Love at First Fight by Mary Jayne Baker

Author:Mary Jayne Baker [Baker, Mary Jayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800241640
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Nineteen

Bridie sat on her bed, smiling as she flicked through the photo album she’d dug out of storage.

So many memories. Photos of her as a child with her mum and dad in the garden of their old house on Messington seafront, before her parents had left the town two years ago for a seaside of rather warmer persuasion in Italy. Her as a gawky teen with her fringe in her eyes, sitting with the rest of the kids in her English set on the last day of school after GCSEs.

Where was Ben? Bridie scanned the group and soon located him in the back row with the popular kids, next to Louise Marsh, trying to look cool by casting a bored glance anywhere but at the camera.

That was around the time Louise had bragged to Bridie and a group of other girls about how she and Ben had celebrated finishing their exams, with a big bottle of Blue WKD and a quickie under the slide in the kiddies’ playground. Louise had always relished telling stories about her sexual feats to an audience of awed virgins. Had it really been total fiction, all the time? There’d been a lot of detail. Bridie still remembered Louise’s in-depth descriptions of the goodies Ben had been packing underneath his grey school trousers as a sea of unblinking schoolgirls had listened rapt. No wonder she’d always got such good marks for creative writing.

Bridie flipped the page to look at the next photo. Ben was in that one too. It was his birthday party – his fifth, she guessed – and he was sitting behind a huge cake, beaming broadly, with chocolate all round his mouth. Bridie soon found herself in a group of kids behind him, giggling as Ben’s dad Jonny entertained them with a couple of hand puppets.

Ben and Cal never saw their dad now, or spoke to him as far as she knew: not since it had all come out eleven years ago. The string of affairs their mum had known nothing about; the mistresses Jonny seemed to have squirreled away in every town he travelled to in his job as a sales rep. The scandal had rocked Messington. Jonny Kemp had been – or at least, had seemed to be – a kind man, well liked around town and devoted to his family. Bridie remembered him as being funny like Ben, but quieter in his disposition, more like his younger son. And all the time it had been nothing but a smokescreen for his womanising. One day, one of the mistresses decided she’d had enough of being someone’s dirty little secret and contacted Alison Kemp to fill her in on her husband’s extra-curricular activities.

Bridie looked at the little boy in the photo, grinning as if nothing bad could exist in the world as long as there was chocolate and cake, and felt a surge of pity for him. Back when it had all happened, she’d been smarting so much from being jilted at the ball that she’d never fully considered what a horrific shock it must have been for him.

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