Pleasant Vices Read Online Free

woman with a clipboard and a heap of scruffy buff folders, all the neighbours filing past to read the shaming sign perched on the dashboard.
    â€˜Why’s supper so early?’ Ben asked as he and Polly clattered into the kitchen.
    â€˜Mum’s going out,’ Daisy said in a whisper, terrified of attracting any more attention to herself. Then she added, ‘I’ll babysit Polly, shall I Mum?’
    Jenny plonked the dish of pasta on the table and looked at Daisy’s extraordinarily humble expression. ‘Well you’ll be home anyway, so you can hardly call it babysitting. Don’t imagine you’ll be allowed out for the foreseeable future, Daisy. I think you can take it that you’re now what you’d call “grounded”. Anyway, Alan should be back before nine.’ Jenny stopped in the middle of the kitchen, salad bowl in hand, gazing unseeing out of the window. What a lot there was to confront Alan with; perhaps she should make a list. She sighed, ‘God knows what he’s going to say.’
    Daisy slumped miserably in her chair and helped herself to a minuscule portion of tagliatelle. Jenny felt infuriated by her air of penitence – Daisy was normally so feisty. She hadn’t said a word in her own defence about the fare-dodging, although she could usually be relied on to make a spirited effort at justifying any misdemeanours. It was almost as if the girl was acting, practising for a school play audition for the role of some mousy Victorian governess.
    It was an enormous relief to everyone when Jenny and her cloudy mood left the house to go to the meeting. Ben opened his bedroom window and lit a cigarette to go with his chemistry homework. He sat in his room up in the attic, wondering if it was time to remove Michelle Pfeiffer from the wall and install someone else. He didn’t feel the same about her since Luke at school had come back from Los Angeles after the summer and bragged that he’d actually met her, really truly spoken to her. ‘She was only this high!’ he’d said, pointing at the middle of his chest. He’d made it sound like they’d spent hours together, though it turned out Luke had merely collided with her for the briefest second in a restaurant doorway. It was hard to carry on fancying someone who might actually have spoken to greasy Luke, even to tell him it didn’t matter that he’d stood on her foot; such an off-putting thought that she might have wasted one of her sensational smiles on such a creep. All the same, if Michelle was actually lying on his bed right this minute, instead of being blu-tacked to his sloping wall . . .
    Jenny strolled slowly up the road towards the Mathieson’s house at the end of the Close, where it sat importantly in central position, watching over the rest of the inhabitants like the responsible head of a family, which was rather, she thought, the role the Mathiesons had taken on for themselves over the past few years.
    The Close was a cul-de-sac, jutting like a fat thumb into the Common, giving the inhabitants a feeling almost of rural isolation. But across the main road at the end of the Close the council estate loomed high and huge. It was the mysterious hinterland from which all crime and chaos was generally assumed to originate. No-one from the Close had ever been mugged, threatened or harassed by anyone from the estate, but on dark evenings, mindful of terrifying newspaper reports of no-go areas and escalating violence, they automatically carried only credit cards or small amounts of change to the off-licence, and at night carefully took their in-car entertainment systems into their homes with them. When, through its owner’s forgetfulness, a car stereo went missing, there was a man at the pub round the corner who could reliably supply and fit a replacement Blaupunkt within twenty-four hours.
    The houses in the Close were big, sedate Edwardian villas, with attics Veluxed and