After the kids and her husband had disappeared to go wherever it is they vanished whenever dishes piled up in the sink, Amber thought about her life. Not only was she running a boutique hotel for all the people in her radius – people who apparently believed the dirty crockery levitated itself in and out of the sink of its own accord – she was also expected to quietly guide and advise her kids and her hubby and the pets and her employees and her clients and her demanding mother and her mother’s maligned manicurist/gardener/pool boy/etc. with the patience of a police officer talking someone down off a ledge.

After putting the laundry on, stacking the dishwasher, defrosting a big tray of lasagne for tomorrow’s dinner, checking that all teenagers’ electronic devices were off and putting the cat out, Amber finally crawled, exhausted, into bed. The one thing she was fantasising about was sleep – and then she felt her husband’s hand groping for her across the sheets. As he tweaked her left nipple, she found herself contemplating a subtle hint to let him know she wasn’t in the mood – such as smashing the ceramic bedside lamp on his head.

It wasn’t that Scott was unattractive. While many of her girlfriends’ husbands’ six packs had become blobs of mozzarella dangling there over their dooverlackies, Scott was still fit. He didn’t have time to help around the house, but he miraculously found hours to jog and cycle and play squash. Scott was the kind of man who would hire a gardener to cut the lawns so that he had time to play golf for the exercise.

As her husband’s hand moved down her belly and under the elastic of her pyjama pants, she wondered how it was that a man who hadn’t spoken to her all day, and had nearly burnt down her kitchen, could think she’d be in the mood for love. No. She was in the mood for garrotting him with his jockstrap. As he prodded away at her clitoris as though it were an ATM machine, all she wanted to say was ‘Out of order. Not dispensing. And definitely no deposits.’ There’s so much emphasis on women faking orgasms, Amber thought, but what about men faking foreplay? She’d toyed with starting a His and Her orgasm chart to highlight discrepancies, but would he even care? Her husband was so self-obsessed, Amber often thought Scott should have just asked for his own hand in marriage. But part of Amber’s ‘happy marriage’ mirage meant keeping her husband content, and so she rolled towards him.