Read The Love Market for Free Online

like a death, Celine. You have to grieve the marriage but you have to move on too. There’s no point in moping. Divorce means a marriage is over, not a life.’
    ‘Who said I’m moping, Jacqui?’ My pace slows. ‘And of course I know my life isn’t over! But it’s only been a week. They say it takes two years to get over a divorce.’
    ‘That’s only when they’ve walked out on you when you’re three months pregnant. Or they’ve been displaying their willies on the Internet. When you’re the one that wasn’t happy, life begins the minute he’s down the garden path. In theory, I suppose.’
    ‘I don’t believe that. Not for one minute. Even if I wanted to run out and get someone else, I feel a bit like discounted goods now.’
    She scowls at me. ‘That’s a thing to say!’
    ‘It’s true. It’s not exactly an attribute, is it: telling someone you’re divorced.’ I am only saying that silliness because I am feeling sorry for myself.
    It’s stopped raining so I take off my nylon jacket and wrap it around my hips as we run, enjoying the April air on my bare arms. ‘Do you think that’s why I’ve never exactly cracked up, Jacq? Because I was so convinced it was what I wanted?’ I nip my dripping nose. The worst I’ve done when he first left was spill the milk when I was putting it on my cereal, because I was distracted by a moment of extreme missing him. ‘I mean, I’ve never totally lost the plot, have I? Never walked around Hexham market in my dressing gown, stockpiled Prozac in the garage, backed my car into a small person who I mistook for a street lamp… What’s wrong with me?’
    Jacqui’s striking almond eyes latch onto mine. Even though we’re not real sisters—Jacqui being the daughter of my mother’s second husband—our thoughts and fears definitely seem to spring from the same well. We’ve even been told we look alike. Similar height—I’m an inch taller; similar body-types—slim enough, but prone to packing on ten pounds after two weeks of pigging out. At thirty-six, I’m already going grey and colour my long hair a dark chestnut brown, whereas Jacqui, two years my junior, has naturally mousey hair, and highlights it blonde, and wears it in a bob. When my mum married Len, his kids—Jacqui and Chris—had lost their mother to cancer. Somehow there we all were, a miscellany of identities put together under one roof, trying to be a family: a five-piece family in a doll’s house. I just thought that Len was a pervert, Chris a lame-brain, and Jacqui was always there, trying to be my friend. Maybe I’d not have resented her if she didn’t seem to have my mother’s approval in a way that I never did, even if it was just my mother sucking up to Len—who was there, earned good money, and wasn’t my father. That is, until he started going out in Chris’s shirts and coming home covered in love-bites, then ran off with a nurse, and became exactly like my father. Then Jacqui, Chris and I had a bit more in common. We all had absentee dads, and in a way we were all motherless: theirs had died, and mine was there in body but little else. Chris now lives near Hull with his high-maintenance girlfriend, and once in a while he’ll phone and we’ll end up talking for four hours then he disappears for two years. And Jacqui is the human equivalent of my ligaments, always holding me in place to prevent my dislocation.
    ‘You don’t have to have a public breakdown to prove to the world that you carry pain,’ she says.
    I shake my head, feeling the tears build. ‘It’s just odd thinking of him being out there living a life without me. Him with someone else. Or me, with somebody who doesn’t share any of my history, who isn’t Aimee’s father. Who never actually stood there and shared that joy and amazement when she was born. How do you suddenly not have someone in your life any more when for thirteen years they literally were your life?’
    Our pace slows a little more, until we come