Tabloid Love by Bridget Harrison

Author:Bridget Harrison [BRIDGET HARRISON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780738211275
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It took me an hour to write my—admittedly somewhat lame— story and another to work out how to get online to send it. Then I realized I hadn’t eaten since I’d left New York. I decided to brave the saloon again. So what if I was the local leper? I could at least treat myself to a hot meal before bed.

“Sorry, we stopped serving food at nine o’clock,” said the barman when I asked for a menu. It was now eight minutes past.

“Is there any way you could make an exception? I literally haven’t eaten all day.”

Apparently not. I had a dinner of salt-and-vinegar potato chips.

Then I returned to my room, lay down on my bed, and stared at the ceiling in misery. Did some people actually enjoy this kind of work? All those years I had dreamed of being a reporter—to end up stuck in a grim village alone eating potato chips for dinner in a pub full of people who hated me. Yes, Sarah had been right all along. News reporting was the most miserable job in the universe. And I wasn’t even any good at it.

The creeping fear washed over me again. What if I had totally fucked up my life? If it hadn’t been for my stupid Lois Lane fantasy, I might have stayed in the UK and been married by now. Right at this moment I would have been coming home from a healthy evening of yoga and about to cook dinner for Angus. Okay, so yoga was boring and I couldn’t cook, but I would have learned by now.

Instead I was stuck in some hellhole pub with no boyfriend at all and with another lame story in a paper which would be garbagetruck fodder by this time tomorrow. Okay, so I had my column. But for how much longer could I go on making jokes about my pathetic love life? And maybe Sandy, the producer who matchmaker Janis Spindel had set me up with, had been right. What if it was actually putting guys off?

I thought back to three weeks earlier, when I’d flown home for another uneventful Christmas at home in Ealing with my mother and father, older brother Andrew, also unmarried, and my younger sister Jacqui, a painter who lived alone on a canal barge. Like every other year, it had just been the five of us.

On Christmas Eve my mother and I had been in the garden putting nuts in her new bird feeder, and she’d pointed to a scrappy fir tree planted by our falling-down, neglected wooden playhouse.

“The Austrian Tourist Board gave me that tree when it was tiny. I planted it thinking we’d bring it in the first Christmas we have a grandchild,” said my mum.

The tree was already eight feet tall.

“Hmm, I doubt you’d get it through the back door now,” I’d cracked as we stood looking at it. But I’d felt bad.

Now I closed my eyes, trying to blot out the depressing green paint in the room.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.