The Bright Side Read Online Free Page B

with a frigging bear .
    I’d never seen him in Cleo’s before – I assumed he’d started going during my leave of absence. He was with a bunch of his mates and, oddly enough, he wasn’t looking his best. Nothing about his physical person had changed since the last time I’d spotted him (coming out of an off-licence, carrying a bottle of whiskey), but he looked … uncomfortable. Out of place. That didn’t stop me staring, though, and while I was staring, it occurred to me that looking out of place in a dive like Cleopatra’s was not necessarily a bad thing. One of the guys he was drinking with was a neighbour of ours named Brendan Hunt. For a brief period around the previous Christmas, he had been my sister’s boyfriend. I wasn’t quite sure why it had ended, but I doubted that it was anything Brendan had done. He’d always struck me as a decent enough sort of bloke. When he caught my eye, he visibly flinched, so I smiled to let him know there were no hard feelings. Then, to my surprise, he beckoned me over. We chit-chatted for a few minutes. Turned out it was one of their number’s birthday. He’d insisted on going to Cleo’s, to the horror of his friends, all of whom considered themselves above such things. Eventually, Brendan plucked up the nerve to ask about his ex. I was halfway through an elaborate lie about how Melissa had seemed a little down lately when Gerry appeared at his shoulder and asked him if he wanted a drink. Brendan declined. Gerry turned in my direction and looked me over, head to toe. What about me? Was I old enough to drink? I would be soon, I told him. Seven months later, we were married with twins on the way .
     

CHAPTER 4
     
     
     
     
     
    If anyone had told me when I was eighteen that one day I’d be living in a house worth half a million euros, I would have said, “What the hell is a euro?” Then I would have said, “Wow”. Sadly, half a million didn’t buy you an awful lot of house, not in Ireland in 2006. Ours was a bog-standard – nice, but bog-standard – three-bedroom semi on the Dublin side of Ashbourne, County Meath. Its best feature was the kitchen, which was surprisingly large. Its worst feature was the bathroom, which was only just big enough to accommodate the bath, the loo, the sink and one thin person standing stiffly upright. The bathroom had only recently risen, or rather sunk, to the worst feature position; the previous champion had been our old windows. They were seriously grotty. The frames were half-rotten and a lot of the glass was splattered with paint. Two of the smaller panes were badly cracked and all of them seemed to be permanently dirty. We’d tried to make the best of a bad lot by hanging net curtains everywhere but had only succeeded in making the place look old-fashioned and shifty. I was beside myself with delight when we finally got PVC replacements in 2001. As soon as they were in, I practically danced round the house, ripping down the nets and proclaiming a bright new day. I did worry, at first, about the front room being exposed to the street, but given our location at the end of the last cul-de-sac in the estate, I decided it wouldn’t be a serious issue. And it wasn’t. Not for the first five years or so. Even then, I was the one doing the looking in .
    My first reaction on catching my husband in the act of infidelity was to wave. In my defence, I didn’t know that he was being unfaithful at the time. That information didn’t arrive until approximately three quarters of a second later .
    It went like this: my headache had advanced so rapidly and so dramatically that I’d thought better of driving myself home and had ordered a taxi. When I got out at the house, I barely noticed that Gerry’s jeep was in the drive. He was supposed to be shooting a wedding in Kildare and I presumed it had been cancelled at the last minute. Such were the depths of my misery that I wasn’t even excited by the prospect of finding out why. I’d only