My Secret Wish List Penny Jordan MILLS & BOON
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CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
THIS is it, then, is it? This is all I’ve got to show for my life. Apart from droopy boobs. This is what it all comes down to. Me, the computer, and a medical diagnosis that says that I must stop being self-pitying and accept that I am past sell-by-date! I must conquer unattractive and immature desire to possess Madonna-style bod and a stomach washboard-flat enough to flaunt navel stud. That’s one of the reasons I am keeping this diary. As a form of therapy. On the advice of the personal, one-to-one life-changing session I had with one of the universe’s top life-coaches (a birthday present from trendy stepsister who works in Public Relations—well, it was more of a consolation present, really.) The one-to-one session was a ten-minute phone call and an impossible-to-fill-in questionnaire which came in the post and which I thought was junk mail. Luckily managed to rescue it from the rubbish before Mr Russell—that’s the elderly pensioner who lives two doors down—dumped his dog’s poop-a-scoop in my wheelie bin. Anyway, one of the things life-coach instructed me to do was keep a diary, so that I could write down all thoughts and feelings and thus find out hidden meaning behind own self-destructive tendencies—like eating chocolates and agonising over non-husband’s opinion that boobs are saggy when I should be going to gym and should also be doing helpful things in community, like busybody neighbour from three up who patrols local park counting number of discarded used condoms. I have always been a sucker for a bit of self-indulgence, which is probably why I am currently two stone overweight—well, actually it’s only one stone ten pounds now, but scales haven’t been reliable ever since they were used under broken leg of late mother-in-law’s commode. So here I am, aged fifty-one, miserable, moody and menopausal. Hard to believe that five weeks ago I was congratulating myself on how serene, successful and satisfying own life was. But that was before daughter sent me a birthday card which read ‘Happy Easter’; son rang from university to say he was putting off taking his finals because he wanted to ‘chill out’ for a year or two first. Oh and—almost forgot—before my husband came home too late to take me out for the celebratory dinner I’d booked at Chez Luigi’s (Luigi is Italian, but Roux Brothers-trained, and he’s very good about Derek only ordering one starter and one sweet, asking for two sets of cutlery and then complaining about the small portions). I was in bed, eating the last of the Christmas chocolates—the soft cream centres which I really hate and always leave until I am really desperate—wrapped in typical husbandly Christmas present of flannelette nightdress big enough to go round myself twice. Husband had written tender little note with the present, saying he thought it would be large enough to hide gross sight of droopy boobs. (Husband has definitely got ‘from Mars’ sense of humour and thought it very funny to send self birthday card showing hideous old hag lifting skirt to reveal boobs down to knees, having written inside that the card reminded him of me.) Anyway, husband walked in wearing oversize shiny nylon trousers that he thinks make him look trendy but in reality make him look like a chimpanzee. I suppose it’s not husband’s fault, though, that he has short legs and big stomach. Husband’s earlobe was still weeping from the new earring he had put in. His tattoo was finally scabbing over and his hair finally beginning to grow again after Beckham haircut that went wrong. Husband said he’d got something to tell me. Thought it was going to be a joke. Well, in a way it was. He said that we didn’t have anything in common any more. This is a complete lie. What about our huge mortgage and the set of semi-antique chairs his mother gave us, two with wonky legs, and one with ‘Digger loves Jimmy’ scratched on it? (Jimmy was his uncle. He never married.) Not to mention the twenty-seven years of marriage and the two children we produced? But what do twenty-seven years of unwanted memories and two children mean to a man who’s head over heels in lust with a raving nymphomaniac of a twenty-something-year-old woman called Cheree (it was Sheryl, but she changed it) with dyed blonde hair and enormous inflated breasts? My own best friend, Jacki (who knocked the ‘e’ off the end at the same time as she ‘lost’ years off her age and ‘found’ herself in the Gambia with some toyboy who made her realise what life was really all about), says I could have boobs lifted, but I can’t see the point since no one else but me is ever going to see them again. Luckily my own eyesight isn’t what it was! Jacki’s divorced now. She loves it. She got to keep the house, the car, and David’s money! But I think that must have had something to do with the affair she was having with their accountant. Derek—that’s my own husband—well, was my husband—is now rushing through the divorce because he doesn’t want to leave any messy ends when he and Cheree leave the country and she’s concerned that if he dies whilst they’re away I will inherit everything. (She must mean all his debts, because Derek swears there isn’t any money). Derek told me that he and Cheree were going to sail round the world together and that he’d already sold the business—that alone was a shock ’cos only the previous week he’d been moaning that the business was losing so much money he’d be lucky to give it away! And the money it was losing wasn’t really ours—not strictly speaking! It was the money the building society had given us and in exchange we had given them the
