Further Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes Read Free Book Online Page B

told himself and seemed to make another tick on the piece of paper.
    ‘Finally, have you prayed to St Anthony?’ (As God is my witness, I’m not making any of this up.)
    I admitted that I personally hadn’t and he looked as though he was gearing up to tell me to go away and come back after I’d had a good pray, then I played my ace. My mother was praying round the clock!
    ‘She is, is she?’ He studied me carefully.
    ‘Round the clock,’ I gasped. ‘I swear.’
    ‘Right,’ he sighed. ‘If St Anthony has been prayed to and it hasn’t turned up, then it really is lost.’ An arm movement that could have been the final tick on his checklist. ‘We’d better organize you a new passport, so.’
    Under the glass hatch I slid in my thick bundle of documentation – the application form, photos, birth certificate (which bizarrely I had a copy of at my office) and photocopies of my plane tickets which Charlotte had suggested I bring in case they needed to be convinced of the urgency of my case. Your man picked up my photo. ‘Not the most flattering of pictures,’ he remarked. ‘Mind you, they never are. Right, all of this is in order. All you have to do now is pay.’
    ‘Here, here.’ I thrust thirty quid at him (which Charlotte had lent me because all my spare cash was in traveller’s cheques awaiting unloading in the Zara on 59th and Lexington).
    ‘You pay at the Cashiers. That’s the next hatch.’ He slid the bundle of papers under the glass hatch and back to me,and I stepped three feet to my left to the next hatch, the one that said Cashier. At the same time he stepped three feet to his right. For a moment we eyed each other through the new glass and he said (and I’d say he was joking, I
hope
he was joking), ‘Can I help you?’
    Once again I slid the bundle of paper under the glass to him and this time he took the money.
    ‘Come back tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and we’ll have a new passport for you.’
    The following day Charlotte once again gave me time off work to go to the Irish Embassy. When they gave me my pristine new passport I couldn’t let go of it – I kept opening it and closing it and reading my name, just to make sure it was mine – and the following day I was on a plane to New York.
    Previously unpublished
.

Cheaper than Drugs
    I know a man who denies that jet lag exists. He regularly flies halfway across the world, marches off the plane after a twenty-seven-hour flight, goes straight into the Auckland office, pausing only to brush his teeth, and immediately starts barking orders and making people redundant. (Or whatever super-macho, no-human-weakness job it is he does.) I want to sue this man. As far as I’m concerned denying jet lag is like denying that the earth is round. I am so prone to jet lag that I even get it when I haven’t been on a plane: I get jet lag when the clocks go back.
    (It’s because I’m so in thrall to sleep. I’m grand if I get my habitual sixteen hours a night, but if anything happens to interfere with that, I’m all over the place. I am a
martyr
to my circadian rhythms.)
    Naturally, I’ve investigated all the jet-lag ‘cures’: stay away from the jar on the plane; drink plenty of water; eat lightly; do a little exercise; get on to local time patterns immediately; and, most importantly, walk around in the sunlight as soon as you arrive at your faraway destination.
    All nonsense, of course: as effective as giving someone a Barbie plaster for a shattered femur. I must admit I don’t trust ‘natural’ solutions to conditions, I like chemicals. I am probably the last person in the Western world who doesn’thave a homeopath and who still swears by antibiotics. I would
love
it if someone invented an anti-jet-lag drug and I couldn’t care less about side effects, in fact I’d embrace them – dry mouth? Trembling? Blurred vision? Better than being fecking jet-lagged and falling asleep face downwards in my dinner at six in the evening.
    But unfortunately,