The One Before the One by Katy Regan

Author:Katy Regan [Regan, Katy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Romance, General
ISBN: 9780007440092
Google: SCTQxE9UV0oC
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2011-06-06T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’m lying in bed hoping death comes quickly. It is morning, just after 7 a.m. (when I last threw up) and the room is dark, just a strobe of light from the gap in my curtains, but even that seems to burn through my head, cauterizing the main artery in my brain, which probably still oozes Sauvignon Blanc.

The barbecue was horrendous. Never mind the Barbecue of Horror, this was more the entire box-set of Nightmare on Elm Street, only live.

I reach for the glass of water on my bedside table. My throat feels like I’m trying to swallow a hedgehog – but I can’t sit up far yet without the room spinning, so end up throwing half of it up my nose, nearly drowning in the process.

Sleep it off, that’s what I need to do, although all I see when I close my eyes, is me (ridiculously drunk) going:

‘Fever Pitch. Yes. That’s what we’re reading, it’s an iconic novel of our times.’

Idiot.

Then Rachel, (ridiculously sober) going: ‘It’s not a novel, it’s a memoir.’

It’s not novel it’s a memoir. It’s not a novel it’s a memoir. It’s not a novel … You get the picture. That’s basically on repeat play until I can’t take it any more and have to self-medicate some more with ibuprofen in the hope of oblivion.

In my defence, Fever Pitch-gate only happened because the book club conversation happened in the first place, and the book club conversation only happened because, despite everything Toby had told her, Lexi brought it up.

We were just finishing off the monkfish kebabs (this was no standard bbq, not a burger in sight) and I was already almost a bottle of wine and several vodkas down due to nerves and a whole catalogue of previous, equally excruciating faux pas.

Rachel finally sat down after hours of hosting, since Toby’s idea of ‘doing the bbq’ as far as I could tell, amounted to chucking meat on there then forgetting about it whilst he got more drunk.

‘Can I just say, Toby,’ said Lexi – scanning the bookshelf that lined one wall of the kitchen, which looked out through French doors onto the garden – ‘considering you go to a book club and are meant to be some sort of bookworm, you haven’t got many books, have you?’

It was a typical flying brick comment from Lexi and one that had me down a glass of white in one.

Toby took a swig of beer, Rachel laughed. ‘Toby? A bookworm?’ she said. ‘I think the only thing he’d ever read before he started that book club was Allen Carr’s How to Stop Smoking and even then he borrowed it from some mate and had to buy another because he’d got a fag burn in the cover. Isn’t that right, hun?’ she teased. ‘That’s why I couldn’t believe that he was so into this book club malarkey.’

I look over at Toby. This was news to me. He’d always made out he was quite the bookworm to me – or

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