Shameless by Paul Burston Read Free Book Online

prices, and why his appointment book was always full months in advance. Luckily for Caroline, there had been a late cancellation, and since she was one of Tony’s favored noncelebrity clients, he had graciously agreed to squeeze her in.
    She was sitting with her damp hair wrapped in a towel, enjoying the reassuringly expensive aroma of Tony’s own-label hair products and flicking through a copy of
Vanity Fair
when her cell rang. Graham, she thought. About bloody time, too. She dived into her bag, flipped open the phone, and pressed it to her ear.
    “Hello, dear, it’s your mother.”
    Caroline stifled a groan. The last thing she needed today was one of her mother’s little lectures about the vast amounts she squandered at the hairdresser’s. This was one of the reasons Caroline had always felt far closer to her grandmother than she ever had to her mother. It was her grandmother who had first encouraged her to “make the best of herself” as she put it. And she certainly knew what she was talking about. She was in her seventies now, but she never left the house without a protective layer of makeup and a good strong coat of nail varnish. Clearly the glamour gene had skipped a generation because her mother couldn’t have been more different. Caroline had long since given up trying to justify her expenditure at the hairdresser’s to her mother. Try as she might, there was no point trying to explain the high cost of contemporary styling to a woman who had absolutely no concept of the vagaries of fashion, and who had worn her hair in the same casual style for the past thirty years. Besides, Caroline didn’t really want her mother to know that it was the kind of hairdresser’s where favored customers were treated to a line or two of cocaine with their double espresso.
    “Hi, Mum. Yes, I’m fine. The thing is, I’m a bit tied up right now. Can I call you back later?”
    There was a pause, and for a moment Caroline thought that she might actually have pulled it off. Then she heard that familiar wounded tone and knew that further resistance was useless. It didn’t matter how busy she was. There was an unspoken rule that any telephone conversation between Caroline and her mother should last a minimum of five minutes, and should contain reference to at least four of the following subjects—the cost of things today, the neighbors, the weather, Europe, the National Health Service, and the latest developments regarding the house that Caroline’s brother, Kevin, and his lovely wife, Louise, had bought just outside Coventry and were in the process of doing up before they started planning a family. This last topic of conversation had been a particular favorite of late, ever since Caroline had made the mistake of mentioning Graham and her mother had made the mistake of thinking another family wedding might soon be in the cards.
    Eight minutes and one gentle reminder about the cost of living later, Caroline said good-bye to her mother and finished off her coffee, though a part of her secretly wished it could have been the other way around. Caroline was very rarely lost for words. She had spent the best part of her adolescence locked away in her bedroom poring over the collected works of Oscar Wilde, so she usually had an answer for everything. For instance, if anyone dared to suggest that she had her priorities wrong, or that her obsession with looking good indicated that she was a little shallow, she was always quick off the mark: “Only shallow people don’t judge by appearances.” But when confronted with her mother’s quiet but persistent disapproval, Caroline’s usual defenses simply weren’t enough. Words failed her. Her mother knew her too well. She knew that behind those carefully selected phrases and that polished delivery was a girl who had grown up in a terraced house on a dead-end street in Swindon, a girl who had never been considered pretty as a child, and who still had moments, hours, even days, of