The Near Miss Read Online Free PDF Page B

got sick of being the other woman.’
    She kept an ear out for Lotte, asleep. This was her first night since the accident to sleep without painkillers. The medicine and measuring cup sat at the ready.
    The joke about being the other woman was an old one between them. Various incarnations of his last invention, the Oldbot, sat around the shed. She knew which one could speak back if charged up and addressed by a human. Hello Polly! (Lotte had nicknamed it). The dream of the robot had once been a solid part of their marriage; it had entwined itself around them like cement around bricks. They had sat up nights, talking and dreaming, and during the year Tom had taken off work it was a fantasy that lay behind everything they did. Tom refined the design and Grace planned the marketing. They collected news articles about similar inventions, they anxiously followed the progress of other inventors travelling down the same path of creation, who might cross the finish line first, they imagined a world where small robots with emotional intelligence could watch over lonely old people, and, worst of all, they imagined the money they might earn from such a creation. And even as they went backwards on the mortgage, they dreamed of a life of no debt. Oh God, the freedom. Annual overseas travel and nice cars and expensive hobbies. A proper workshop for Tom, instead of a little tin shed. Grace would quit her job and start some private marketing consultancy with a fancy website and prices so high she would only accept one job a year, and they would have to fly her to Paris for it, and then maybe Stockholm and Geneva. Oh, their dreams had once united them.
    But then Tom got a couple of knockbacks from companies that had once been keen, and those companies bought instead from other inventors. Grace saw the time flying by, and the mortgage getting larger, and the robot not selling, and her chances of a second baby slipping away. She had never known how much she had wanted children until she had one, and then she never knew how much she wanted a second until everything seemed stacked against her.
    She went to her doctor and the doctor said, are you trying? And Grace said, well no, my husband is not working, we can barely afford the house, we thought we would wait. And the doctorshook her head and said thirty-eight is too old to be waiting, there is a window. And it closes. And Grace felt cold all over, and she said but Cherie Blair? Carla Bruni? And the doctor said oh God, don’t think about them. Rich people. Lucky people. Just get on with it, Grace.
    So Tom had reluctantly returned to his day job, just three months ago. But then, after trying the electromagnetic motor and discarding that, he had come up with the solar tiles idea, and her home had filled with old plastic bottles, and his passion for them grew every day, and she really didn’t like the direction in which this was heading.
    She sighed now, and felt another day of her life passing by, tick-tock. The near-loss of Lotte had made everything sharper, keener, more exquisitely fragile. Even sitting here. It was one of her favourite places in the world, this chrome-legged kitchen chair with the torn vinyl seat that sighed when she sat on its cushion, puffing resignedly out of the foam-filled gash. Weeds clung to its legs, a pile of twisted metal sat off to the side. Leaf litter flapped against Tom’s workbench. Tom got up and closed his laptop, slapping it with loose fingers as if it had let him down. He turned and faced her.
    â€˜So, we both hate our jobs.’
    â€˜Well, big deal! It’s not the whole of our lives. And we like our house, and our jobs pay for our house. And for another baby , Tom. We can’t have another baby if you chuck in your job.’
    Tom sank in a little on himself, like a deflating balloon, and studied her for a long minute. He looked at Grace in the way he might look at someone he didn’t much like. He started to speak but the words