I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,68

giant read the story and really did get in touch because he wanted to get in first. I borrowed cash to rent the smallest factory on the planet with kitchens, hired workers. We couldn’t produce them fast enough. By then I was working on a fake fillet steak. I hired an ex-chef who’d been in prison and needed a break. What he didn’t know about food and nutrition wasn’t worth talking about.’

‘You still employ him?’ asked Jack. His father would have promoted women to executive positions before he’d have had an ex-con in his factory.

‘I do. And his wife, son and daughter,’ said Luke. ‘When Plant Boy got big, I moved all my best people over to Manchester with me. I have a shit-hot team, great products. But it was the name Plant Boy that spun the magic, the buyers loved it.’

Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s insane isn’t it?’

‘Tell me about it. Bridge was starting to do really well at the time too. She’d just made a stack of money from selling a plot of land she’d bought for peanuts.’

‘You could have been a power couple.’

‘We could have.’

‘What was the thing that finally split you up then?’

‘A lie,’ replied Luke.

* * *

‘What finally split us up?’ Bridge repeated Mary’s question back to her. ‘He slept with my best friend,’ she replied. ‘So I slept with his.’

* * *

‘Oh?’ A small sound but nevertheless one full of Jack’s curiosity.

‘At the time Bridge and I were on yet another break. I holed up with an old pal of mine, James. His wife Tina and Bridge got on in the beginning, they were like best mates but then Bridge pulled back, said she didn’t quite trust her, she got the feeling that Tina was a bit jealous of her.’

Luke left out the irrelevant detail that Bridge also thought Tina had a head shaped like a football.

‘I didn’t realise their marriage was in such bad shape until I stayed with them. They argued more than Bridge and I did, and that’s saying something. It was quite uncomfortable and awkward and I was actually packing to go and stay in a B and B when it happened.’

In the dark Jack heard Luke’s long outward breath as he waited to hear what it was.

‘I heard James storm out. Tina was crying hysterically, craving comfort, she wanted a hug…’

‘Ah.’ A picture was forming.

‘No, I didn’t in case you’re wondering,’ Luke answered the unsaid recrimination. ‘But she told me she didn’t love James, because she was in love with me, in fact she said she’d been in love with me for a long time and wanted us to be together. She said she’d seen the way I looked at her, she knew I felt the same and that’s why I’d walked out on Bridge and gone to her. I swear, Jack, I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. I felt like I’d run off from a frying pan and ended up in a vat of boiling oil. I backed right off as you can imagine, told her she’d got the wrong end of the stick; she went bananas, accused me of leading her on. I was out of the house with my bags in five minutes flat. And so she used me as a weapon at James, and she used James as a weapon at me. She told him I’d slept with her. He believed her. And he told Bridge.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No, I would never have done that.’

Jack winced. ‘Oh shit. That’s a mess. That’s a real mess.’

‘There’s worse. Bridge and James got their own back. A revenge fuck. A revenge fuck for a revenge fuck that never happened in the first place.’

Jack made a pained, strangled sound.

‘And that was the real end of us. Our marriage was no longer on life support, in intensive care; that yanked all the tubes out and pulled the plug. We were dead.’

It sounded like a horror story. It sounded like Jack’s parents’ marriage, so much heat and hate, intensity and fury, jealousy and bitterness. Something to be avoided at all costs. As soon as relationships got complicated and involved, Jack cut and run, sensing that inevitability of walking in his parents’ footsteps. It never occurred to him that it might not happen.

* * *

‘I was so hurt when James told me what Tina and Luke had done,’ said Bridge. ‘He used me to get back at his wife, I can see that. I was manipulated, stabbed in my sweet