I Heart London Read Free Page B

normal, so seven ‘call me now’ texts at what had to be ten-ish in the evening UK-time couldn’t be good news. I fannied about with my iPhone contacts, trying to get it to call her back, but was cut off by an incoming call.
    From my mother.
    Someone was definitely dead.
    Or someone was about to be.
    With a very unpleasant feeling in my stomach, I reluctantly answered the phone.
    ‘Mum?’ I grabbed a tea towel from the kitchen counter and wrapped it around my chest. It just didn’t seem right to be topless while on the phone to my mother. Thank goodness I’d put on pants. ‘Is everything OK?’
    The last time she’d put in an impromptu call was when my dad was in hospital after enjoying a recreational batch of space cakes at my auntie’s house. Ever since, I’d been waiting for the call to say he was leaving her for the milkman or that he had defaulted on the mortgage to fund his crack habit. It was impossible to say which was more likely.
    ‘Angela Clark, do you have something to tell me?’
    The quiet fury in my mother’s voice suggested that my dad wasn’t in trouble but that I certainly was. And I was almost certain I knew why. Louisa’s texts suddenly made a terrifying kind of sense as I put two and two together to come up with a big fat shiny emerald-coloured four.
    ‘Um, I don’t think so?’ I answered sweetly. Because playing dumb had worked so well when I’d ‘borrowed’ her car in the middle of the night when I was eighteen, only to return it with three exciting new dents. I thought they added character. She thought they added to the insurance premium.
    ‘Are you or are you not −’ she paused and took a very deep, very dramatic breath − ‘engaged to that musician?’
    Sodding bollocky bollocks.
    It wasn’t like I’d planned on keeping my engagement a secret from my parents, but circumstances had conspired against me. And by circumstances, of course I meant stone cold terror. I’d called on Christmas Day to deliver the happy news, but my mum had been so mad that I hadn’t come home for dry turkey and seething resentment, and so mad that I was choosing to stay in ‘that country’ with ‘that musician’, that I couldn’t seem to find the right way to tell her I had just accepted a proposal from ‘that musician’ to stay in ‘that country’ for the foreseeable. Then, as the weeks passed by, the more I replayed the conversation over in my mind, the less I felt like casually mentioning my betrothal.
    ‘Am I engaged?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘To Alex?’
    ‘Yes Angela. To Alex. Or at least one hopes so.’
    She used the special voice to pronounce my fiance’s name that she usually saved to refer to Sandra next door and Eamonn Holmes. And she hated Sandra next door and Eamonn Holmes.
    ‘Well, at least I’m not going to end up a barren spinster.’ Yes, dangling a grandchild-shaped carrot in front of her was a low blow, but needs must when the devil shits in your teapot. ‘Surely?’
    ‘Oh dear God, Angela, are you pregnant?’ she shrieked directly into the receiver before bellowing at the top of her voice in the other direction, ‘David! She’s pregnant!’
    ‘I’m not pregnant,’ I said, resting my head on my knees. I might be sitting half-naked on a dirty kitchen floor with a slightly grubby tea towel over my boobs, but I wasn’t pregnant. As far as I knew. ‘Seriously.’
    ‘Oh Lord, I should have known,’ she wittered on regardless. ‘Moving in with that musician, never calling, never visiting. How far gone are you?’
    ‘I’m not pregnant,’ I repeated with as much conviction as I could muster while simultaneously trying to remember if I had taken my pill that morning. ‘Mum, I’m not.’
    ‘How far gone is she?’ I heard my dad puffing his way down to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Is it that musician’s? Is that why she’s engaged?’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Even though they couldn’t see me, I couldn’t resist an eye roll and emphatic wave of the hand.