Plastic by Christopher Fowler Read Free Book Online Page A

flying waitress before slipping home and pressing it into the small of your back. We can take him down.’
    Lou was happy to take revenge for all the wives in the world if necessary. She cracked the cap from another beer, slid it across the counter and patted my arm comfortingly. The radio DJ began to play Love Is In The Air. ‘God, this song’s such shit. Love songs are all lies. There’s only suffering and death in the air once a woman stops looking like she’s fun. That’s why you spend all your waking hours cruising malls, because you let shop-smiles replace the respect of a husband. If he ever showed you any.’
    ‘He did. It’s just... he’s busy and angry all the time. I’m at home, so I don’t have the kind of problems he deals with.’
    ‘Of course you do, you just don’t see them, sitting over there in your frilly little house full of frilly little things, burying yourself in books and TV shows. I’m not being rude, darling, but you’ve got absolutely no fucking idea about what’s really going on in the world. It’s changed a lot since you were locked up in the marital penitentiary.’
    ‘I’ve wasted my life. Seneca said that there’s nothing so ruinous to good character than idling away time at spectacles.’ I always remember things I’ve read when I start to get drunk. ‘Although I imagine he was talking about gladiatorial games rather than shopping.’
    Lou started mixing a fresh cocktail. ‘If you’d spent as much time on a StairMaster as you have reading, you’d be able to split walnuts in your butt-crack by now instead of quoting somebody who’s been dead for fifty years. I really don’t get it. You’re the smartest person I ever met, you know shitloads of really long words, you could have been anything you wanted. I’ve seen you get a couple of drinks in you and go all lyrical and passionate, quoting Byron and shit, it’s like a cloud that comes over you. You could have done something special. You could have got out. Yet you settled for this. I just don’t understand.’
    I stopped listening to Lou. Her words wavered past me like moths. I knew that once Gordon had made a decision there would be no negotiation with him, and that without money I would have to find a job. But I had no skills to fall back on. I didn’t dare go and see my mother, because she was waiting for affirmation that I had failed to keep my marriage together. When she heard that I had lost my baby boy, she called me and said: ‘If you can’t give him children, you can’t expect him to stay with you.’ Besides, Ruth was becoming lost inside her head. She tried using the phone to change TV channels, and put catfood in the washing machine. Her mother had been a cold Englishwoman of the old school. Ruth had confused distance with privacy and would let no-one, especially me, help her.
    ‘I don’t even want to go back to the house,’ I told Lou.
    ‘Well, darling, you can’t stay here. Mr. Charisma will be home in an hour, and I’ve got a fight booked with him.’
    ‘I don’t have the talent to hold down a real job. I’ll have to work in McDonalds or something.’
    ‘You’d be the oldest person there. They only employ easily duped children.’
    ‘Then I’ll do something part time. Something from home.’
    Lou tipped the remains of the blender into her glass. ‘This isn’t the Victorian era, you can’t sew dolls for sixpences. Besides, you haven’t got a home any more, you haven’t got any money and you haven’t got a marriage. He’s got it all, including a new sex life. What are you going to do, go back and stand in the middle of the room again?’
    Alarmed, I looked at the tiny gold watch Gordon had given me as a wedding gift. ‘I have to go home and cook his dinner. Just in case he comes back.’ I climbed down from my stool and made my way unsteadily across the road.
    ‘I want you to know you’re being pathetic,’ Lou stood in the middle of her front lawn shouting after me. ‘Stand up