Free The Learning Curve by Melissa Nathan Page A

ready, under the bed, and flip-flopped to the kitchen.
    Radio on, kettle on, toaster on. Sunday was on.
    After she’d finished a thorough clean of her house, she drove to her sister Claire’s house to the
Desert Island Discs
theme tune, wondering idly why none of the radio guests had ever asked for a five-star hotel as their luxury item. This guest – the latest lad-lit novelist to have written a startlinglyhonest book about contemporary masculine alienation – had just asked for a football, so he could practise ‘keepie-uppie’.
    ‘Twat,’ muttered Nicky as she parked outside her sister’s house.
    Nicky often asked the girls to come and visit her at her flat, and when they did, they loved it there, but Claire always found it so much easier for Nicky to come to her place. On the few occasions when Nicky had insisted, Claire had either turned up late or phoned at the last minute to explain why one of the girls was refusing to get into the car. Eventually Nicky just accepted that this was the way it was. She was the free-and-single Mohammed, Claire the mother-of-three mountain.
    She opened the wrought-iron gate and walked down the path to her sister’s front garden, waving at niece number two, Isabel, at the window. Niece number three, Abigail, answered the door.
    ‘You came!’ she jumped on the spot.
    ‘No I didn’t!’ cried Nicky, mirroring her tone. ‘I left him in the restaurant.’
    Abigail laughed without knowing why.
    Isabel leapt out of the front room into the hall, Sarah-Jane appeared at the top of the stairs and their mother, Nicky’s older sister by six years, appeared at the kitchen doorway, tea-towel in hand.
    ‘Please don’t teach them new words,’ she said with a weary smile.
    ‘And a hello to you too!’
    Nicky turned back to her nieces. ‘Right!’ she cried. ‘I want kisses from everyone.’
    The girls rushed forward and Nicky kissed her nieces in turn, hung up her coat, took off her shoes and then approached her sister. They went into the kitchen.
    ‘You don’t mind taking them swimming, do you?’ asked Claire. ‘They loved it so much last time.’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Can we go to the cinema afterwards?’ asked Sarah-Jane.
    Claire made the unique sound of an unimpressed mother, a cross between ‘Um’ and ‘Up’. A sort of ‘Uhgpt’ the
hgpt
silent.
    ‘Please,’ added Sarah-Jane quickly. ‘If you’ve got time.’
    ‘Hmm, we’ll see,’ said Nicky. ‘But what film would a ten-year-old, an eight-year-old and a six-year-old all want to watch?’
    They were happy to tell her and she found that her Sunday was mapped out.
    Eight hours later, Oscar was having dinner with his dad, and he was not going to eat the Brussels sprouts.
    ‘They look like bogeys,’ he told his dad.
    ‘Crikey.’ Mark grimaced. ‘I don’t want to see your bogeys.’
    Oscar laughed and then scowled. He did not want to find his dad funny tonight. He was angry, and determined to stay angry. Being the last one to be picked up from a friend’s birthday party was one thing, but when he’d specifically asked his dad to be on time because his friend was a dork was
well
annoying. His dad had never been on time. But half an hour late! He’d had to sit with the family while his schoolmate had opened all his presents. His schoolmate’s mum had made ridiculous clucking noises of worry for him which had made him want to hit her. And then, when it got to half an hour,she’d actually come over to give him a cuddle. He’d thought he was being buried alive. Then finally his dad had arrived.
    ‘God,’ he’d heard Mark say to the mum in the hall, ‘I’m
so
sorry.’
    ‘No, don’t worry! We’ve been having fun.’
    ‘I just had to get something finished –’
    ‘Yes of course you did. I don’t know how you manage.’
    Why did they always say that? fumed Oscar. What did he have to
manage
? Most of the kids in his school only had one parent, so why was his dad the only one who was crap at it? Was he a more