Infidelity for Beginners Read Free

the
neck every time they phoned to complain about some little mistake we’d printed
and drag them off to the nearest paediatric ward and continuously slap them
until they were prepared to admit that caravans were simply the things they
attached to the backs of their cars to go on holiday in.
    I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because I was the editor of Caravan Enthusiast , and as the editor of Caravan Enthusiast , I couldn’t very
well go around beating up my readership, not if I wanted to continue to gather
food, maintain a shelter, look after my wife and buy lottery tickets every
Saturday and Wednesday. It simply wasn’t possible to do both.
    In the years gone by I’d been able to take out some of these
frustrations on a few strategically timed cigarettes but I couldn’t even do
this any more.
    All I had was my job.
    My insignificant, boring, tedious, crappy, little job.
    And my report too.
    God, I wanted a fag.

 

Sally's Diary: November 22nd
    Andrew came home cursing Norman
again. I don’t know why he works himself up so much. It’s actually quite
embarrassing to watch. Also, I can never work out what’s so bad about Norman.
He doesn’t sound too terrible to me and certainly doesn’t seem to justify the
names Andrew reserves for him. I’ve tried to pin Andrew down on this point but
he just gets annoyed and tells me I don’t understand. And he’s right, I don’t.
I don’t understand at all. From what I can gather Norman’s latest crime is to
ask Andrew to draw up a plan of the budget and shave off a little here and
there. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me. After all Norman is Andrew’s
boss. He is entitled to ask Andrew to do stuff every now and again, isn’t he?
What does Andrew expect? It’s not like he’s asked him to work late or take a
pay cut or sit on his knee and suck him off. All he’s asked him to do is
compile a few numbers and write up a report.
    To be honest, I think anything you’re asked to do (within
reason) during working hours is fair enough. It would be different if Andrew
worked in a nineteenth century cotton mill and he was expected to crawl into
the machinery to extract his colleagues’ hands whenever they clogged up in the
gears, but he doesn’t.
    Andrew works in publishing. How terrible can it be?
    I think about Andrew and all his constant complaints then I
think about Carol at school. Carol is such a wonderful woman, just turned sixty
and still as energetic as a humming bird.
    She’s really upset she has to retire at the end of the year
and almost cried when the children presented her with all the birthday cards
they’d made for her in Art. I think she’s incredible. She’s been at that school
since she was in her early twenties, almost forty years, and has taught
children of some of the children she taught years ago, which is amazing, and in
two or three instances, their grand-children.
    But does she have any regrets?
    Not a single one. She says she’s loved every second of her
life and, given the chance, she wouldn’t do a thing differently if she had to
live her life all over again.
    I told this to Andrew and you know what he said?
    “Jesus, what a saddo!”
    Typical.
    But what I wouldn’t give to live a life as sad as Carol’s.

 

Chapter 2. Sex Lives of the Poorly Paid and Anonymous
    Time is an amazing thing.
    Just trying to get your head around it is all but
impossible. Believe me I’ve tried.
    About the only way you can do it is by putting it into some
sort of context. The popular way is by condensing the whole of time into a
normal 24 hour day. Actually forget that, the whole of time is too big a deal.
Let’s just condense the lifetime of the Earth into a normal 24 hour day.
    Four and a half billion years.
    Right, here’s what happened.
    Earth was formed out of a swirling mass of dust and space
particles and at midnight was one big molten horrible place to live. Slowly it
started cooling down but it wasn’t until about quarter past five in the