The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva
The queen of the black-hearted soap opera is back!Welcome to the upwardly mobile Prendergast Road…On Prendergast Road, deep in Nappy Valley, among olive trees in terracotta, lower fuel emissions, Lithuanian prostitutes, teenage drug dealers, stalkers and soaring house prices, five desperate women wait…The progeny of the IVF generation is ready to start school and only one of them is destined to get a place in Nappy Valley's most oversubscribed cradle of learning. How far will these women go to get that place?Follow Kate Hunter into the depths of her impeccably honed life, as she struggles to maintain the façade of perfection. When exactly did life become a life class? Is happiness overrated? Is it just possible that beneath the flawless sheen of her friends' and neighbours' amazingly trouble-free lives, beneath the freshly-ironed shirts and home-grown veg, lie the same half-truths, the same uncertainties and the same desperation to keep up with the Joneses…?Sarah May is an intimate observer of society (AKA curtain-twitcher of the highest order) and her novel is an hilariously dark-hearted soap opera of our everyday lives. In a society that always strives to be more organic, less carbon-polluting, more virtuous than any other, 'The Rise and Fall of the Domestic Diva' is a breath of fresh air (imported from the mountains of Nepal and filtered organically for purity, of course. A snip at only £6.99.).
Читать The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva онлайн беплатно
The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia
Nudist Colony
Spanish City
The Internationals
The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva
SARAH MAY
This book is dedicated to all women who are either currently attempting - or who have in the past attempted - to raise children and pursue a career…at the same time. Whatever your bank balance… whatever your dress size…whatever the state of your mental health …you’re all DIVAS!
Table of Contents
THE PRENDERGAST ROAD COMMITTEE
CONTACTS LIST
| Name | Address | Tel. |
|---|---|---|
| Harriet Burgess | 236 Prendergast Rd | 020 8369 4435 |
| Ros Granger | 188 Prendergast Rd | 020 8369 2311 |
| Kate Hunter | 22 Prendergast Rd | 020 8369 7866 |
| Evie McRae | 112 Prendergast Rd | 020 8369 4956 |
| Jessica Palmer | 283 Prendergast Rd | 020 8369 4221 |
Deep in a valley in the heart of south London, Kate Hunter woke up suddenly among the kind of rumples only a nightmare’s sweat can give black sateen sheets. It was 4.52 a.m. She pulled the sheet up over her head, not wanting to see the early hours’ outline of their IKEA wardrobe, IKEA bed, or IKEA chest of drawers - in case she saw something else that wasn’t meant to be there; something that didn’t feature in the IKEA catalogue - excluding Robert.
The only thing she could remember about the nightmare - and it was a vivid memory - was the feeling of water beneath her. She’d been floating effortlessly until she became aware that the dress she was wearing was beginning to pull her down - was in fact weighted in some way. As soon as she became conscious of the dress, her legs fell down through the water and she started to drown.
She and Robert had argued the night before - or rather, she had argued and he had watched. This was the way they rowed these days. What had the row been about? She didn’t know any more - all she remembered was Robert sitting on the edge of the bed, looking sad and slowly undressing.
For a moment she thought it had started to rain, but it was just a dry April wind brushing through the branches of the rowan tree outside.
Peeling the still-damp sheet from her face, she watched orange streetlight and flat moonlight fall through the broken blinds and compete for space on the bedroom walls. Turning towards the unconscious hump of Robert’s back, she curled into his warmth, her fringe tickling his spine in a fragile apology as she let her nostrils fill with the scent of his skin - and drifted back to sleep.
On the brink of losing consciousness, she thought she heard a strange, sobbing scream. Her body jerked momentarily awake. One of the children? Robert’s mother - Margery - asleep on the sofa bed downstairs? Whoever it was, she wished… she wished…her right leg slipped out of the side of the bed until her toes were hovering just above the floorboards. So that it looked as though she’d been dancing.
At that moment, Robert Hunter woke up without meaning to, unsure whether it was the scream - which he’d heard in his sleep - or Kate’s hair and breath running up his spine that had done it. Rolling carefully onto his back and trying not to trap any of his wife’s hair under his shoulder blades, he listened. In his muddled, pre-dawn mind, he became convinced that Kate’s breath on his spine and the scream had conspired to wake him.
The scream unsettled him and, not entirely convinced he wasn’t still asleep, dreaming, he took himself off to the bathroom and had a perplexed, early morning wank in the shower.
Afterwards, he let his back slide down the tiles until he was crouching, hot water pounding on his bent head.
Today he was teaching Jerome.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, he taught Jerome - and today was a Thursday. He didn’t know when exactly it had happened, he was only aware that now he plotted his week mentally around when he did and when he didn’t teach Jerome.
There were children who got to you and then there were children who got inside you. Every teacher he knew - apart from himself, up until now - had one, and his was Jerome. When he shut his eyes he could see Jerome’s face more clearly than he could see his own son, Findlay’s, and what terrified him more than anything was that Jerome was changing him in a way nobody else had; not even Kate, not even his children… and he hated Jerome for that. He’d never been afraid of teaching before, but he was afraid now.
The dry April wind carried on making its way up Prendergast Road through the branches of winter-flowering cherries, silver birches, poplars and more rowans, past bay-fronted Victorian terraces whose drawn curtains were meant to conceal nothing more than healthy functioning families coping with life’s run-of-the-mill ups and downs. The wind knew better, but didn’t have anybody to tell.
