What If?. Shari Low

the kids will end up with a criminal record (this is Jess’s little chestnut – she’s obviously been researching crime today).

      Pros: more presents at Christmas, someone else to visit you when you’re in a care home and, statistically, more probability that one of them will end up running the country (also Jess’s contribution).

      I catch Jess’s expression out of the corner of my eye. She’s doing that thing again where she looks happy on the outside, but her eyes tell me she’s miserable on the inside.

      ‘What’s up?’ I ask her gently. ‘You okay?’

      ‘Sure. I was just thinking that in my present situation, the chances of me having children are up there with winning the lottery and shagging Jeremy Paxman.’

      Jess is in that age-old crap situation which, considering she’s the smartest of us all, is quite difficult to fathom – the unhappily unmarried mistress. If Basil Asquith’s constituents only knew what he is thinking when he advocates corporal punishment (being attached to his antique king-size bed with handcuffs), they may take their vote elsewhere. But Jess is inexplicably attracted to him.

      Their affair started four years ago, when she took a post as his researcher, and has motored along, fuelled by endless promises to ‘re-evaluate his marital situation’. Meanwhile, Mrs Asquith poses quite happily with him at their country estate in endless editions of House and Garden. The irony is that Jess is gorgeous (she always reminds me of Julianne Moore), successful and fiercely intelligent. She’s also second only to Kate in being grounded and innately sensible. The whole Basil thing is obviously an episode of diminished responsibility from which she’ll recover at any time.

      She visibly shrugs off her melancholy and turns the over-table light so that it shines in my face. ‘Anyway, Cooper, it’s your turn. Spill the story.’

      I’d almost forgotten I had something to share.

      The others are staring at me in anticipation.

      I pause for effect, then reach into my bag and pull out two letters and my purse.

      ‘This,’ I say placing the first letter down on the table, ‘is my letter of resignation. Goodbye bog rolls.’

      I place down the next letter, amused at the three confused faces around the table.

      ‘And this is a note to my landlord, terminating the lease on my flat.’

      Confusion is now approaching astonishment.

      ‘I’ve decided that by the turn of the century, I’m going to have found the love of my life and the first place I’m going to look is in my past. So these…’ I hold up my credit cards, ‘… are going to take me around the world to find every poor bugger who has ever had the misfortune to have exchanged bodily fluids with me. Ladies, we have a mission. We’re going in and we’re taking no prisoners…’