Plastic by Christopher Fowler Read Free Book Online Page B

for yourself. Give him the divorce he wants, then get yourself a good lawyer. Have a massage and a joint an hour before the hearing, lie your tits off in court, I’ll coach you through it and we’ll split whatever we make. If you don’t, you’ll just stay here with a wandering husband and no money until you end up like one of those old dears who creep around Sainsbury’s with a fucking tartan wheelie-basket complaining about the price of fish, except that most of those are still happily married because they snapped up the last decent men in the sixties. I’m serious, June. You’re thirty next week. It’s a sign from God. This could be your last chance to get out alive. Don’t fuck it up!’
    But I had already closed my front door.

 
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    The Proposition
     
     
    T HE HOUSE HAD changed. The pastel rooms with their bright corners, as soft and decorative as patterned paper towels, now looked alien and comfortless. It was like going back to someone’s house after attending their funeral.
    When you’re just a housewife, you end up watching too much television, and I’ve watched a lot: celebrity makeovers, comedy quizzes, Top 100s, reality TV, chat shows that consist of TV personalities with the depth of balloon animals. I could run a restaurant or an airline from the knowledge I’ve gained. Worst of all, I got addicted to documentaries. Secrets Of The Pharaohs, Killers Of The Serengeti, Unexplained Weather, Jet Engines Of The 20th Century, Hitler’s Flying Saucers, The Boy Whose Skin Exploded, The World’s Heaviest Teen Mother. I’ve watched so many pseudo-science documentaries that I feel like I’ve been to a third-rate university. I leave the rolling news on all afternoon. I’m sure they interview the same people every day. Woman Outside School, Fat Girl On Sofa, Man In Shop Doorway, Welsh Pensioner In Strange Hat. I see the Sky anchorman reporting from Africa and think ‘horrible John Lewis shirt’, because I’ve touched a John Lewis shirt on a man but I’ve never been to Africa.
    The tanned BBC weather girl was wearing a navy blue jacket with gold buttons and no blouse underneath. Lou was right – even she looked like she might be fun when she wasn’t pointing out incoming cold fronts. She waved an oracular claw across the British Isles to reveal a dirt-streaked whorl: wind, rain and plunging temperatures for the coming weekend. I opened a window, placed my hands over my heart and took a deep breath. It seemed hard to catch the air. The smell of frying steak sharpened the cool evening outside. Through next door’s kitchen window I could see Gordon sitting at the dinner table with his back to me, enjoying someone else’s cooking.
    Shaking slightly, I returned to the lounge and emptied out the rubbish bin, then neatly arranged the pieces of credit cards on the table so that they looked whole once more. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. The one thing on my mind was what would become of me. I only knew the house and the few streets that constituted our neighbourhood.
    I could recall every inch of the view from my windows, the threadbare limes and hornbeams against low-pressure skies, the dusty box hedges, the shadows condensing with the arc of the day. Every morning, the old lady opposite would kneel on a pink rubber pad in her threadbare front garden and snip invisibly at the grass surrounding a solitary rose bush. My home, like hers, had become my fixed point on earth. As a child I had fantasised of distant travel; instead, all movement had gradually ceased until I had almost reached a full stop. I existed in a handful of routes, from the house to the shops and back again, like a chicken or a bus, or an electrical circuit for a very basic appliance.
    I patiently waited for Gordon to finish his dinner, hoping that he would come and talk to me. Some awful camp comic was on television asking a woman about her most embarrassing sexual experience. He wasn’t listening to a word she