Read Online Virtual Strangers by Lynne Barrett-Lee - Free Book Online Page B

trolling off up the dales without me, principally because he had asked me if I’d wanted to come when he’d booked it, and I had said no. So the fact of my father intimating that some archaic rule had been broken coupled with Phil looking/feeling/acting even remotely guilty about it coupled with the fact that I had all these ridiculous but unsettling stirrings about a man I was swapping emails with made me even more irritable than I already was. I didn’t need “escorting” anywhere, thank you. I rolled my eyes to emphasise the fact, and, quite without consciously realising I was doing it, reached out and plucked a bud - pop! - from the chrysanthemum. My father took the roasting tin back to the kitchen.
    ‘Do you have a problem, Charlie?’ Phil enquired quietly.
    My scarlet face clashed with the forlorn yellow petals.
    ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that,’ I said.
    Grrr. I wish I was in Canterbury. Wish I was eating parsnips from Rose’s Raeburn, instead of disgusting grey roast beef and rag-rug cabbage plus jam roly poly with Ben and Phil and Dad. Wish I had gone with subversive plan B and snuck off with Ben to the Sports Café and eaten nachos and chilli dogs while playing slam-dunk or on the complimentary Playstation console. Anything . Wish I hadn’t invited Phil over at all . Wish I could pluck up enough resolve to tell Phil that I’m very much not an English Heritage type person. Wish I could pluck up enough courage to tell Phil I’m actually very much not a Phil type person. Wish I could take Ben and Dan up a very large mountain and explain cols/moraines/screes etc. while marvelling at the inspirational new perspective on life afforded by the breathtaking high altitude aspect. Wish I could get a new perspective, period. Wish mainly that I could persuade myself that mystery griffith was really of not the slightest importance at all.
    ‘ Is there something up?’ This was Phil, while we were loading the dishwasher. ‘You’ve not seemed yourself over the last few weeks.’
    Crash, clatter, fumble, bang.
    ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the chrysanthemum, okay? And, no. No, there isn’t. Phil - up side down. The cutlery has to go in up side down or it doesn’t get clean. See? And if you put all the knives in together like that, the blades stick to each other and you end up having to wash them all again. There. No. No, I’m fine.’
    ‘No you’re not.’ He rattled the cutlery basket. ‘Feeling a bit low? Hormones?
    Hormones? Why do men say that? Do they really think it will cast them in a saintly, so-switched-on-to-women’s-issues type light?
    ‘Yes. I have the usual complement, thank you.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Of hormones.’ I slapped down the meat tin and a big glob of fat hit his trouser leg. ‘As do you. But if you’re in a strop, I don’t ask after the state of your adrenals, do I?’
    ‘I only asked. It’s not like you to be testy and irritable. Is it Rose going? Is it me?’
    ‘Of course not,’ I said, in my instinctive, not facing up to the issue at large, usual ineffectual Simpson manner. ‘It’s just that I really can’t be with someone who insists on slap dash dishwasher procedures.’
    Phil flapped his tea towel and said, rather sneerily, ‘a touch anal for someone who prides herself on being a bit of a ‘wild child’, isn’t it?’ And put finger quote marks around the wild child bit. Pah!
    ‘Pshaw! When did I ever say I was that ?’
    ‘You didn’t need to,’ he sniffed, launching a spoon at the cutlery basket. ‘It’s a bit of a persona thing with you. You know - the free spirit bit. Don’t pretend you don’t ham it up.’
    What?
    ‘Ham it up? Persona bit? What are you on about? Just because I don’t want to spend every waking moment footling around appreciating architraves and first editions of worthy biographies, and going to the bloody opera, doesn’t make me a ‘wild child’ you know.’ (Even though I was rather pleased with the label,