‘Brilliant, Pat, now you’ve told her it’s Monopoly before she’s even opened it!’ Grandad Norm shook his head, disappointed.

And strangely, this was the thing that made Bessie laugh. It was her sixteenth birthday and her grandparents had bought her a new Monopoly set. No doubt the same one they had bought her for Christmas and for her birthday the year before last. She resolved to put it with the others in the bottom of her wardrobe.

‘Thank you,’ she managed through a giggle verging on hysteria.

‘Atta girl!’ Her mum breathed a big sigh of relief and Bessie wished she could do the same.

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

August 20th 2021

Bess put away the breakfast things, sprayed the surfaces with an antibacterial cleaner and wiped them down with a damp dishcloth. She did this on her day off – cleaned, wiped, plumped, fluffed, vacuumed and laundered, until she fell into bed exhausted and ready to go back to work the next day for a rest and a change of scenery. This morning she decided to tackle the chores with more of a spring in her step. Jim was right: she should try to celebrate the day!

Pulling on her rubber gloves, she knelt on the floor with her face pushed up against the toilet bowl and wiped round the back with her sponge, soaked in hot water and bleach, still amazed after thirty-odd years of marriage just how much wee Mario had managed to splash there in seven days.

‘Oh Mario! Can’t you control your pee-pee?’ she had once asked him over the tea table.

‘Control my pee-pee?’ he had asked, his fork midway to his mouth, held still, as the minced beef and onion gravy dripped through the tines back on to the plate. ‘What am I, six?’

‘I don’t know, Mario. Can six-year-olds control where they pee-pee?’

He had thrown the fork down and gone out in a huff, angered apparently by her comment, which was just too bad – it was her, not him, that had to face this most unpleasant task each Friday. With the bathroom sparkling, the bed stripped of linen, and the duvet cover, sheets and pillowcases tumbling inside the machine on a hot wash, she hummed along with the radio to Cher’s dark tones declaring what she would do if she could turn back time . . .