Shattered Read Free

steaming dishes arrived and Gemma picked up her fork, hoping this time she might be able to eat her meal and have it stay down. She tested a mouthful, the hateful, terminal fight with Steve still haunting her memory, the food almost tasteless because of her preoccupation.
    ‘It’s so bloody ironic,’ she said, putting her fork down, ‘that I have to actually lose the man I love before I really get to learn how destructive jealousy is.’
    ‘Come on,’ said Angie, ‘don’t cut yourself up about it. Eat up, sweetheart. The opera’s not over –’
    ‘Till the fat lady goes into labour,’ Gemma interrupted.
    ‘And that’s why you’ve got to tell Steve. My feeling is he’d come back.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I just know, okay?’
    ‘There’s something odd about this conversation, Angie. What’s going on?’
    ‘What’s going on? I’ll tell you! Here’s a woman who still loves her boyfriend heaps but won’t tell him that she’s going to have his baby. That’s what’s going on. You should have told him ages ago.’
    ‘Angie! I’m starting to feel verballed!’
    Angie lowered her voice. ‘It is Steve’s, isn’t it?’
    ‘For God’s sake, Angie! Of course it is!’
    ‘What about that tacky misbehaviour you told me about some time back – in the front seat of Mike Moody’s car after you’d had too many cocktails?’
    ‘Nothing happened.’
    ‘Nothing?’ Angie’s plucked eyebrows vanished under her fringe, which shone copper under the downlights.
    ‘Nothing pregnancy inducing.’
    Gemma considered a moment. If Steve comes back, she thought sadly, I want it to be for me – because he loves me and wants to be with me. ‘I wouldn’t want him back,’ she said, ‘if he was just coming back for the baby.’
    ‘It’d be for you too,’ said Angie.
    ‘Oh come on, Ange. You can’t know that.’
    ‘It’d give him a great way to get back with you. It gives him the chance to be noble. To do the right thing.’
    ‘What else did he say?’ asked Gemma, acutely aware that the conversation with Steve had made a very big impact on Angie.
    ‘Sorry, Gemster. I’ve already said too much. Message ends.’
    Gemma felt both admiration and frustration at Angie’s discretion. It was always difficult to negotiate a friendship with both people involved in a break-up and respect confidences as well.
    ‘I wish I’d never heard of bloody Lorraine Litchfield. She’s such a non-issue now.’
    ‘She always was, you silly chook,’ said Angie. ‘She was just part of a job to him.’
    ‘But she’s so beautiful!’
    ‘Yeah. Beautiful like a box jellyfish. You took it too damn seriously.’
    ‘I could say the same thing about you and a certain TRG guy, Ange,’ Gemma said, unable to resist, recalling Trevor, the ex-tactical response group operative, who wrote Angie very bad poetry and failed to mention that he was married.
    ‘Don’t remind me,’ said Angie. ‘Although memories of my revenge still give me a thrill.’
    Gemma smiled. Angie, dressed in dominatrix black leather and studs, had love-cuffed Trevor to a hotel bed and taken out her whip. Trevor had discovered too late that the fluffy pink covers on the cuffs concealed not easily snapped play-cuffs but steely, non-negotiable police issue handcuffs. The whip, too, had been real.
    ‘And his wife arrived on the scene to find him like that,’ Gemma said, ‘only moments after you’d left.’
    ‘I heard afterwards that she picked up the whip and took over where I’d left off.’
    Angie’s face was suddenly serious. ‘Funny you should mention Trevor .   .   .’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘You know, despite all our problems, Steve and I were always on the same wavelength,’ Gemma mused, returning to her preferred subject. ‘I remember once we were driving to Nelson Bay, and I’d been about to say something but changed my mind, then Steve turned to me and asked: “What was it?” He heard me changing my mind!’
    Angie’s mobile