Cursed by Marie O'Regan

Author:Marie O'Regan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

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MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

I’m going to tell a little fib to start off with. Don’t worry – I’ll let you know what it was, later on. I’ll leave you with the truth, I promise.

But I’ll tell you the other stuff first.

And I’m pregnant.

* * *

When it started, I’d been out for the evening. A work dinner, which meant a few hours in an Italian restaurant in Soho while my boss rambled about the challenges facing his company in these tough economic times, and was fairly good about not glancing down my blouse.

It wasn’t a long dinner, and even after taking the tube back I was home by half-past nine. I own a very small house in an area of North London called Kentish Town, not far from the station and the main road. Kentish Town is basically now an interstice between the nicer and more expensive neighbourhoods of Hampstead, Highgate and Camden, but before it was subsumed into urban sprawl it had been a place of slight note, open country enlivened by the attractive River Fleet – sourced in springs up on Hampstead Heath but long-ago so snarled and polluted that it was eventually lost, paved over for its entire length and redirected into an underground sewer.

My narrow little house stands close to where it once ran, in the middle of a short mid-Victorian terrace, and is three (and a bit) storeys high with a scrap of garden out back halved in size by a galley kitchen extension put in by the previous owner. Originally, so I was told by said owner, the houses were built to home families of men working on the railway line. It’s remarkably unremarkable except for the fact that one side of my garden is bounded by an old stone wall, inset into which is a badly weathered stone plaque mentioning St. John’s College. A little research turned up the fact that, hundreds of years before, the land that these houses was built on – and a chunk of Kentish Town itself – had belonged to the College, part of Cambridge University. Why a college would have owned a garden a hundred miles away is beyond me, but then I’ve never understood the appeal of reality television or Colin Firth, either, so it’s possible I’m just a bit dim.

Here endeth the tour.

It’s a very small house but I’m lucky to have it at all, given London’s lunatic house prices. Well – not just lucky. Oh, how my friends took the piss, when I bought my first flat and shackled myself with a mortgage straight out of university; but now I’ve been able to swap up to a place with an actual staircase, and they’re still renting crappy two-bed apartments in neighbourhoods where not even hipsters want to live, it’s not so bloody funny, it appears (except to me, of course).

Once indoors I hung up my coat, kicked off my shoes, and undid the top button of my skirt in an effort to increase my physical comfort in a post-pasta universe.

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