Free Death on Demand by Paul Thomas Page A

she wasn’t an ideologue and partly to avoid upsetting Stuart, who was an anarcho-communist. As far as Joyce could make out, that meant he’d quite like to eliminate every political figure who wasn’t an anarcho-communist, starting with the prime minister, Rob Muldoon, whom he wanted to eliminate even more than Augusto Pinochet and all the whites in South Africa. Christopher turned out to be a Muldoon admirer but, unlike Joyce, wasn’t inclined to soft-pedal his views to keep the peace. Unlike Stuart, he could argue about politics without losing his temper.

    Stuart got flushed and sweaty; he raised his voice and jabbed his finger; he called Christopher “a fucking Nazi”. Christopher told him to grow up. Joyce didn’t know where to look. Penny asked if they could please change the subject. A waiter came over to remind Stuart that he was in a restaurant.
    Stuart told Joyce they were out of there. Without even thinking about it, she said, “See you later.”
    â€œPeople couldn’t believe it when I started going out with Joyce,” said Lilywhite. “Understandable, really. My previous girlfriends had been either private-school princesses or party girls like Joyce’s flatmate. Suddenly here was this small-town girl, this rather earnest primary schoolteacher, not bad-looking by any means but not someone who stopped the conversation when she walked into a room. Put it this way: my mates weren’t green with envy.
    â€œWhat they didn’t get was that her difference was the big attraction. I went to a private school. I’d been going out with precious, empty-headed little bitches since I was fifteen. Joyce might have been unworldly, in the sense of not being sophisticated, but she came from the real world. She wasn’t stupid; she read newspapers as opposed to glossy magazines; you could have a conversation with her that wasn’t about things that don’t matter. The party girls were fun but, let’s face it, you don’t take them home to meet your parents. Well, I certainly didn’t. My father was one of the Canterbury Lilywhites – first four ships, Christ’s College, all that stuff. He gave me two pieces of advice about women: the most important quality in a prospective wife is loyalty; and while you don’t want a prude, if you marry a sexual animal, she’ll end up humiliating you. That’s a direct quote.
    â€œJoyce and my parents got on well. She was polite to the point of being deferential. They liked that, and they liked the fact that she obviously adored me. Of course, they
weren’t too thrilled about her background, but I guess it was a case of two out of three ain’t bad. And while appearances can be deceptive in this regard, she didn’t come across as someone who couldn’t get enough sex.
    â€œThe idea was that Joyce would keep working till she got pregnant, but the Lilywhite juice is high-octane stuff. Once we put our minds to it impregnation ensues like night follows day. By the time we got back from the honeymoon she was pregnant. Six months after Matthew was born she was pregnant again. Our marriage was very much like my parents’ – I was the breadwinner; I went off to work, Joyce stayed home to look after the kids, keep the house immaculate, and have dinner waiting for me when I returned from slaying dragons. Everything revolved around me, and that was that. We’d go to dinner parties where wives got cross-eyed drunk and made bloody fools of themselves or played footsie under the table or picked fights with their husbands, and I’d thank God I’d had the good sense to marry Joyce. It wasn’t long before my mates, who’d been a bit patronizing about her, were telling me what a lucky man I was.
    â€œWithout over-egging the pudding, we chugged along very happily for twenty-odd years. With the benefit of hindsight you could question whether a woman as able and energetic as