The Woman Who Upped and Left: A laugh-out-loud read that will put a spring in your step!. Fiona Gibson

       Chapter One

       Fried Chicken

      Pants. There’s a lot of them about. Tomato-red boxers are strewn on the sofa, while another specimen – turquoise, emblazoned with cartoon palm trees and pineapples – has come to rest under the coffee table like a snoozing pet. A third pair – in a murky mustard hue – are parked in front of the TV as if waiting for their favourite programme to come on. I’m conducting an experiment to see how long they’ll all remain there if I refuse to round them all up. Perhaps, if left for long enough, they’ll fossilise and I can donate them to a museum.

      Yet more are to be found upstairs, in the bathroom, slung close to – but crucially not in – the linen basket. The act of lifting the wicker lid, and dropping them into it, is clearly too arduous a task for a perfectly able-bodied boy of eighteen years old. It’s infuriating. I’ve mentioned it so many times, Morgan must have stopped hearing me – like the way you eventually become unaware of a ticking clock. Either that, or he simply doesn’t give a stuff. Not for the first time I figure that boys of this age and their mothers are just not designed to live together. But I won’t pick them up, not this time. We can live in filth – crucially, he’ll also run out of clean pants and have to start re-wearing dirty ones, turned inside out – and see if I care …

      Beside the scattering of worn boxers lies a tiny scrap of pale lemon lace, which on closer inspection appears to be a thong. This would be Jenna’s. Morgan’s girlfriend is also prone to leaving a scattering of personal effects in her wake.

      I stare down at the thong, trying to figure how such a minuscule item can possibly function as pants. I have never worn one myself, being unable to conquer the fear that they could work their way actually into your bottom, and require an embarrassing medical procedure to dig them back out. I know they’re meant to be sexy – my own sturdy knickers come in multipacks, like loo roll – but all I can think is: chafing risk. And what am I supposed to do with it?

      Although Morgan has been seeing Jenna for nearly a year, I’m still unsure of the etiquette where her underwear is concerned. Should I pick it up delicately – with eyebrow tweezers, perhaps – and seal it in a clear plastic bag, like evidence from a crime scene? Tentatively, as if it might snap at my ankle, I nudge it into the corner of the bathroom with the toe of my shoe.

      Stifled giggles filter through Morgan’s closed bedroom door as I march past. He locks it these days, i.e. with a proper bolt, which he nailed on without prior permission, irreparably damaging the original Victorian door in the process. We’ve just had a Chinese takeaway and now they’re … well, obviously they’re not playing Scrabble. Having known each other since primary school, they’ve been inseparable since a barbecue at Jenna’s last summer. Favouring our house to hang out in, they are forever draped all over each other in a languid heap, as if suffering from one of those olden-day illnesses: consumption or scarlet fever. They certainly look pretty flushed whenever I happen to walk into the room. ‘Yes, Mum?’ my son is prone to saying, as if I have no right to move from room to room in my own home.

      ‘Morgan, I’m off now, okay?’ I call out from the landing.

      Silence.

      ‘I’m meeting Stevie tonight. Remember me saying? I’m staying over, I’ll be back around lunchtime tomorrow. Remember to lock the front door and shut all the windows and try not to leave 700 lights blazing …’

      More giggles. How amusingly petty it must seem, wishing to protect our home from thieves and avoid a £2000 electricity bill …

      ‘And can you start putting milk back in the fridge after you’ve used it? When I came back last week it had actually turned into cottage cheese …’

      Muffled snorts.

      ‘Morgan! Are you listening? It blobbed out into my cup!’

      ‘Ruh,’ comes the barely audible reply. With my teeth jammed together, I trot downstairs, pull on a black linen jacket over my red and black spotty dress, and pick up my overnight bag.

      ‘Bye, Mum,’ I call out, facetiously, adding, ‘Have a lovely time, won’t you?’ This is the stage I have reached: the point at which you start talking to yourself in the voice of your own child. Where you say things like, ‘Thanks for the takeaway, Mum, I really enjoyed it.’

      The spectre of Jenna’s lemon thong shimmers in my mind as I climb into my scrappy old Kia and drive away.

      *

      My shabby, scrappy life. It’s not very ‘Audrey’, I reflect as I chug through our small, nondescript town en route to the motorway. Although I don’t obsess about her – the real Audrey, I mean – I can’t help having these thoughts occasionally.

      You see, my name is Audrey too. It was Audrey Hepburn; let’s get that out of the way. It’ll come as no surprise that I am named after Mum’s favourite actress, which might sound sweet and romantic until I also explain that she and Dad had had an almighty row on the day she was going to register my birth. She’d threatened to go ahead with the Audrey thing. ‘Don’t you dare,’ he’d yelled (Mum filled me in on all of this as soon as I was old enough to understand). And she’d stormed off to the registrar’s and done it, just to get back at him over some silly slight. ‘What did Dad want to call me?’ I asked once.

      ‘Gail,’ she replied with a shudder, although it sounded perfectly