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

My father was an addict.

The dictionary definition of ‘addicted’ is to be physically or mentally dependent on a particular substance and unable to stop taking it without incurring adverse effects.

Dad could get addicted to anything. Alcohol. Star Trek. Taking pictures.

If there was an opportunity to do whatever it was to an unhealthy degree and to the exclusion of what he should be doing – i.e. going out to work and earning a living for his family, caring for his children, securing them a roof over their heads and so on – then he would do it.

He indulged in many things to an unhealthy degree but his real downfall was gambling.

Internet research tells me that ‘behavioural addiction’ is a compulsion to engage in rewarding non-drug related behaviour regardless of any negative consequences to the person’s physical, mental, social, or financial wellbeing.

It also tells me that there’s a gene that addicts have, and that it’s often handed down through the generations.

I could read that and excuse myself my actions, talk myself down from the cliff edge of guilt and anguish and helplessness. But I don’t. It just makes me hate my father and everything he did to me and my siblings even more.

His gambling lost us our house. We were homeless, out on the streets. If I tell people that, it’s usually the worst thing they can possibly imagine. But he caused us another loss that was even more terrible.

Our mother.

She left, walked out one midsummer morning, and moved in with a man she’d met at the Citizens Advice Bureau, when she was trying to sort out what she was entitled to, what benefits she could claim given that she had no income and no way to support herself and her three children.

He advised her all right.

I’ll always believe that if she’d stuck by Dad, if she’d tried to get him help and encouraged him, he could have beaten the addictions. But she didn’t want him, and nor, as it turned out, did she want us. Me and my two younger siblings.

We went to live with our grandparents and I hardly spoke to my mother ever again. Or my father, because he passed away shortly after the house was taken, found sleeping rough on the streets, dead from alcohol poisoning.

I picked myself up, turned myself around and determined that I would never find myself in either of my parents’ situations. But the best laid plans and all that. I’m completely dependent on Dan. If the worst came to the worst and we did divorce, at least the laws are tougher these days and maintenance payments are rigidly enforced. But still. I wouldn’t be able to live the way I do now, nothing like. I’m not sure I’d be able to live at all. Not just in the survival sense, but metaphorically. I’m as reliant on him as I’ve ever been on any of my … habits, shall we call them.

And if the truth came out I’d more than likely lose the children, be deemed an unfit mother, a bad influence, or both.

So the worst is not going to come to the worst. It’s not going to happen. I want my children to grow up with a mother and father and to have the secure and happy childhood I didn’t have. I won’t let anything or anyone – not Naomi or any other jumped-up floozy – come between us.

I won’t let myself and my sins and misdemeanours come between us, either.

Chapter 18

Susannah

I’m starting to notice that Dan really does come to the cafe an awful lot; he’s been in every day this week, breezing past me in a sophisticated flurry of expensive aftershave, easy bonhomie, and the self-possession of the affluent. He says he starts work late because he deals with west coast US so he has to wait for them all to wake up.

Today, he’s in as usual for breakfast and orders his customary flat white accompanied by homemade granola with summer berries.

‘Did you forage for them?’ he asks jokingly, gesturing towards his bowl that is brimming with redcurrants, raspberries and blueberries as I fuss with my ordering pad and the arrangement of the salt and pepper pots on the table.

‘No,’ I confess. ‘They don’t grow wild around here and I think I might cause a bit of a stir if I raided the village allotments.’

I pause to allow him to smile, which he does, obligingly.

‘But the lunchtime soup is a caldo verde of cow parsley and wild rocket that I gathered myself,’ I tell him, with faux primness. I’ve got much more confident with my plant identification these days, and I’ve revisited the patch of verge where Charlotte showed me the difference between the edible plant and the toxic weed several times. We’re pretty much at the end of the cow parsley season now, though – much longer and it will be too tough and unpalatable.

‘So if I stay for lunch do I get it cheaper, if all the ingredients are free?’ Dan retaliates. ‘A discount at least, surely?’

At this point, Naomi comes bustling over, all huge breasts made even more prominent by her apron, which sports an image of a naked female body, private parts naively obscured by fruits. I think she finds it amusing.

‘My favourite customer,’ she gushes, running her hand down Dan’s cheek and then pulling him into an embrace that involves his head being engulfed by the aforementioned bosom.

Dan doesn’t bat an eyelid. Well, he hardly could, given that his eyes are more or less subsumed by Naomi’s chest and arms, submerged in a sea of flesh. But even when released he remains as dignified and unruffled as ever, taking it all in his stride.

‘Can I get you anything else, my darling?’ she asks, fishing a notepad out of her apron pocket. I hang around, feeling redundant.

Dan waves her away. ‘Susannah’s got this,’ he says firmly. ‘All in hand.’

I just about manage to stop myself from