The Worst Case Scenario Cookery Club

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘Will you think about it, Liz?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we won’t tell Saskia just yet, right?’

  ‘So that means you’re going back to Brittney’s tonight?’ Liz asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ian. ‘I need to give you some time to think. But regardless of what you decide about us, I’m going to tell her it’s over this week. I swear I am.’

  ‘If you bring Saskia back here after her rehearsal, so you and Brittney can have a bit of privacy, you could tell her what’s going on this weekend.’

  ‘Yeah. I would but … but it’s not a good time for Brittney.’

  Too right, thought Liz. She’s just all but announced her engagement on the interwebz.

  ‘She’s got some important blog convention coming up.’

  The convention that was taking place over their daughter’s sixteenth birthday.

  ‘I don’t want to drop my bombshell at such a big moment for her career. That seems unfair.’

  ‘Yes,’ Liz agreed. ‘But there’s never a right time, is there?’

  Ian glanced at his phone, ostensibly to see the actual time. Liz noticed that he had a couple of text message notifications. Ian didn’t check them but when he put his phone back on the table, he placed it face down so that Liz couldn’t see the screen.

  ‘I’ve got another fifteen minutes before I need to pick Saskia up. Any chance I could have some more beef?’

  ‘Won’t Brittney smell it on your breath when she kisses you?’

  ‘She doesn’t kiss me any more,’ said Ian.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Later, as she washed up two plates instead of one, Liz wondered what on earth had just happened. Was Ian serious about wanting to come back? He seemed to have given some deep thought to how it might work. All that stuff about staying in the spare room though. What was that really about? On the one hand, Liz knew she should be impressed that he’d realised she might not want him to move straight back into the master bedroom. On the other hand, she couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t pushed it. If he wanted her back, didn’t he want her body and soul?

  Did she have the right to refuse him the spare room anyway? The house was still in both their names. If she didn’t let him come back, a judge certainly might.

  Oh, it was all she’d ever wanted. Her ideal life. Her husband, her daughter, her dog, all safely cocooned inside their lovely family home, which they would no longer have to sell to complete the settlement. And yet …

  Ian had scrunched up his paper napkin and left it on the table as he always did. Even though he had blown his nose on it. Liz was surprised at how irritated she felt by her nearly ex-husband’s appalling table manners. She’d forgotten how bad they were.

  Was Liz ready to face that every day again?

  When Ian first left, Liz thought she would never get used to a life without him. He had been a part of her day-to-day existence for seventeen years. It felt as though her adult life really began when she met him. It was with Ian that Liz had shared so many firsts. She went on her first foreign holiday with Ian. They bought their first house together. They had their first child together. Ian’s revelation that the timing of his leaving was down to the fact that Brittney thought she was pregnant had been a wake-up call. At forty-five, Liz didn’t expect to have any more children. She had found Saskia’s baby years such hard work that she didn’t fret over the thought that she might not go through that again. But that didn’t have to be the case for Ian. There were plenty of younger women who could keep on producing his progeny if that’s what he wanted.

  However, in the past twelve months, Liz had experienced a whole new raft of firsts. The first time she had to put the bins out (Ian was always very traditional about that). The first time she had to take a meter reading (he never trusted her to get it right). The first time she had to take her car for an MOT (he was sure the garage would rip her off if he didn’t take it in for her, though he knew just as little about cars as she did). The first time she holidayed alone with their daughter (that was a disaster, but never mind). The first time she cooked a fish pie (another disaster). The first time she had been arrested (though technically, Ian had been there for that).

  It was an entirely different list of firsts and experiences Liz might not have chosen for herself but she had survived them all and they had made her a stronger person. Never again would she worry about the car making a funny noise or the towel rail in the bathroom not heating up evenly. Liz knew what to do in both those circumstances and many more besides. And if she didn’t, she could always find someone to ask. She’d cultivated quite a few ‘handy people’ over the past twelve months.

