Sausages or Sticks

Diney Bindman

Description

A warm debut novel from a new author who follows the lives of a seemingly normal, happy family living in rural Northumberland whose comfy world is disrupted by bereavement and betrayal. The novel traces Isabella's leap of faith from dependent young wife to strong and sexually confident young mother. Along the way to retrieving her self esteem, she has to face turbulent waters as truths are revealed about her family which drag her out of her previously cacooned world where she was hermetically sealed by the love of a man she trusted completely. From an unwordly, dependent young woman, Isabella finds that life sucks and it's no good just sitting back and letting it get the better of you. And being confident with who you are is paramount to surviving in this world.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849891417
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
SAUSAGES OR STICKS
Diney Bindman



Publisher Information
Published in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © Diney Bindman 2010, 2013
The right of Diney Bindman to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Dedication
To Adam and Ellie with all my love



Acknowledgements
With thanks to the most patient and supportive husband in the world EVER!



Chapter 1
The swaying sunflowers of Gascony radiated a warm welcome of saffron some months before it all happened, nodding their sanguine approval at the three as they swept along the challengingly rural roads in their hired Renault. It was their first day on holiday, and Isabella felt a buzz of exhilaration at driving abroad, to say nothing of using a left hand drive. Now that she was able to - albeit precariously - gauge her distance to overtake parked cars in the narrow village streets without noisily thwacking their wing mirrors, she joined in the family sing song feeling strangely liberated and carefree. Even Georgia, irascibly unplugged from the thudding beat of her own preferred music, now sang along zealously to Simon’s ‘Lion King’ cd. Grungy black clothes had been temporarily renounced, and Isabella was comfortably smug with how easy it had been to cajole rather than dragoon her step daughter into a pair of cute denim shorts. She refused to part with the hideous stack-heeled trainers with coloured laces even though they made her clomp clumsily rather than her preferred sashay, but at least her legs were able to see sunlight for the first time in months.
‘Hey! Look, you two!’ Simon shrieked with the unsuppressed excitement of any nine year old on holiday, ‘that looks like it! Over there, look! It’s mint!’
He jabbed a sticky green finger towards a group of whitewashed buildings clustered attractively just beyond a small apple orchard which was generously proffering armfuls of green and bronzed fruit, his beaming face pressed up against the car window.
‘The apartments, just like we saw in the thingy’
‘The brochure, noodle!’ conceded Georgia, trying to mask her own, slightly more mature holiday excitement. ‘And what’s that gross stuff on your finger, dork?’
Simon ignored his sister’s customary bossiness but licked the remainder of the Fizz Wiz popping candy from his fingers.
‘I can see the pool - it’s wicked! Mint... look ! ’ Simon was at fever pitch and rising. It could have been an excess of E numbers, it was hard to tell.
It had been a bit scary having Mum driving instead of Dad, as she kept banging the car into something hard which had made a mega loud noise, and he had heard her muttering a naughty rude word each time it happened. He knew it was a naughty word because his friend Josh had an older brother who said it. He pretended that he hadn’t heard her swearing, although it had made him want to giggle, but he had just kept his head down with his game boy, not even daring to glance at his sister. He was glad they had arrived in one piece.
Isabella was extremely relieved too, after her perilous drive, and optimistically manoeuvred their car into the neatly gravelled driveway which concealed no parked cars with wing mirrors, winding gently past the orchard to the paved courtyard around which various apartments and small cottages were arranged in a ‘u’ shape, as if warmly embracing the guests.
‘Here we are guys, home for the next week! Let’s go in and have a peek’.
Isabella hugged an indulgent smile to herself and hoped it was as nice inside as it had sounded in the ‘thingy’.
Their apartment, on closer appraisal, was part of a 20 th century farm which had been given a basic slick of white paint over unevenly plastered walls in a fussy attempt to make it look more authentically rustic, with random daubs of wobbly stencil work portraying naff baskets of fruit. It had been advertised as ‘modern yet graceful and sophisticated luxury, basking in the history of Gascony’, but sadly it didn’t look as welcoming or luxurious as she had anticipated. There were signs of damp by the windows, plus there was a large, black spider with a corpulent body lurking ominously in the corner of her heavily pseudo- beamed bedroom. She would have to heave her bed away from the wall and check underneath before she could even contemplate sleeping there. If there was one resident then it was bound to have relatives living nearby, perhaps even larger, older and blacker ones. She shuddered and her skin felt itchy at the mere thought of one touching her. The ones at home knew they weren’t welcome as she had them humanely removed to the bottom of the garden, if Jack or Bunty were available, or else she dropped the Chronicles of the Second World War on them if she had to cope with the crisis alone.
