Read Online Something Good by Fiona Gibson - Free Book Online Page A

woken up in his bedsit and spied her clothes bunched up on the floor. They looked as if they’d come off in one swoop.
    Jane had been on the brink of leaving home, and it had made sense for her to move into Max’s bedsit. A backpacking trip to India and severe stomach upset later—and, presumably, throwing up the Pill—and she was pregnant. Too fast, like Hannah’s speedy delivery. Jane had barely known who she was. Yet, when Hannah was born, she’d felt as vital a part of Jane as her own heart.
    Then one night, when Hannah was nearly five years old, Max had blundered home looking bewildered and poured it all out—that he’d slept with a woman who worked at the shop. He’d waited for Jane to start shouting and crying. She hadn’t cried—not in front of him anyway. But she’d frozen inside, as if her blood and heart had stopped moving, and everything had changed.
    Hannah was coughing now, crying, “Mum!” from her room.
    Jane tumbled out of bed and hurried through. “What is it, Han?”
    â€œWas Dad here?”
    â€œYes.” Jane crouched beside Hannah’s bed and touched her clammy forehead.
    â€œWhy?” Hannah asked hoarsely.
    â€œHe…he just came to see the drawings I’d done for his window.”
    â€œYou weren’t talking about me?” She sounded like a little girl.
    â€œNo, darling. Go to sleep.” Jane bent to kiss her cheek. An acidic smell hung in the air.
    Later, as dawn crept into her room, Jane wondered if it had really happened: Hannah throwing up, Max blurting out that Veronica stuff. It had been a night, she decided, for all kinds of stuff falling out of mouths.
    Â 
    Nancy’s knife rapped against the chopping board like some manically pecking bird. While Jane had ploughed gallantly through her mother’s dinner, Hannah had shunted tinned peas and boiled potatoes around her plate before excusing herself to watch TV in the living room. “How’s the window business going?” Nancy asked, battering a nectarine with the rusting knife.
    â€œReally well,” Jane said, refusing to be riled by her mother’s refusal to use the term stained glass. Window business made Jane think of cold callers trying to hard sell double glazing.
    â€œHad many commissions?” Nancy asked, swiveling round from the worktop to fix Jane with her beady gaze. Her eyes glimmered like sequins.
    â€œIt’s been a good month,” Jane said firmly. “I’ve done a window for a restaurant, I’m restoring a panel for a church in Stoke Newington and Max has this window—”
    â€œYou’re working for Max? ”
    â€œWhy wouldn’t I, Mum?”
    â€œAnd three jobs is a good month?” Nancy remarked, for once resisting the urge to comment on her curious relationship with Max. Jane had never told her mother why she’d left him. Throwing everything away over one silly one-night stand? Nancy would have thought she’d lost her mind.
    â€œIt’s enough,” she said, perching on the table’s softly worn edge. “A panel takes me at least a couple of weeks—sometimes months.” Months, Nancy would be thinking, and I had that wall concreted in one afternoon?
    Nancy lived alone in an echoey house in a quietly fading tree-lined road in Muswell Hill. Her kitchen was of a 1950s vintage with the odd post-war toast crust poking out from under the oven. One afternoon, when Jane had been helping her mother prepare dinner, she’d opened the oven door and glimpsed the grisly remains of what appeared to be an antique shepherd’s pie.
    Nancy was short and stocky with wiry hair cut close to her face. Her hands were large and powerful, like a farmer’s. Since Jane’s father had died five years ago, Nancy had appeared to be entirely self-sufficient. When a car had skidded into her front garden wall, Nancy had rebuilt it. She’d boycotted supermarkets with