Love by the Stroke of Midnight by Raven McAllan (best historical biographies .txt) 📗

as eating four-day-old pizza that no one had thought to cover and the mice had nibbled. She didn’t even like fresh pizza. Her Italian food of choice was spaghetti with clams and a bottle of Gavi.

That was a good topic for her weekly newspaper column. She’d need to make a note of it later. Not the wine, but the yawn-a-gasm. ‘To fake or not to fake, that is the question’.

She wasn’t doing it, enough was enough. Time for a shake-up, she was in a rut, and was sick of the view.

That summed up her life, and not just with Stuart, although that—and he—was the catalyst.

Three months previously they had met at a pre-Christmas party and appeared to connect. How wrong could someone be? One month of skirting around each other, two of having sex—piss-poor sex if she were honest—and Daisy knew their relationship was doomed. Should she tell him then or later?

The insistent buzz of her mobile phone answered that.

Later.

She hefted Stewart to one side, ignored his incoherent mumble, picked up the phone and squinted at the caller’s name.

Plum…

Oh shit, what now. She flicked it on. Stewart grunted contentedly. “Glad it wasn’t a second earlier. Great, eh?”

Oh how she’d like to say, ‘no you selfish shit it wasn’t’. Daisy ignored him and spoke into the phone. “Hi, Ma, what’s up?”

The voice on the other end of the phone was nigh on incoherent. But as ever, Daisy got the gist of it. “Arrested? What the hell for?” She listened for a moment more as Stewart got up, scratched his cock and balls and wandered in the direction of the bathroom, as uninterested as ever in her family and their goings-ons.

“You did what? Oh for f…flips sake, Ma, how many more times? No, I’m not bailing you out this time. Ask Pete the…” Just in time she stopped herself calling him ‘the plonker’. Her mum got really agitated when she did, and she supposed she couldn’t blame her. “The guy you’re ah…seeing.” Better than saying ‘screwing’ to your mum. Not that it would faze her mum, but it just didn’t feel right.

Her mother’s diction became clear. “I’ve ditched him, Daisy. He wanted me to wear a bra.” Her voice rose. “Can you believe it? The controlling bastard. A bra.” She sounded as if she’d been asked to eat meat and she was a card-holding vegetarian. “I mean, where would I get one? What a waste of money. And if that wasn’t enough, he thinks I should call myself Priscilla. I am not a Priscilla, am I? Prissy Pris. So not me. It was the last straw, Daisy, it really was. Pr…isss…illa.” If you could hear a shudder, Daisy heard it.

However, Daisy could agree with that statement. Prickly Pris maybe, not prissy, anything but. Her hippy mum, who thought free love should include condoms on the NHS, had called herself Plum ever since she’d snuck into one of the early Isle of Wight music festivals, met Gregory, a.k.a. Leaf, Daisy’s dad, and gone to live in a tepee on the edge of a Scottish loch. There they communed with nature by picking wild fruit and berries, had a lot of dodgy tummy upsets when they didn’t know what they’d picked, swam naked and ate guddled fish. Not, Daisy devoutly hoped, all at the same time.

Even now Plum mostly lived there. Leaf, a reasonably successful musician was as he said, like his name, still blowing in the wind. Daisy met him a few times a year and suspected he and her mum did the ex-with-benefits meetups slightly more often. She chose not to ask. Her mum could be a bit too graphic at times. Enough to scar you for life. After all, who needed to know just how her dad turned her mum on? When Plum had started going on about erogenous zones, ice cubes and pressure points, Daisy zoned out. It was bad enough seeing her mum’s peek-a-boo scanties on the washing line. She didn’t want or need any more information.

Unless it was for her column of course, but nobody knew about that except the editor of the paper and herself. Sexpert Sadie, the lady with all the answers. Except, it seemed, with regards to her own sex life.

She had to be very careful in some of her replies in case anyone recognised them as similar to something they had said or done which she knew about. It was a pity because some things she’d been told about were doozies. The cock ring someone put in the freezer before using it and getting ice burns just where you didn’t want them, or the time someone got caught out having sex in a hut they thought was derelict and turned out to be used by the local coalman for storage. They’d been locked in behind two dozen full coal bags. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the married couple had been trying to rejuvenate a marriage. Which was the marriage of only one of them. She could have achieved more than one week’s column about the ecstasy and pitfalls of that.

The joys of having a sideline you didn’t tell anyone about.

“Anyway, I don’t need bailing out, just picking up,” Plum went on robustly. “Just at the local nick, as ever. They are getting a bit too zealous these days. And some of them are hardly old enough to be my grandkids. That is, they would be if I had any.”

Daisy ignored that. She’d have had to have been very precocious for offspring old enough to be policemen to be realistic.

“Get real, Mum.”

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