Crappily Ever After Read Online Free Page A

that Sam can fix my Denis Healey’s, as my eyebrows are now referred to. I do the obligatory call home, so Mum can have a glass of wine poured and tea in the microwave. I wish Mike a happy and relatively painless time at home and brace myself for the biting North Sea air.
     
     
                                                          Chapter Two       
     
    I battle with my case and backpack up one flight of stairs and down the second set at Arbroath station. I spot my sister leaning against her car, smoking a roll-up and observing my struggle with an amused expression. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that all hell has been let loose in the back seat of her car, as her young daughter and son scream at each other over a packet of sweets.
 ‘Hi sis, are they all right in there?’ I envelope her in a nicotine-clouded hug, plucking the roll-up from her fingers, and inhaling several lungfuls before she snatches it back.
 ‘Good to see you, doll. Don’t worry about them. We’ve been at Mum’s all day, wrapping and hiding your presents,’ she accuses. ‘They’re on a Haribo high, it should pass in an hour or so. I’m dropping them at home to their Dad now, so we can party.’          
     
    Mary is one year younger than me, but has always been the more mature one. She always   seemed to know where she was going in life while I, in comparison, seemed to be the only one with no direction and no clue. We are also a complete contrast to each other; physically, Mary takes after our Mum’s side of the family, while I take after Dad’s. She has gorgeous red curls that everyone admires, but she hates them. God invented hair straighteners just for her, she claims. Mary had married young. Too young, she now says. Bill had been her first love and they were completely smitten with each other. Walking round High School holding hands and not caring who laughed. Neither had any aspirations to go to Uni. Bill started an apprenticeship as an electrician for the same company his Dad worked for; Mary took a job in our town’s one and only department store, later changing to a different in-store shop when she got bored. They married two years later. 
     ‘I wish I’d held off ‘til I had a bit of dress sense – and until they invented straighteners,’ she later told me, putting down her wedding picture with a wistful sigh. A mass of red curls and a huge puffball dress was not, in her opinion, such a good look. We suggested she get married again in a blessing ceremony when the kids were born, with her new updated look. 
    ‘Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to marry him twice?’ was her incredulous reply.
    They did, however, hold off having kids until they were both thirty. Before they decided to start a family they took off for a late gap year around Australia and Asia; Mary came back already pregnant and, shocked beyond belief, tearfully asking me what the hell you do for nine months with no fags and booze? It was beyond me. She’s the only person I know who had pre-natal depression.
    It wasn’t until Mary had Josh and Jess that things really started to sour with Bill. He did   nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, unless you count the fact that he gambled, drank too much and ignored her requests that he smoke outside away from her babies. 
    Mary decided to discuss it with her mother-in-law, Joan.  
    ‘He’s just like his bloody father,’ snapped Joan, bitterly. ‘If I haven’t been able to do anything with Bill senior in 35 years, then I don’t rate your chances with Bill junior.’ They gripped their coffee cups with clenched fists and stared into space. Identical pained expressions on their faces.        
     
    We drop off the now sleeping children with their very reluctant father. 
    ‘Unbelievable that just fifteen minutes before they were screaming like banshees,’ I observe.
Mary had informed me that she might have to stay at