CHAPTER ONE

      I don’t know how you would react to finding your brother-in-law knocking off your fiancée in the potting shed, but I can tell you that I was annoyed. Not annoyed so much as bloody choked. I mean, what a liberty. My own brother-in-law! The horny bastard who was living in the room below mine at the ancestral home of the Leas in Scraggs Road. It would have broken my sister’s heart. Poor Rosie thought the sun went in every time he pulled up his trousers. But what about me? Why was I being so generous with my sympathy? The cunning of the bitch. All that ‘butter wouldn’t melt between my legs’ innocence. The reproving looks every time I used a four-letter word, her little hand sneaking over the top of her glass after the second Babycham. Well, she certainly had me fooled.

      That’s what annoyed me most of all, really. I’d been fooled. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d reckoned her as being a bit on the flighty side, but I’d never had an inkling. She’d really made a mug out of me.

      I must confess that when I’d stalked off into the night, leaving them clambering out of the wreckage of the shed, I though seriously about going straight home and sobbing the whole story to Rosie. But as I strode through the drizzle and my blood cooled a bit, two things stopped me. One was the praiseworthy desire to spare my sister’s feelings already alluded to, and the other, and much stronger emotion, the fear that everybody in the neighbourhood would soon know that I had been shat on by sexy Sidney, Balham’s answer to the piston engine. If I dropped Sidney in it, he wouldn’t be slow to make sure that everybody in S.W.12 knew that my fiancée preferred him in bed, in a shed, or anywhere, and I couldn’t have stood that. Some of the things I’d heard her whispering to him in the shed fair made my blood curdle; mainly because I had a horrible suspicion that she had never felt like that with me. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help it.

      Mum and Dad had gone to bed when I got home and I tiptoed up to my attic room and lay there staring at the roof (I didn’t have much alternative because it was about three inches above my head) and wondering what I should do. As is my normal habit in situations like that, I eventually decided: nothing. Apart from Rosie and my reputation, there was the job (Sid and I were partners in a window-cleaning business) and though we went pretty much our own ways, I didn’t want to rock the boat too much there.

      The more I rationalised it all the more I put the blame squarely on Liz’s shoulders. I hated her, but at the same time I wanted her more than I’d ever done in the past. Not with any shred of affection, but with a desire to batter her to death with my body so that she died gasping “You are the greatest” with a look of unspeakable contentment etched across her glazed eyeballs. It had been this ability to look on the brighter side that has been my salvation in many chastening situations.

      Not that I was prepared to give Sid a book token or anything. The bastard would be dead scared that I’d spill the beans to Rosie and I decided to let him sweat on it. I didn’t hear him come in before I fell asleep and the next morning when I got down to breakfast early, there was no sign of him or Rosie. Dad was sitting there studying his form book and Mum was frying bread. Dad is very working-class because, though he never does anything, he’s always very punctual about not doing it. He gets down to the Lost Property Office where he works a quarter of an hour before they open and then spends forty minutes in the cafe opposite before he strolls in and bleats like buggery about some kid who comes in five minutes late and gets down to work immediately.

      “Morning,” I say cheerfully.

      “Morning,” says Mum.

      Dad grunts without looking up.

      “Have you seen your Dad’s Dentucreme?” says Mum. I shudder because I can’t stand false teeth at the best of times.

      “I think Sid tried to clean his wet-look shoes with it,” I say.

      “Oh, no! You must be having me on.”

      “Straight up, Ma. Sid got mad because it took all the shine off and threw it out of the window.”

      “Bloody marvellous,” says Dad. “Who does he think he is?”

      “You’ll be able to ask him yourself,” I say, as Sid comes in trying to look all relaxed. I am glad to see that there is a lump under one of his eyes and his upper lip is grotesquely swollen.