  For a while Ian’s departure had left Liz feeling like she was losing a limb – she felt helpless and abandoned – but without even really noticing it, she had changed and grown and become a woman who was perfectly capable of looking after herself, her daughter and their dog. She didn’t need a man to do life’s ‘heavy lifting’ any more, so if Liz was going to have a man in her life, she wanted him to be there to be her best mate and her lover. She wanted him to be there so that she had someone to laugh with. Someone to hold. Someone to kiss.

  Liz thought about Ian’s assertion that Brittney would never find out he’d been eating beef because she didn’t kiss him any more. At least the last six years of Liz and Ian’s marriage had been a kiss-free zone, no matter what Ian had eaten. It wasn’t Liz who’d stopped wanting the affection. If Ian came back, would the affection miraculously come back too?

  With the washing up finished, Liz sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She sat in Ian’s seat, which was now her seat. If Ian returned, she’d have to give up the comfort of the radiator at her back and the garden view. How had he ended up bagging the best seat anyway? Liz thought of her boss Vince and his wife Bernie. At the surgery’s Christmas dinner, Vince always insisted that Bernie have the better seat, looking into the room. Bernie was his princess.

  ‘I want to be someone’s princess,’ Liz said out loud.

  Ted put a paw on Liz’s knee, in a gesture that said, ‘You’re mine.’

  ‘Oh Ted,’ she scratched the little terrier behind the ears in the way that always sent him into a happy trance. ‘What are we going to do? Do you want Ian to come back? Do you miss him? Would he take you for better walks than I do? He never used to take you for walks, did he? I’m sure he’d make you stick to the diet though.’

  Ted was not much help.

  The bottom line was Liz wasn’t entirely sure she wanted Ian back and she wasn’t convinced he really wanted to come back either. Not for the right reasons. Not because he woke up one morning and realised that he was missing the love of his life. Liz began to suspect that if there hadn’t been a spare bedroom in the Chandler family home, Ian might have been looking elsewhere.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ‘Good weekend?’ Corinne asked when Liz walked into the surgery on Monday morning.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Liz.

  ‘Did you get laid?’ Corinne asked, as she always did.

  ‘Fat chance.’

  ‘You should go on Tinder.’

  ‘You should get lost. Anyway, Ian asked if he could move back home.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He says he wants to leave the blogger.’

  ‘What! Oh my days, Liz.’ Corinne grabbed Liz by the arm and steered her into a quiet corner so they could gossip without Julie hearing. ‘What happened? And what did you tell him?’

  Liz recounted Friday evening’s events, finishing with, ‘I told him I’d think about it.’

  ‘That’s right, girl. You make him sweat before you let him come home. And make sure you lay down the law before he gets his feet under the table. This is your chance to get it right, Liz. Catch him now, while he’s at his weakest. He’ll agree to anything. I’d demand a renewal of your vows for a start. And a nice new eternity ring to go with them.’

  ‘I hadn’t even considered the possibili
ty of getting jewellery out of the situation,’ said Liz.

  ‘Oh, but you must. How will the bastard ever learn his lesson if it doesn’t cost him lots of money? You need diamonds, my girl.’

  ‘I really don’t,’ said Liz.

  ‘Whatever. When’s he going to tell her?’

  ‘He says he’s got to wait for the right moment. She’s got some big blogging convention coming up and he doesn’t want to upset her before then. He doesn’t want to ruin her career as well as break her heart.’

  ‘If only he’d given you the same consideration,’ Corinne pointed out. ‘Didn’t he leave you the week before we went to the Dental World Fair in Nottingham?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘I remember. You were in pieces.’

  ‘I didn’t have to get up on stage or anything.’

  ‘So? You ought to tell him that if he’s leaving her, he’s leaving her. If he’s coming back it’s you he needs to be thinking of now.’

  Liz nodded vaguely. It was an odd sensation. Liz wondered if she was feeling as Brittney must have felt when Ian told her he was going to end his marriage. On the one hand, Liz’s dream was coming true. The days until Ian came back should be like the days on the advent calendar. But Liz couldn’t help thinking about the row that would have to happen first.

