Love Your Neighbour: A laugh-out-loud love from the author of One Day in December. Kat French

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СКАЧАТЬ Whether you like it or not, in a few weeks’ time I absolutely will be opening for business next door.’

      Emily slid down the bathroom wall, slumping to the floor, her back pressed against the radiator to ease the all-too-familiar ache. She hurled the unopened pregnancy test across the room. At least the tell-tale scarlet streak on the loo roll had saved her the bother of wasting eight pounds this month – not that she’d expected much else, given that she and Tom had barely seen each other, let alone made love.

      What had started out as a crazy, exciting plan to make a baby had steadily turned into a monthly cycle of failure and heartache, that, month on month, was ripping the heart right out of their marriage.

      Seventeen months, to be precise. Eighteen, including this one.

      They hadn’t expected to score a home run on their first month, of course not. Hoped maybe, but not expected. Nonetheless, Emily had passed that first month daydreaming of ways to tell Tom their happy news. Would she buy him a card? Spell out ‘daddy’ in alphabetti spaghetti? No, Tom hated tinned spaghetti. And anyway, he’d want them to do the test together, wouldn’t he?

      In the end, they’d perched side by side on the edge of the bath and passed the upside-down stick between them as if it might singe the skin off their fingers.

      ‘You look. No, you! Please, you do it, I can’t …’

      In their defence, they had every reason to feel hopeful. Hugh Hefner himself would have been impressed with the way they’d dedicated themselves to their task over the month, but all they wound up with for their trouble was numb bums from the old ceramic bath and a stubbornly empty window where there should have been a blue line. Month two followed pretty much the same pattern. Month three involved a little less sex and a decent bottle of Rioja to drown their sorrows. Month four … well, suffice to say it had been one long downhill slide from there to here, eighteen months later on the bathroom floor.

      Emily was just glad Tom was away on business. Again. At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.

      Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet-hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to relax.

      Guilt gnawed through his gut as he glanced at his BlackBerry on the bedside table. His hand even hovered over it for a second before he bottled it and reached for the TV remote instead. Emily would’ve called if there was good news to report, and he just couldn’t muster up a long-distance supportive shoulder. This trying-to-conceive business, or the TTC club, as it was chattily called on the many message boards Em had signed up to, wasn’t at all like those rose-tinted rom-com movies she adored. Oh no. This was more like some fright night, bloodthirsty Halloween movie being shown on nightmarish monthly repeat, and Tom was sick to the back teeth of the lot of it. He’d had a bellyful of Emily’s brave attempts to raise a smile for his benefit with grey tear tracks on her cheeks, and he could practically recite his own predictable ‘maybe next month’ speech in his sleep.

       How in hell had it got this bad?

      God knows he loved her, and before all of this baby crap he’d known exactly how to show her, too.

      ‘Let’s make a baby.’

      He wished he’d never uttered those immortal bloody words as he’d cradled her in his arms in bed, still buried deep inside her, knowing he wanted nothing else for the rest of his life.

      Since then, somewhere along the way, sex had become less about impulsive lust, and more of an insert tab A into slot B, and then hope like hell that something sticks. And now, to make things worse, if things could possibly be any worse, Emily had started to mutter about going to the bloody doctor to get tests.

      He sighed hard and dragged his weekend bag closer.

      A fresh wave of guilt washed over him as he shoved his hand underneath the carefully folded shirts, feeling for the dog-eared porn mag beneath the baseboard. He tried to block out the thought of what Emily would think of him for wasting precious semen.

      But then, she wasn’t in her fertile window anyway, so what did it matter?

      The bleakness of being more familiar with his wife’s menstrual cycle than he was with the football fixtures wasn’t lost on him. He pushed the whole sorry mess to the back of his mind and unbuckled his belt. He flicked the magazine open to his favourite page. At least he could rely on Candy from Arizona not to take her temperature before spreading her legs.

       CHAPTER THREE

      Jonny clanged his fork against the side of his wine glass.

      ‘Order, mon chers, order!’

      He looked from one face to another as they gathered around Marla’s kitchen table. It had been a little over a week since Gabriel Ryan had thundered into the village on his motorbike, and this was the first official meeting of the hastily cobbled-together committee to get him thrown out again just as fast.

      Emily paused with her fork full of lasagne midway to her mouth, and Dora, the chapel’s octogenarian cleaning lady, fiddled with her hearing aid until it whistled furiously. As the self-proclaimed campaign leader, Jonny shot her a mutinous look. Dora’s husband, Ivan, smiled benignly at his wife.

      ‘You hum it, I’ll play it, dear,’ he muttered, and helped himself to a third glass of Merlot.

      ‘So,’ Jonny said with a theatrical flourish. He nodded pointedly at Ruth, village florist and gossip central, to start taking notes in the pad he’d thrust into her hands when she sat down. Taking a great slug of wine, she darted her eyes around the table, then picked up her pen and clicked the end a few times in a show of efficiency.

      Satisfied that his every word would be recorded for posterity, Jonny cleared his throat and planted his hands on his snake hips.

      ‘Right, so. We all know why we’re here. The fucking Munsters are trying to set up shop next door to the chapel, and it’s our job to get shot of them. Like, pronto.’

      He glanced around at the suddenly hushed group, who looked slightly shell-shocked by his rousing opening gambit.

      Ruth raised a hesitant hand.

      ‘Er, Jonny? Do I have to write the “fucking” bit down?’

      ‘Christ almighty, Ruth!’ he exploded. ‘Just get the general gist down, this isn’t CSI fucking Shropshire!’

      ‘Why is he reciting the alphabet?’ shouted Dora, her hearing aid now whacked up to full.

      ‘He isn’t, Dora. It’s a cop show,’ Emily supplied.

      ‘Oh. Oooh, you wouldn’t half make a lovely Bergerac, Jonny.’

      ‘Drove a Jaguar, you know.’ Ivan nodded sagely.

      ‘“Bergerac”?’ Jonny СКАЧАТЬ