Tarnished by Julia Crouch Read Free Book Online Page A

library affected a flowing, earth-mother style – the complete opposite to Peg’s new, number-one-all-over look. She was also wondering what on earth Jean and Doll would make of it.
    ‘Fuck Marianne. She doesn’t own your head. I do.’ Loz bent and ran her lips over the smooth velvet on Peg’s scalp. ‘It sharpens you up, Peggo. Like how you should be more like inside. Here, hold on. I’ve got just the thing to complete the effect.’
    Loz dashed into the bedroom where she bashed about opening and closing drawers, searching for the effect-completer, whatever it was.
    As she waited, Peg looked around the flat and marvelled at the changes Loz had already wrought.
    When Peg’s old flatmate – fellow-librarian Petra – lived here, it was a purely functional space that they used for sleeping and eating. When Petra moved away to live with her boyfriend in Brixton, Peg suggested to Loz that, as they spent nearly every night together anyway, it would make sense if she took Petra’s place on the rent book. She would have put it more romantically had she the equipment to do so; Loz was, after all, the love of her life, her first proper serious relationship. But practical forms of expression came more easily to her.
    Loz had accepted like a shot, and Peg couldn’t quite believe her luck.
    And now, already, after just four weeks, Loz had turned the bare little flat into a home. She had scattered old kilims and new cushions and hung paintings and art photographs that she had ‘nicked’ from her parents’ house up in Camden. She had filled the empty old fireplace with pillar candles and placed an essential oil burner on the mantelpiece.
    Peg’s hundreds of novels – of the kind that might constitute the entire reading for a degree in English Literature at one of the older universities – had been joined on the burgeoning shelves by Loz’s equally vast collection of real-life crime books. She liked nothing better after a night sweating at the pass than to relax with a story full of brutal descriptions of dismembered corpses or ghastly doing-away-withs. Her addiction to this sort of book was the one big inconsistency in her otherwise politically exemplary life.
    ‘It’s good to measure my goodness against how bad other people can be,’ she had once tried to explain to Peg. ‘And the fact that it’s all actually happened makes me feel I’m learning about the real world, not just what some writer makes up.’
    Loz didn’t need the filter of literature to answer her existential questions. In this she was the complete opposite of Peg, who had liked nothing better than to lose herself in a fictional world. At least, this had been the case until Loz had shown her the seductions of real life.
    ‘Naomi and Richard hate my sort of books of course,’ Loz had said of her parents. ‘They think they’re awfully lowbrow. But it’s not all that far from Freud, if you think about it, and God knows Naomi’s read him enough times.’
    But Loz’s biggest impact on the flat had been on the kitchen area. Before she arrived it had been so basically equipped that it would have been a real challenge to do anything other than microwave a ready meal. It now had the air of a semi-professional enterprise, with a block of razor-sharp knives, all sorts of chopping boards, and top-notch saucepans and woks. Previously empty shelves were now crammed with enough oils, herbs, spices and vinegars to stock a small specialist shop.
    ‘Kitchenware. It’s my only extravagance,’ she explained to an awestruck Peg as she breezed through the kitchen, emptying drawers and cupboards of their blunt, chipped and broken contents, scrubbing them clean, then restocking them with her state-of-the art kit.
    Cooking was Loz’s passion. She was ambitious and would tell Peg bedtime stories of the restaurant she was going to run once she had saved enough, and how Peg would run the front of house and they’d live in a little flat above the shop.
    Peg wasn’t