FitzGerald Dead Lovely

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28325-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Dead Lovely is the debut novel from Helen FitzGerald, the bestselling author of The Cry and My Last Confession. What happens when your best friend gets what you've always wanted? Krissie and Sarah - best friends for years - have always wanted different things from life. Krissie has no desire to settle down, whereas Sarah married a doctor in her early twenties and is dying to start a family. So when Krissie becomes pregnant after a fling and Sarah can't seem to conceive, things get a little tense. They decide to go on holiday along with Sarah's husband in the hope of getting their friendship back on track. But what starts as a much-needed break soon becomes a nightmare of sexual tension, murder and mayhem... 'Outrageous, clever, funny, poignant. Helen Fitzgerald really is one to watch.' Mo Hayder Perfect for fans of Julia Crouch, Sophie Hannah and Laura Lippman, Dead Lovely is a debut novel, a fast-paced thriller and a dark, enthralling examination of friendship. Helen FitzGerald's other books include The Cry, The Exit, My Last Confession and The Donor.

Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely (2007) and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including My Last Confession (2009), The Donor (2011), The Cry (2013), which was longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, and most recently The Exit (2015). Helen has worked as a criminal justice social worker for over ten years. She is one of thirteen children and grew up in Victoria, Australia. She now lives in Glasgow with her husband and two children., Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including The Donor, The Cry, which was longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, and The Exit. Helen has worked as a criminal justice social worker for over ten years. She is one of thirteen children and grew up in Victoria, Australia. She now lives in Glasgow with her husband and two children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzgerald, Helen

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

It was Sarah who helped me through the pregnancy. We had a history friendship – time had earned us the right to each other’s unconditional love. And while we annoyed each other endlessly, especially as the years morphed us into our mothers, we felt true love for each other. If the parking inspector did not back down, it was Sarah I rang for a whinge. If I had an ingrown hair that required surgery, it was Sarah, the nurse, who operated. If I needed to sit on a sofa and not talk, it was Sarah who silently provided the very good crisps. She was my rock, my protector.

Sarah and I met when we were four, and I immediately loved her because she was pretty, with well-brushed shiny blonde hair and bright blue doll-like eyes. She was never alone in the playground, was never worried about people liking her or not, and was soothing to look at, like the sea.

Sarah was everything I wasn’t. She was sensible, and would never rollerskate down a steep hill or spill juice on her spelling jotter. She was girly. While Santa brought me water pistols and gardening rakes, Sarah got pink fluffy things and dolls that peed and cried (and freaked me out). But perhaps the biggest difference between us was that Sarah was an indoors person. She could spend all day in her room playing with Tiny Tears – cooking for her in her mini kitchen, ironing for her with a mini iron, dressing her in those mini dresses.

I, on the other hand, hated being indoors. I’d play in the street, in Pollok Park, at the arcade, in my friends’ gardens, but when I played at Sarah’s house we almost always stayed inside. If I ever managed to get Sarah to come outside to play when we were little, it would be on the strict condition that Tiny Tears could come too, and while I would build a mini tree house for the doll to escape to, Sarah would feed her porridge, wipe her face, change her nappy and rock her to sleep.

*

Poor Sarah. A baby was all she’d ever really wanted for as long as I could remember. At first when Sarah was trying to conceive she’d ring her husband Kyle excitedly at his surgery and get him to come home and do it because the time was right – her discharge was clear, her temperature was high, and she was horny as all hell. Afterwards they’d giggle as he put his stethoscope on her tummy to ‘listen to him swim’.

But as time passed, Kyle found he couldn’t leave patients waiting, or he had home visits to do, and Sarah wondered if her cycle was more elusive than she’d believed. After a while, she decided that it wandered around the month invisibly, and in order to catch it she and Kyle should have sex every night.

This went on for two years. They got good at it. Who needs lubrication? One difficult shove at the beginning is a small price to pay for efficiency.

But after twenty-four months of nightly sex, the sperm still seemed to be doing bugger all.

So Sarah left work, deciding the stress in Intensive Care could be having a detrimental effect on her ovaries. Then Kyle used his clout as the longest-serving GP in South Shawlands Surgery to get a speedy referral to the best fertility specialist in the United Kingdom. Sarah took medication, felt ill and grumpy, no longer tended her garden with gentle care, put the renovation plans for the weekender near Loch Katrine on hold and moaned to her oldest and closest friend – me – every night on the telephone.

‘Kyle is working all the time! Why? Why? Why?’

The first time she rang, I suggested we go out and get drunk.

‘Do you want the baby to grow up short?’ exclaimed Sarah.

Next I suggested going out for dinner. I only suggested this once, after she put me off mussels marinara forever with her concern about bacteria.

