The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Read Online Free PDF Page A

listening in the first place. (How mindful, how forward-thinking Amber Fraser could be, how dedicated to her new role as suburban homemaker and pillar of the community!)
    When I pressed the bell for the upstairs flat there was initially no response and it was only as I was about to give up that there finally come a gruff male ‘Yep?’
    ‘Could I come up for a moment? I’ve just moved in next door and wanted to have a quick word.’
    ‘Huh?’
    It was obvious he was irritated by the rude awakening and I smiled to myself, remembering a time when noon on a Sunday had been offensively early to me too.
    ‘Fine, come up,’ he added, and I heard him clear the phlegm from his lungs as he resigned himself to the nuisance of my visit.
    I still think sometimes about that short walk up the stairs to his flat, one of those moments of sweet, ordinary innocence you don’t appreciate until it’s gone – like the liberty you take for granted in the minutes before you get in your car and run someone over.
    It was as I turned onto the narrow landing that I saw him. He was tall and broad, black-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned; he was both young enough and old enough, both too much and not enough: in other words a police photo-fit of what I remembered as my type. He was also dishevelled, hung-over and entirely unrepentant of being in no fit state to greet his caller – in fact, he was still dressing as he stood in his doorway. He had his jeans on and his arms in the sleeves of his shirt – yesterday’s shirt,I guessed, plucked from the floor – but he was looking down at the open front as if he couldn’t quite remember how buttons worked. He radiated Saturday night debauchery, reeked of it, and the yearning it evoked in me was startling in its violence, just how I imagine a ghost taking bodily possession. By the time I’d thought to stop it, it was too late.
    ‘Hi,’ I said.
    He raised his gaze to me, doubtless expecting some middle-aged crone, and at once his fingers halted, hovering a while as if he might change his mind and undress again. It goes without saying that I’d made myself presentable before setting out on this errand, my hair soft and loose over pale cashmere shoulders, lashes long, lips baby-pink. I was as demure and clean as he was louche and unwashed, and I could have curled up and purred on the lap of the god of vanity to see his response.
    ‘Hi,’ he echoed, and in this single appreciative syllable I was able to detect that casual wickedness I’d found so addictive in the men I’d gone out with before I came to my senses and married Jeremy. He was so like them, in fact, that I almost gasped one of their names aloud in recognition (Pete! Phil! Or, briefly and most dangerously, Matt!). I knew his kind inside out, had no doubt that regardless of his day job (if he had one) he was in his own mind a rock star or a poet or both. What he was doing on a street like Lime Park Road I couldn’t begin to imagine, but, then again, since we were on the subject, what was
I
doing? Putting in high-end flooring with the aim of pushing an overpriced baby buggy back and forth across it,picking the neighbours’ brains about school applications and piano lessons: was that really what I’d chosen for myself for
the rest of my life
?
    I was momentarily speechless, frightened that I should suddenly be having these thoughts when I’d had no such ones for years.
Years
. Since the earliest days of being with Jeremy, I had only congratulated myself on my propitious and mature change of direction; I’d had no cold feet whatsoever, not a hint of a shiver. I’d managed my weakness for dissolute creatures like this one as you’d manage alcohol addiction or self-harming or any other disorder. I’d thought I was its master.
    Why, then, was I relapsing now? Who
was
this man?
    Clenching my toes inside my boots, I composed myself, heard my voice emerge in a low, cool purr: ‘I’m Amber Fraser, your new neighbour. In the Lockes’ old