Skeletons Read Online Free PDF

wanted to be a dutiful daughter and to pay her mum back for the fact that she had done so much for her, bringing Jen up on her own after Rory had left, working full time but never deliberately
making her daughter feel as though she was hard done by. Jen had done that on her own. It was just that the second Jen arrived, she couldn’t wait to leave again. She would spend hours beating herself up
about it, promising herself that the next
time she would stay longer, look happier, try harder, but then the day would come around, and she would be somehow incapable of behaving any differently.
    She didn’t know why her mother brought out the worst in her. Elaine had never done anything but try to do her best. Actually, a thought had occasionally inveigled its way into the back of Jen’s mind, hovering there until she forced it
out again: it was her mother’s trying that did it. It was too much, too revealing, too in need of her attention.
    Elaine Blaine. Even her name was laughable. Jen had asked her once, when she was a teenager, why she had given up her own, more majestic surname, Rochester, for something that sounded like the start of a limerick.
    ‘Because that’s what people do when they get married,’ Elaine had said, as if that settled the matter.
    Even after Rory had left, she had clung to the name like a life raft, unwilling to let the last part of him go.
    Elaine liked routine. She had made it an art form once she and Jen were on their own. It could have been her specialist subject on
Mastermind
. What time will you get up every morning for the rest of your life? What time will you make
yourself a pot of tea every afternoon? What day will you stock up at the Co-op?
    Meals were allocated a night and never rotated, so Jen always knew that if it was Tuesday, it was fish fingers, oven chips and peas, but Thursdays meant spaghetti Bolognese. As far as she knew, Elaine still ate the same daily specials on the
requisite day. Certainly Sundays, the only day she and Jason ever visited, was
still roast. Jen had seen the frozen packets of individual chicken breasts lined up in the freezer like coffins, next to the already partially roasted potatoes and
Yorkshire puddings.
    ‘Can’t we have something different?’ she had asked once, when she was about fourteen. A Wednesday, it must have been, because Elaine had taken a packet of ham out of the fridge, and lettuce and tomatoes to make a salad.
    ‘Ham salad today, you know that,’ Elaine had said cheerfully.
    ‘Let’s save that for tomorrow. I could make baked potatoes. With beans. Or scrambled eggs.’
    ‘Baked potatoes is Friday,’ Elaine had said, as if that was stated in the Bible, and who was she to argue? Thou shalt only eat baked potatoes on a Friday. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s spuds. ‘If you want to help,
you can slice the tomatoes.’
    Jen had stamped her foot. Literally stamped it like a cartoon rendition of a sulky child. ‘God, Mum, what does it matter? If we feel like having something else, then let’s have something else.’
    ‘I feel like ham salad,’ Elaine had said in a small but determined voice. ‘It’s Wednesday.’
    It was only more recently that Jen had realized that Elaine probably thought that by taking control of what she had it in her power to influence, she could make her daughter feel secure in the wake of the devastating break-up. It hadn’t
worked. Jen had felt scornful, even ashamed, of her mother’s lack of adventure and flair. Irritated by her practical ordinariness. No wonder her father had felt he couldn’t stay; he would have been bored to tears by the
day-to-day
mundanity. She had had no doubt he would come and rescue her from it one day.
    Clearly, he hadn’t.
    Now, every Sunday, Jen and Jason would either drive to Jen’s mum’s house – where they would use up all their conversation in the first five minutes, and then sit for hours in an oppressive silence punctuated every now and then by
Elaine asking if