Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets

It was only when Hugh was down to his boxer shorts and led her over to the bed that Leonie decided she had to do something. While Hugh pulled the duvet back, she carefully moved the picture till it was facing the other way. When she turned back to Hugh, he was watching her.

‘Sorry, I feel uncomfortable being watched,’ she said nervously. ‘Having one’s children watching doesn’t feel right.’

‘Is that all?’ he smiled.

‘Mothers can be very prudish about things like that,’ Leonie said.

What they did next wasn’t prudish at all. Hugh buried his head in her cleavage and moaned happily as he nuzzled her breasts. Leonie stopped feeling upset and began to enjoy herself again. She enjoyed it when Hugh stroked her all over, telling her she was gorgeous and that he adored her beautiful, sexy underwear. She enjoyed touching a man erotically again, feeling him grow aroused because of her. And she adored it when she finally guided Hugh inside her, remembering how wonderful lovemaking felt and asking herself why it had been so long since she’d experienced it.

‘Oh, Hugh,’ she moaned as the tempo of their lovemaking increased.

‘Leonie,’ he murmured hoarsely, his naked body hard against hers.

Suddenly, Hugh’s body spasmed and he came, shuddering and calling, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ before slumping motionless on top of her.

A religious orgasm, Leonie thought unexpectedly, her own excitement quenched with his lack of activity. There were four types of orgasms, Hannah had gigglingly told them in Egypt: Religious, Positive, Negative and Fake.

Religious was ‘Oh God,’ at the moment of orgasm. Positive was ‘Yes!’ Negative was ‘No!’ And fake was the name of whoever you were with. ‘Oh, Hugh!’ in this case.

Leonie waited a moment, feeling Hugh heavy on top of her. She waited for him to murmur something about being sorry for coming too soon, she waited for him to insist on pleasing her. She’d read all the articles in magazines and newspapers: modern men knew what was expected of them in bed. The days of wham, bam, thank you, Ma’am were over. Men were sensitive creatures with instincts finely tuned to the needs of their women. Leonie had expected multiple orgasms, she’d read all about them in women’s magazines. Moments of such exquisite pleasure that she’d squeal like a turkey at Christmas and possibly wet the bed into the bargain. Men knew how to do that type of thing nowadays. The G-spot was as well known now as the offside rule in football.

Hugh moved. Leonie smiled with expectant pleasure. Now it was her turn. Hugh planted one sloppy, sleepy kiss on her shoulder and slid off her to lie on the other side of the bed. One leg was still resting heavily across hers. He moaned and began to snore gently. In the darkness, Leonie blinked fiercely with rage. He was asleep. Hannah would murder her if she knew Hugh had dropped into the Land of Nod without making even an attempt to satisfy her. Hannah only went out with New Men. Leonie got Neolithic Men.

Boiling with a combination of rage and unfulfilled desire, she lay beside the sleeping Hugh.

‘It’s all right, Jane, sweetie,’ she muttered, glaring at the turned-away photo. ‘You’d have been proud of your old dad tonight. There wasn’t anything for you to be jealous of.’

It was better in the morning. Leonie woke to find Hugh gently stroking her naked back. She stretched languorously but didn’t turn to face him. Let him turn her on this time. She didn’t want a repeat performance.

This time, when their naked bodies fused, Leonie was ahead of Hugh. With enough stored-up sexual energy to power the national grid, Leonie focused on making herself orgasm. When she screamed with pleasure, thrashing around in ecstasy, Hugh was the one who had to do the catching up.

‘That was amazing,’ he said afterwards.

Leonie just grinned.

‘It was better than last night.’

She couldn’t help herself. If they were to have a proper relationship, he had to know: ‘Last night, Hugh, you fell asleep as soon as you’d come and I didn’t come,’ she said.

He was contrite. ‘I didn’t know you hadn’t,’ he protested.

How could he not know? Still, she could teach him.

Leonie snuggled up to him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ve got lots of time to get to know each other in every way.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#ulink_b716f39a-e250-540e-8287-477a90eb949d)

Leonie was tidying when she found them. It was Friday morning and she was having a much-needed day off. The house was like a tip and she’d promised herself that if she could spend two hours on housework, she’d have lunch out as a treat. Danny’s room was a complete nightmare and there wasn’t much she could do there except pick up all the dirty clothes from the floor and hoover the bits of carpet uncovered by college books, sports gear and stacks of CDs. The bed looked as if Penny had been rolling in it after a particularly dirty walk.

‘How did I rear such a piglet?’ Leonie wondered out loud as she stripped the sheets and duvet.

Herman the hamster, who somehow managed to survive in the murky ecosystem that was Danny’s bedroom, climbed into his hamster wheel in shock at all the domestic activity and started running furiously. ‘You’re next, Herman,’ warned Leonie. ‘Your house smells. It’s clean-out time.’ Herman ran faster.

When Danny’s room was done and the bathroom was gleaming, it was half eleven and Leonie was beginning to wane. The thought of a leisurely lunch in the Delgany Inn with a glass of wine and a magazine made her feel wearier than ever. But the girls’ room needed a quick whizz with the Hoover and, as she’d ironed duvet covers the night before, she decided to change their bedclothes too. Normally, the girls changed their own sheets but she might as well do it while she was cleaning. Mel still hadn’t unpacked after the weekend in Cannes and her suitcase lay on the floor, clothes spilling out of it. Mel’s method of unpacking was to slowly remove things from the case as she needed them. Eventually, it would be emptied out.

