After the Break. Penny Smith

you were.’

      ‘I admit to a certain amount of toyness,’ said Katie, with a laugh. ‘And now I’m going to spend the rest of the day getting ready. Should I have my legs waxed and my bikini line done?’

      ‘Absolutely not,’ said Dee, horrified. ‘Go out with your legs like a plucked chicken and walking in a funny way?’

      ‘I don’t walk in a funny way after my bikini wax.’

      ‘Well, they aren’t doing it right, then.’

      ‘How can they do it in the wrong way?’

      ‘Not taking enough off.’

      ‘This is not,’ said Katie, ‘a top-trumps to see how much of a trim one gets. I refuse to have it bald, like some pre-pubescent schoolgirl. I’m an adult, with body hair. One doesn’t have to have an entire bush under which to shelter when it’s raining but one does need a little tidy-round from time to time.’

      ‘All right,’ said Dee. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist. Talking of which, do you have to wear awfully big pants to cover up the, er, hedgerow?’

      Katie smiled. ‘Enough already. If I can’t wax, I’ll have to go out as a scary hairy Mary. Which means trousers or a skirt and boots.’

      ‘Well, while you spend many happy hours pondering your outfit, I’m going home to kip. Oliver and I are off to the cinema tonight.’

      Oliver was a proctologist, and a great friend of Katie’s doctor brother Ben, who was now a consultant anaesthetist at a large London hospital.

      ‘Well, wish me luck, then,’ said Katie, putting on her coat and pushing the chair in towards the table.

      ‘Good luck–as if you need it.’

      Katie was glowing. Her hair was shining, her green eyes glittering with anticipation.

      ‘How the bloody hell do you look so good, considering your vast age?’ asked Dee.

      ‘Oi. I’ll have you know that early forties is the new early thirties. And, in all seriousness, not getting up at sparrow’s fart every morning is one of the greatest aids to youth. I’m finally getting my beauty sleep. In fact, the only fly in my ointment is the lack of a job, and therefore a certain restriction on my spending.’

      ‘Oh, OK,’ said Dee, with exaggeratedly weary acceptance. ‘I’ll stump up for the tea.’ She made a slow move towards the till, shoulders slumped.

      ‘Cheers,’ said Katie, picking up her sports bag. She caught up with Dee, gave her a kiss on the cheek and left her. As she got to the door, she turned. ‘Give my love to Oliver,’ she called. ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow and give you a blow-by-blow account.’ She made a suggestive face.

      ‘You are disgusting,’ said Dee, without looking up from her purse.

      Katie’s evening was everything she had hoped it would be–and more.

      Adam was charming, witty, and very, very flirty. He and Nick had both fallen for the presenter of their show the first time they had seen her. But Nick was away supervising filming in France, and Adam had stolen a march on his rival. He had absolutely no intention of letting his business partner know that he was seeing Katie for dinner–or that she was single.

      As soon as he had heard on the grapevine that Katie and Bob had split up, he had begun his campaign. He was enough of a hunter to let her think he knew nothing of the separation and was merely after a discussion of future projects in a ‘more comfortable environment than the glass box that is my office’.

      It had been an unnecessary subterfuge.

      Katie considered dinner with any man to be a prelude to intimacy. ‘They may say it’s about work,’ she bragged to her friend Kirsty, whom she’d phoned from the back of a cab on the way home from the gym, ‘but if it was, they’d do it where I couldn’t pounce on them.’

      ‘Aren’t you going to let him do the pouncing?’ asked Kirsty, who was pregnant with her second child and couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to pounce anywhere.

      ‘We may do a double pounce,’ Katie pronounced.

      ‘With a triple salchow?’

      ‘Absolutely. Followed by a…erm…’

      ‘Ha. Stumped, my little fat friend,’ said Kirsty, triumphantly.

      ‘I think you’ll find that you are going to be my little fat friend before too long,’ said Katie, sliding to the other side of the cab as the driver swung round a bend too fast. ‘How’s it going?’

      ‘Vomiting a lot, which isn’t great. Actually, I wouldn’t mind so much if I thought I could eat more without putting on too much weight. But I’m eating dry biscuits to keep it down, and I’m going through two packets a day. And then I’ve got this awful craving for pickled beetroot. I get up, throw up, eat biscuits, throw up, eat pickled beetroot, get heartburn, go to bed and start the cycle all over again. And I have the midwife saying I’ve got to hold off on the biscuits and not eat so much beetroot. At the moment I’ve got spots round my mouth from being sick, got red pee, red poo and Fred has left a deposit of something on one shoulder.’

      ‘You poor thing,’ said Katie, solicitously. ‘Nothing I can do, I assume?’

      ‘Take Fred off my hands occasionally?’

      ‘If you’re desperate enough to ask me to take him, you must be in a bad way. Of course I will. But you know I’m not that good when they’re little. In a couple of years’ time I’ll be taking him out and about all over the shop. Tea at the Ritz. A tour of the National Gallery. Whatever.’

      ‘He’ll be three in a couple of years’ time.’

      ‘Well, the Science Museum, then.’

      ‘He’ll be three.’

      ‘You see? I’m hopeless when they’re like overgrown foetuses. I mean, honestly, what do you do with a one-year-old?’

      ‘Play with him?’

      ‘He’d get bored.’

      ‘You mean you’d get bored. Enjoy your dinner. The idea of flirting with anyone in my current state makes me feel sick. You know, I always wondered why they called it morning sickness when it can strike at any time of the day or night. I’ve taken to chewing a nub of toothpaste to take away the taste.’

      ‘Do you spit or swallow?’ asked Katie with interest. As you know, one swallow doesn’t make a girlfriend.’

      ‘You are rude, crude and disgusting. I am now putting the phone down.’

      ‘Enjoy your beetroot,’ said Katie, pressing end call and putting the phone into her bag.

      Back home, she had a shower and washed her hair, making sure that the conditioner was the nicest-smelling one she had. She let it dry naturally as she padded round the flat, slowly getting ready. With the towel wrapped round her waist, she opened her wardrobe doors and surveyed the contents. First things first, she thought, and took out her brand new, vertiginous, purple Gina shoes. They were not exactly practical. She could barely walk the length of the sitting room before she needed a rest–but they were beautiful. It wasn’t often you got such a jewel-like colour. As soon as she had slipped them on in the shop, her head had buzzed with the busy refrain, ‘Neeew shoooes.’

      She put them on now and stood in front of the mirror, admiring the way they made her feet look so small and elegant. She dropped the towel. Hmm. Probably better with clothes.

      She took out a little black dress with discreet fringing, which she had been thinking would be perfect. Had it always been so snug a fit, she wondered, as she tugged at the zip? She flicked back her hair from her now slightly sweaty face and stood up straight. Omigod, she thought. I look like a singed woodlouse.

      Over