Free Famous by Kate Langdon

once the four tall white candles were lit. The three of us stood back and admired our handiwork.
    ‘See! We can be domesticated when we want to be,’ said Lizzie.
    ‘Absolutely!’ agreed Mands and I, beaming at the beautiful table.
    Julie and Hamish were the first to arrive. They appeared to be one of those ridiculously loved-up newly married couples who, although there’s no doubt they both used to be fixtures of style in the single world, now appeared to be sliding towards the married wayside. Julie had, predictably, managed to pack on a few post-wedding pounds. It seemed to me that every woman who got married immediately got fat. (Even stick-thin Lizzie had put on a few unwanted pounds.) As soon as they were out of their white frocks and back from the honeymoon it all turned to custard, literally. The personal trainer who had been hired pre-wedding was now unemployed and washing car windscreens at the traffic lights. The macrobiotic diet was replaced with a whatever is in the refrigerator regime and those three-times-a-week yoga classes were deemed an inappropriate use of time management. But it was perfectly okay to spend all the time in the world sitting on the sofa with the new husband watching HBO movies and eating crisps. And all this before the first baby came along.
    It was like married women resigned themselves to the fact their bodies were never going to be the same Ever Again (at best a milk-vending machine) and that its management was simply no longer under their control. Some women blamed it on happiness, that old cliché of eating all the pies in the shop because you’re just so happy. But how can putting on thirty pounds and no longer being able to fit your single-girl clothes make you happy? I just didn’t understand it. It was just one more reason to never, ever get married, I decided.
    Sean was the next to arrive, followed closely by a very nervous-looking Simon, his wife Lisa, Darcy and Samuel, Sven, Jenna, and finally, looking as though he’d caught a bus directly from the night before, Jasper Carlson.
    Although the food and liquids were firmly under control, no thanks to any of us, the evening didn’t begin all that well.
    ‘We’re having a baby!’ announced Lisa, once everyone else had arrived and were mingling in Mands’ living room.
    Oh sweet Jesus!
    ‘And somewhere a little girl waits,’ muttered Mands.
    Lizzie’s face promptly contorted into a silent scream. She dropped the skewered garlic prawn she was holding onto the carpet. I picked it up and put it in a napkin.
    ‘Well,’ I replied, breaking the morgue-like silence. ‘That’s lovely. Just lovely.’
    Simon looked as though he wanted nothing more than for the floor beneath to open up and swallow him whole. The fact that Lizzie was completely motionless, with fiery daggers shooting out from her eye sockets towards his head, was not helping matters. Eventually she snapped out of her trance and excused herself from the room.
    Mands and I found her standing motionless in the kitchen, a large stainless-steel carving knife firmly in her grasp.
    ‘Whoa back!’ said Mands, attempting to prize the knife from Lizzie’s grip, without success.
    ‘Easy,’ I said, also attempting to take the knife from her, and eventually getting her to release it with the aid of a Chinese burn.
    ‘Ouch!’ squealed Lizzie.
    ‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘But really sweets, what are you doing?’
    ‘Thinking about what would be the best way to stab him. Not the best way as in the quickest death, but the best way as in the most painful, with the most gradual blood loss and slowest death imaginable.’
    ‘Right,’ said Mands and I, obviously a little concerned.
    ‘But then you’ll have to go to prison,’ I reasoned.
    ‘And you’ll have to wear one of those hideous orange jumpsuits,’ said Mands. ‘You know orange isn’t one of your colours.’
    ‘And a gorgeous thing like you,’ I added. ‘You’d be everyone’s favourite little