ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would never have happened if it wasn’t for Rowan Lawton, my agent. Her belief that I was the right person to take on this project, gave me the confidence to go for it. Her passion, friendship and guidance for my books have been a game changer for me. I shall always be grateful to the talented Mike Bullen, creator of Cold Feet, ITV’s Shirley Patton and Kate Howard at Hodder & Stoughton for choosing me! As a die-hard fan of the show, I’ve adored writing this book. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Kate Howard, Veronique Norton and Lucy Howkins in Hodder & Stoughton. And I’ve seen first-hand how clever they are. My sincere thanks to each of them and the team at Hodder & Stoughton and Hachette who have welcomed me so warmly to their publishing family. Your encouragement and support have been so appreciated.
I’d also like to thank Jimmy Nesbitt, Helen Baxendale, Fay Ripley, Jon Thompson, Hermione Norris and Robert Bathurst who made my job so much easier, because of their incredible portrayals of the characters, who are at the centre of my book. It was an honour to dig a little deeper and show the readers the internal thoughts of the characters. I hope the fans of the show are happy with what I’ve done. I promise you I worked hard to ensure that I retained the emotional undertones of Mike’s wonderful creation, in every chapter I wrote.
I’d like to thank all at ITV and Bigtalk Productions, Mike Bullen and the cast and crew for their warm welcome to Roger and me when we visited the set in Manchester earlier this year. Series 7 looks amazing, and seeing the work that goes on behind the scenes to make each episode perfect was a lot of fun.
Special thanks must go to Cold Feet’s Line Producer – Margaret Conway. True story – Mags and I went to school together, but we hadn’t seen each other since we left Wexford (in two different directions, I might add) at the tender age of eighteen! The universe threw us back into each other’s lives recently, through books and of course Cold Feet. We’re both older, wiser (ahem) and thrilled that we have reconnected. Roger and I feel very lucky to have both Mags and her wife Lisa, in our lives now. A gorgeous couple.
Writing can be a solitary experience, but for me that’s never been the case. When I started to write I found my tribe. Too many to mention really, but shoutouts must go to Hazel Gaynor, Fionnaula Kearney, Claudia Carroll, Catherine Howard, Charlotte Ledger, Shane Dunphy, Alex Barclay, Caroline Grace Cassidy, Adele O’Neill, Sheila Forsey, Debbie Johnson, Caroline Busher, Madeleine Keane, Maria Nolan, Louise Hall, Jennifer Burke (thank you for those Robyn legal gems), Margaret Madden, Sharon Thompson and Ruth Long.
I’m also sending thanks to all at Wexford Literary Festival, the Imagine Write Inspire Group and the Elaine Show, especially Elaine Crowley and Sinead Dalton.
To my family, I send you my love and thanks for the enduring support – Tina & Mike O’Grady, Fiona, Michael, Amy & Louis Gainfort, John, Fiona & Matilda O’Grady, Michelle & Anthony Mernagh, Sheryl O’Grady, Amy & Nigel Payne, Evelyn Harrington, Adrienne Harrington & George Whyte, Evelyn, Seamus & Patrick Moher, Leah Harrington & Ann Murphy, John, Ben, Abby & Sean.
To my friends who held my hand metorphorically and at times physically (Sarah!), thanks for sticking with your crazy writer pal and checking in on me when I disappeared into my writing cave. You all know who you are and I am grateful. There’s a proverb that says it takes a village to raise a child. I use this quote in the book actually and it’s never been more true for me, than this past year. Like Karen’s struggle in the book, I’m a working mother trying to prevent the balls crashing to the floor every day. The juggle struggle is real folks, it really is. With a deadline hurtling towards me at breakneck speed, a number of friends stepped up and welcomed Amelia and Nate into their homes for play dates, often at a moment’s notice! Catherine Kavanagh, Fiona Murray, Davnet Murphy, Gillan Jones, Fiona Wickham & Caroline Hodnett, I can’t thank you enough for your help. But Queen of my village was Leah, my sister-in-law, who moved into the crazy H house while I wrote this book, and to whom I’ll always be grateful.
