Original Cyn Read Online Free PDF Page B

on its axis. She wouldn’t have been remotely surprised to have come round from one of her glorious orgasms to discover that winter had turned into spring.
    The only problem was that Mark had very little conversation beyond his work. She wouldn’t have minded so much if he had been a doctor or a lawyer or a journalist. She would have enjoyed listening to tales of who he’d cured or saved from a life sentence, or who Camilla Parker-Bowles was now shagging on the quiet. Dishy and sexually adept as he was, Mark was in public health. To be more specific, he was a restaurant inspector. “Did you know,” he would say as they lay snuggled up in her bed basking in their postcoital glow, “that raw meat and poultry contaminated with fecal matter are among the most frequent causes of food-borne illness?”
    She was forever trying to explain why, when one of her girlfriends invited them to dinner, it was less than tactful to discuss E. coli and ptomaine poisoning at the table. He would take the point and then at the next dinner party he would be off again, chatting away about mice droppings and European chopping board protocols.
    It had taken her weeks to find the courage to end it. She hated hurting people and apart from his passion for food hygiene, Mark was one of the kindest, sweetest boyfriends she’d ever had.
    “But at least you did it,” Veronica had said, leaning forward in her chair, eyes gleaming. “That is real progress.” According to Veronica, the reason Cyn was in therapy was to learn how to be bad.
    For the record, Cyn was not a doormat. It was more complicated than that.
    In 1982, when Cyn was nine, Barbara was diagnosed with breast cancer. The tumor was minute and successfully removed. After three months of chemotherapy she made a complete recovery. But during that time, nobody knew how it would turn out and the family was thrown into complete turmoil. Her dad was at his wit’s end, and both Cyn and her brother were constantly being told by relatives to be on their best behavior so as not to worry their parents. Jonny, who was seven, responded by doing the very opposite. For a while he turned into an uncontrollable monster, desperate for parental attention. Cyn saw that this was only increasing the pressure on her mum and dad and became a model child. She never grew out of the habit.
    Even when she was going through her brief punk phase, Cyn hadn’t done anything really bad. OK, she’d smoked a bit of weed with Jude, her best friend from school, and once or twice the two of them had gotten severely drunk, but that was about as far as it went. Her rebellion was very much rebellion-lite. She never trashed her pink princess bedroom (which she’d had since she was nine), never hung out with the wrong crowd, never shoplifted (God forbid!) nor swallowed a tablet more potent than Tylenol. When she lost her virginity at seventeen, it was to Jason Lieberman, a nice Jewish architecture student from Stanmore. Admittedly, a couple of years later she tried to seduce an Aryan homosexual, but that was hardly a hanging offense.
    Sin didn’t sit easily with Cyn. It wasn’t in her nature.
    She was one of those women who find it hard to stick up for themselves, but have no problem rushing to somebody else’s defense.
    Ages after somebody had made a bitchy comment or insulted her, she would be lying in bed or relaxing in the bath and the perfect response would hit her. Then she would kick herself for not thinking of it at the time.
    One night after a couple of glasses of wine, she thought up what she firmly believed was a wonderful riposte (albeit a month late) to a sleazy pickup line this bloke, Milo, had used on her. Since he was a friend of a friend she was able to get his number and, without thinking, phoned him. “Hi, Milo, it’s Cyn, Lucy’s friend. We met a few weeks ago at a do at Bar Med. You don’t remember? OK, I was wearing a pink halter-neck top and new Paper Denim Cloth jeans. Anyway, what I wanted to