Stop the Clock Read Online Free PDF

organic butcher’s on the corner, and as she lumbered round the tail end of it she barged straight into a tall blonde hurrying in the opposite direction.
    Of all the people . . . It was Tina.
    They both apologized and righted themselves. There was a brief mutual hesitation before Tina stepped forward to plant a respectful air kiss as close to Natalie’s cheek as the bulge of Natalie’s belly would permit, and Natalie let one arm rest lightly across Tina’s back before withdrawing it.
    Up close, Natalie noticed Tina’s perfume, which was sharp, sweet and spicy all at once, grapefruit with a hint of pepper. Natalie wondered if her own smell would give her away. It was probably a combination of fetid Underground, and the raisin Danish and vanilla bean smoothie she’d scoffed on the way: hot and bothered, a little sickly and suggestive of comfort eating.
    Tina was as slim and chic as ever, of course. She had on a tightly belted raincoat – designer, probably – whereas Natalie’s tunic top and stretchy dress were long, large, and amorphously funereal. Clothes to hide in. Who was she trying to kid? Sure, black was slimming, but even black couldn’t make you disappear.
    Still . . . OK, she’d put on far too much weight and she was going to have a right battle to lose it all – just that morning she’d tipped the scales at 16 stone – but was there something rather brittle about Tina’s thinness that she hadn’t really registered before?
    Obviously Tina had always been attractive – enough, once upon a time, to pique Natalie’s interest in a way that had been confusing and ultimately not terribly helpful, though thankfully all that was well and truly in the past. But what had really appealed about Tina was her confidence, and right now she didn’t look particularly at ease with herself. She looked tense, and even though she was smiling, the effect was not one of warmth.
    Natalie was reminded of the sharp, rather predatory expression of the byline photo that went with the new column, and a quotation from one of the textbooks they had both studied more than a decade ago came tomind:
If a journalist offers to take you out for lunch, make no mistake, you’re on the menu. Become a source, and sooner or later you’ll be paying.
    ‘So how are you?’ Tina asked. ‘Have you finished work yet?’
    ‘This is my last week.’
    ‘And you’re going to be off for how long, six months?’
    ‘I’m planning on taking the full year. Actually, I’m not sure I’m going to go back to work at all, at least not while Matilda’s little.’
    As soon as this was out Natalie wished she hadn’t said it. She hadn’t actually discussed it with Richard yet, not as such, and she shouldn’t discuss something so important with a friend before she’d been through it with him. Particularly not a friend she was feeling a bit annoyed with, thanks (but no thanks) to that snarky column.
    She knew that if she made a halfway decent case for staying at home with Matilda, if she stressed the benefits of one-to-one care and the ludicrous cost of nursery fees and so on, Richard would listen, and ultimately he would agree. What made him uncomfortable was prevarication; she needed to know her own mind first, otherwise it would all end up with her getting worked up about nothing that either of them could explain, and him staring at her in anxious bafflement.
    And she didn’t really know what she wanted, not yet. She liked her job, more or less – she did, overall, believe in what the Department for Children, Schools and Families was trying to do, and if she was occasionally required to manipulate the facts for thesake of an effective press release, at least it wasn’t in the interests of entertainment. There was no real reason why she should have this niggling feeling of having sold out – of being someone other than the person she’d become.
    ‘Oh God, don’t tell me you’re going to go down the Lucy route,’ Tina said. ‘You can’t.