Chasing Charlie by Linda McLaughlan Read Free Book Online Page A

Ed twinkling at me across the kitchen table. He didn’t look like someone who needed worrying about to me.
    â€˜Do you think it could be drugs?’ Claudia asked.
    â€˜Drugs!’ I squawked, my turn this time to get people turning their heads. ‘No way, he’s too smart for that.’
    â€˜Yes, that’s true . . .’ Claudia paused for a moment and looked at me as if she was searching for something.
    â€˜What?’
    Claudia lowered her gaze and took a sip of her coffee. ‘Oh nothing. I just think he’s lovely.’
    â€˜You don’t fancy him, do you?’ Surely not. Claudia seemed so much more grown up than Ed. I couldn’t imagine her ever seeing him as anything but a friend.
    â€˜Me? No, I don’t fancy him.’ Claudia looked me in the eye again. ‘Do you?’
    â€˜Ed?’ My head hurt. Do I like Ed? That wasn’t even something to try thinking about. ‘He’s Mara’s brother, and he feels like my brother too, I think,’ I answered eventually.
    Claudia lifted her shoulder in a tiny shrug.
    â€˜Me too,’ she said.

10
    SAM
    Who am I kidding? I wondered, as I positioned my lamp to shine more directly onto my face. It really was too late to improve my looks at the ripe old age of thirty. Why hadn’t I invested more time and money in looking after my skin in my twenties? More to the point, why hadn’t I invested in a lamp that stayed in one place and didn’t keep falling down? Of course I hadn’t given a toss about my skin until I bumped into Charlie. I have, as a rule, looked down at the sad girls who spend too much time looking in the mirror when they could be doing more important things. Playing frisbee in the park, for instance, or drinking. Or both. But overnight the stakes had escalated and I had already spent a shameful number of minutes checking out every pore and hair on my face.
    Specifically I was looking for my freckles. When I came back from breakfast with Claudia, I had shut myself in my room and spent minutes, several of the bastards, looking for signs of the cute freckles I was sure I’d had once upon a time. They had to be there somewhere but, after some time, I had to admit it. They’d gone. I’d lain on my bed in despair then, and the ‘who was I kidding?’ whine started in earnest in my tired, freckle-free head. That was when I spied my lamp. Sessions under a sunbed weren’t an option. I couldn’t even afford breakfast that morning (Claudia had paid, again). But the lamp might just be worth trying . . .
    I wriggled as close as I could to the edge of the bed, my arm teetering on the side, and finally the lamp behaved itself and stayed in one place, shining directly onto my face. I was soon asleep.
    *
    I woke to a sharp voice.
    â€˜What on earth are you doing?’
    I sat up and my head banged into something hard, making a loud ‘clang’. Instinctively, I reached out and grabbed whatever was in the way.
    â€˜FUCK!’ My hand registered the pain from holding hot metal in the same moment I remembered what I was doing. What a nightmare, and on top of it all I was dreaming that Rebecca was . . .
    In my room.
    Fucking brilliant. It wasn’t a dream.
    â€˜What’s that smell?’ Rebecca squawked.
    I shoved my hand into my mouth and then waved it in the air.
    â€˜Fucking hell that hurts!’
    â€˜It smells really wrong.’
    She was right, of course. With the smell of burning paint in my nostrils, I gingerly reached out with my good hand and turned the lamp off. Perhaps a hundred-watt light bulb in there wasn’t such a great idea after all.
    â€˜You should really put that under water, you know,’ she said. So helpful, my sister.
    â€˜You think?’
    I rushed past her and into the bathroom and thrust my hand under the cold tap. How many varieties of idiot was it possible for me to be in one day, I wondered. Damn my hand hurt. I