LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      ‘Lord! Would you look at the mess in here. I’m all for salads but you’ve really got to take them out of those awful little white plastic containers when you get them home. They leak everywhere. What’s this?’ Anne-Marie O’Brien squinted over her glasses at the supermarket label on the tub of couscous which had made an oily puddle in the middle of the otherwise spotless fridge. ‘Couscous? Messy, that’s what it is.’

      Emma Sheridan said nothing as her mother searched for a clean J-cloth, rinsed it out in hot water and then zealously scrubbed the middle shelf of the fridge with the help of a bottle of antiseptic kitchen cleaner Emma had forgotten she’d possessed and had meant to throw out. An overpowering scent of pine disinfectant filled the room. It smelled nothing like any pine tree Emma had ever come across, unless pines were mating with bleach factories these days.

      ‘Much better now,’ Mrs O’Brien said, straightening up. She briskly rinsed the cloth out again, inspected the rest of the kitchen with narrowed eyes, then gave the melamine surfaces a quick squirt of cleaner, her every movement the work of an expert with a PhD in Cleaning the Home. Only then did she take the precious Tupperware and tinfoil-wrapped parcels and place them carefully in the fridge, giving her daughter a commentary on her actions at the same time.

      ‘Can’t have poor Peter eating that supermarket stuff. Proper dinners is what he should have. I know your father wouldn’t touch anything that had to be microwaved, but if I was away from him for a week, it’d be a different matter. Husbands! I’ve made lasagne that’ll last for at least two days, shepherd’s pie for tonight and these two are chicken and mushroom pies – I’ll put them in the freezer part. Emma, dear! Do you ever defrost this thing? It won’t do it itself. Never mind, I’ll just sort it out…’

      Emma tuned out. Thirty-one-years of her mother had taught her that listening to the ‘nobody does things the right way, my way’ monologue would put you in a mental home if you didn’t tune out. Especially when the monologue was designed to tell you what a slatternly housekeeper/student/driver you were and how your poor husband would drop dead from salmonella if you didn’t start boil washing both the tea towels and his underpants immediately.

      It was immaterial that Emma had spent most of the previous day cleaning and polishing Number 27 The Beeches from top to bottom; immaterial that she’d used up her precious day off work cleaning instead of swanning around the shops buying last-minute bits and bobs for her holiday. She’d toyed with the idea of going into Debenhams to see if she could get one of those black uplift bikinis she’d spotted in a magazine. Even if you were as flat as a pancake boob-wise, this bikini would give you a cleavage that’d take the sight out of people’s eyes, or so the magazine claimed.

      As the only way Emma’s cleavage was going to take somebody’s eye out was if a wire from one of her AA cups escaped and actually poked them in the eye, she desperately needed a new uplift bikini.

      But as usual, the only overdeveloped part of her person, namely guilt, had swung into action and put the kibosh on the shopping trip. Emma’s sense of guilt was like a medical textbook description of the heart: a large muscle which contracts unconsciously. Guilt at leaving Peter on his own at home for an entire week while she sailed down the Nile with her parents overcame her desire for a skilfully padded bikini, so she’d given Debenhams a miss and spring-cleaned the house instead. Peter, who wouldn’t notice if he had to eat his dinner off the table because they’d run out of plates, would be unaware of her feverish scrubbing. However, Emma’s Guiltometer had worked out that an entire day of cleaning would go a long way (fifty-five per cent) to making up for having a holiday without her beloved husband. Buying him an enormous present she couldn’t afford and cooking him his favourite dinners for a week after her return would almost compensate for the remaining forty-five per cent.

      Sadly, she’d forgotten to buy new rubber gloves for the cleaning fest so her hands were now dry as an overcooked chicken thanks to scrubbing the toilet bowls with bleach. But the house was a veritable palace, with clean carpets, clean loos and not an unironed item of clothing anywhere.

      All that and her mother was still tut-tutting over the only visible blemish in the entire premises. Emma could just picture Pete wrenching open the couscous and eating it with his finger beside the fridge that morning, shoving the greasy tub back in carelessly afterwards before grabbing the orange juice carton for breakfast. He adored couscous – and he hated shepherd’s pie with a vengeance. Still, what was the point of telling her mother that? Anne-Marie O’Brien wouldn’t listen: she never listened to anyone. Except her husband, James P. O’Brien, boss of O’Brien’s Heating Contractors, master of all he surveyed and the person who absolutely always had to have the last word on every subject.

      Emma sat down wearily on one of her

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