Free Christopher Brookmyre by Fun All, v1.0 Games

Rachel and Thomas over in the afternoon - the pair of them capable of turning the place upside down in minutes. But she needed, every so often, to restore a kind of equilibrium. It reassured her to achieve this - the untrammelled carpet, the sparkling kitchen tiles, the empty laundry basket, no clothes on the horse or in the pile - because if that equilibrium had been restored, even for a short while, it meant that no matter what the subsequent disruption, it could be restored again. And this also, she knew, was daft. Very daft. She had to take a step outside herself to see it, however, which was a rarely glimpsed perspective, and sadly not one revelatory enough to free her. It meant she was still obsessivecompulsive, but self-conscious and embarrassed about her lot into the bargain. Obsessing over carpets and laundry. How on earth had it come to this?
    Tom said she was suffering some kind of mid-life crisis, though that was in response to her Private Hire work and her abortive mature student foray into academia. He didn't really mean it. It was merely his way of discounting what she was doing as a phase he was impatiently awaiting her to get past. Men were good at that; Tom was anyway: filing your activities and enthusiasms away under Silly Female Behaviour, transient notions of a feeble and ditzy mind. Bide your time and she'll be back to normal soon. But what if this 'normality' was her mid-life crisis? If so, she'd be extremely disappointed. She'd always imagined it would take a form considerably more dramatic than involuntary emotional investment in the condition of her floor coverings, and be precipitated by something significant, remarkable and halfway interesting. But maybe normality was what precipitated it. What bigger crisis was there at this late juncture in your life than finding yourself asking: Is this it?
    The ironing, dusting, hoovering, mopping, sponging and re-hoovering complete, Jane moved on to cleaning the bathroom and the downstairs toilet -
    temporarily gleaming china representing a few more brief licks on those riverspanning girders - before continuing her rich, full day with a jaunt to the shops.
    Apart from the major milestones of marriage, parenthood and bereavement, other people marked the passing phases of their adult lives by the cities they had lived in, stages in their careers, lovers they'd been with, projects they'd worked on. 'Ah, yes, the Barcelona years. Those summers with Theo, before we grew apart. That controversial tenure with the Philosophy Department. My Impressionist period.' Jane could break hers down by supermarket. Early Eighties: Presto. Late Eighties to mid-Nineties: Tesco. Late Nineties: Safeway. Early Twenty-First Century: her J Sainsbury period. This last she considered something of a belle epoque , but strictly in terms of the shopping. Jane had never had a career. A succession of jobs, yes, interrupted by childrearing, but never a career. She'd known only one city, and having lived on its periphery in East Kilbride most of her adult life, she couldn't even claim to have known it that well. For more than twenty years she'd lived in the same house, and for longer than that had had the same lover. Well, the same man anyway. Projects? At least on that score she could say there'd been two. But they had both left home now, indeed one of them had left the country, and neither gave the impression they believed she'd done a bang-up job. On the plus side, one of them was still speaking to her. Being just up from Whirlies Roundabout, the Kingsgate retail park was yet another node in the EK traffic-generation-and-recycling system, but it was worth tolerating the congestion to shop in a comparatively calm and spacious environment, especially when you spent as much time in supermarkets as Jane did. Also, for Lanarkshire, they boasted more than the average number of aisles not selling oven chips and frozen pizzas.
    Jane enjoyed trailing along the shelves and counters, daydreaming about