Free The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill

are playing an adult variation of grandmother’s footsteps.
    ‘All right, Lucy, you’re in charge of heating until spring,’ he acquiesces. I think he is relieved to have the responsibility taken away from him, although he would never admit this.
    There are secrets in every marriage. There are large-scale acts of deception. Then there are the smaller, more innocuous kind. Despite being married for almost ten years, Tom still hasn’t uncovered the following: 1) I have five sources of credit card debt, 2) the car got stolen shortly after I lost the spare key, 3) I have an unconfessed infidelity dating from the second year of our relationship. The last one might qualify as a big one, except that I know he has one of similar magnitude.
    He opens the door and is genuinely pleased to see Cathy standing there.
    ‘Cathy, what a lovely surprise,’ he says with unaffected feeling, as though her arrival is completely unexpected.
    While some men might resent their wife’s friends, Tom has always relished mine and consequently they reciprocate with ill-thought-out adulation. Cathy kisses him enthusiastically and sweeps through the narrow passage to go downstairs, hugging me on the way down. Cathy is perpetually in motion. She is one of those people who take up a lot of space even though she is quite small, like a centrifugal force sucking people into her wake. She comes with baggage: handbags, shopping and a laptop computer. Tom is immediately pulled into the slipstream and follows her downstairs.
    ‘God, it’s hot in here,’ she shouts up to me.
    When I get down, she has already opened the computer, removed our phone from the socket, and sits down, tapping away without even taking off her coat. ‘Have you got a work crisis?’ Tom asks.
    ‘No, no, no,’ Cathy says excitedly. ‘I have to show you all a photo of my next Internet date.’
    Emma is lying languidly on the sofa.
    ‘Will you bring him over here, Cathy, so I don’t have to get up?’
    ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘That’s the beauty of the Internet, men delivered to the comfort and privacy of your very own sofa.’
    ‘I really can’t imagine why you need to look for men on the Internet. Can’t you meet enough through the normal channels?’ Tom says, opening the door of the fridge.
    ‘The men you meet through the normal channels are fatally flawed,’ she says.
    ‘Well, there are several single men in my office. They seem normal enough.’
    ‘Why don’t you introduce me to them, then?’ Cathy demands. ‘I am doing multiple dating at the moment.’
    Scores of tiny faces the size of postage stamps appear on the screen. She points to one.
    ‘What do you think?’ she asks. ‘It was a tough decision. There’s so much choice.’
    ‘Difficult to tell. I mean, he has all the key features in the right places, which is always a good starting point,’ I say, squinting at the screen.
    So she starts to enlarge him, until frame by frame his face takes shape and we observe a well-calibrated if slightly large nose, short, almost spiky, brown hair, and challenging brown eyes.
    When he is life-size, we sit in a row and silently stare at the stranger before us. There are a few wrinkles on the forehead and around the eyes.
    ‘Absolutely your type,’ says Emma.
    ‘Well, he’s definitely walked on the wild side,’ I say, after a long silence.
    ‘How can you tell that?’ shouts Tom from inside the fridge.
    ‘Just something about those wrinkles on his forehead. They’re not from laughing too much or being too anxious, they are the kind that appear when you wake up too many mornings and you can’t remember where you are or who you are with.’
    Tom snorts and continues his tour of the fridge.
    ‘Actually, Lucy’s generally right about these things, Tom,’ says Cathy. ‘She was right about my husband long before the fault lines appeared. Anyway, isn’t he gorgeous? He’s a solicitor, thirty-seven years old, lives in Earl’s Court, what could be more perfect?