One Thing Led to Another Read Online Free PDF

anything, he just isn’t boyfriend material. And Gina, more than anyone else I know, could really do with a boyfriend.
    I am getting out of the shower when I hear my mobile. Oh for God’s sake, piss off! Who can possibly have something so important to say, that it needs saying at eight a.m.?
    I get to the phone on the fifth ring.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Tess?!’
    Even though she has known me and my voice for nearly thirty years, my mother still behaves as if I am Terry Waite, and this is the first time she has spoken to me after twenty-five years in captivity. I wouldn’t mind, but this level of drama can be quite exhausting, especially when she sometimes rings twice a day.
    ‘Oh it’s you. Hi mum,’ I say, sitting down on my bed. I am only wearing my towel and am dripping wet through.
    ‘Oh, thank God. Thank God you’re OK,’ she says breathlessly.
    ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
    Had there been a national disaster whilst I was in the shower? A bombing, a military coup? A tsunami perhaps?
    ‘I just worry about you down there, that’s all. There’s always that part of you when you’re a mum – you’ll see when you become one! – that worries something might have happened in the night.’ Remembering the near miss I had last week, I wince at this, hold the receiver away from my head.
    Welcome to the world of Pat Jarvis. Fifty-four, happily married to Tony Jarvis, two wonderful children, Tess and Edward, the loveliest woman on earth, and pathologically pessimistic, especially when it comes to the safety of her own children.
    If there had been a train crash in, say, Cardiff, my mother would not rule out the chance that I had been interviewing someone in Wales that day and am therefore lying dead and mutilated on the rail-track. If I am not able to get back to her within half an hour of her ringing, she’ll imagine me bound and gagged in the boot of a crack-dealer’s car, as my phone rings futilely in my coat pocket. When I was a little girl, she would refuse to let me help her bake in case I got my hand mangled in the whisks of her electric blender or my jugular slashed through with a bread knife. To cut a long story short, my mother is constantly amazed that at twenty-eight years old, I am still alive. Such is her faith in my ability merely to survive.
    ‘I was just calling you to remind you about your brother’s birthday. But before we talk about that, I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news.’
    Now there’s a surprise.
    ‘David Jewson died yesterday. Sixty-two, dropped dead in his garden, just like that.’
    She awaits my reaction as I trawl through my brain, trying for the life of me to remember who David Jewson is.
    ‘That’s terrible. But…um…who’s David Jewson?’
    Mum sighs. This is not quite the reaction she was hoping for.
    ‘Oh come on, you do know David Jewson, Tessa. You went to school with his daughter, Beverley. Lovely girl, very pretty, works at Natwest in town.’
    Beverley Jewson had middle-aged hair and once won Young Citizen of the Year (need I say more?). That doesn’t make it any less terrible for her to lose her dad, of course, but why does my mum insist on banging on about the merits of other people’s children all the time? Wasn’t I pretty? Wasn’t I intelligent? (Wasn’t I deplorably childish and should pull myself together?)
    ‘Oh yes, I remember Beverley now,’ I say, biting my lip. ‘That’s awful. Absolutely terrible.’
    ‘Well it was Tess, it really was,’ she says, perking up. ‘The thing was, he was perfectly fine last week. I saw him in the Spar as I was buying your dad a chicken Kiev for his tea. There I was, digging around in the freezer section when I felt this hand on my back and heard this voice say, “Hi Pat, is that you?” I felt awful because I had my bi-focals on at the time and I didn’t recognize him and…’
    Bla bla bla…
    I am only roused from the catatonic state brought on by one of my mum’s monologues when I hear her say…
    ‘And your