Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 115737 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 579(@200wpm)___ 463(@250wpm)___ 386(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115737 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 579(@200wpm)___ 463(@250wpm)___ 386(@300wpm)
‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ Dad barks as he wanders into the kitchen armed with his garden shears.
I jerk at his voice. Did he hear my thoughts? Oh God, he knows. He knows what I’ve done! Beads of sweat – guilty sweat – start to form on my forehead. They’ll disown me.
‘Your car is an absolute disgrace,’ he goes on. My hands hit the side of the worktop, holding me up. Shit, I’m being paranoid.
‘You can wash it if you like,’ I breathe, gathering myself and finishing off the tea, handing him his mug. He eyes the tea with caution, and I know it’s because my mother hasn’t made it. ‘Half a sugar,’ I confirm before he asks.
He places his shears on the side, making Mum shriek in horror. ‘Stanley, dear good Lord!’ She darts over and swipes them up. ‘Now I’ll have to clean the worktop again.’
Dad rolls his eyes and turns on his heel. ‘Well, it’s been at least an hour since you last disinfected it, June. I’ll be in the garage.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Mum chimes, not showing a shred of annoyance at my dad’s grumpiness. I don’t know how she does it. Since he’s retired, he’s a real grouch.
‘I’ll be in the dining room,’ I say, leaving Mum scrubbing the worktop. I park myself at the dark wooden circa-1990s table and load my laptop, falling into thought as it fires up. A bad move, but those marks on Jack’s neck are a constant in my mind, now accompanying Jack’s face and his wife’s.
‘You work too much,’ my mother says, wandering over to the sideboard and dusting off a minuscule speck of dust from the shiny surface.
‘That’s how people become successful, Mum.’
‘And what about the other things in life?’
‘Like?’
‘Like a husband and children. When are you going to make me a grandmother?’
Grandchildren? I laugh to myself. More people for her to faff over. ‘Give me a chance, Mother.’
‘Well, you’re knocking on thirty.’ She nods at the drawings splayed out on the table before me, while I look at her incredulously. ‘Does that really make you happy, Annie?’
I swallow and return to my laptop. ‘Yes. Very happy.’
I hear her sigh, leaving me to get on with my work quietly. ‘Maybe when the right man comes along you’ll think of something other than work.’
I close my eyes, wilting in the chair. I’m already thinking of something other than work. Except he isn’t the right man.
After a pleasant dinner with my parents, I pack up my things and kiss them both goodbye, promising I’ll pop over this weekend. I’m scrolling through my e-mails as I make my way to my car, checking for any that are going to keep me up late. One jumps out at me from the French company that is manufacturing my super-duper glass roof, and I frown as I open it, hoping the production is still on track as they promised.
‘Oh shit,’ I breathe, scanning through the e-mail. ‘No, no, no!’
I pull my car door open and throw my bags onto the passenger seat, then fall into the driver’s.
‘How can you miscalculate the weight?’ I ask my phone, diving into my work bag for my calculator and drawings.
I urgently punch at the keys, hoping beyond all hope that they’ve made a mistake in saying they’ve made a mistake. If the roof is two hundred kilos heavier than they’ve stipulated, it’s going to throw all the engineers’ calculations askew.
‘Fuck!’ I slam my head against the headrest when the figure on my calculator matches the revised calculations in the e-mail. ‘You bloody idiots.’
I start my car and reverse down the drive quickly, kissing goodbye to my planned early night.
When I pull up at the project site, it’s dusk and the driveway is now jam-packed with skips, scaffolding and materials, the two entrances blocked off with security railings. I park down the road and grab my things, my mind searching for a remedy to the spanner in my works. I can think of none, and the thought that I may have to kiss my glass roof goodbye makes me want to cry.
Of course, I ignore the warning signs all over the metal railings telling me not to enter the site, and pull back one of the panels, squeezing through the gap. I let myself in, hurrying straight to the rear of the building where the extension will be built from the back external wall. Flicking a light on, I get my drawings out and find the calculations I need while pulling up the e-mail with the new, actual weight of my roof. It takes approximately ten seconds for me to conclude that my roof doesn’t stand a chance of being held up by the proposed steel frame without another load-bearing wall to support it. And there is no other damn load-bearing wall nearby that I can tap into. My heart sinks, and I reach up to my forehead to rub away the instant headache.