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soon so he can bring us to Disneyland before scummy Jason Pierce goes.’
    As Izzy cleared away the dirty dishes, she thought ruefully that it wasn’t a prayer that was needed to get them to Disneyland . . . it was a miracle.
    She walked into the sitting room and gave a little shiver. The house was
so
cold. She felt thoroughly resentful and frustrated that she could no longer just flick a switch and have
instant heat. Even though they had tried to conserve oil by turning on the heat later in the evenings, because winter had come early they had run out of that precious dark liquid a week ago. Since
then, Izzy had been lighting the fire and, because they were economising on fuel, the back boiler was never hot enough to give off more than lukewarm heat from the radiators. Because of Christmas
and all its expenses, they wouldn’t be able to afford oil until well into the New Year. If even then.
    I’m sick of this
, Izzy thought bitterly as she walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out at the lowering sky that threatened snow. Snow! That was all they needed
to make life even more miserable. Come the New Year, she might go looking for a part-time job that would enable her to be there when the children came home from school. She’d been a clerical
officer when she had married Bill. Maybe she should have stayed working instead of taking her lump sum. Then they wouldn’t be so hard hit now. If she got a part-time job, though, it could
affect Bill’s means-tested dole money. There was no point in her working if it meant a reduction in his income, Izzy thought glumly, straightening the folds in her lace curtains. She had
washed them yesterday and they were pristine. Most of the other houses in the cul-de-sac had roller blinds, net curtains being rather old fashioned, but Izzy had always liked ‘proper
curtains’, as her grandmother called them. She hated the idea of people being able to see through her front window. Her home was her haven, not a showpiece for the neighbours to view every
time they walked by.
    Owen, whose latest foible was practising his putting shots on the front lawn, was always trying to gawk in the window and it gave Izzy no small satisfaction to know that he couldn’t see
in. Her curtains were her protection from his prying eyes.
    He was out now, strimming the edge of the grass, despite the fact that it was a bitterly cold winter’s day. She grinned as the catgut broke and flew across the lawn. She knew she was being
petty but she didn’t care. He just got on her nerves. She had got so fed up of him strolling in front of her windows and playing rugby with Jason on the front lawn that she had asked her
brother, a horticulturist, what she could put down to separate the gardens and keep her unwanted neighbour out. A large thorny orange-berried pyracantha trained along a white wooden picket fence
now formed a border between numbers 7 and 8 Maple Wood Drive, curtailing Owen and Jason’s sporting activities somewhat.
    Jason was driving poor old Keith around the twist about the new computer he was getting for Christmas. It was going to be ‘the best computer in the world’, with better games than the
old Dell one that Keith had, according to Jason. Every mother in the cul-de-sac could cheerfully have wrung Jason Pierce’s neck, as their own envious offspring demanded ‘a best
computer’ as well.
    Bill and Izzy had been arguing that morning about what to buy the children for Christmas. Bill, as sick of penny-pinching as she was, wanted to borrow a couple of hundred quid from the credit
union to splash out on Christmas, and to hell with it. Izzy had argued that they needed oil. The house insurance was coming up and all of the children needed new shoes. If there was one thing Izzy
was very particular about, it was about getting good shoes for her children and nowadays a pair of decent shoes for a three-year-old could cost the guts of fifty euros. Paying out fifty euros each