I am deeply ashamed of this now, but after months and months of calls I got tired of it all. I had listened and counselled with proper concern for so long. I had cried with her, my friend whose inexplicable maternal urge had exploded inside her with enthusiasm but without capacity. I had bought her homeopathic remedies, books, nicotine patches, gum and inhalers. What about this? That? Get Kyle checked out. Check your elasticity down there. Clear and elastic. Most important, relax.

But none of it had worked, and I got tired.

So, there came a time when I found myself taking a very deep breath before answering the late-night calls. There would be a silence and a snuffle, and I would ask her how she was and the answer would never be good. She was obsessed. Everything in her world had found its way to her ovaries. Dinner, work, clothing, footwear and dog shit were ovary-related.

In turn, the single aim of my conversations became ovary-evasion. ‘How’s the stone wall going in Loch Katrine?’ I asked her once at 10.33 pm on a weeknight.

‘I’ve stopped,’ she said. ‘The strain might be bad for my ovaries.’

*

When Sarah rang at 11.03 pm one night to say Kyle didn’t even want to do it anymore, I’m afraid I snapped and told her to pull herself together. I told her that not having sex was probably quite a significant factor in not getting pregnant, and unless she sorted herself out who could blame Kyle for not wanting to go anywhere near her?

She hung up on me.

Ashamed at my outburst, I phoned back. She didn’t answer. I phoned back again. And at last I got Kyle, who said in a conspiratorial voice, ‘She’s not available.’

So I went round and knocked on the door. Kyle answered with that annoying expression of his. I remembered that expression from university days when I’d shared a flat with Kyle and a friend of ours, Chas.

I’d met Chas while eating dhal with my right hand in Goa. He was living in a tree at the time, as you do, and pondering. He was cute, and we had our Scottish background in common, but he was not my type. He was kind of grungy: scraggly, rough around the edges, a bit too skinny, but with magical eyes that someone one day would fall hopelessly in love with. He wore unusual clothes that he threw together oddly, and looked better naked than clothed. I knew this because I had seen him in an outdoor shower once in Goa and he was surprisingly muscular and square, not at all weedy. I found his company to be the most comfortable I had ever had. No expectations, no bothersome political differences, and no sexual tensions. Chas always said yes if I needed an emergency date to make an ex-boyfriend jealous, but I never once considered him as a sexual partner, never thought of him in that way at all. There was one time when we got very drunk at a medical ball and he tried to kiss me in the taxi on the way home. It felt like I was kissing my brother and I pushed him away with a ‘Yuck!’ We’d both laughed, but it had felt kind of weird.

Chas moved into my flat a while later and spent his time singing and occasionally proclaiming truths about beauty, among other things. We’d get openly annoyed with each other when the milk or the loo roll ran out, and read the papers over breakfast in companionable silence.

Kyle was mostly fun to live with. He could whistle the theme tune to every seventies cop show, and not just the obvious ones like Kojak or The Sweeney. We’re talking Rookies, SWAT and Barnaby Jones. But when he had an exam and Chas and I were making too much noise in the lounge he’d come in and sit on the sofa, his facial features settling around his nose, all scrunched up in a tight ball of bloodless tension. We’d get the hint pretty quickly and go to bed so he could study.

Kyle was the only one in the flat who really had to get through a lot of work at university. I was doing social work and never had to study very hard. And Chas dropped out of medicine after a year, threw himself into ill temper, and started smoking copious amounts of dope with the apparent long-term plan of graduating from depression to schizophrenia.

I looked at Kyle all these years later and thought to myself, why can’t you just say how you feel? ‘My wife is driving me crazy and I wish you hadn’t upset her.’ Instead, he stood there as he always had when distressed, fizzing inside with a tornado of emotions that he had no idea how to harness.

He beckoned me into the kitchen and there was an awkward moment as we stood trying to chat as if nothing was going down.

‘How’s work?’ he asked me.

‘Busy! Awful!’ I replied.

It struck me as we stood there talking that it was probably the first time Kyle and I had been alone since he’d met Sarah.

We were all twenty-one when the two of them met. Sarah had dropped around to see me after work one day and Kyle answered the door. He’d just had a shower, so he had no top on. Chas and I felt the sexual tension between them straight away so we made our excuses and went to the pub, feeling giggly and excited at the prospect of our two friends getting together.

Later that night, and throughout the courtship that followed, our respective mates gave us glorious details that we exchanged and analysed.

According to Sarah, on that first evening they had four coffees and talked for three hours about hospitals.

According to Kyle, Sarah leant forward, affording him a clear view of her bosom.

According to Sarah, Kyle was everything she’d ever wanted – a decent, hard-working, honest man.

According to Kyle, Sarah was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Sarah loved how Kyle was so patient and respectful.

Kyle said by...