My great aunt Margaret (Peggy) died this year. Her loss broke the hearts of my family. We loved her dearly. It’s no coincidence that Adam meets a gorgeous, wise, funny, endearing character called Peggy, while line-dancing. I like to think that somewhere, Aunt Peggy and my Uncle Terry are once again dancing together all night.
Roger, my husband, my best friend, my love and my biggest supporter – every time I faltered and said, I can’t do this, you picked me up and insisted I could. My children Amelia, Nate and my stepdaughter Eva, you all make my life a brighter, more beautiful world every day.
And lastly, to you the reader – thank you. I love to write and every time one of you takes time out of your busy day to read one of my books, I am in awe. I truly am. I hope you enjoy your time with the Cold Feet gang, as much as I did writing their story.
Cold Feet creator Mike Bullen’s debut novel is also available to buy now in ebook, paperback and audio.
TRUST
When one bad decision sends a happy couple into turmoil and turns an unhappy couple into love's young dream, there's only one thing that can keep everything from falling apart: trust.
‘Trust made me yelp with laughter and cringe with recognition at the same time. Blissfully funny and blisteringly honest. I loved it.’
Caroline Quentin
Read on for an extract.
Chapter One
Greg Beavis lay awake in the dawn light that infiltrated the bedroom. He had an early train to catch and so had set the alarm for 6 a.m. If he hadn’t, he’d have woken at six thirty. But because he had, he was fully alert at five thirty. How did the body know to do this? Greg had half an hour before he needed to get up, thirty minutes in which he could contemplate this irony (if indeed it were an irony and not, like rain on your wedding day, merely inconvenient). Alternatively, he could gently nudge Amanda awake in the hope of interesting her in an early-morning shag. Of these options, the latter was by far the more appealing but by an equal distance the less advisable. Amanda was a woman who valued her sleep and, though she enjoyed sex as much as the next person (and in this instance the next person was Greg, who enjoyed it a lot), something told him she would not appreciate being cheated of her last half hour of slumber. That something was experience.
Still, if the sex were good, it would be worth the grief. And sex with Amanda was always good, often great, even ?ways glance towards her sleeping form. During the night she’d shrugged off the duvet, exposing the rise of her hips. The curve was a little more pronounced than when they’d first met. Amanda had been twenty-three then. Greg had been two years older than her, and indeed still was. It was only reasonable that in the ensuing years her figure should have filled out a bit. What struck Greg as remarkable was just how sexy she was, notwithstanding the gobbet of saliva bubbling on her lower lip.
Greg edged a hand across the no-man’s-land of the queen-sized mattress, bringing it to rest lightly against Amanda’s thigh. Troops in position, ready to commence engagement.
‘And what do you think you’re doing?’
Greg stiffened at the sound of Amanda’s voice, or at least those parts that weren’t already stiff did. He found her staring at him, one eyebrow cocked. This was one of Amanda’s faculties: the ability to go from comatose to vigilant at the flick of a switch. No slow turn of the dial for her. She should have been in the SAS.
‘Nothing,’ he improvised inadequately, withdrawing the expeditionary force that was his hand. He smiled sheepishly. It was this boyish charm that had first attracted Amanda to Greg and even now, as he stumbled among the foothills of middle age, she still found it appealing. In truth, it was not Greg that had woken her but thoughts of the day ahead. It was a Monday. That meant Molly had sport. But did she have a clean top? And where was Lauren’s lunch box? Amanda couldn’t remember seeing it the night before. Chances were their younger daughter had lost it again.
Amanda shot a glance at the bedside clock. No way was she getting up at 5
.38 a.m. to look for a bloody lunch box. Twenty-two minutes till the alarm was due to sound: plenty of time for a quickie, and a cuddle afterwards. To Greg’s surprise and joy, Amanda manoeuvred across the cotton sheet and pressed herself against him, resuscitating his diminishing erection.
Greg needed no further invitation. He tenderly traced the outline of Amanda’s jaw, a gesture she interpreted as romantic, but which was in fact a diversionary tactic allowing him to flick the spittle from her chin. Mission accomplished, he redeployed his hand to its earlier bridgehead on her thigh, advancing the fingers slowly northwards, increasing their pressure as they neared the delta. Amanda shuddered appreciatively. But then Greg heard a dread sound: a low rumble far off up the street that subsided then rose, louder, as it drew close. How could he have forgotten? Idiot! But perhaps Amanda wouldn’t notice.
