Dead Lovely by Helen Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

to spend time looking at.
    Krissie, on the other hand, had many things he wanted to look at. Sitting on the sofa beside Kyle, with Krissie doing sit-ups on the living room floor, Chas had said, ‘When I first met Krissie, for example, I thought she was a dog.’
    Krissie hit him, pinned him down on the ground and began tickling him.
    Through screeches of wonderful ticklish pain, Chas continued, ‘But now, I think you’re the most beautiful woman in Glasgow.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Scotland.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Okay, okay, the universe! Stop!’
    Krissie then looked at Kyle and raised her eyebrows questioningly.
    ‘I still think you’re a dog,’ said Kyle, jokingly.

    Kyle hadn’t really thought Krissie was a dog. And now he thought she was the opposite of a dog. Over the last ten years, her boy-body had, when in ‘functional mode’ become a lean, perfect female specimen, and when in ‘going out mode’, it could have been used on the Paris catwalks. Her features had metamorphosed into captivating elegance. She seemed to throw outfits together within seconds and come out looking both sexy and comfortable.
    Chas had also said that women always, without exception, become their mothers. And this had proved true. Sarah had become Vivienne Morgan, the-stage-actress-turned-soap-star, last seen in the Glasgow soap The Lake for a three-episode story-line involving a long-lost mother, but best known for her work in the eighties power-drama A Life for Rizzo. In her prime, Vivienne Morgan was sex on a stick. Now the ‘stick’ was more like a large vodka-filled trunk, and the ‘sex’ was two round balls of silicone perched beneath an implanted, injected face.
    Sarah had inherited personality traits from her mother such as a ‘fix-it’ approach to life. For instance, Sarah’s mum did not talk to her daughter about periods and sex. Instead, after she noticed the stain on the back of her daughter’s school uniform, she sent her off to the chemist, alone.
    Krissie’s mum, on the other hand, was a sixty-three-year-old hill-walker with rosy cheeks, a beaming smile, a nicely thought out wardrobe and a ‘let’s talk about it’ approach to life.

    Why had Kyle been so blind? Why had he fallen for a woman who was destined to be as miserable as her mother?
    Other things Kyle regretted included buying the house on Loch Katrine, which Sarah expected him to work on non-stop. He regretted following in his father’s footsteps and doing medicine, because he did not like hard work and being a doctor was hard work. There was no way of skiving, even as a GP, and he was constantly plagued with guilt and self-loathing because he had no ambitions to study or write or further his career. He wanted the opposite. He wanted to leave and take people on skiing trips. But he could never do this. Doctors can never leave.
    And when Sarah decided not to talk to Kyle for two whole weeks, refusing to pass him both the salt and a message about a vulnerable patient needing to be seen immediately, he regretted telling her that her shorts were too tight.
    *
    After Kyle left to dig his paper out of the recycling bin, Sarah packed her perfect camping clothes in her perfect rucksack and smiled. Things were in order.
    Therapy had helped her to admit that she was a control freak and that her aggressive perfectionism was a reaction against the adults whose behaviour towards her had been less than perfect – her mother, her father, and her stepfather, Mike Tetherton. Whattherapy hadn’t clarified was: what was wrong with being a control freak? What was wrong with having things in order? If things were in order, and if it all went according to plan, Sarah might succeed where her mother had failed. She might keep her man and build a happy family.

CHAPTER TEN
    Mike Tetherton had tried escaping once before. He’d left his wife, Vivienne, and his stepdaughter, Sarah, and had boarded a train.
    Now, as he sipped on his hot chocolate, and placed the thermos safely on