Married Love Read Online Free Page A

the stars showing in the sky like flecks of broken glass. Pam was late as usual, but Shelley hadn’t wanted to wait inside in case the doorbell woke the others: her daughter and baby granddaughter were asleep upstairs. She felt herself growing heavy and thick with cold. You forgot about the cold – the house had central heating, and winters weren’t like they used to be. When Shelley was a child, she’d wrapped her scarf around her head and mouth on the way to school, trying to trap the warmth of her breath inside; these days, you hardly needed a scarf . The phase of life Shelley was in now, anyway, the heat of her body came and went in blasts, and she had a horror of being caught out in tight clothes.
    She could have stamped her feet or flung her arms around, but it was too early in the morning; instead, she let the cold creep into her as if she were made of stone. When the car pulled up at last, she could barely even move towards it, though she could see Pam lit up inside, peering out through the window, looking for her. Pam always drove with the interior light on. She treated her car like just another room in her house – while she was driving, she’d fiddle around with piles of paper and bits of crocheted blanket and boxes of tissues on the passenger seat, hanging on to the steering wheel with her other hand. She was a danger on the road, but Shelley didn’t drive. For a moment, before she headed over to the car, Shelley imagined herself as Pam was seeing her – just another pillar of dark, like the hedge and the phone box and the pebble-dashed end wall of the kitchen extension. She and her husband Roy lived on what had been a council estate, although they had been buying their house for years now.
    Pam was fat like a limp saggy cushion, very short, with permed yellow curls that were growing out grey; her face was crumpled like an ancient baby’s. Roy said that Pam and Shelley side by side looked like Little and Large, because Shelley was tall and thin. She had never been one to eat too much. Her only weakness was tea with sugar; she drank a lot of that – couldn’t give it up. Her daughter Kerry said her insides must be black.
    — Hiya, Shell.
    Pam leaned over to open the door, then began throwing stuff into the back seat. — I’ve had a letter off the hospital about my gallstones.
    All Pam’s conversations began as if you hadn’t stopped talking since you last saw her; they were as cluttered as her car. The heater was on high, belting out a stinging warmth that smelled of the little cardboard pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
    — What gallstones?
    — Well, they may not be. I’ve got to go in on the fifteenth. Typical – that’s the day John wants the car to go and see his sister in Tamworth. I said to him, ‘You’ll have to fix another day.’ He says he doesn’t want to mess her around. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got a lot of time for his sister.
    Pam’s husband John was meant to do the books for the cleaning business, but as far as Shelley could see he sat in front of the telly and did nothing, while Pam went driving about all over the place like a mad thing – and the car was forever breaking down. John used to be a plasterer. He was supposed to have damaged his leg years ago, falling from a scaffold, but Shelley had seen him limp with a different leg on different days. Pam was a good worker, though. Once she got into a job, she stuck at it until the sweat was running off her, she wouldn’t give up. Shelley was like that too. They didn’t make a bad team.
    They crossed the river. It was at low tide, sunk to a twisting channel between flanks of mud glinting with moonlight. A notice outside the red brick warehouse, which was not much more than a two-storey shed, warned that it was patrolled by security dogs, but there was no sign of them. Pam stopped in the empty car park, and they got out some of their kit from the boot; the employers were supposed to provide