Struggling to lift the suitcases from the car to the apartment, with Georgia giving a less than half-hearted hand, they dragged the sinking wheels over the gravel to the paved courtyard. Simon tried valiantly to be helpful, in an on-going effort to please his Mum, but made the manoeuvre more difficult by fooling around, trying to sit on the case to hitch a ride.
‘Get off you little toe rag’, hissed his sister. He really could be a major pain in the butt, and she wanted to sit down in the house and listen to some of her own music now, in peace. She had done her nice big sister bit for the day.
Sweeping a mass of reddish waves back from her face with pale, lightly freckled fingers, Isabella peevishly began the task of settling her family into their home for the next week. She really wanted to put her feet up as well, having observed that Georgia was now doing just that, and watch someone else do all the work for her, as Georgia was also now doing, but reminded herself that she was purportedly a mature, grown up woman, a mother for goodness’ sake, and this was what mature, grown up mothers did - get on with the business of mothering on a strictly no-moan basis.
Think straight, woman, think! Make a mental list of what needs to be done and just do it!
She sighed. This independence lark wasn’t going to be much fun until she got a grip - menacing spiders and driving shakily on the wrong side of the road might just be the beginning of unwelcome challenges set to spoil her holiday euphoria. But she was on her own now, so it was up to her.
‘Rats, Jack, why couldn’t you have made the time to come with us,’ Isabella muttered, with a whiff of peck lip permeating the air. Jack had excused himself from joining them at the last moment, giving his deadline as the reason for his absence. Jack would have sorted them all out with annoying zest, being a skilled organizer, incredibly tidy, a man who loved to get things done straight away. The problem for Isabella, although she didn’t see it as one, was that she needed Jack, or else her Mother, to motivate her into being pro active, or merely to be active rather than merely laid back, and she was quite happy and content to be led, nurtured, protected and loved. But this was going to be a different week’s holiday for the three of them and, as a temporary single parent, she was determined to enjoy the heady novelty of being in charge, to control the purse strings, to call the tune. At home it was Jack who hogged the remote control of life - in everyone else’s best interests, he would maintain, without a hint of irony.
Her mood lifted and she began her task systematically at first then, chuckling mischievously to herself, in a more higgledy piggeldly, random fashion, eventually resorting to slinging her colourful array of holiday clothes into a small wooden chest of drawers in the room she knew she would probably share with Simon. He still loved having a snuggle and was secretly planning to creep from his bedroom, which he was to share with Georgia, into Mum’s bed every night whilst Dad wasn’t around to disapprove, ‘cos he thought nine year olds should be ‘over that nonsense’.
Georgia, who had been only just seven when Isabella finally became her step mother, five years after her biological mother had left them, had never been as demonstrative. She adored her father with pure filial devotion. She loved Isabella too, but nowadays it was on different terms, with all the gauche surliness imbued by truculent teenagerdom. She had made herself at home already, and was sprawled over a squidgy, brightly covered armchair, her long, swinging legs lost now in the folds of a black fringed skirt, small feet still clad in those black clumpy shoes with red and white laces, her eyes closed in the private pleasure of thumping rock music from her headphones. She felt spiteful for not helping, and she was going to (soon), but something perverse inside made her delay just a bit longer.
Despite the lack of help from her children, they quickly became quite happily ensconced in their little apartment, just 17 kilometres from a town called, to Simon’s continued delight, Condom. It was decided by mutual agreement to go there for lunch, to buy some postcards with Condom written on the front. Isabella couldn’t help thinking that Jack would disapprove, but she felt deliciously free to make her own decisions for a change
Already they had trooped to the local supermarket and bough