The Great Christmas Breakup

PROLOGUE

Christmas Day,
December 25

EVERY
MEMBER
OF THE
hideous
Teeson family was
there to greet us on our arrival at the hospital. I felt the demon-like stare of my mother-in-law before I saw her.
Then
a sound, like a chainsaw stuck o
n metal, began its customary crescendo
. M
y head, bandaged and bleeding, began thumping in tune with my elevated heartbeat. 

‘What have you don
e to my baby!’
The question was rhetorical, because
Cecily
Teeson
always had
all
the answers.

I
grimaced as
t
he
newly dyed
magenta hair
and
red
booze face
came
towards me. The look was
o
ffset by a nause
atingly twee festive jumper embroidered with
what looked like fornicating reindeer
.
Her
usual
shiny
blue eyeshadow
had been replaced with a colo
r somewhere between orange and dung.
Some sick hairdresser had put so many gold highlights in her light
-
globe hair
that I noticed
Cecily
2’s
long-suffering
husband
Rufus
put on
sunglasses to protect himself from the glare.

‘I want an ice
cream,’ said
Rufus’s son and
Carson’s nephew Howie, making rapid eye movements as he tried to source a kiosk.

‘No
,
ice
cream,’ screamed his mother,
Cecily
2.
Pencil thin, with absurdly huge ears and a bulldog nose,
Cecily
2’s festive jumper was black with a huge cherry on it.

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Yeeeeeeees!’

‘Noooooooooo!’

I had begged to die many times before, but this time I meant it.

Closing my eyes in preparation, I was forced to open them when the voice of doom spoke again.

‘What did you do
now, Scarface
?’ As she came closer to the gurney, the familiar scent of knock
-
off designer perfume only added to the urge to throw up.

So I did.

On her, which would have been satisfying had she not immediately spun about, spraying goop back over me and half the A&E.

‘Errrrr!’
Cecily
Teeson hopped about like she’d been infested with conservatism. ‘What have you done t
o us? To my darling son?
’

‘There is a canteen on th
e fourth floor,’ Howie declared, ignorant of the chaos.

‘No,’ said
Cecily
2.

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘I said NO!’

Was Cecily for real?
What have I done to him
?
What about what they had done to me?

I wanted to kill her.

And him.

Only
I couldn’t move either of my arms, which
was more that slightly worrying
.

Carson was being wheeled in. He gave me a sympathetic grin.

How dare he smile
!

I may h
ave de
liberately driven at a body of water
at high speed, but this
was
all his fault!

Suddenly, the painkillers the paramedics had given me at the scene of the accident began to kick in.

‘Aren’t you gonna answer me?’ the
putrid
mother-in-law barked.

‘Are those rei
ndeer fucking?’ I replied, pointing at
Cecily
’s foul festive garb.

‘Yes,’ said Howie.

‘No,’ said
Cecily
and
Cecily
2 in unison.

‘Yes,’ I told Howie.

And then promptly
and conveniently,
I
passed out.

CHAPTER ONE

Wednesday November 22

The problem w
ith marriage is that when you think you’ve
had enough,

the best
is
often
yet to come.

Jocelyn Priestly.

CARSON HAD GIVEN ME
the Jocelyn Priestly calendar for Christmas the year before
. It was a complete load of rubbish
– the most horrific of eleven years of utterly pathetic and unromantic gifts.

Then, this morning, I’d gone to my re
-
gifting box, to
plan
how I would
redistribute
the awful, and in so
me cases offensive
,
gifts we’
d received from the
previous Yuletide
. That’s when
I’d found the stupid thing.

Worse, I began to read it.

Apparently, if you read the blurb on the second of the flippy little pages of the cheaply made tat, Ms Priestly is some sort of marriage guru.

My motto,
the bog
standard and poorly spaced Helvetica typeface read cheerily,
is that any marriage can be resuscitated. It just requires the spiritual knowledge.

Wha
t the hell does that even mean?

Carson’s mum
, or mom, as they say over here
,
bought it
for him
to give me. She must have done, no doubt during
one
of her ch
arity
shop expeditions
.

I know what you’re thinking – that’s nice, support
ing charity. It would be, if Cecily
didn’t just nick stuff
straight
from the bags
of donations left out front of the shops overnight
.

T
hat’s the family I married into: t
hieves, hooligans, and sta
u
nch L
efties who hated everything about me, including what they perceived as my
privileged
upbringing.
Because they are American and I am English, they assume I am posh because of my accent. I’m anything but – my
dad worked
as head of th
e Gardens department of Bath
Council, my mother’s mother was a maid servant and the women of the family hadn’t worked since.

However, I did come from Bath, which was, according to the Teesons, posher than Boston.

Whatever that meant.

Cecily
Teeson
, her daughter
Cecily 2 and her
long-suffer
ing and selectively deaf son-in-law
Rufus imagined that
, since my parents had
never known the delights of a trailer park
except for holidays to France,
I consider
ed myself too good for them.

Carson Teeson
, however,
is about as far removed from a trailer park as you can get. Having inherited the shrewd, calculating mind of his mother, and scored some genetic throwback in terms of brains, my darling husband
somehow
convinced Harvar
d
that he was a diamond in the rough.
Scholarship in hand, and i
n the face of his mother demanding he become a doctor so that she could sell illegal prescription drugs at his grandmother’s care home,
he
earned a doctorate in law and became . . . a teacher.

Yes, that’s right f
olks, a teacher.

What do you do when you’ve
grown up
deal
ing
with
ranting lunatics, uncontrolled
bullying and disgusting food throughout your
entire
childhood? You seek out the same by working at a local
, not particularly exclusive,
private school.

It was
the one thing that
Cecily
Teeson and I agree
d
on. Someone with a Harvard L
aw degree should not be teaching at Frithington Lodge. He should be ensconced in a cosy partnership somewhere on Madison, while I ran around Central Park with the dogs and a nanny took Jessie and Joey to school in a limo.

Instead, I ra
n around
Flindes
, the local
cut-price
supermarket, doin
g price checks
and Carson took
the kids to school on his way to work.

All in all, life wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that Carson and I
no longer had a relationship to speak of.

Sometimes I thought I hated him.

Perhaps h
ate was actually too kind a word.

Disgust
and complete distain were
better ones.

But i
t hadn’t always been that way.

Had it?

-
C
ue melancholy memory number o
ne:

‘
Excuse me, what exactly is
that
garment for
?’ I knew, before I’d even turned around, that I was going to like the face,
because the voice was knee-buckling
. Deep, rich and intellig
ent sounding
–
a miracle in the
New Y
ork street where I lived.
I was surrounded by
would-be
gangsters who specialized in vocabulary exclusively populated by the words ‘fuck’ and ‘mother’.

The market stall
I worked
at
and co-owned
sold dresses made by local fashion students. It was a joint vent
ure
between me and my best
friend
, Lolly. Lolly
had managed to develop a
distinct talent for sourcing hip products while scoring As on her college assignments. I scored Cs, so my contribution was wearing a fanny pack and collecting the income.

It transpired that t
he face was
as delicious as the voice.
It was o
ne of those faces that wasn’t too handsome, but masculine, with a hint of stubble. I guessed the stubble was necessary because the guy had cherubic blond curls that were cut tight in an attempt to keep them under control
.