Read A Certain Age for Free Online Page A

of quite violent effort
] Uff! Oof! Uff! It was just after that she called me in and sent me home! Oh heavens! She thinks I stabbed Steve! Stabbed him until he flew around the room going [
blows raspberry]. [Serious
] It’s funny, I’ve spent so much of my life worrying with Steve about things that don’t happen, now something has really happened I feel I can’t worry about it, as if I’ve done all the worrying already. It’s only when I think, [
moved
] oh, Steve might never see the new biscuit tin—
    I told DS Law, I thought I had to, that Steve did often say animal rights people might come after him for hisjob at the lab, and how he checked under the car for bombs. I felt very disloyal saying it; Steve feels so strongly that no one should know. But once I’d said it, and the DS was so surprised his jaw dropped, I started thinking, oh lumme, I must have made that up, it’s very peculiar, isn’t it? But the truth is, we’ve been checking under the car for years. Just common sense, Steve said. Self-protection. The threat of terrorism was just part of our lives – the house alarm, the mirrors on sticks for looking under the car, the perusal of the papers every day for stories of animal rights activists, the decision never to have children in case they were used as hostages or left orphaned. I mean, the very day Steve disappeared he’d cut a piece out of the
Times
about a senior research scientist in Denmark whose wife had been abducted. It does happen, I said. DS Law stopped writing it all down in his notebook, put down his pen, took a biscuit, and said the point is, though, Steve is not a senior research scientist, he’s a lab technician. At the Fawley Research Centre, where he works, there are at least 150 people who are more likely to be targeted than Steve. And I said, [
brave laugh; it’s a shock
] “I know that! Good heavens, I know that!”
    I’ve been turning the place upside down looking for the passports, and of course I found stuff I’ve been hoarding – my degree certificate and this, my letter admitting me to the civil service. And suddenly, all these years of living like, like mice in the skirting board, just came over me in a wave, and I sat here, and I thought, [
quite upset; not angry, but sad
] spit, that was my life, Steve. What’s happened to me? Twenty years ago I was on a fast track in the Home Office, and now I can’t keep a job in a petting zoo. Now I agree with you and your mum about my “MTs” and having no willpower whatsoever, and I keep it a secret if I find joyin anything, so my husband can’t say I’m unbalanced. No children. Didn’t we work and worry strenuously to avoid children? And of course it never helped the mood exactly to have Steve breaking off to run downstairs to check the fridge was shut. And it was me who wasn’t normal, apparently. I’m beginning to wonder what normal is, Steve. I’m beginning to think it’s not really normal to sweep your front lawn for landmines.
    Scene Six: home, happy music
    It was just after DS Law left that it all happened. I was putting the biscuits away in the cupboard and I saw the old biscuit tin, and I thought, “Now, what am I going to use you for?”, so I picked it up and opened it and inside there was this letter from Steve with my passport and quite a lot of cash in used notes. He had stuck a note saying “Don’t Lose” on the passport and sealed up the letter in an envelope.
    “To my wife,” it said on the outside. “Urgent. Private. By hand.” I turned over the envelope to open it and found on the back “Destroy After Reading”. I opened it. I sat down. This had better be good, Steve, I thought. “Dear wife,” it said. “This evening, June 15, I returned home from Fawley’s at the usual time and found no sign of you. Alert to the Danish experience in this morning’s
Times,
I naturally fear you have been abducted according to the same pattern; I also fear that if you have been abducted, they are really