Free Christopher Brookmyre by Fun All, v1.0 Games Page B

concert with committed, remarkable people, giving the best of themselves to create something of such excitement and beauty - a fluid, living testament to the peaks of human aspiration. Who wouldn't want to swap reality for the world between those pages?
    Answer: someone who'd rather be further advancing his attempted symbiosis with a leather armchair while watching endless repeats of Celtic games on satellite pay-per-view.
    She toured the store methodically, threading her trolley along every aisle apart from the pet-food section, briefly skirting the alcohol selection last, to pick up more cans of Export for Tom. The shelves of wine bottles glinted colourfully as she passed them, but, as ever, she wasn't tempted to lift any. She also felt a little intimidated by the vastness of the selection, reckoning you really needed to know what you were doing when it came to that sort of thing. She didn't drink wine. She'd had the odd glass of fizzy stuff, but it gave her a headache, and on the very rare occasion they'd been out for a meal, Tom just drank beer with his food. She remembered he had once or twice (more probably once) opted for sharing a jug of sangria with dinner when they were on holiday in Spain with the kids, but she wasn't sure whether that counted. It had tasted like medicine.
    Her friend Catherine drank wine. She'd often have a glass or two, sometimes more, when they met up for lunch. Jane never quite caught what she was ordering, unless it was Chardonnay; she'd heard that mentioned enough to remember, and had even tried some once. It tasted worse than medicine. She knew you had to 'train your palate' to appreciate it, but couldn't imagine herself doing so. Catherine only ordered Chardonnay occasionally, so most of the time what she asked for sounded like some arcane code, worse than when Ross started to talk technical. Every so often she would urge Jane to have a glass, but as they usually met for lunch in Bothwell, where Catherine lived, Jane would have to drive afterwards. She liked the idea of drinking wine, but it was the same as she liked the idea of learning to play piano. She suspected it was a bit late to start, and besides, you'd need to go to night school or something to learn your way around all those bottles.
    Jane headed for the checkouts, habitually scanning along the row. It wasn't busy, but she'd have to own up to queue length not being the only criterion for her choice of conveyor belt. Embarrassing as it was to admit, she preferred not to be served by a certain cheerful elderly lady, identified as 'Margaret' on her name badge. Margaret was pleasantly chatty and entirely efficient, and had done nothing to Jane that any rational person could complain about, but had nonetheless meted out the greatest offence in a passing remark, all the more wounding for it being an inescapable truth.
    Jane had often been at the supermarket in charge of one or both of Michelle's kids, for whom Margaret always had a smile and a wave; and when Jane was there on her own, the sight of a few bags of chocolate buttons on the conveyor belt would prompt an affectionate enquiry after the wee ones. It was on one of the latter such occasions that Margaret committed her great oblivious sin, in response to Jane's relating her recent success in getting the weans to take a nap one afternoon while she got on with the ironing.
    'Aye, us grannies ken the score,' she had said.
    Jane could still feel that moment, the sensation of paralysis as disbelief and denial crumbled, leaving a shattering revelation amid the broken shards of the illusion with which she'd been deceiving herself. All right, maybe that was laying it on a bit, but she'd never experienced such a sense of life having ambushed her since the first time she found out she was pregnant. Us grannies. She and Margaret, this white-haired and birdlike woman with false teeth and wrinkled fingers, who was old enough to be Jane's mother. It was intended as a show of solidarity, even