Read Online The Love Shack by Jane Costello - Free Book Online Page A

I moved out, the walls were stripped and whitewashed, the bed fumigated and the place transformed into something sufficiently pastel and pleasant to be used as a guest room.
    Yet, for a reason I cannot explain, my mother has taken it upon herself to restore this room to the original and produce a weird, quasi-historical recreation of it, circa 1999.
    I haven’t seen the posters she’s plastered up since the days when I’d while away hours dousing my forehead in Clearasil and experimenting with activities that risked hairy hands and blindness.
    I gaze at the walls, noting how schizophrenic my tastes were when I was fifteen: there’s a massive image of Che Guevara and another of Bob Marley next to a marijuana leaf. Underneath are movie posters – X-Men , The Matrix and, to prove my intellectual credentials, Betty Blue (which I’d never actually seen).
    Directly in front of us is a shrine to the leading ladies of late 1990s showbusiness: Marisa Tomei, Cameron Diaz, Cerys Matthews, Jennifer Lopez and – in the centre, in glorious, bootylicious Technicolor – Kylie. Although to say Kylie is misleading: this is simply Kylie’s rear end, a close up of her hot-panted bum, as featured in the Spinning Around video. I’m trying to work out whether these went up before or after I took out a subscription to New Socialist magazine and developed a passionate disapproval of the objectification of women – a firmly-held principle that I struggled with daily, I recall.
    ‘My mother is insane,’ I decide, sitting on the edge of the bed.
    Gemma doesn’t answer. ‘Sorry, I was just distracted by J-Lo’s hair. I never remember it being quite so . . . nineties.’
    ‘I wasn’t interested in her hair.’
    ‘Clearly.’
    She sits next to me and slides her arms round my neck, kissing me on the lips. I experience a rush of what you’d politely call well-being. More kissing ensues, as we fall backwards on the bed in a tangle of hot limbs.
    ‘God, I fancy you tonight,’ she whispers. It’s not an especially poetic string of words but they have a positively magical effect on re-diverting my blood supply. With my face against her neck, I slip my hand between her legs and pull back to get a proper look at her. She’s breathtaking: all pink skin and soft breasts and parted mouth and . . .
    She stops and glares at me. I lean in to kiss her, pretending not to notice, but she closes her legs on my hand like a trap door.
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    She hesitates. ‘Nothing.’ I’ve learned over the years that the accurate interpretation of this is, in fact, ‘something’.
    ‘Go on, tell me,’ I insist. The idea that I’d rather Talk – with a capital T – than get down to any kind of conjugal business is of paramount importance in situations such as these.
    ‘Honestly, it’s nothing.’ I slide my hand across her skin, when she pauses again and says, ‘Now you mention it . . .’
    I pull away. ‘What?’
    ‘It’s Kylie’s arse,’ she splutters. ‘How am I meant to do this with Kylie’s arse looking over us.’
    ‘It’s not looking over us. Arses can’t look.’
    ‘Well, whatever. I can’t.’
    ‘I’ll just tear Kylie down then,’ I decide, standing up. ‘If it’s Kylie or you, then you win, hands down. I never wanted her up there in the first place. Not since 1998 anyway.’
    Gemma props herself up on her elbows and watches as I peel away one corner, before starting on the adjacent one.
    ‘You’re being very careful, considering you were going to “tear it down”,’ Gemma points out.
    I shrug. ‘Oh, come on. This is Kylie we’re talking about.’
    She kicks me in the leg and I chuck away the poster, before sinking into the warm, soft pleasure-zone that is my woman’s arms.
    Only she seems distracted. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I sigh. ‘Reese Witherspoon’s cleavage?’
    ‘Course not,’ she lies, glancing resentfully across the wall. ‘I’ll just turn off the light.’
    She flicks the switch and