Read Online Beautiful Child by David Menon - Free Book Online

did she single you out?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Penny. ‘All I do know is that our Natasha could get away with murder but I was wrong every time I took a breath. Natasha said some horrible things today, Adrian. She said that if I wasn’t her sister she wouldn’t want anything to do with me.’
    ‘Oh, babe.’
    ‘Mum never offered me one word of comfort or support and when I left the house in tears nether of them came after me to see if I was alright.’
    ‘I don’t know what the hell is wrong with your Mum and Dad at times.’
    ‘Natasha also said something else.’
    ‘What more could she have said?’
    ‘She said that I was so boring that she couldn’t work out how you’ve stayed with me and had three kids and that you’d be off shagging if you got the chance.’
    ‘I’ll bloody swing for her!’
    ‘It’s not true though, is it, Adrian?’
    ‘You know it’s not true,’ said Adrian, still holding her tight in his arms. ‘Penny, no other woman could ever hold a candle to you as far as I’m concerned. As for your Mum and Dad, well, I don’t know what goes on inside their heads. What I do know is that they should be proud of their eldest daughter.’
    ‘They never come and see the kids, do they. That’s because they don’t like me.’
    ‘Oh Penny, sweetheart,’ said Adrian as his wife broke her heart. ‘They couldn’t be more wrong. Natasha is jealous because we’ve got real love. That’s something she wouldn’t recognise if it leapt up and slapped her across the face.’
    ‘I nearly slapped her one this afternoon.’
    ‘You should’ve done.’
    ‘My parents really would’ve really hated me then.’
    ‘But you’d have got a lot of satisfaction out of it.’
    ‘Too right. It’s never even crossed my mind to slap any of our kids but my sister could turn me into a female boxing champion.’
    ‘Well before you do, let’s wait until the kids are all in bed and then curl up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and talk about how boring we are.’
    ‘It’s a date,’ said Penny, looking up into her husband’s face and smiling, ‘I am happy, you know. More than I ever could say.’
    ‘Me too, sweetheart’ said Adrian.
    Penny snuggled up to her husband and wondered how she was going to tell him that the familiar feelings of back ache and nausea had been sweeping over her again lately.

CHAPTER SIX
    The atmosphere among everybody who worked at the surgery was relaxed but it didn’t stop Charlie and Matt falling into the roles of good cop and bad cop with the staff when necessary.
    Charlie always got away with murder because he was Charlie and everybody loved him. Any issues that came up were left to Matt to sort out. There used to be two phones on the receptionist’s desk, one for surgery calls and one for appointments, each with different numbers. When Matt witnessed one of the receptionists tell a caller off for ringing on the surgery line and then pick up the appointments phone to the same caller only seconds later, he decided that the surgery’s patients needed to be treated with a bit more respect than that, especially since many of them couldn’t afford to make multiple calls. So he cut the two numbers and now patients ring just one number for whatever they wanted. The receptionists hadn’t liked this because it had taken away some of their perceived power. Then the nurses had been in a sulk with him because he’d asked them to be more civil with the patients after some of them had complained about the nurses being rude. So it had fallen on Matt to tell everyone at the weekly staff meeting that they were going to extend evening surgery by one hour to make visiting the doctor easier for people who worked full-time.
    ‘It’s about their convenience, not ours.’ Matt had said. ‘We’re not here to serve ourselves, we’re here to provide healthcare in this community. I’m sorry if that doesn’t fall in with your childcare plans but things move on and develop. They