Secrets and Mince Pies teaser
Secrets and Mince Pies is available on Amazon Kindle and in print format.
Chapter 1
There were few people in the world who annoyed John more than
Cliff Richard. Graham Norton was certainly up there, and so too
were Richard Madeley and that bloke off the Halifax adverts. But
what made Sir Cliff stand out head and shoulders above all the
others, was that he had been consistently annoying John for over
four decades. There were several reasons for this. There was his
hair, his voice, his unnaturally orange skin. There was that video
where he was prancing around on roller-skates, and that brown
leather jacket he insisted on wearing everywhere. There was his
name, which was rather appropriate, thought John, as he wanted to
throw himself off one every time he heard one of Cliff’s records.
There was the fact he turned down Sue Barker at her peak, and of
course who could forget the day God took his revenge on tennis
lovers and the whole of mankind in general by making it rain at
Wimbledon and allowing good old Cliff to get his hands on a
microphone. If only Cliff had gone on his Summer Holidays and
stayed there, thought John, the world would be a far better place.
And right now, Cliff was up to his old tricks again. John was
trying his very hardest to concentrate. He knew he had to if he
was to have any chance of salvaging what was turning out to be a
pretty desperate situation. But how could John’s brain be expected
to function normally with the sultry sounds of Sir Cliff seeping
out of the speakers and invading his ears?
Even for Cliff, thought John, this was a low point. As far as John
could tell, he had nicked the words of a well known prayer,
combined them with the music to that stupid song everyone sings at
New Year, and chucked the word “Millennium” into the title to make
it somewhat topical. And as a result he had got to number one,
made a shed load of money, snapped up a few more brown leather
jackets, and in the process ruined the Christmases of millions of
people around the world. John wondered if EMI would be interested
in his own musical endeavour – “A Hymn for 2004”: the words of
Hail Mary set to the tune of the Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up.
Anyway, enough of that. John had to concentrate. He was in
trouble. A few moments ago, Bradley had confidently scooped up all
seven of his letters, arranged them neatly on the board, and in
response to his father’s bemused face, announced:
“QUASSIN, as in the medical compound obtained from the wood
quassia. And that’s on a double word, and it also makes QI, the
vital force that in Chinese thought is inherent in all living
things, and UP, as in the opposite of down… so it’s eleven points
for QI, five for UP as the U is on the double-letter, seventeen
doubled is thirty-four for QUASSIN, plus the fifty point bonus for
using all seven of my letters, makes… one hundred points. Which
moves me onto three hundred and eighteen, and you are on
sixty-five. Your go Dad”.
John again looked down at his letters. He had six vowels and an L.
He didn’t think his son would accept “AAAOOEL”, even if it was the
exact sound he wanted to scream at the top of his voice right now.
Still, thought John, as he carefully placed his A, L and E after
his son’s S to pick up a handy four points, if being serenaded by
Cliff Richard whilst being comprehensively destroyed at Scrabble
by his ten year old son was the only thing worrying him this
Christmas, John would have been a very happy man indeed.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
Chapter 2
The voice came from out in the hallway, but it managed to creep
its way underneath her locked bedroom door like an unwelcome
intruder.
“Gemma, can you please get off the phone!”
“One second, babe… yes Mum, just give me five minutes, for God’s
sake!”
“You said that an hour ago. Come on love, I need to call your
Auntie Lorna”
Gemma pretended not to hear and instead pulled her blanket right
up to her chin and started wrapping her long, recently dyed hair
around the index finger of her spare hand.
“Sorry about that babe, just the old parentals again. I wish they
would just chill out”
“Have you told them yet?”
“Babe, we’ve been on the phone for almost two hours. Don’t you
think I would have mentioned something about it if I had told
them? Anyway, we agreed we’d tell them together, remember?”
“No, I don’t mean that, I mean have you told them that I am coming
for Christmas?”
Gemma’s nose was itching, but her finger was too entwined in her
hair for a quick release. She struggled to get it free, and ended
up pulling out a few hairs in the process causing a sharp pain to
dance across her head and a small tear to appear in her eye.
“Ow!...Yes, I told them this morning”
“What did you say?”
“I said: Mother and Father, the person who is screwing your
daughter is coming to stay with us for Christmas, so that he and I
can screw right through the festive season and into the New Year.
Here are some earplugs, you are sure going to need them”
“And what did you really say?”
Gemma smiled to herself.
“I said: Mum and Dad, would it be okay if my darling boyfriend
Matt came to stay with us over Christmas? His parents have gone
away on business, all his family are abroad and he has nowhere
else to go. He can sleep in the spare room, and he is very good at
washing up and making cups of tea”
“The spare room?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, babe. I know where all the creaky
floorboards are and how to avoid them. Let’s just say that you are
not the first male guest to have stayed over in the spare room”
Matt did not reply, and Gemma immediately regretted what she had
said. She had to remember that Matt wasn’t like all the other
boys. He was a keeper, and the last thing she wanted to do was to
drive him away.
“Anyway, Mum was a bit funny about it at first, and she and Dad
asked me to go out of the room for a bit while they discussed it –
I think they must have picked up that technique from some TV show,
or something – and then about five minutes later they called me
back in and said it was okay, so long as we respected The House
Rules”.
“So, you’re sure it’s okay?”
“Chill out, babe, it’s totally fine, honest. They’ll love you,
just like I do”
Gemma smiled again. Matt wasn’t the first boy she had used the
L-word to, but he was certainly the first for whom she meant it.
“And when are we going to tell them about… you know, the other
thing?”
Gemma looked out of her window. She could see the road below lit
up by the soft orange glow of the street lamps, and above it a
world full of stars.
“I don’t know, babe, I don’t know”
Secrets and Mince Pies is available on Amazon Kindle and in print format.