Free A Funny Thing About Love by Rebecca Farnworth Page A

college.
    â€˜Oh, you know, just doing the usual positive things one does at a time like this – not getting dressed, wallowing in a pit of despair, watching daytime TV.’
    â€˜I know things seem bad right now, and I’m really sorry about Nick and the baby. But you will feel better for leaving your job, I’m sure. Why don’t you come down to see us at the weekend? Sean could babysit and I could take you out for dinner. It’s been ages since I saw you.’
    Jess was right, it was a good four months. Since she and Sean had moved to Brighton Carmen had seen much less of her friend. ‘Thanks, Jess, but it’s Matthew’s farewell party, and apparently mine. Another time would be great, though.’
    The next call came from another good friend, Sadie, an actress. Given the roles were quite thin on the ground and she was yet to land a much-coveted part in
Spooks
or
Waking the Dead
, Sadie often worked for BBC Radio 4 as a freelance continuity announcer. She had a deep, sexy voice that conjured up dark chocolate and velvet. The news never sounded quite so bad when she delivered it. People, for that read men, always assumed that with such a voice Sadie was some kind of sex siren; Carmen had been to many a party with Sadie where married men were stopped in their tracks and cameover all dreamy when she opened her mouth. And she was forever receiving emails, letters, poems and gifts from her admirers, several of which were treated as suspicious packages by the BBC post room but were subsequently X-rayed and found to contain nothing more dangerous than racy underwired bras. But Sadie was no temptress. If you had to sum her up you’d say she was ditzy, obsessed with fashion and dating comedians. She was pretty, with wild, curly blonde hair, brown eyes and a dimple on her left cheek. ‘Darling Carmen, are you okay? I heard from Marcus. You should have called me last night, I would have come round.’
    â€˜Thanks, Sadie, but I needed to sort it out in my head.’
    â€˜And have you?’
    Carmen sighed. ‘Not really, and especially not about Nick and the baby. I keep thinking about him and Marian going off to the first scan and doing all those things that expectant parents do and—’ here her voice caught.
    â€˜And it’s really tough for you,’ Sadie said gently. ‘Which is why we’re all here for you.’ Indeed, Carmen’s friends had been there for her throughout the awful roller-coaster ride of fertility treatment. At times she must have driven them mad by going over the same ground, and she couldn’t bear for that to start up again. She wanted to be there for her friends now, didn’t want to be poor Carmen again, wanted to be the happy, carefree Carmen she had been some fiveyears ago, back in the day, when she imagined her future included a baby.
    â€˜I know you are, and it means a lot. But I need distraction now, so tell me how things are with you and Dom.’
    Dom was the latest in a long line of comics Sadie had gone out with. She had a weakness for them and persisted in a naive belief that because they made her laugh when they were performing, they would make her laugh in the relationship. They seldom did. Carmen realised that Nick had been an exception, as he was relatively well balanced, not prone to bouts of depression, and no more egotistical than any other man. But Nick aside, dating a comedian was rarely an amusing experience. As the girlfriend you were expected to go to all their gigs and hear them recite the same routine, massage their egos that were generally the size of a continent and invariably pay for everything because they were broke. Once Sadie had gone out with a comedian who had mined their sex life for source material, and even then it had taken her an entire month to dump him for it. Any other woman would have got rid of him on the spot, or sewn prawns into the hem of his curtains or cut off one leg of each