The Best of Friends by Alex Day (accelerated reader books .txt) 📕

woman’s kind of job – is that they don’t need to work. Or rather, if they do need or want to work, they already have a career, and if they don’t, it’s probably because they’ve got no intention or need of getting one.’

I don’t want a job. But I need one desperately. I’ve got to pay the debt off somehow. They’ll be chasing me every second of every day until I do. Whilst I owe them, I’ll never be free of them. Giving them more money seems the best – the only way – to free myself of the continual terror I’m living in. I can’t get any more from Dan – he’s so generous in the amount he transfers into my account every month as it is. I have to dress exclusively in designer labels to justify what he gives me, so I shop on eBay and have parcels delivered to a PO Box address. Most of my ‘hobbies’ are fictitious, just an excuse for asking for more cash. I’ve done it all – yoga, reiki, life drawing … You name it, I’ve pretended to have an expensive obsession with it. Dressage was the most ridiculous one but nevertheless, Dan didn’t question it, didn’t bat an eyelid, just wrote the cheques. Believed me when I said I had to give up because of my knees.

It’s deceitful, I know, and wrong, I’m sure. But what options do I have? If Dan knew what I’d done, the lies I’ve told, the secrets I’ve kept, the trouble I’ve got into … he’d never forgive me. And despite all his flaws – and hell, we’ve all got flaws, haven’t we? – he is my husband; we are committed to each other by our marriage vows. I do love him still, though it’s hard to remember that sometimes, through all the guilt and despair and the pretending. The pretending is the worst of it all. It’s doing my head in, as the children would say.

They don’t mess around, these people. Back in Hong Kong – our second sojourn there – things went rapidly downhill. I got my fix by joining gatherings communicated only by untraceable phone messages and word of mouth. Remember, this is before the internet kicked in and changed everything forever. Back then, you had to take part for real; there was no online option that enables a distance to be kept between participants.

For me, I think it was partly the thrill of the subversive that constantly garnered my enthusiasm and spurred me on, the addiction to breaking the rules, to stepping outside the cloying prison of the expat world into something so much grittier, earthier, more raw. Of rubbing shoulders with gangsters, criminals, the population of an underworld that people like me normally only ever see in the movies. It’s amazing the resources you can find within yourself, the things you do that you could never imagine, when you are in the grip of a passion.

But one day I’d no way to pay. I’d maxed out my credit card, spent all my cash. The cigarette burn was only a small one. I managed to cover it up; Dan never noticed it. It was meant to be discreet. A warning. And it worked. I didn’t participate without sufficient funds again. Not until right at the end, anyway.

By that time, it was out of control. The leeches can spot when the flesh is weak, when it will be easily punctured and bled dry. And that’s what they did. We left just before it all blew up. They only let me out because I said I was pregnant. I begged for more time to pay for the sake of my fictitious unborn child, swore on my existing children’s lives that I would.

Sometimes I’m not sure if the worst thing is the deed itself, or the person it makes you become.

So my immediate problem is that I need money and I can’t ask Dan for any more. Recently, I’ve been putting my hopes in my talent for photography. I’m going to write a book about foraging, a glossy, illustrated volume that will grace coffee tables across the land.

How ridiculous is that? How unlikely that I’ll ever make a bean?

They say hope springs eternal and that’s never been truer than right here, right now. Which is more absurd, the hope that I’ll get the money from somewhere or the hope that they won’t find me before I have?

Even if the caller today wasn’t them but stupid Miriam, they still know where I go and follow me when I leave the house. I’m sure they do. I have a constant feeling of being watched, spied upon, studied. I see the black car everywhere, cruising along the streets, cool as you like. Sometimes it drives me crazy, sometimes to despair. I know they’re waiting for me to put a foot wrong, to make a mistake. To miss a payment again.

If I told you, you’d probably say, ‘go to the police’, or ‘tell Dan, it’s always best to be honest’. But I can’t. If I tell the police, they’ll know immediately and that will be the end of me. The UK forces of law and order are hardly going to give me twenty-four-hour protection, are they?

At that thought I instinctively look around me. It’s insane. The only window faces onto your enclosed backyard. It’s bleak and bare outside, nothing and no one in sight.

I’ve put into Dan’s mind that my low mood is due to worrying about growing old, being past my sell-by-date. Everything in Dan’s world can be fixed by throwing money at it, and ageing is no exception. The cash he gives me for Botox and fillers is the only cash I actually spend as I say I do, because it would be impossible to take such large sums and then explain away a face that is still covered in wrinkles.

Maybe that’s the solution, it occurs to me now. Plastic surgery, giving myself a new face and