Ring Road: There's No Place Like Home by Ian Sansom

Author:Ian Sansom
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: mom - add to kindle, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780007402472
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2004-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

14

Self-Help

In which the author sets out and fails to disprove that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus

It’s been blue skies for Cherith for a long time now – holiday weather. Whatever the temperature and no matter how damp, it’s the Azores overhead for Cherith, a perpetual high-pressure front. She’d lost three and a half stone by cutting out all snack foods, dairy products, tea, coffee, taking up aerobic yoga and doing a couple of hundred sit-ups every morning. She had forsaken each and every kind of ibuprofen and paracetamol, and instead ate a lot of fruit, drank at least two litres of water a day, enjoyed the occasional enema, and her urine was the colour of sparkling mineral water, with just a hint of tint – flavoured sparkling mineral water. She wore no man-made fibres, had her hair done once a month in Fry’s – which is the fancy new salon up on Abbey Street, with wall-to-wall MTV, coffee in proper cups and a monthly magazine bill that would pay everybody’s wages at Central Cutz and then some, and it’s just a pity Noreen Fry couldn’t be persuaded to call it something else, so it didn’t sound like a chippy – and she wore a crystal to channel positive energies.

She had good chi, her yin was balanced with her yang, her communication channels were open, she practised the seven habits of highly effective people and she could fit into some of her daughter’s clothes. She’d been granted custody of Bethany after the divorce from Francie and even Bethany seemed happy – Bethany of the perpetual, seemingly endless teenage sneer, of the secret smoking, she of the hormone furies and the constant ‘WTF!’ texting. Bethany loved living with Cherith – whom she now called ‘Cherry’, obviously, rather than ‘Mum’ – and with Sammy, who doted on her, unlike Francie, who resolutely remained ‘Dad’, and who’d always been rather preoccupied with God and the problem of salvation, who’d been so wrapped up in the church, in fact, that he was really a live-at-home absent father, more like a vague Holy Spirit, you might say, than the historical Jesus. Francie could hardly have been called a disciplinarian, but he did believe that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, which meant that he would occasionally emerge from contemplation and prayer or the laying on of hands, to object to bad manners, and boyfriends, and certain kinds of unsuitable skirt. But Sammy was more like a friend to Bethany than a stepdad – he was most definitely just ‘Sammy’ – and these days it was Cherith, if she wanted to, who was wearing the unsuitable skirts and there was no one to disagree with her or prevent her. Sammy was cool about that, as about most things. He even allowed Bethany to smoke in the house, as long as she only did it in her room and at the moment she was hooked on something that her friend Finn

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