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above-average
prospects. Nevertheless, Henry and Esther remained extremely close
into old age. As a child, Anna had always received a ten-shilling
note in her birthday card from Uncle Henry and Aunty Yetta, and
always thought of them as part of her mother's family.
       
    G loria put on her jacket, gave Anna's worktop another wipe, took a look in the fridge to check she had enough food in, kissed
her and said, “See you Thursday.”
       
    A nna went upstairs to the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat and started to read the small ad Brenda had ringed.
    “Are you in a relationship or happily married, but would
like a lover? Liaisons Dangereux is a dating agency with a
difference.” Then there was a telephone number.
    Anna refolded the page, rolled it into a small cigar and
slipped it inside a box of Tampax.

C H A P T E R     T H R E E
    “ W E USED TO BE A HAPPY FAMILY before all this happened,' wept attractive mum of two, Dawn, 40, from the beamed
mock-Tudor lounge of her apartment in Barking. “I used to enjoy
going out for a Malibu and Coke with the girls of an evening. Terry
used to look forward to a bit of a fight with his mates at the West
Ham football matches. These days, all our friends have deserted us.
We daren't even walk round the estate without the Rottweilers,
because there's always some bastard pointing a finger at us.
Sigourney and Keanu are wonderful kids since they came out of the
detention center, but they're being bullied so much at school over
this, they've been offered counseling.' ”
    Anna was sitting at the word processor in her
bedroom-cum-study, just getting to the end of a piece for the
health pages of the
Globe on Sunday
about coping with
nits—provisionally headlined “Lousy Mother's Nit Nightmare
Shame”—when she looked down at her watch and realized that
if she didn't get a move on, she was going to be late for Uncle
Henry's funeral.
    The article should have taken only a couple of hours to
write, but Anna was spending ages on it, because she had passed
most of the morning staring out of the window trying to pluck up
the courage to phone Liaisons Dangereux, but then decided she
couldn't because they were bound to want her to deliver her
romantic manifesto in some cringe-makingly embarrassing video. She
knew the style, since she had done an article a couple of years ago
on women who used dating agencies, and had sat in while some of
them performed what one outfit referred to pretentiously as the
client's “piece to camera.”
    The women fell into two groups. First there were the fat
middle-aged divorcees with bad perms, who had just started some
computer access course or other. Then there were the sad
twenty-something lasses with eczema and brains the size of
Cadbury's Creme Eggs, who sat in front of the camera and gabbled:
“Hi, my name's Nicole and I come from Worcester Park. I work in
personnel for a large company which specializes in intimate
rubberwear. My ambitions are to meet Simon Cowell, to find a way to
wax my bikini line without getting that embarrassing rash and to
end world hunger. At this moment in time I am without a special
someone in my life and I'm searching for a soulmate for walks,
talks and maybe more. Are you the shining star who can brighten up
my lonely nights?”
    With the possible exception of auditioning for
Pop Idol
in
nothing but silver hot pants and a matching boob tube, Anna could think of no worse humiliation
than making a dating agency video. Nevertheless, she couldn't help
fantasizing about what she might say, should the occasion arise.
She suspected she would dispense with the introduction and launch
straight into: “Look, I live with a fucking lunatic who would
rather spend his nights on an Internet Terminal Illness Forum
exchanging information on symptoms and hospice facilities with
fellow hypochondriacs in Kentucky than have sex with me. So if you
own your own liver, your tap stops dripping after you've had a pee,
or better still, you had yet