Carrie Goes Off the Map Read Free Page B

get home just in time for the wedding. An old university friend had invited him to be an usher; not that Matt liked weddings—usually he found catching malaria more fun—but it would be good to meet up with an old mate after all these years.
    Throwing his bags into the back of the Jeep, Matt climbed in beside the driver and grunted a hello. The engine started and he glanced round. Shelly was standing outside the medical center, her hand raised in farewell. The kids were dancing round her, waving wildly. Then the wooden huts became smaller, the river glittered one last time, and he was swallowed up by the jungle.

Chapter 3
    It was June, and the tiny spare bedroom at Rowena’s cottage in Packley Village, Oxfordshire, was sweltering. Through the floor Carrie could hear the juicer whirring in the kitchen, and behind it, a CD was belting out the soundtrack to Ten Things I Hate About You . Closing her eyes, Carrie tried her magic trick again: the one, where, if she wished very hard, the past four months vanished like a puff of smoke.
    In some ways, she’d been lucky. That was what she’d tried to tell herself in the darkest moments, when she hadn’t been howling with pain, or sitting piggy-eyed with crying, using up tissues as though she was trying to kill off what was left of the world’s forests. She’d been lucky because she had her shocked parents to cancel all the wedding arrangements and explain the situation to their relatives and friends. She’d been even luckier to have Rowena, who had offered her spare room the same night that Huw had left her. Two o’clock in the morning it had been when she’d finally finished rowing and shouting and pleading and crying with him.
    Rowena had turned up at the farm in a taxi and taken Carrie to the cottage she owned in the village high street. She had sat up all night with her, handing over vodka and tissues and unrelenting sympathy. She had been one of the few people who hadn’t said: ‘ You’ll get over it. You just need time .’ Or even: ‘ There are plenty more fish in the sea .’ Instead, she had called Huw every name under the sun—and a few Carrie had never heard of—and offered to help her sabotage his tractor.
    For a few weeks, a couple of months if they were feeling generous, people had expected Carrie to wallow in self-pity, to indulge her grief; but then, quicker than she could ever have imagined—not that she had ever imagined—they’d expected her to get over it and move on. So she’d become an expert at nodding in agreement when they offered their condolences, smiling bravely and tactfully changing the subject. Everyone agreed how well she’d coped. ‘You’ve been so brave,’ they said. ‘You deserve a medal.’ Because that was what the world expected her to do: be dignified, stoical, and calm.
    But they’d forgotten how good an actress she was.
    The other Carrie—the one she wanted to be—had been a vengeful bitch from hell. In her dreams, that Carrie had maxed out Huw’s credit card on male escorts, outrageous handbags, and a full-page ad in the Farming Times calling him a heartless, spineless shit. In her dreams, Huw was strapped naked in the stocks, while every woman in the world who’d ever had her heart split in two pelted him with rotten eggs and rancid diet shakes.
    She opened her eyes to find a red-faced Rowena standing over her with a large wooden spoon. ‘My God, what are you doing?’
    â€˜We are going into town,’ Rowena declared solemnly.
    â€˜Okay, but what do you need the spoon for?’
    â€˜We’re having a cooked brekkie first.’
    â€˜That would be the royal “we,” then, would it?’ asked Carrie over the top of the duvet.
    â€˜Don’t be a plonker. Not just me. You’re coming too.’
    â€˜And resistance is futile, I suppose?’
    â€˜Utterly,’ said Rowena,