This Body of Death Read Online Free PDF

She didn’t want that. Dear friends weren’t easy to come by.
    The how of the apology took a little thought, which Meredith engaged in as she showered. She settled on a birthday cake. She would bake it herself, take it to Ringwood, and present it to Jemima along with her heartfelt apology and her admission of wrongdoing. What she would not include in the apology and the admission was any mention of Jemima’s partner, who’d been the source of their row in the first place. For Meredith now understood that would be pointless. One simply had to face the fact that Jemima had always been a romantic when it came to blokes, whereas she—Meredith—had the complete and utterly undeniable experience of knowing men were essentially animals in human clothing. They wanted women for sex, childbearing, and house-wiving. If they could just say that instead of pretending they were desperate for something else, women who involved themselves with them could then make an informed choice about how they wanted to live their lives instead of believing they were “in love.”
    Meredith pooh-poohed the entire idea of love. Been there, done that, and Cammie Powell was the result: five years old, the light of her mother’s life, fatherless, and likely to remain that way.
    Cammie was, at that moment, bashing away on the bathroom door, calling, “Mummy! Mummmmmmmm-eeeeeee! Gran says we’re going to see the otters today ’n we’ll have ice lollies ’n beef burgers. Will you come ’s well? Cos there’s owls, too. She says someday we’ll go to the hedgehog hospital but that’s for an overnight trip and she says I got to be older for that. She thinks I’ll miss you, that’s what she says, but you could come, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you, Mummy? Mummmmmeeeee?”
    Meredith chuckled. Cammie awakened every morning in full-monologue mode, and she generally did not cease talking until it was time to go to bed. Meredith said as she toweled herself off, “Have you had your breakfast already, luv?”
    “I forgot,” Cammie informed her. Meredith could hear some scuffling and knew her daughter was shuffling her slippered feet on the floor. “But anyways, Gran says they’ve got babies. Baby otters. She says when their mums die or when they get eaten, their babies need someone to look after them properly and they do that at the park. The otter park. What eats an otter, Mummy?”
    “Don’t know, Cam.”
    “Something has to. Everything eats everything. Or something. Mummy? Mummmeee?”
    Meredith shrugged into her dressing gown and pulled the door open. Cammie stood there, the mirror image of Meredith at the very same age. She was too tall for five and, like Meredith, far too thin. It was a real gift, Meredith thought, that Cammie did not resemble her worthless father in the slightest. This was beyond good, since her father had sworn he would never see her should Meredith “be pigheaded and carry on with this pregnancy because, for God’s sake, I’ve a wife , you little fool. And two children. And you bloody well knew that, Meredith.”
    “Give us our morning hug, Cam,” Meredith said to her daughter. “Then wait for me in the kitchen. I’ve a cake to bake. D’you want to help?”
    “Gran’s making breakfast in the kitchen.”
    “I expect there’s room for another two cooks.”
    That turned out to be the case. While Meredith’s mother worked at the cooker, turning eggs and overseeing bacon, Meredith herself began the cake. It was simple enough as she used a boxed mix, which her mother tut-tutted as Meredith emptied its contents into a bowl.
    “It’s for Jemima,” Meredith told her.
    “Bit like taking you know what to Newcastle,” Janet Powell noted.
    Well, of course it was, but that couldn’t be helped. Besides, it was the thought that mattered, not the cake itself. Beyond that, even working from scratch with ingredients provided by some goddess of the pantry, Meredith would never have been able to match what Jemima could