Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [205]
‘Oh, my good God.’
‘For a freckly bastard he sure is a big hit with the goils,’ Joy observed drily.
‘Oh my good God,’ Ashling repeated.
‘Don’t go all compassionate and start to feel sorry for Clodagh,’ Joy begged. ‘Please don’t go rushing round there to hold her hand.’
‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Ashling said. ‘I’m fucking delighted.’
‘I’m coming over to get my stuff,’ Marcus said.
‘It’ll be ready,’ Clodagh confirmed heatedly.
Fuming, she banged around the house, shoving his personal effects into a black bin-liner. She couldn’t believe how quickly it had all splintered. They’d gone from mutual obsession to near-hatred in a matter of weeks, eddying in a downward spiral from the moment it had stopped being just about sex and started being about real life.
She’d thought she loved him, but she didn’t. He was a boring bastard. The boringest of boring bastards. All he wanted to talk about was his act and about how none of the other comedians were as good as him.
And he needed so much attention. She found it distasteful the way he resented it whenever she focused on Craig and Molly. Sometimes it was just like having three children.
Not to mention that bloody novel he’d started. Garbage! Unbelievably depressing. He took criticism so badly, even constructive suggestions. All she’d said was that maybe the woman in it could set up her own business, baking cakes or making pottery, and he’d gone mad.
And lately he wanted to be out every night. Simply refused to understand that she couldn’t keep leaving her two children. It was hard to get babysitters. It was even harder to afford babysitters on what Dylan was giving her. But more than that, she didn’t want to be out every night. She missed Craig and Molly when she was away from them.
Staying in at home was nice. There was no shame in watching Coronation Street and having a glass of wine.
And the sex. She no longer wanted to do it three times a night. She shouldn’t be expected to. No one did after the first crazy passion had passed. But he was still on for it, and it was exhausting.
But all that was small potatoes compared to the bombshell he’d just hit her with – that he’d ‘met someone else’.
She was boiling with anger and deeply humiliated. Especially because in some remote corner at the back of her head she’d always entertained a suspicion that she was doing him a favour, that it was the luckiest day of his life when she’d fallen out of a stultifying marriage and into his arms. She minded desperately that she’d been dumped. It hadn’t happened since Greg the American jock had lost interest in her a month before he went back to the States.
She was shoving the last pair of underpants into the bag when the doorbell rang. She marched out, opened the door and thrust the bin-liner at Marcus. ‘Here.’
‘Is my novel in there?’
‘Oh yes, Black Dog, the masterpiece, is in there all right. Bin-liner’s the right place for it,’ she said in an undertone, which wasn’t really an undertone at all.
His thundery face indicated he’d heard and he prepared to retaliate.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he threw over his shoulder as he turned to go, ‘she’s twenty-two and she’s had no children.’ He accompanied this piece of information with a wink. He knew Clodagh had a thing about her stretch marks.
Scalded, she thumped back in. Eventually the first rush of bilious rage passed, and she tried to talk herself into something positive. At least she was rid of Marcus and his jokes and his novel and his moods – that had to count for something.
And it was then that she realized she was in a bit of a bind. No husband, no boyfriend.
Oh fuck.
The Jack Devine fanclub were in full flow. Robbie, the Honey Monster and Mrs Morley were clustered together outdoing each other in their bid to wax lyrical.
Jack had recently passed through the office, looking better turned out than usual. Which, as Trix said, wouldn’t be hard.
‘I wonder,’ she often mused, ‘if anyone has ever come up to him in the street, given him ten pence and told him to buy himself a cup of tea?’
But this morning he