Saturday 4 March

Extract 4

9st (what is point of dieting for whole of Feb when end up exactly same weight at start of March as start of Feb? Huh. Am going to stop getting weighed and counting things every day as no sodding point).

My mother has become a force I no longer recognize. She burst into my flat this morning as I sat slumped in my dressing gown, sulkily painting my toenails and watching the preamble to the racing.

“Darling, can I leave these here for a few hours?” she trilled, flinging an armful of carrier bags down and heading for my bedroom.

Minutes later, in a fit of mild curiosity, I slobbed after her to see what she was doing. She was sitting in front of the mirror in an expensive-looking coffee-colored bra-slip, mascara-ing her eyelashes with her mouth wide open (necessity of open mouth during mascara application great unexplained mystery of nature).

“Don’t you think you should get dressed, darling?”

She looked stunning: skin clear, hair shining. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I really should have taken my makeup off last night. One side of my hair was plastered to my head, the other sticking out in a series of peaks and horns. It is as if the hairs on my head have a life of their own, behaving perfectly sensibly all day, then waiting till I drop off to sleep and starting to run and jump about childishly, saying, ’Now what shall we do?”

“You know,” said Mum, dabbing Givenchy II in her cleavage, “all these years your father’s made such a fuss about doing the bills and the taxes - as if that excused him from thirty years of washing-up. Well, the tax return was overdue, so I thought, sod it, I’ll do it myself. Obviously I couldn’t make head nor tail of it so I rang up the tax office. The man was really quite overbearing with me. ‘Really, Mrs. Jones,’ he said. ‘I simply can’t see what the difficulty is.’ I said, ‘Listen, can you make a brioche?’ He took the point, talked me through it and we had it done inside fifteen minutes. Anyway, he’s taking me out to lunch today. A tax man! Imagine!”

“What?” I stammered, grabbing at the door frame. “What about Julio?”

“Just because I’m "friends" with Julio doesn’t mean I can’t have other "fiends",” she said sweetly, slipping into a yellow two-piece. “Do you like this? Just bought it. Super lemon, don’t you think? Anyway, must fly. I’m meeting him in Debenhams coffee shop at one fifteen.”

After she’d gone I ate a bit of muesli out of the packet with a spoon and finished off the dregs of wine in the fudge.

I know what her secret is: she’s discovered power. She has power over Dad: he wants her back. She has power over Julio, and the tax man, and everyone is sensing her power and wanting a bit of it, which makes her even more irresistible. So all I’ve got to do is find someone or something to have power over and then... oh God. I haven’t even got power over my own hair.

a) What changes took place in Mrs. Jones’ life?

b) How did Bridget react to her mother’s behaviour?

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