She stuck their radio on and found some uplifting music before pulling out each twin bed and ripping the covers off. Mel’s bed was soon freshly made with the hot pink cover she loved. It didn’t go with the pale coral stripey wallpaper, but the girls didn’t appear to mind. Leonie turned to Abby’s bed. As she leaned over to tuck in the pale pink sheet close to the wall, she found them: a large red pack of laxatives.

Leonie stared uncomprehendingly at the packet for a moment as if the lettering on the front was Swahili instead of English. Laxatives. Whatever did Abby need them for?

The answer came to her in a blinding flash – Abby didn’t need them.

Neither did any of the thousands of schoolgirls who bought them, and consumed far more laxatives than was safe. They did it in order to be thin. Laxatives in teenage girls’ bedrooms meant eating disorders.

Leonie sank abruptly on to the bed as if someone had just taken her ability to stand away. She opened the pack to find that half the laxatives were gone. Half of a pack of twenty-four. God alone knew how many more packs Abby had already gone through. God knew how many were hidden under the bed even now, emptied and waiting to be dumped when Leonie wasn’t looking.

She fell to her knees on the floor, pulled up the duvet and stared under the bed. Old magazines, a couple of tennis balls and a shiny blue doll’s suitcase stared out at her. Balls of fluff and scrunched-up tissue paper reproached her for not hoovering there often enough. For once, Leonie didn’t feel upset at signs of dust. She used a tennis racquet to poke around under the bed, discovering an old cuddly rabbit, some pens and an odd blue sock. Nothing else. Then she dragged out the doll’s suitcase. It had come with a travelling doll, an ugly black-haired witch of a thing that Abby had unaccountably loved when she was seven. Leonie remembered Mel teasing her twin about her secret hiding place and knew without doubt that the suitcase was it. A perfect place to hide things from prying eyes.

Opening it was like reading your children’s diaries or bugging their telephone calls or something awful, Leonie was sure. Child psychologists would have a field day telling her what she was doing was totally wrong and would be betraying her daughter’s trust. But right now, Leonie didn’t give a damn about child psychologists and their version of child-parent relationships. What did they know? They hadn’t just been presented with the evidence that their fifteen-year-old daughter had an eating disorder. They weren’t the parent who felt guilt creeping up on her because she’d never noticed what had been going on.

Leonie wrenched the suitcase open. Inside lay a hideous treasure trove of Abby’s goodies: empty sweet and chocolate wrappers, a half-eaten packet of chocolate biscuits, several bags of crisps and at least eight more bright red laxative packets, all empty. She touched them lightly, running her fingers over the scrunched-up foil wrappers the tablets had come in. Poor, poor Abby. She had visions of her daughter doubled up with pain in the bathroom, trying to cope with horrific cramps from taking an unhealthy amount of laxatives.

Guilt hit her painfully. How could she not have known? What sort of a mother was she when she hadn’t noticed what was going on? Her mind flew over the events of the past few months, desperately trying to piece together evidence of Abby’s problem, evidence that seemed painfully obvious now but imperceptible then.

She remembered Abby losing weight and becoming picky about her food. She thought of the fuss and bother when Abby insisted on eating only vegetarian products, and how happy she’d been that Abby was growing prettier and slimmer, convinced her daughter wouldn’t have to cope with the pain of being large and dull the way she’d had to. Now those happy thoughts turned sour in retrospect – Abby had been getting thin because she was taking laxatives and…Leonie paled at the thought of what the ‘and…’ might be.

If only taking these things was the extent of her problem, if only she wasn’t developing anorexia or bulimia.

The phone rang and she let it ring out. Leonie sat on the floor of the twins’ bedroom and stared blankly at the posters of the boy bands on the walls, not seeing their bronzed and toned torsos; seeing instead sweet little Abby coping with this awful thing on her own. Leonie cursed herself for not noticing. She’d been so obsessed with her own problems, worrying about the effect Fliss would have on their lives, getting caught up in her romance with Hugh, that she’d completely missed all the signs.

Leonie had felt a lot of emotions in her life but never had she felt like a bad mother. She did now. Schoolgirls who didn’t look much like schoolgirls made their way out of the big silver gates of St Perpetua’s at four that afternoon. Trailing schoolbags and sports bags, sleek, grown-up looking girls wandered out, regulation navy coats unbuttoned, royal blue A-line skirts hitched up as soon as they’d passed the watchful eyes of the nuns. The older ones all looked far too old to be in secondary school, Leonie thought, as she sat in the car and watched for Mel and Abby. Some lit up forbidden cigarettes as they walked towards the bus stop, others applied mascara and lipstick as they waited for lifts, chattering nineteen to the dozen, delighted to be free for the weekend.

The bus to Bray had come and gone before Mel and Abby appeared in the middle of a group of other transition years, laughing like drains at some magazine they were all craning their necks to read.

Mel saw their mother’s car first and hurried over to it. She looked startled to see her mother for they usually got the bus home from school.

‘Mum! What’s wrong? Is it Gran or Danny? What is it?’

‘Nothing like that,’ Leonie replied.

‘But you never pick us up any more…’ began Mel.

‘I need to talk to you both,’ said Leonie grimly.

‘Oh.’ Gloomily, Mel got into the front seat and fastened her seat belt. ‘What have we done now?’ she asked.

‘What’s up?’ Abby asked blithely, opening the back door. She threw her bags into the back seat and fell in. ‘I’m knackered, Mum. This is a nice treat. Did you have a good day off?’

Leonie looked intensely at her daughter through the rear-view mirror, searching Abby’s face for some sign of illness or bulimia, as if it would be written on her forehead.