Free Marriage and Other Games by Veronica Henry Page A

of south-west London - a dreary high street with rows of dull, utilitarian shops selling cheap jewellery, kebabs, insurance, pet food. It smelled of petrol fumes and frying onions. It was a million miles from the bijou parade of shops she frequented near home, with its fishmonger boasting monkfish and red snapper, the bakery crammed with pains au chocolat and cupcakes.
     
    Get used to it, she told herself grimly as she jumped off the bus.
     
    She chose the least salubrious hairdresser she could find, not least because she couldn’t afford the usual hundred pounds it cost her to have her tresses tended to. She walked in with trepidation and asked for an appointment. She got one straight away. There was a three-month waiting list at her salon.
     
    She showed the stylist a picture of a Kiera Knightley crop in a magazine.
     
    ‘You won’t end up looking like her,’ the stylist said, not unkindly.
     
    ‘I know,’ replied Charlotte with a sigh. ‘But I want a change.’
     
    ‘If you’re sure.’ The girl picked up her scissors, clearly unconvinced. ‘Some people think they can just walk in with a picture and walk out looking like a film star.’
     
    Charlotte didn’t answer. She just wanted to look as unlike herself as possible, but she didn’t want to explain.
     
    Ten minutes later she looked at the mirror in horror. She’d imagined that she might look chic and gamine. Instead, a twelve-year-old boy stared back at her. The shortness meant her usual blonde looked mousy. It was as severe and unflattering as a haircut could get.
     
    She blinked back the tears, cursing Ed for the trillionth time.
     
    ‘What you need,’ said the girl helpfully, ‘is some false eyelashes. To give you some definition. It takes a bit of getting used to, a crop.’
     
    Charlotte managed a smile of thanks, handed over twenty pounds then fled the salon. She looked back and saw the junior sweeping her golden locks into a dustpan. She went back to the bus-stop and tried to work out how on earth she was going to get back to civilisation. She decided to give in and go to see Gussie. She needed her friend’s sympathy almost as much as she needed one of her industrial-strength gin and tonics.
     
    She gazed at her reflection in the window, astonished at how unlike herself she felt, unable to believe how she seemed to have been stripped of all her femininity with a mere snip of the scissors. In any other circumstances she might have broken down and wept, but at this point in time she was just grateful that it was unlikely that anyone on the planet would be able to recognise her.
     
     
    It took Gussie a good ten seconds to clock who it was on her doorstep.
     
    ‘Crikey!’ Gussie wasn’t the type to give false reassurance. ‘Sinead O’Connor, eat your heart out.’
     
    ‘Is it that bad?’
     
    ‘It’s pretty drastic.’
     
    Charlotte put her hand up to her shorn scalp.
     
    ‘It’ll grow.’ Then she sighed. ‘Someone spat at me in the street.’
     
    Gussie was her dearest friend. Forthright, no nonsense and fourteen stone, she dispensed advice and Pinot Grigio from her kitchen while a stream of children came and went demanding Pritt sticks, Pringles and reassurance, all of which she produced without turning a hair.
     
    ‘You’d better come in.’ Gussie opened the door wider, and Charlotte picked her way carefully through an assault course of rugby boots and dismembered Barbies into the heart of the house.
     
    Once Gussie had unscrewed the lid on a bottle of Tanqueray and poured them each a sharpener, Charlotte felt a little calmer. She filled her friend in on the hopelessness of her predicament: the fact that Ed was undoubtedly going to do time, that they would have to sell their house, that she was out of a job. Gussie listened carefully, non-judgemental, and then replenished their glasses.
     
    ‘Right,’ she said, fixing Charlotte with a look that meant she knew she wouldn’t like what she was about to say, but