To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

other person in the photo.

      Chapter Thirteen

      ‘Marking homework?’

      Lizzie jumped. She’d been so engrossed in her gardening books she didn’t hear Gerry’s key in the lock. She’d only just reached April and the things that should have been done by now already stretched to three pages of an exercise book.

      ‘A gardening book?’ He looked surprised.

      With one sock-clad foot Lizzie kicked a half-eaten packet of chocolate HobNobs under the coffee table and out of Gerry’s line of sight. Only that morning he’d grabbed her bum as she struggled into size twelve jeans – jeans that now cut into her middle, forcing a roll of flesh over the waistband – and made some comment about her ‘filling her jeans’.

      How had that happened? Only last autumn she’d been comfortable in her favourite size tens. Now she was on the verge of swapping the twelves for the fourteens she kept under her bed for just such emergencies. Some people, people who mostly didn’t need to lose weight in the first place – Nicci, for example – responded to life’s traumas by losing their appetite. The heartbreak diet.

      Lizzie was the total opposite; her emotional history mapped out in junk food. Recently, this ran:

      1) Mother with Alzheimer’s – one packet of chocolate HobNobs.

      2) Row with sister, over Mother – whole tube of Pringles. 3) Best friend’s funeral – bottle of dry white and a bowl of peanuts with takeaway pizza chaser, repeat as necessary.

      4) Fight with Gerry about giving up teaching to become a proper wife/mother; her timekeeping; what she/he was doing at the weekend^* (^*delete as applicable) – that happened so often it barely merited more than the bar of Sainsbury’s cooking chocolate she’d hidden from herself at the back of the freezer.

      Hunger had nothing to do with it.

      Closing the gardening book, Lizzie stretched her cheek up to receive his kiss. Gerry had the kind of whiskers that meant if he shaved at 8 a.m., he had a beard by lunchtime. It was early evening now. There were days she felt she could get a rash just by looking at him.

      ‘Pooh,’ she said. ‘You smell beery.’

      Gerry winked. ‘I am beery,’ he said. ‘Nineteenth hole.’

      ‘Thought it was rugby today.’ She didn’t need to glance at her watch to know he’d spent far more hours in the clubhouse than he had on the course.

      ‘Golf. Told you this morning. Anyway, I knew you’d be out so I went for a late lunch with the guys after.’

      And drove home? Lizzie wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, she reached for her book, flicking to a boxout on compost.

      What was the difference between peat, loam and ericaceous compost? Who cared and why would it matter? She couldn’t believe Nicci had. Nicci had to be more of a ‘shove it in and see what grew’ type of gardener. Didn’t she?

      ‘How was your mum?’

      ‘The same,’ she said. ‘Still thinks I’m Aunt Kathleen, though . . . Thanks for asking.’

      Crouching down beside her chair, Gerry slipped both arms around her, fingers grazing her breast as they passed. His breath was yeasty on her ear. Lizzie forced herself not to tense.

      ‘I’m glad you’re not down,’ he said, as his left hand crept back up, cupping her breast.

      Lizzie wasn’t in the mood, not really. Some people lost themselves in sex, used it as a release. Mona, for one. And Nicci too, when they were first at college.

      Not Lizzie.

      She’d always felt a bit out of it like that. A bit uptight – frigid, some git who played rugby had called her in sixth form – but that was just her. She had to feel close, loved and liked to want sex. And she had, with Gerry, in the early years, but now . . .

      ‘Come upstairs?’

      Closing her eyes, Lizzie emptied her mind, forcing herself to go with it as Gerry began kissing her neck, his free hand deftly unbuttoning her shirt. After all, you didn’t get babies without sex and they hadn’t ‘done it’ in almost a month.

      They used to have the ‘There’s never a right time to have babies’ row every second month. Back then, Lizzie was the one arguing to start a family. Gerry was too busy, he was in line for another promotion, he wanted to wait until next year when they’d be able to afford another, bigger, house . . . The only argument he never used back then was her job. Because he knew she’d throw that up in a second. It was a job – teaching at the local primary – and she enjoyed it, but it wasn’t her life’s work, not like her sister’s career. Something she’d be willing to ditch when they started a family. Lizzie was positively old-fashioned like that. It was another thing she and Karen didn’t agree on.

      Then it changed. Gerry started talking about babies and she – Lizzie hardly dared say it – began to wonder if the time was right.

      But she’d always wanted a family.

      Lizzie could remember her elation the first time she’d mentioned babies over breakfast and he hadn’t flinched. That had been a couple of years ago.

      The other night, he’d made some comment about the pre-prep school his boss sent his son to. So now he was willing to talk babies; but the local school at which she taught was no longer good enough.

      Gerry groaned as his hand eased into her bra and stroked her nipple until it stiffened. His other hand slipped inside her jeans.

      No babies without sex, Lizzie reminded herself. And she did want to start a family . . . didn’t she?

      Chapter Fourteen

      ‘Where’s the roasting tin?’

      ‘Same place as usual, I imagine.’

      ‘Nu-huh.’ Lizzie shook her head. ‘I’ve looked there, and all the other likely places.’

      The two women looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

      Jo threw open the kitchen window. ‘David,’ she yelled. ‘What have you done with the roasting tin?’

      ‘What have I done with . . . ?’ he shouted over the shrieks of two small girls. Having hunted Easter eggs, provided by Jo and hidden by David after they’d gone to bed the night before, Charlie and Harrie were on a carbohydrate high, taking turns to be pushed on the tyre hanging from the old apple tree.

      ‘Higher, Daddy, higher!’

      ‘In a sec . . . Nothing. Haven’t touched the damn thing. Do I look like a man who’d know what to do with a roasting tin?’

      ‘More than Gerry does,’ Lizzie muttered, looking for a cupboard she hadn’t yet searched. ‘Who else would move it? The kitchen ghost?’

      She caught Jo’s eye. Jo raised a quizzical eyebrow.

      Jo looked tired, Lizzie thought, nothing like herself. The roots were visible in her usually flawlessly highlighted hair and her fringe kept falling into her eyes. She was dressed as if for a ramble: battered biker boots; knackered, not-for-going-out jeans; and what looked suspiciously like one of Si’s fleeces. A fleece? Nicci would have had something to say about that. Maybe that was the point. Nicci couldn’t see them. For the first time in years Jo was at liberty to wear whatever she wanted. They all were. But it was Easter Sunday and the first time they’d all been here, together, since Nicci’s funeral. Lizzie had assumed that meant they’d make an effort. But no.

      She felt painfully overdressed. Glancing down at her floral dress and heels, she wondered if there was time to nip home and change.

      ‘You OK?’

      Lizzie snapped back to see Jo looking concerned. ‘Yeah, fine, just spooked myself with the ghost comment,’ she lied. ‘But I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway,