A Bicycle Built for Sue

charity, no less. The most she’d ever seen the pair of them do for charity was some mad ice bucket challenge and one incredibly awkward run on The Great Sport Relief Bake Off when Kev’s soufflé failed to rise on the first show and he was voted off. She’d not felt an ounce of sympathy for the man. Those teeth! Whiter than Matt Damon’s had been in that war film of his. Private Ryan Gosling, was it? Something like that anyway. She hadn’t remembered much from the film, just that the lad’s teeth had been terrifically white. Honestly. As if teeth stayed that white during a war.

Taptaptap.

Another surge of exasperation took hold. She yanked her coat from the hook in the corner (wrought-iron pineapples bought in Fiji). Why couldn’t Stu break away from the blinking puzzles long enough to chat with her? He was the one always complaining she wasn’t home. That they didn’t do enough together. So why, when they were together, was he such a slave to his routine? She scraped her keys out of the little lacquered bowl she’d been trying to program herself to drop them into (Japan). She could narrate the blessed thing without the benefit of witnessing it: Alarm at six. (He didn’t need it. His body was conditioned to rise.) Right arm out to turn it off. Same arm flipped off a triangle of bedding and one-two-three there we go, Stu’s sitting up in bed, stretching his arms to the ceiling to start another day of exactly the same thing as he’d done the day before unless, of course, it was a Saturday or they were in Portugal where the routine altered insofar as there’d be no dog walk (they tended to leave Captain George at home, too hot) and sometimes, and this was only an occasional sometimes, sometimes he set the alarm for 5:30 so as to catch an earlier tee-time. Bless.

Taptaptap.

She fought the urge to yank the pencil out of his hand, throw open the conservatory doors and shout, Look! Look at the world out there. All of the life happening around you! Don’t you miss it?

‘Darling?’ He looked up from his paper and gave her a warm smile. It was filled with love, that smile. Warmth and love she knew she should appreciate more than she did.

‘Yes, duck?’

‘Have you left any lunch out?’ He nodded at the coat she was pulling on, then patted his tummy. ‘Wouldn’t want me languishing away while you’re out saving lives, now, would you?’

‘No, love. Course not.’ She opened the cupboard, grabbed the first tin of soup she could see and put it on the counter next to a small pan, a bowl and a spoon, the movements as familiar to her as her husband’s were. She shouldered her handbag, wondering how on earth he’d survive if, say, she were hit by a bus and never came home again. He needed a project. She needed a project to stop herself from going mad. Perhaps she should take a page out of Kath’s book. Pick something to do on her own. It wasn’t as if there was a law that couples had to do everything together. She glanced back at Stu, one hand patting the dog’s head as the other returned to the puzzles.

Taptaptap.

Then she stepped out into the rain, relishing the sensation as it lashed her face with icy reminders that she was still alive.

Chapter Eighteen

‘It’s a certain path to failure.’

Raven held her sharp inhalation in her mouth, not wanting to give her mother the satisfaction of an ‘adolescent response to common sense.’ AKA – a sigh. Sighs, apparently, were now a sign of disrespect and, even more reprehensibly, immaturity. Silliness wasn’t really a thing in the Chakrabarti household. Earnestness ruled over all.

She pushed a stack of black tops into her duffel back and zipped it shut, thanking her lucky stars that her father had gone into the shop early. Who knew a girl could be grateful it was flu season? A two-pronged attack would’ve been unbearable. It wasn’t as if she wanted to move out. They were making her move out. Sort of. If you used her logic anyway.

‘A call centre,’ her mother repeated in an ominous tone.

Raven double blinked. Seriously? Her mum was more cross about the call centre than the fact her youngest daughter had just announced she was moving out?

Shouldn’t she be bursting into tears or something?

Raven waited for something, anything, to flicker across her mother’s immovable features. Nope. Nothing. Fair enough. Hysterical pharmacists weren’t really a thing. ‘I can’t believe you are turning your back on a promising future in law for a call centre.’ Her mum spat out the words as if Raven had announced drug dealing was her chosen career path.

She squelched a sting of hurt. Did her mother not care in the slightest what Raven wanted for her life?

It wasn’t as if she was planning on making her life’s work answering 111 calls. It was a way to pay for uni. Ooo. What a crazy way to rebel against your parents. Pay for her own degree, just like thousands of other students do when their parents don’t/can’t/won’t cover her student loans. And second of all, this wasn’t exactly a surprise. Her mum knew she couldn’t bear Uncle Ravi; his ambulance-chasing mentality wasn’t even close to the type of law she wanted to practice; if she did want to practice it, which she wasn’t sure about because living here was so ruddy claustrophobic it was difficult to get a solitary thought of her own squeezed in amongst her parents’ detailed spreadsheet plans for her. In fact, the more she thought about it, moving out was definitely the right decision. Having one’s life thrown into chaos always seemed to work out in the movies. Not so much in Game of Thrones, but she was going to go with the positive angle and pray it didn’t colour her parents’ opinion of her for all eternity. Memories like elephants.