The Amateurs Read Online Free Page B

glass of the house red, would never have left her sitting alone in a restaurant.
    Death had elevated her husband from a mere deity into something closer to all the gods of Greek mythology rolled into one: handsome as Apollo, as merry as Dionysus, wise as Zeus. Thirteen years gone and how often did he cross her mind? It would be far easier to ask how often he left it, for his memory occupied by far the largest part of Cathy’s consciousness. When she woke in the morning, from her dreams of when they were young and together, her stretching leg still registered the other side of the bed as being empty. Every night she fell asleep communing with him, whispering to his ghost, telling him what had happened that day, of her tiny triumphs and disasters, fancying she could feel him beside her in the dark–the nightly transubstantiation in which the pillow became his body. Thirteen years gone and she could no more see herself taking a lover than she could picture herself piloting a space shuttle. Thirteen years gone and, when faced with any decision, from serious financial ones to what to put in her weekly shopping trolley, Cathy’s first question was invariably ‘What would he have done?’
    What he wouldn’t have done, she thought, was leave her sitting on her own in the bloody Pepper Pot. But, Cathy reminded herself, her younger son had an important job. Office. Management. Three Highers. Could have gone tae the uni. Brains from his father. And, just as she thought this, as her dead husband was conjoined in her mind with her living son, here he was coming through the door, both of them coming through the door, the father’s echo in the face of the child, an apology already forming on his lips as she rose togreet him, her face exploding into the kind of terrifying super-happy smile Cathy used only on very special occasions.
    ‘Happy birthday, son!’ she beamed, kissing him on the cheek and pressing her face into his neck as she hugged him, savouring the smell of his hair as fiercely as she used to when he was little, when, freshly scrubbed from the bath, he would sit in her lap and she would read him Harry by the Sea , his tiny mouth quickly learning its way around the slippery vowels as they followed the wee dog’s adventures on the beach. Thirty years ago. It felt like yesterday afternoon to Cathy.
    ‘Aye, same to you, Mum.’
    Gary had been born on the morning of his mother’s twenty-fifth birthday. When he was younger he wondered what this might mean. He didn’t wonder any more, although Cathy was still convinced that this serendipity had marked him out for some great and special destiny. Events had proved her right so far, she thought. Gary definitely represented progress for the Irvine clan: he was the first member of their family to earn a living indoors, to earn it without tearing and bloodying his hands. He was the first to live in a private house, who had a mortgage rather than rent to pay, and the first who didn’t smoke like a laboratory beagle.
    ‘Sorry ah’m late, meeting dragged on. You look nice, Mum.’
    Cathy was thoroughly made up and wearing one of her best dresses. Her reddish-brown hair, a victim of constant experimentation, had recently been streaked with yellowish highlights, the net result making her look as though something had frightened her half to death. ‘And what did Pauline get ye for yer birthday?’ As always when she used Gary’s wife’s name, Cathy experienced a tremor of anxiety, as though just saying it might be enough to summon up Pauline herself. Cathy feared her daughter-in-law, feared that she consideredGary’s family–meaning her and Lee–beneath her, unworthy to play a part in the kind of life Pauline was trying to create.
    ‘Gift vouchers for that new golf place up at the driving range.’
    ‘Oh, very nice,’ Cathy said, thinking, Vouchers? She couldn’t be bothered to get her arse in gear and buy her husband a proper bloody present?
    They fell to studying their