Just What Kind of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly Read Free Book Online

and then, as has become his habit lately, he rubs away the fingerprints with the sleeve of his jacket .
    To kill time he focuses on the view through the windscreen and begins smiling. It’s the smile he’s been practising in front of the mirror for the past few weeks. His natural smile can border on smarmy, shows a few too many teeth, so he takes the trouble to get it right. Makes sure his eyes take on that shiny quality women love .
    Smile at a woman like you’re noticing her and she’ll all but melt to the ground in front of you. It’s not rocket science .
    Without meaning to, his mind has slipped back to the thing he can’t stop thinking about, and his practised smile becomes a grin. He’s grinning like an idiot, and he knows he has to stop before the estate agent arrives .
    Who’d have thought it could be so easy?
    Granted, it hadn’t gone totally as expected, totally as planned. But so what? Wasn’t that even better? The element of surprise – something unexpected happening, something thrilling to perk things up?
    Wasn’t that why bored city workers did extreme sports? And fat-wanker bankers had sex with sluts in the cleaning cupboard? ’Course it was .
    Although this isn’t an extreme sport. He knows that. He can’t pass himself off as some weirdo schizo and pretend like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing .
    His smile fades as he admits this to himself and, as he checks his watch once more, he thinks, maybe I should call it a day. She was scared. Even doped up, she was really, really scared .
    He had harboured a small hope that she might kind of get into it .
    Because, that could happen, right?
    But, no. That wasn’t how it had gone. So maybe best to leave it at that, find other things to do .
    But then a thought occurs to him .
    Suppose the next one gets into it? Suppose she’s been waiting for something like this? For someone like him. That could happen. It was possible .
    A silver BMW Z3 pulls up alongside him, and a harried-looking woman in her mid-forties climbs out, approaches his driver’s side door .
    She’s carrying a stack of papers and is holding them in front of her open blazer, trying to conceal the fact that her ugly belly is straining her skirt to bursting .
    He opens his door, looks directly into her eyes and smiles. She averts her gaze, trying to gather herself. ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr—’
    ‘Not at all.’ He shrugs to indicate that it’s been no bother and holds out his hand. ‘Call me Charles,’ he says, trying to pull himself back to the business of charming this feckless woman .
    But it’s hard .
    Hard because his mind is still on the girls and he’s thinking: Of course it’s possible that the next one will play out differently .
    I mean, anything’s possible, right?

8
    F OUR YEARS AGO , we’d been invited to Kate’s for a dinner party. Something that had never happened before or since. There were to be six of us – Kate and Guy, Alexa and Adam, me and Joe. Kate had not long since moved her children back into the state system and though we’d always kind of known each other over the years, this was her doing what people like Kate do – expanding her social circle to include the parents of her children’s new friends.
    I was eager to go in that way you are when you’re invited to something new and different. No one I knew had dinner parties. Certainly not the other parents in school, who, probably like me and Joe, couldn’t face the thought of tidying up and cleaning the entire house on a Friday night as well as cooking, and after a full week at work. Or maybe they were all secretly having dinner parties and just didn’t invite us. Anyway, I’d never been to one, so I was both excited and anxious.
    Kate, I was pretty comfortable with by then and Guy, I knew from saying hello to at school and around the village. Alexa, I was intimidated by. I confided this to Joe as we made our way up the front path,