Fat chance. Her thighs tensed, and not in a good way.
‘Did you put the rubbish out?’
Greg was torn between evasion and a flat-out lie. The momentary hesitation was enough to sink him.
‘There’s still time,’ she said.
For a glorious moment, Greg thought she meant for their shag, but this hope was dashed when she shrugged him off.
‘And don’t forget the recycling.’
Greg had half a mind to argue. They could miss a collection. All right, their bin would be overflowing by the next, but there were always households with spare capacity: dinkys, or retirees, or that sad sack at number eighteen who Amanda suspected was a paedo. A week hence Greg could sneak out under cover of darkness and surreptitiously stuff their surplus garbage into their neighbours’ wheelie bins, like a serial killer disposing of body parts.
‘Go. Go!’ Amanda jabbed a heel at Greg’s buttocks with a little more force than was playful. The bin lorry lumbered nearer, the asthmatic wheeze of its air brakes provoking a frenzy of barking from the family’s labra?doodle, Jess, who was shut in the kitchen. This in turn spurred ten-year-old Molly and her eight-year-old sister, Lauren, to leap awake in the room they shared, barrel along the landing and, without breaking stride, launch themselves on to their parents’ bed.
There was no way Greg was getting his end away now. Accepting defeat, he gave his daughters quick hugs before hauling himself out of bed and towards the door, bending a little so as to hide the tumescence still apparent in his shorts.
Greg and Amanda lived in Stamford Brook, a charac?terless enclave of west London favoured by families who aspired to, but couldn’t afford, neighbouring Chiswick. Eleven miles to the north and east, in the moderately leafier suburb of Muswell Hill, Greg’s friend and colleague, Dan Sinclair, was still asleep. He had not had a restful night. Despite going to bed a little after eleven, it had been past one before Dan nodded off. He’d made the mistake of trying to calculate how far short he was of his monthly sales target. Dan was good with figures but, not having a maths degree or Asperger’s, struggled with percentages, particularly in his head. This had contributed to his insomnia, though not 50 per cent as much as the numbers he’d come up with. Three weeks into June, he’d only achieved 65 per cent of his forecast sales. That meant that, in the remaining quarter of the month, he still had a third of his target to fulfil. In percentage terms he needed to improve on his current performance by some . . . some . . . It was at this point that Dan had reached the outer limit of his mathematical ability; the answer lay across the border, beyond his grasp. But of one thing Dan was fairly certain: he was screwed.
He suspected Greg had already filled his quota, and this just made matters worse. Because, while the two were mates, they were also rivals. Or perhaps it was because they were mates that they were such rivals. Nine times out of ten Greg came out on top. In fact, in the three years they’d worked together, Dan had only outsold Greg on seven occasions, and never in consec?utive months. In the early days Greg had crowed about ?tition, and over time he’d let the results pass without comment, which Dan found even more humiliating. He longed for a triumph of his own so they could resurrect their competition. Ah, well; maybe next month.
At six fifteen Dan’s clock radio erupted into life, John Humphrys’ hectoring tone jolting him from a dream in which the slides of the Powerpoint presentation he’d been making to the Board had been in the wrong order. Could it really be morning so soon? In a little over an hour he and Greg were due to leave for Infotech 2014, a two-day conference for the UK’s IT industry, usually held in attractive cities like Durham or Exeter, but which this year was taking place in Birmingham. Dan was not looking forward to it, and not just because it was in Birmingham. If there was anything to make him feel inadequate, it was forty-eight hours in the company of colleagues and competitors, all cocksure and confident, or convincingly giving that impression.
He fumbled for the radio’s snooze button, silencing the Today programme presenter. How the hapless junior minister Humphrys was haranguing must have wished she had the same facility. From the en-suite bathroom came the satisfyingly forceful sound of their recently installed power shower. Sarah was up before him. Dan considered confiding in his wife his concerns regarding work, but knew that, in this instance, a problem shared was not a problem halved. Sarah would only worry that he was about to lose his job. And he wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. You needed three consecutive months of missed targets before you were deemed to be in a slump and vulnerable, and this would only be Dan’s second. Still, a trend was emerging. And that’s what Sarah would focus on. Better that she live in a state of blissful ignorance, her mind filled instead with thoughts of . . . It occurred to Dan that he had no idea what was in his wife’s head.
