Second Chances Read Online Free PDF Page B

that hung around her niece’s neck.
    ‘My boyfriend gave it to me. It’s an antique locket. There’s his picture, and mine—see?’
    Lou made enchanted noises. Privately, I thought it was all a bit nauseating. I mean, what modern youth gives a girl a Victorian locket with their photos? What’s wrong with an MP3 player, or maybe a pair of funky bed socks?
    ‘I know what you’ve been talking about.’ Sacha shot me a glance of disgust. ‘Mum and Kit’s epic pioneering scheme. All aboard the Mayflower !’ Lou tutted in mutinous sympathy. ‘There’s a big orange for sale sign by the front gate,’ Sacha continued. ‘And what’s for sale? My home!’
    ‘Already on the market?’
    ‘Oh, yes. If we so much as put a mug down, Mum grabs it and starts fussing about with a tea towel. Crowds have been streaming through all week, led by a geek called Dave from Theakston’s Realty. Poking about in my bedroom, raving on about how much they love my mermaids. Loud-mouthed kids climbing the twins’ apple trees. We should start doing Devonshire teas.’
    Lou laid a hand on Sacha’s knee. ‘We don’t want you to go, darling.’
    ‘Yeah, well. Mine not to reason why.’
    ‘I don’t believe all this, you know,’ said Lou, scowling as she looked from Kit to me. ‘This press release about the mortgage and lifestyle, and Kit’s career. It’s all shit.’
    Her outburst was oddly shocking, because my sister never swears when there are children within earshot. Coarse language , Mum said once, when I was ten and she padded up the stairs and caught me cursing. Only those with an impoverished vocabulary resort to profanity.
    ‘You’ve given us a whole stack of reasons.’ Lou downed her glass. ‘A mile-high pile of excuses. And not one of ’em was the real one.’

Four
    Dad was working when I tapped on his open door. He handed me a mug of something he called tea, and pottered back to his patient. Today it was his old friend Flora. She ran the garden centre and kept putting out her spine.
    Dad lives on the outskirts of Bedford, three streets away from the house where I was brought up. In spite of being on the wrong side of seventy, my father is still a great chiropractor. In fact, he’s the only man I know who can manipulate my neck and stop a migraine in its tracks. Kit tried, once. Big mistake. Nearly wrenched my head off. I couldn’t reverse the car for a week.
    I waited in the kitchen, listening to the rise and fall of voices and dutifully drinking the undrinkable: one of Dad’s herbal brews. It tasted like an infusion of silage. Bernard, the rusty black cat, sat neatly on a rag rug by the stove like a small, curved vase.
    My dad’s eccentric, I’ll admit. The kitchen walls were painted in blurred gradations of gentle colour, and bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling. There were crystals and an oil burner lined up along the dresser. And all this new-age mumbo jumbo worked, that’s the beautiful thing. It did the trick. Dad’s kitchen always felt serene. Wacky, but serene. I loved it in there.
    He’s into the Steiner thing; didn’t discover it until middle age. Now he’s quite a big cheese in the movement. I never argue with him about it. Mum did though, and eventually—once Lou and I were grown up and off her hands—she left him for Vincent Vale, a widower who owned an upmarket country pub. Vincent, she said, was reassuringly dull. He made her happy for the last ten years of her life, so perhaps she was right to go.
    Once Flora had limped out, Dad stood by the stove, stretching the kinks in his own spine. He doesn’t look like a witch doctor; he’s more of a fox terrier—wiry and tough, with curly grey hair and eyes that miss nothing. ‘And what brings you here on a Monday?’ he asked.
    I told him. He didn’t respond at all, at first. Didn’t recoil in horror or fire off a round of reproach; just crouched down and riddled the stove, which banged and sputtered. I watched a twirl of vapour rising like a