The Woman Who Stole My Life Read Free

move.
    ‘Jeffrey …’
    Tonelessly, he says, ‘I’m concentrating. Or rather, I was.’
    ‘Do I have time to visit Mum and Dad before dinner?’ See what I did there? I didn’t just say, ‘What time will I be getting fed?’ I made it not about me, but about his grandparents, which hopefully will soften his angry heart.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I’m just going out for an hour.’
    ‘Dinner will be ready by then.’
    It won’t be. He’s keeping me trapped. I’ll have to confront this passive-aggressive warfare at some stage, but I’m feeling so defeated by my pointless day and my pointless life that, right now, I’m not able.
    ‘Okay …’
    ‘Please don’t come in here while I’m working.’
    I go back upstairs and wish I could tweet ‘#Working #MyHole’ but some of his friends follow me on Twitter. Besides, any time I send a tweet, it reminds people that I’m nobody now and that it’s time to unfollow me. That is a true measurable fact which I sometimes test, just in case I’m not feeling like enough of a loser.
    In fairness, I was never Lady Gaga with her millions and millions of followers, but, in my own small way, I was once a Twitter presence.
    Denied an outlet for my gloom, I remove a brick from my Jaffa Cake wall and lie on my bed and eat many of the little round discs of chocolate-and-orange happiness. So manythat I can’t tell you because I made a deliberate decision to not count. Plenty, though. Rest assured of that.
    Tomorrow will be different, I tell myself. Tomorrow will
have
to be different. There will be lots of writing and lots of productivity and no Jaffa Cakes. I will not be a woman who lies on her bed, her chest covered with spongy crumbs.
    An hour and a half later, still a dinner-free woman, I hear a car door slam and feel someone hurrying up our little path. In this cardboard house, you can not just hear, but you can
feel
everything that happens within a fifty-metre radius.
    ‘Dad’s here.’ There is alarm in Jeffrey’s voice. ‘He looks a bit mental.’
    The doorbell begins to ring frantically. I hurry down the stairs and open the door and there is Ryan. Jeffrey is right: he
does
look a bit mental.
    Ryan pushes past me into the hall and, with zeal that borders on the manic, says, ‘Stella, Jeffrey, I’ve got some fantastic news!’
    Let me tell you about my ex-husband, Ryan. He might put things differently, which he’s welcome to do, but as this is my story, you’re getting my version.
    We got together when I was nineteen and he was twenty-one and he had notions about being an artist. Because he was very good at drawing dogs and because I knew nothing about art, I thought he was highly talented. He was accepted into art college where, to our mutual dismay, he showed no signs of being the breakout star of his generation. We used to have long talks, late into the night, where he’d tell me all the different ways his tutors were cretins and I’d stroke his hands and agree with him.
    After four years he graduated with a mediocre degree and began painting for a living. But no one bought hiscanvases, so he decided that painting was over. He played around with different media – film, graffiti, dead budgies in formaldehyde – but a year passed and nothing took off. Ultimately a pragmatic man, Ryan faced facts: he didn’t like being perpetually penniless. He wasn’t cut out for this starving-in-a-garret business that seems to be the stock-in-trade of most artists. Besides, he had acquired a wife (me) and a young daughter, Betsy. He needed to get a job. But not just any old job. After all, he was, despite everything, an artist.
    Around this time, my dad’s glamorous sister, Auntie Jeanette, came into a few quid and decided to spend it on something she’d coveted since she was a little girl – a beautiful bathroom. She wanted something – said with an airy wave of her hand – ‘fabulous’. Jeanette’s poor husband, Uncle Peter, who had spent the previous twenty