What was in Sarah’s head was the song ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams. It had been on the radio the previous afternoon when she’d collected Russell from swimming practice and it was proving impossible to shift. Still, it could be worse – something by Ed Sheeran or another of those man-child warblers, inexplicably popular nowadays. Stepping out of the shower, Sarah wiped a hand across the steamed-up mirror and considered her reflection. She’d had an hourglass figure in her youth, but now, at the age of forty-two, it was more pear drop, as though the sand had settled at the bottom, causing the glass to warp and buckle. Not for the first time, Sarah made a mental note to resume going to the gym. If only she could attend as religiously as they direct-debited her membership fees.
Sarah checked her breasts for lumps, a cursory inspection, but still more attention than Dan had paid them lately. It wasn’t his fault. She knew he was worried about work. He tried not to show it, but, after sixteen years of marriage, he was an open book. In recent months not a particularly interesting one – nothing that would win the Booker Prize or even make the shortlist. Satisfying herself that the surface of her breasts remained flush, if not exactly firm, Sarah wrapped herself in a bath sheet.
Dan sat perched on the side of the bed as she emerged from the en suite. His pose reminded her a little of Rodin’s The Thinker, had the sculpture been carrying a couple of excess kilos and the weight of the world’s problems upon his shoulders. Poor Dan, she thought. I wish he could be happier.
‘I’ve ironed you a shirt,’ she said, though she doubted this alone would lift his mood.
Dan turned to look at his wife. At five eight she was only an inch shorter than him, but she cut a more impressive figure, he thought. Statuesque. Handsome. His eyes were drawn to where her full breasts met, and where she’d tucked in her bath sheet. A second towel was wrapped around her head, worn like a turban to dry her shoulder-length caramel-brown hair. Dan wanted to desire her, but it’s not something that can be forced. Perhaps if her first words to him on waking had not concerned ironing. Was this what their relationship had become? Mundane exchanges about laundry?
‘Thanks,’ he replied.
In fairness, perhaps this was what a stable and lasting marriage looked like. After so long together it was too much to expect the flames of passion to burn high; enough, surely, that the pilot light was still aglow, providing warmth, if not heat. Dan a
nd Sarah believed that they loved each other, in their own, undemonstrative way. They were content in, if not excited by, each other’s company. And they never had fights, though perhaps this was due more to a lack of emotion than a shared empathy.
Dan leant on his knees and levered himself upright. He felt older than his forty-one years, closer to the end of the decade than its beginning. He sighed. He wasn’t looking forward to the day ahead. Although at least he could face it in a freshly laundered shirt.
Greg picked up a framed photograph from his bedside table and made a pretence of considering it. Taken the year before, during an otherwise lamentable package holiday in Cyprus, it showed Molly and Lauren hugging Amanda, the three of them squeezed together more tightly than commuters aboard a Northern Line Tube. Greg had snapped the picture over dinner on the first night, before they’d realised that Limassol was the Greek word for ‘shit hole’. His daughters’ smiles were brighter even than the camera’s flash. It was his favourite portrait of the three most important women in his life.
Greg shifted his gaze from this facsimile of the girls’ faces to the real things, raised towards him anxiously. The children hung on his verdict, their young brows furrowed in apprehension. What a great age they are, thought Greg; so trusting, so gullible.
‘I don’t think I’ve room in my bag,’ he said, moving to replace the photo on the table and unleashing a storm of protest.
‘You have to take it!’ This from Lauren, although the younger, the sharper of the two, with the keener nose for injustice.
‘You always do!’ chimed in Molly.
‘Please!’ they chorused.
Teasing them like this wasn’t cruelty, Greg mused, not quite. It was a game. They knew that ultimately he’d cave and, until that moment, could revel in the exquisite agony of pretending that some other outcome were possible. It was the same vicarious pleasure that he and Amanda experienced watching a horror movie, safe in the knowledge that the axe-murderer was trapped within the confines of the TV screen. But, enough. Molly looked like she might be about to wet herself. Time to put them out of their misery.
Cold Feet: The Lost Years Page 30