Read Online Life Begins by Amanda Brookfield - Free Book Online Page B

scores in computer games – who cared? And it was probably lies anyway. So what if his parents were getting divorced? It wasn’t like he was the first kid it had happened to. Rose, the new girl in their class, had had a mother who died. Now that, in George’s opinion, was far more dramaticand impressive. If Theresa had said to be nice to Rose Porter he would probably have done his best, because the thought of losing his own mother, for all her bossiness and cunning, was so impossible to contemplate that he actually felt a little sick just trying.
    As it happened, the motherless Rose didn’t seem to need much looking after. She was one of those scary girls, who sat in the front row and shot her hand up to answer everything and buried her nose in a book at breaktime. She was as tall as several of the boys in their class, with carrot-coloured bird’s-nest hair, skin as white as sunblock and blue eyes that stared so hard you felt she was seeing through you to something on the other side. Instructed to partner Sam for an exercise in Drama that morning (a stupid exercise where one person had to be a tree and the other the wind), she had looked so fierce and towering, so scornful of Sam’s puffing efforts round her stick-like outstretched arms, that George had felt almost sorry for his erstwhile friend.
    But not sorry enough, George vowed, slopping more water on to the floor as he scrambled out of the bath, to invite the irritating loser over for the precious treat of a Friday-night tea.
    Downstairs in the sitting room Naomi had been joined by Josephine, whose stylishly cropped blonde hair was dark and damp from having been caught in the rain, but who looked immaculate nonetheless in a navy trouser suit and high heels. ‘Theresa bustled between them, setting out bowls of vegetable crisps, offering top-ups of wine and checking the card table, which had been unfolded from its usual storage behind the piano and set up in preparation for the evening game. Safely retrieved from her sons’ pockets, all the mah-jong tiles were now neatly arranged in the two-tieredsquare required to start the proceedings. Sitting in the middle, like two loose teeth, were the faded misshapen dice that had come with the mah-jong set (acquired on a whim at a car-boot sale a few years before), with a small booklet of instructions, held together by Sellotape so old it had dulled to a dirty brown and lost most of its stick. Naomi, left alone with her glass of wine for long enough to be driven to picking up the little booklet and studying it, warned her friends now that she fully intended going for one of the more high-scoring difficult hands.
    Josephine groaned. ‘I can never remember them. I get my winds and my dragons muddled and some of those bamboos are just like flowers.’
    ‘It’s like cards, Jo – different suits, extra points for winds and dragons – and we must do the North Wind thing this time, Theresa.’
    ‘What thing is that?’ asked Theresa, absently, more concerned for the curry, which was showing severe signs of dehydration, while the rice, being kept warm in the top oven, was starting to look clumped and sticky.
    ‘I don’t get the North Wind thing,’ complained Josephine, stretching out her long legs and settling back with obvious relish into the deep folds of the sofa, hands and wine glass resting on her stomach. With a reputation among her management-consultant employers for being keenly intelligent, ruthless, inexhaustible, she found such evenings particularly relaxing. As her friends well knew, she didn’t really care a jot about the North Wind or whether she muddled bamboos and flowers. Before mah-jong she had been a member of a book club but had found it too much like hard work: fierce, often intellectually frustrated women holding forth, fighting to have nonsense opinions heard and respected – as if it mattered. She read Dick Francis, thesedays, or fluffy stories about women who shopped and had a lot of sex. I’ve