ugly cow."

    "Fine," I thought, "two can play at that game."

    I stared back at him, returning his thought messages. "Well, if you hadn't married a husband-stealing, home-wrecking floozy none of us would be in this mess."

    I was probably doing the poor man a terrible injustice. He didn't say anything to me. He just looked at me in a kind of sad and accusatory way.

    24 WATERMELON

    I hugged Judy good-bye. We were both crying. For once my baby wasn't.

    "Heathrow, Terminal One," I said tearfully to the taxi driver and we swept away from the curb, leaving Mr. Andrucetti staring bleakly after us.

    As I struggled down the aisle on the Aer Lingus plane, I bumped against several irate passengers with my bag of baby supplies. When I finally loc- ated my seat a man got up to help me stow my bags. As I smiled my thanks at him, I automatically wondered if he thought I was pretty.

    It was so awful. That was one of the things I'd really liked about being married. For a couple of years I'd been off that horrible merry-go-round of trying to meet the right man, finding out that he was already married, or living with another man, or pathologically stingy, or read Jeffrey Archer, or could only have an orgasm if he could call you "Mother," or any one of the thousands of character flaws that weren't immediately obvious the first time you shook his hand and smiled into his eyes and got a warm buzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach, and thought to yourself, "Hey, this could be the one."

    Now I was back in the situation where every man is a potential boyfriend. I was back in a world where there are eight hundred exquisitely beautiful women to every one straight single man. And that is even before we start weeding out the truly hideous ones.

    I looked at the helpful man carefully. He wasn't even that attractive. He was probably gay. Or, more likely, this being an Aer Lingus flight, he was probably a priest.

    And as for me, a deserted wife with a two-day-old baby, the self-esteem of an amoeba (that much?), forty pounds overweight, incipient postpartum depression, and a vagina stretched out to ten times its normal size, I was hardly a prize catch myself.

    The plane took off and the houses and buildings and streets of London circled away below me. I looked down as the roads got smaller and smaller. I was leaving behind six years of my life.

    Is this how a refugee feels? I wondered.

    My husband was down there somewhere. My apartment

    25 Marian Keyes

    was down there somewhere. My friends were down there somewhere. My life was down there somewhere.

    I had been happy there.

    And then the view was obscured by cloud.

    I sat back in my seat, my baby on my lap. I suppose I must have looked just like a normal mother to all the other passengers. But--and the thought struck me quite forcibly--I wasn't. I was now a deserted wife. I was a statistic.

    I had been lots of things in my life. I had been Claire the dutiful daughter. I had been Claire the scourge of a daughter. I had been Claire the student. I had been Claire the harlot