After the Break. Penny Smith

read her stars: ‘Capricorn. A decision you make in the next few days could have a major effect on the rest of your life. Don’t rely on other people to make it, even if you trust them. The planets are promising much–but will only deliver if you take the initiative.’

      Ooh. I wonder if I’m going to be offered a new job. Or maybe Oliver will propose. Or perhaps I should. She had another look. Yes, that would work. Or was it only a decision when you had to make a choice between two things? As in accepting something offered. Because otherwise, surely, you made decisions every day from the moment you got up to the moment you went to sleep. As in should I put this magazine down now and get on with the packing? As in; should I make sure I haven’t missed something interesting in this before I get on with the packing?

      She looked through the rest of the magazine, ending up at the problem page. ‘I love my husband,’ she read, ‘but I have been having an affair since we got married. My mother-in-law is very rich. If I stay with my husband, I can get some of the inheritance when she dies. But if I stay with him, my lover says he will leave me. What should I do?’

      Dee was horrified. That was exactly what was wrong with marriage, these days, she thought. Her own husband had had a fling with an au pair. Then she had found her new boyfriend in bed with a male hairdresser. People were disgusting, she thought. Claiming they were in love with one person, then going off with another. She put the magazine in the bin. Was that the decision that would make the rest of her life different?

      She put the vase and the sock in the suitcase–forgetting to check where the other one was–then chucked everything else in haphazardly, along with a seriously full hairbrush. She leaned firmly on the bulging case and clicked the fasteners with difficulty After a cursory look in the bathroom, she dragged the case out of the door, and let it close behind her.

      At eleven o’clock, as the maids entered the hotel bedroom to find Dee’s cleanser, mascara, nightie and one pink sock, Katie was indulging in one of her favourite activities. Tidying.

      She had got up an hour earlier and eaten four pieces of toast with sliced apple and Marmite, then decided that she was going to do a pre-emptive spring clean. Unlike Dee, she had not read her stars. They shared a sign, but she rarely read it, and paradoxically put that down to being a Capricorn. An earth sign. Sensible. No time for that namby-pamby nonsense. She couldn’t see how one twelfth of the planet would be having a good day, no matter where they were. Capricorns around the world were being tortured, becoming single parents, being put in jail, discovering they were ill, losing socks…yet apparently they were all about to travel or meet the perfect person. It didn’t help that her birthday was three days before Christmas, so generally people bought her a birthday-cum-Christmas present. It made you feel rather bitter about birthdays and birth signs. Although Adam had given her a beautiful Cartier watch.

      She spent a blissful day cleaning and de-cluttering. There were few things more satisfactory, she thought, as she sat cross-legged in front of a cupboard, than looking round and seeing a mountain of items to be disposed of at charity shops or in the bin.

      And then there were the surprises. She had found a picture of herself, which she had believed long lost, with an Olympic weightlifter. She had interviewed him when she had been on the newspaper. It made her smile. She had written an article full of innuendo, which the news editor had threatened to spike unless she rewrote it. The trouble was that the name of virtually every lift had a double meaning, and for a girl who liked a pun, it had proved irresistible. The snatch. The jerk. How on earth did sports commentators do it? ‘What a magnificent snatch. What a superb jerk.’

      She remembered Mike, the pervert co-presenter on Hello Britain!, once saying, ‘Congratulations on your Brazilian,’ to the manager of a football team that had bought one of the world’s best defenders. She’d had to explain to him later why she had barked with laughter. If you were a Brazilian, could you have a close shave? she wondered. She put the black-and-white photograph into a packet with a few others.

      And that, she thought, is that.

      She stood up, and went to get a whole load of bin-liners. She checked her watch. Perfect. Enough time to get to the Oxfam shop before it closed, then to Marks & Spencer for some groceries.

      By the time she got home with her food, she was feeling too weary to do much. She put the vegetable curry into a pan and tried to work out a way of not dirtying another for the rice. In the end, she had it with toast.

      Later, in the bath, Katie pondered life’s conundrums. Why do the English call condoms ‘French letters’ and the cap the ‘Dutch cap’? Why do the French call syphilis the ‘English disease’? Who makes up jokes? What is a homonym?

      She squeezed an in-growing hair on her leg and was then worried that it would look spotty later. Hopefully, Adam will be so busy elsewhere that he won’t notice, she thought rudely.

      Hair and hare. I’m sure that’s a homonym. Or is it a homophone? There were days when all her English grammar lessons came back to her. And other days, like today, when she would be hard pressed to tell her oxymorons from her synonyms.

      If you’re bald, put a rabbit on your head because from a distance it looks like a hare.

      She wished her bath was bigger. If she sank down until her chin was in the water, her knees were chilled and if she put her knees in, her shoulders got cold. She ran the hot water, moving her knees to one side to avoid scalding them.

      By the time she got out of the bath–swaying and holding on to the radiator because of the rush of blood to her head–she was cranberry-coloured. She opened the bathroom door to a welcome blast of cool air. When she could stand unaided, she went into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe doors and perused the contents for fifteen minutes, deciding what to wear. She pulled out a soft brown dress that didn’t need much ironing. Anyway, the heat emanating from her body would get rid of the creases. She matched it with a pair of high suede boots. The underwear choosing took four times as long. If underwear was going to be seen by a man, it had to produce no bulges and it had to go with the stockings. And that was another dilemma: stockings or tights? Stockings always went down well, in every way, but tights gave a smoother line. And then there were hold-ups, which some men found more attractive than stockings and suspender belts. It was all bloody exhausting.

      Katie loved young relationships, but you wasted an inordinate amount of time on clothing. The only good thing about a comfortable old relationship was comfortable old clothes. Otherwise it was boring. It was like having cheese for the rest of your life–there would come a moment when you simply had to have something else.

      Katie liked it when men held the door open for you and gave you flowers and gifts and wanted to kiss you all the time. She loved the electricity that flowed as your lips were about to touch. She could have lived on it for ever. She was a romantic who, deep down, was holding on to the hope that if she found the ‘right’ man, she would stop feeling like that. Was Adam the right man? He was bloody handsome. Funny. Intelligent. Good taste in music. Fit as a robber’s dog. Ticks in all the right boxes…but was he Mr Right? Her soul-mate? Her sole mate for the rest of her life? God, that was scary. For the rest of her life.

      She went over to the CD player to put on some loud music to stop the voices in her head. Muse. Black Holes and Revelations. She sang along to the words she could remember.

      Excellent. She went back to the underwear drawer. Brown silk with a turquoise ribbon threaded through, and Wolford hold-up stockings. So much easier to decide when death and destruction were coursing out of the speakers.

      Katie did a mental bit of air guitar, and then, with her head bobbing in rhythm to ‘Starlight’, she picked out a sheer petticoat to iron out the bumps. She checked in the mirror. Dress. Boots. Gold earrings. Perfect. Or as perfect as it was going to get, she thought, peering at herself again. Getting older was a nightmare. Every day another crow’s foot. There must be no crows left with feet. Stop it, she remonstrated. Like there’s an alternative to getting older. She gave herself an imaginary shake, tied her hair back loosely (to make it easier to loosen later), turned Muse off and set out.

      She would have been gratified to know that Adam had