Plastic Read Free Page A

in the Vauxhall because once I searched the glove box and found an empty foil disc of birth control pills and a luggage receipt for Antwerp. But I still couldn’t imagine him being unfaithful – even with all the weird phone calls.
    They were weird because he took the cordless into the shed even when the temperature was below zero, and he had the kind of peculiar strangled conversations men have when they’re trying to hide something. I’d stayed in denial because I wanted our marriage to work, which is an unfashionable view when you see all those trendy women in car commercials kicking men out of their loft apartments. But life wasn’t like that for me, it was about bleach and Hoover bags and quietly crying after midnight so as not to let the neighbours hear. Gordon said we had to talk problems over, but he always managed to talk me out of anything I wanted to change.
    I cleaned the cut on my head and was standing by the garden gate with the earring in my hand feeling a bit dazed when Hilary, my next door neighbour, walked past and spoke without stopping to engage her brain. Hilary is tall and wears a shade of coral gloss lipstick I’m sure they’ve discontinued everywhere except Africa.
    ‘Oh you’ve found it,’ she said, ‘thank God, I’ve been looking everywhere.’
    She thought I’d just picked the earring up in the street. Then she realised the truth and changed colour. Hilary makes herself taller with pinned-up hair that needs a better conditioner than the complimentary kind she hoards from air-crew hotels. Hilary is a BA flight attendant who knows how to blow a whistle for attracting attention, which is something she looks like she’s had a lot of practice at.
    I didn’t know what to say. I numbly handed her the earring, and as I did I had a clear mental picture of Hilary with her tights off and her Zara skirt hiked up astride Gordon in the passenger seat, banging her head against the windscreen. What was so galling is that she’s older than me, one of those old-school British Airways bulldog-women in Belisha-beacon makeup who’s born to wear a Hermes neck scarf with horseshoes on it.
    I had a deal going with Gordon; he always paid for his infidelities. But this was so blatant that as I grabbed the car keys I thought to hell with Croydon, it’s time for Selfridges and Harvey Nicks, the point being that in one afternoon I planned to revenge-shop myself into a coma. If I hadn’t decided to do that I wouldn’t have seen the shoes and I’d never have ended up here, covered in blood.
    I was only going to go shopping, and now I have to die for it, how does that one work out?

 
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
    Birth Of An Addiction
     
     
    B EFORE I MOVED to Hamingwell, I lived with my parents in one of those yellow-brick Edwardian terraced houses that provided a dream-memory of order and safety for its inheritors.
    Our quiet sidestreet was a warm-walled canyon where children played ball games in the road and went to bed while it was still light in the summer months. My parents had been children during the confused decades after the war, and raised me without religion, politics or convictions of any kind in the hope that I would make up my own mind. After their weekly fight they would buy me a small gift to make amends for what I had seen and heard.
    Over the years, the gifts got bigger.
    By the time I was seventeen there was no cupboard space left in my bedroom for new clothes, and I couldn’t take any more of their fighting, so I left home and moved into the flat over the shoe shop where I had a Saturday job. I dated the manager, but when I finished with him he had me thrown out of the flat.
    I knew Gordon because he visited the store as a sales rep, and I started seeing him because he wouldn’t leave me alone. After my marriage I was transferred to Kimberley Road, Hamingwell, where the children were posted indoors at their games stations and arguments were whispered because they could be heard through the