  Oh, that was Brittney’s lookout. She had knowingly got involved with a married man. She had stolen him away from his wife and his daughter. And his dog. Now she was getting a taste of her own medicine.

  Corinne gave Liz a high-five. ‘I knew he’d come back to you,’ she said. ‘You rock.’

  Before she started work, Liz logged on to Brittney’s Bites. There was nothing to suggest that Ian had dropped his bombshell yet. Brittney had merely posted a picture of that morning’s healthy breakfast, complete with instructions on how to make her super-food muesli, which worked out to cost about the same per ounce as gold, once you’d bought all the raw ingredients at your local Holland and Barrett.

  Disappointed by Brittney’s blog, Liz logged on to Facebook to do a little light stalking of the Waggy Weight Losers. There was good news from the latest weigh-in. Hercules had hit his target weight. Twinkle the Cockapoo was the week’s biggest loser, which was a surprise. And there was a photograph of Coco, wearing a great big canine choirboy collar designed to stop her from picking at her stitches. She was photographed sitting on the grass outside the surgery with Dr Thomas crouching beside her. He looked so pleased with his patient’s progress. Liz couldn’t help smiling.

  Once again, there was no mention of the fact that Dr Thomas had done the operation for free. He was keeping his generosity safely under his hat.

  Liz found herself enlarging the photograph so that she could get a better look at Dr Thomas’s eyes. The nice eyes that twinkled when he laughed at the antics of the Waggy Weight Loss dogs.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Corinne asked, walking in and looking over Liz’s shoulder. ‘He’s gorgeous. Did you meet him on Tinder? No wonder you don’t know whether you want Ian to come home.’

  Liz abruptly clicked the screen closed.

  ‘Give over,’ said Liz. ‘I was just trying to get a closer look at the dog.’

  Corinne just gave her ‘the nod’.

  ‘Can we have one more girls’ night out before Ian leaves her and moves back home?’ Corinne asked. ‘A farewell to your singledom? It’ll be like a second hen night.’

  Corinne had been at Liz’s actual hen night. Liz had only hazy memories of that party and they were all highly embarrassing. Vow renewals and the prospect of a second hen night seemed strangely unappealing. It was all a bit Katie Price.

  ‘We’ll go back to that Mexican place,’ said Corinne. ‘Tequila!’

  Before Liz could make her excuses, her first patient of the morning arrived.

  Derek was an ageing punk, who took a very un-punk interest in his oral hygiene. He was a regular in Liz’s chair and absolutely unimpeachable when it came to brushing and flossing. There was rarely very much for Liz to do.

  Derek asked if Liz would play ‘Firestarter’ by The Prodigy while she was giving him his scale and polish.

  ‘Louder,’ he said, when she started with the Sonic Pic.

  Liz hadn’t listened to The Prodigy in a long while. It reminded her of when she and Ian first started seeing each other. When he was still living with his old girlfriend in Totnes and they had to meet up on the sly. The Prodigy was one of the CDs Ian played when he drove Liz to deserted beaches for illicit snogging sessions.

  Liz wondered what had happened to the girlfriend from Totnes. Kat, Liz thought her name was. Ian had taken at least four months to find the right time to say he was leaving her. He told Liz that Kat took their break-up badly. He said she refused to let him have a lot of his stuff, which necessitated him having to go round there on a regular basis for a while in an attempt to persuade her to relinquish his shirts and CDs. Now Liz wondered whether Ian had actually moved out when he said he did. He had done a lot of ‘business trips’ in the weeks after he first left a toothbrush and holdall full of worn-out underpants at Liz’s.

  Already that day, Ian had sent Liz three texts. It was the most communicative they’d been since the beginning of their separation, when Liz texted Ian around fifty times a day to remind him that he was an arsehole and he’d left her for a bitch. The tone of their communication was somewhat different now.

  ‘Hope you’re having a nice day!’ Ian wrote almost before the day had started.

  ‘Just thinking about you and how you’re getting on.’

  ‘Had any more thoughts about what we talked about on Friday night?’

