Dancing Over the Hill: The new feel good comedy from the author of The Kicking the Bucket List. Cathy Hopkins

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       1

       A year later: Cait

      ‘Matt, Matt. Are you OK? Matt.’

      No response. I’d just got home from work to find Matt, stretched out and snoring softly on the sofa in the sitting room. He’d taken off his suit jacket, tie and shoes and cast them onto the nearest chair. An empty bottle of red wine and glass were on the coffee table in front of him, together with an open dictionary. Something must have happened. Matt was never here on a weekday, he was in Bristol, working, usually back on the train which got in around 8.30 p.m. He wasn’t a big drinker, either.

      Maybe I shouldn’t wake him, I thought. Should leave him to sleep it off. But … he’s never home in the day. What’s happened? I gave him a gentle shove, then a more persistent one, but he was dead to the world. I checked he was still breathing. He’d been snoring a moment ago – of course he was.

      Reassured that Matt was still in the land of the living, I tiptoed out and into the kitchen to search for my mobile to see if it offered any clues. I’d forgotten to take it out with me, so didn’t know if he’d been trying to reach me. I found the phone in the fruit bowl and turned it on to see if there were any messages. There were four missed calls and one text. All from Matt. The text said: When r u back? Need 2 talk.

      Two minutes later, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to my two closest friends, Lorna and Debs. They had said they’d drop in on their way back from a trip to the garden centre.

      ‘Spring flowers,’ said Debs, and handed me a bunch of white tulips.

      ‘Thanks, but shh, Matt’s home, asleep on the sofa,’ I said as I ushered them through the hall and into the kitchen diner, where I shut the door after them. They made an odd pair. Debs, a curvaceous bohemian, forty-seven years old, with a mop of dark hair piled on top of her head and kept in place with a chopstick, was wearing a kingfisher blue silk top, green harem trousers and a big emerald amulet fit for an Egyptian high priestess. Although British born and bred, with her olive skin and brown eyes she looked Spanish, a throwback to her Andalusian great-grandmother, she’d told us. Next to her, Lorna was small and slim, in her fifties, and was in jeans and a blue shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, her silver-white hair cut neatly to her shoulders. I was the oldest of the three of us, but often felt like the youngest, a twenty year old trapped in an old body. Matt called my friends the S and S, the silly and the sensible, Debs being the first, Lorna the latter; he said that each of them represented a different side of my nature. ‘There’s more to me than that,’ I’d told him. ‘I have many sides – I’m multifaceted, like a diamond.’ He’d laughed. Cheek.

      ‘Matt? СКАЧАТЬ