The Woman Who Stole My Life Read Online Free Page A

be … depressed?’
    ‘Do I seem depressed?’
    ‘You seem insane.’
    Even before he speaks, I know he’s going to say, ‘I’ve never been saner.’ Sure enough, Ryan obliges.
    ‘I need you to help me, Stella,’ he says. ‘I need publicity.’
    ‘You’re never out of the magazines.’
    ‘Home decor magazines.’ Ryan dismisses them with contempt. ‘They’re no good. You’re matey with the mainstream media.’
    ‘Not any more.’
    ‘… Ah, you are. A lot of residual affection for you. Even if it’s all gone to shit.’
    ‘How are you going to make money from this?’ Jeffrey asks.
    ‘Art isn’t about making money.’
    Jeffrey mutters something. I catch the word ‘knobhead’.
    After Ryan leaves, Jeffrey and I look at each other.
    ‘Say something,’ Jeffrey says.
    ‘He won’t go through with it.’
    ‘You think?’
    ‘I think.’
22.00
    Jeffrey and I are sitting in front of the telly eating our pepper, pineapple and sausage stew. I’m trying hard to force down a few mouthfuls – these dinners of Jeffrey count as Cruel and Unusual Punishment – and Jeffrey has his face in his phone.Suddenly he says, ‘Fuck.’ It’s the first word we’ve exchanged in a while.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Dad. He’s issued a Mission Statement … and …’ Speedy clicking. ‘… his first video blog. And he’s started a countdown to Day Zero. It’s Monday week, ten days’ time.’
    Project Karma is a go.

 
     
    ‘Keep breathing.’
    Extract from
One Blink at a Time
     
    Let me tell you about the tragedy that befell me nearly four years ago. There I was, being thirty-seven and the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy and the wife of a successful but creatively unfulfilled bathroom designer. I was working with my younger sister, Karen (but really
for
my younger sister, Karen), and generally I was being very normal – life was having its ups and downs but nothing to get excited about – when, one evening, the tips of the fingers on my left hand started to tingle. By bedtime, my right hand was also tingling. Maybe it’s a sign of how dull everything was that I found it pleasant, like having space-dust popping under my skin.
    Sometime during the night, I half-woke and noticed that now my feet were tingling as well. Lovely, I thought, dreamily, space-dust feet too. Maybe in the morning I’d be tingling everywhere and wouldn’t
that
be nice.
    When the alarm went off at 7 a.m., I felt knackered, but that was par for the course. I felt knackered every morning – after all, I was very normal. But this particular morning, it was a different sort of tiredness: a bad, heavy, made-of-lead tiredness.
    ‘Get up,’ I said to Ryan, then I stumbled down the stairs – and in retrospect, I probably really
was
stumbling –and started boiling kettles and throwing boxes of cereal onto the table, then I went upstairs to rouse (i.e. shout at) my children.
    I went back downstairs and took a swig of tea, but to my surprise it tasted strange and metallic. I stared accusingly at the stainless-steel kettle – clearly bits of it had infiltrated my tea. It had been such a good friend all these years, why had it suddenly turned on me?
    Giving it another wounded look, I started on Jeffrey’s special toast, which was simply ordinary toast without the butter – he had a ‘thing’ about butter, he said it was slimy – but my hands felt fumbly and numb, and the enjoyable tingling had stopped.
    I took a mouthful of orange juice, then spat it out and yelped.
    ‘What?’ Ryan had appeared. He was never good in the mornings. He was never good in the evenings either, come to think of it. He might have been in top form in the middle of the day, but I never got to see him then, so I couldn’t comment.
    ‘The orange juice,’ I said. ‘It burned me.’
    ‘Burned you? It’s orange juice; it’s cold.’
    ‘It burned my tongue. My mouth.’
    ‘Why are you talking like that?’
    ‘Like