A Friend of the Family: The Addictive and Emotionally Satisfying Page-Turner That Will Have You Hooked by Jewell Lisa

Author:Jewell, Lisa [Jewell, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Mystery, Adult
ISBN: 9780141916231
Goodreads: 23020991
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2003-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

Big Quiffs and Little Cars

It had been a long week for Ned. As well as his disastrous night out with Carly, he’d had the pleasure of receiving eighteen delightful text messages from Monica, an envelope full of her toenail clippings, a package containing wax strips with her pubes attached and then the pièce de résistance this morning. A small vial of her blood. It was only tiny – she’d siphoned it off into one of those miniature plastic bottles of soy sauce you get in sushi boxes. But the fact was that the more parcels and text messages she sent him the less concerned he felt. He found them quite comforting now – they meant she wasn’t dead, that she wasn’t in a plane on her way to London and that she wasn’t getting any worse. The scale of the gruesomeness of the ‘body parts’ had diminished rather than gathered momentum; there’d been no severed digits or bits of flesh. And when the toenail clippings had arrived on Tuesday, Ned had actually breathed a sigh of relief. Toenails weren’t disturbing – they were just grim. Now she was just being annoying instead of scary.

The blood was a bit more of a hark back to the days of hair and eyelashes, but it wasn’t hard to extract that much blood from yourself – it might not even be blood; she might have got it from a joke shop or something.

No – unless Mon suddenly upped the ante and started sending him thumbs and eyeballs, he wasn’t going to let it get to him. He had enough to worry about without worrying about Monica and her stupid little games.

Like tonight, for example.

He was sitting in the living room at the moment, watching The Simpsons on Sky One, eating Jaffa Cakes out of some kind of new-fangled metal-tin affair and waiting for Gervase to get back from work. He was waiting for Gervase because tonight he, Ned London, was going out with him. Bizarre. He’d scoured his mind, searching for the perfect excuse to get out of it, but had been unable to come up with anything. The fact that they lived in the same house meant that in order to concoct a believable excuse he’d actually have to have somewhere else to go; and, sad to say, he didn’t. The ritual Friday night out with friends seemed to have fallen off almost as quickly as Mac’s hair after Ned left the country.

‘No one really goes out any more,’ Simon had said, sadly. ‘Everyone’s just sort of coupled off. It’s all Friends and Frasier and home-delivery Thai on a Friday night now. Unless it’s someone’s birthday – we still go out on people’s birthdays.’

But he’d made a few phone calls last night, anyway, hoping for a last-minute reprieve in the form of an alternative social engagement, and found that everyone else was doing things like staying in because they were knackered (pathetic), working late at the office (tragic) and having dinner with their parents (verging on the sick).

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