Read Online Conditional Love by Cathy Bramley - Free Book Online

–’ Emma added.
    ‘I’m not!’ Grabbing the remote, I turned the volume up on Grand Designs several notches, hoping she’d take the hint.
    Emma huffed and tutted for a good ninety seconds, while I attempted to apply myself to my sketch.
    ‘That takes me back, seeing you draw,’ she sighed. ‘Pass me the remote control.’
    I slid it across the carpet.
    I knew why she was sighing; she was thinking back to our teenage years, when our heads were full of dreams and plans. So young and optimistic about life.
    ‘At college, you used to have a sketchpad permanently glued to your hand, remember?’
    I nodded fondly.
    ‘And the show homes!’ she groaned. ‘Every weekend, you used to drag me round looking at colours and furniture, then you’d sketch little ideas in your pad.’
    She was right. I had been pretty obsessed with interior design at the time. I used to spend all my spare cash on House Beautiful .
    ‘When did you start playing it so safe, Sophie Stone?’ Emma eased her feet out of her Converses and wriggled her toes, trying not to disturb Jess.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Back then you had dreams. You were going to go to London, remember?’
    ‘Course I remember,’ I muttered darkly.
    ‘You were going to work on the glossy home mags, doing interiors styling for photo shoots. The job at The Herald was only ever a stop gap, you said, the first rung on the media ladder.’
    The hairs on the back of my neck prepared themselves for a good bristle. My face felt hot and my lips were doing a passable impression of a cat’s bum.
    ‘Yeah, a stop gap, until I had a reality check and found out how hard that was going to be.’
    Getting a job in classified advertising when I left college had seemed like a dream job. My optimistic young self assumed that if I worked hard, it would only be a matter of months before promotion to the editorial department followed. I would cut my teeth on the property pages, styling Nottinghamshire’s most glamorous homes, then swan off to London, possessions in a spotted hanky on a stick like Dick Whittington, after being head-hunted by Homes and Gardens .
    Unsurprisingly, the road to the big city had not been paved with gold. Once at The Herald , I had researched styling jobs in London and found to my horror that they were a) generally unpaid to begin with and b) looking for graduates.
    While Emma was at university, jealous of my monthly payslips and place in the world of work, I was stuck in an office, selling second-hand bikes and unwanted baby rabbits, and managing my own finances, green with envy at her bohemian, carefree lifestyle which was paid for by Bank of Mum and Dad. My mum, by contrast, had packed a case as soon as I turned eighteen and emigrated to Spain to pursue a singing career in a club, covering everything from Abba to Olivia Newton-John.
    ‘But you used to be so creative and full of ideas. Now you just drift along, bored with work.’ She flicked a disapproving look my way and then started picking a scab off her knuckle.
    I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of my current position on the ladder of success, thank you very much. Promotion had beckoned, eventually, but rather than to the sexy editorial department on the top floor, I had moved to display advertising. Now my clients were retailers and restaurants with bigger budgets, but when you’d done one closing down sale, you’d done them all.
    My creative juices had well and truly dried up years ago, along with my special Staedler drawing pens.
    ‘Dreams are all well and good.’ Especially when you’ve got parents to bankroll them, I added to myself, uncharitably. ‘But they don’t pay the rent, do they?’
    Flippin’ heck, she was like a dog with a bone. ‘You don’t mention styling or interiors any more. What happened to the Sophie who was going to be the next Linda Barker?’
    A childhood spent in less than perfect bedsits had rendered me infatuated with TV home makeover shows in the nineties. I