Prime Time by Jane Wenham-Jones Read Free Book Online

thumping in my chest. I had sat glazed and frozen with terror while the woman next to me, Jean, gave an impassioned account of how she had driven her car through the front window of the local newsagent’s when it was “the wrong time of the month” and her husband, Brian, who looked as petrified as I felt, haltingly explained how he used to lock himself and the children in the cellar when she “had the painters in”.
    Every time Randolph moved, my stomach lurched in case he came to me. The woman next to me was breathing so heavily I wondered if she was in the midst of some sort of heart failure. At least they’d have to stop filming.
    â€˜And your husband left you too, didn’t he, Laura?’ Suddenly Randolph was perched on the step in front of me, his microphone almost touching my nose. ‘Was that because of your violence?’ he asked silkily.
    â€˜No!’ It came out too loudly. How did they know about Daniel, I thought wildly. Nobody had told me he’d be mentioned. ‘I just get very bad moods,’ I said hastily. ‘I’ve never hit anyone.’
    Randolph brought his orange face closer to mine. ‘Tell us how you feel, Laura. What happens when you get angry?’
    â€˜Well, I sort of get very impatient,’ I said, flustered. My voice sounded higher than usual. Randolph nodded encouragingly. ‘I find I shout at my son a lot. I get clumsy and drop things, I feel very fat …’ My hand moved protectively over the half-yard of stomach that was trying to escape my waistband. ‘Things make me cry and once I threw a shepherd’s pie against the wall …’
    Randolph turned and smiled into the largest camera. ‘And yet Laura looks quite normal. With us today, we have Dr Steven Barrington, consultant gynaecologist at St Saviours Hospital …’
    I sat and squirmed as Grey Suit on my left went through all the scientific stuff I’d prepared and forgotten. What on earth had possessed me to say that about the shepherd’s pie? It was years ago. I’d never given it a thought since and suddenly, here, in a TV studio when I was supposed to be sounding sophisticated, it had just popped out of my mouth. Now the whole country would think I was totally bonkers and it wasn’t even true. It was lasagne.
    Grey Suit had finished and Randolph was standing in front of us all again, sounding sincere.
    â€˜We’ve heard all sorts of stories this morning, of violence and domestic mayhem, of lives being ruined, of relationships in the balance. Ordinary-looking women going about their lives with a terrible secret …’ He gazed around the audience. His eyes were beginning to get a strange light in them. ‘They are filled with pent-up, barely-suppressed rage just waiting to boil over …’
    I jumped as he suddenly swung the microphone back toward me. ‘Would you say, Laura, that PMS was the single most contributory factor to the breakdown of your marriage?’
    I opened my mouth and nothing came out. My brain whirred, searching for the right thing to say. ‘The single most contributory factor to the breakdown of my marriage,’ I might have replied, ‘was my husband having a mid-life crisis and getting his leg over the first available female that came along. Lying to me was most definitely a contributory factor, as was trying to pretend I had developed paranoiac-personality-disorder for assuming that finding a packet of three extra-long-lasting melon-and-passion-fruit flavoured condoms and a carton of chocolate body paint in your husband’s briefcase when he was supposed to be meeting up with the district auditor (male, 57, shocking case of halitosis) was a fair indication that he was up to no good. For let me tell you, Randolph, Daniel may have liked to pretend he only left me because I was difficult to live with but smashing crockery against the kitchen tiles was the least of it.