  Liz started to type a response to the third text but it struck her halfway through that she still didn’t really know what she was thinking. And then her next patient arrived downstairs. A new patient, according to the schedule on Liz’s screen. Thomas Evans.

  As she pulled up his details, Liz realised she was busting for a wee. She asked Julie on the front desk to show Thomas Evans in and settle him into the chair while she nipped to the bathroom. When Liz came back, Thomas Evans was obscured by the back of the reclining seat. Talking all the time, Liz tipped back the chair – still a bit Sweeney Todd – and simultaneously flicked on the stereo, which was still playing ‘Firestarter’ at full volume.

  When Liz leaned over her new patient, he stared up at her with frightened eyes.

  ‘Mrs Ted!’ the vet exclaimed.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  ‘You’re not Thomas Evans.’

  It was Dr Evan Thomas. Trust Julie. She was forever getting things the wrong way round, especially if people had surnames that could be Christian names. She always had one eye on an article in Hello! when she was tapping things into the electronic diary.

  The vet sat up, looking worried and clutched at his collar in a protective sort of gesture.

  Liz turned off the music.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ said Liz. ‘I had no idea the music was going to come on so loud. I had no idea the Firestarter CD was still in there.’

  ‘And I had no idea the hygienist was going to be you,’ said Dr Thomas.

  He didn’t look happy about it. Fair enough. He did know Liz as a careless dog owner and a salami-wielding psychopath after all.

  ‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘I’m sorry to have surprised you. You do have the right to walk if you want to. I’ll understand if you do. We won’t charge.’

  ‘No. No. No,’ said Dr Thomas, settling back in the seat again. ‘I need to have my teeth cleaned and I don’t want to wait for another appointment. I have a busy schedule. I have animals to treat.’

  ‘In that case …’

  Liz put Dr Thomas into the prone position again.

  ‘But I would prefer not to have to listen to “Firestarter”.’

  ‘What do you want instead?’ Liz asked. ‘You can have anything except Coldplay.’

  ‘Why no Coldplay?’

  ‘Do you really have to ask? My office, my rules.’


  ‘OK.’

  ‘And don’t say Ed Sheeran either.’

  ‘Got any Chopin?’ Dr Thomas suggested.

  Liz pulled up some Chopin Nocturnes. She talked Dr Thomas through the breathing exercises she gave her patients in times of stress (even if she was more stressed than he was by this point). He took to them like a yoga master.

  ‘I do something similar for my cat owners,’ he said. ‘They tend to be nervous of needles.’

  ‘OK,’ Liz said. ‘I think you’re ready. Open up.’

  With only a little residue reluctance, Dr Thomas opened his mouth.

  Liz winced at the sight of his molars. Deliberately. At first sight they actually looked pretty good but she didn’t want him to know that.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ Dr Thomas asked.

  The temptation was to tell him there was a big one. She had Dr Thomas in her chair. She was in charge now. She could put her instruments in his mouth and tell him exactly how he’d made her feel over the past few months of Waggy Weigh-Ins and his high-and-mighty attitude to her having covered his car in cold meats. This was karma in progress.

  However, Liz reminded herself that Dr Thomas’s reaction to her having covered his car in cold meats was actually to attempt to pretend the deeply embarrassing incident had never happened. He’d not asked her for any compensation until she forced him to reveal his interest and told him he was a pompous ass. Then, while she was pretending to be Mrs Coco, she had seen a whole other side to him. A man who put the welfare of animals well above his own financial gain.

  ‘Actually, your teeth look very good,’ said Liz. ‘You obviously look after them well.’

  Dr Thomas’s face visibly relaxed.

  ‘I’ll just give you a little tidy-up.’

  So Liz didn’t use Dr Thomas’s vulnerability to get her own back for having been made to feel so small in so many ways over the past couple of months. She did, however, take the opportunity to try to explain herself. She guessed that she might never have another chance and there was something about Dr Thomas that made her want him to understand what had driven her to the salami incident. She wanted him to know that she wasn’t a bad person. Temporarily mad, maybe, but not truly awful.