Nirvana Bites by Debi Alper Page A

rage.
    â€˜No!’ I shrieked. ‘No! What kind of sadistic bastards are you? She killed herself to escape him. Now you’re going to plant his corpse next to hers? You can’t do that! You just can’t do that!’
    â€˜Now calm down, Jenny,’ Straight Kate mewed, ‘I can tell you’re upset.’
    â€˜Upset? You think I’m fucking upset? I’m not fucking upset. I’m fucking incan-fucking-descent . Can’t you see what you’re doing you, stupid, insensitive cow? That man made my mother’s life a living hell! What do you fucking know about it? I was the last to leave. And do you know why? Do you think I willingly chose to stay under the same roof as – as him?’
    My chest was heaving with dry sobs, but the Thames Barrier had shattered and nothing could stop the flood.
    â€˜It was because I didn’t want to leave her. I begged her to come with me. But she virtually pushed me out. And do you know what she said? She said her life was over, but mine was still ahead of me. Her life was over! She was forty-fucking-five, Kate. Forty-fucking-five! She pushed me out but she still cried when I left. She cried for six weeks. She cried for six weeks and then she died.’
    I stopped, my body racked with the pain of unshed tears.
    â€˜Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,’ soothed Kate. ‘Of course this is all very distressing for you. But you know, you’re not responsible for your mother’s death.’
    What?
    â€˜She always was unstable.’
    I should have hung up, of course. But that would have robbed me of a target for my rage. A torrent of incoherent abuse tumbled out. In the background, I could dimly hear Kate’s measured tones.
    â€˜I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, Jenny. Dennis said you’d be difficult. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll speak to you again when you’re calmer.’
    I carried on yelling into the receiver long after I heard the dialling tone.
    At some point I hung up. I slumped to the floor and sat, knees drawn up, head in hands, and went in for some manic rocking. Agonising pains stabbed my guts. In an award winning moment of self-delusion, I told myself I must have picked up a stomach bug.
    I lurched to my feet and shot down the hall in a Groucho Marx lope. Reaching the toilet, I threw up violently, straightened, pulled the chain, splashed cold water on my face and then repeated the process. Twice.
    Most people who have trouble expressing their emotions would have gone and kicked the cat. I couldn’t do that – Gaia would never have forgiven me – so I decided to go in and kick Stan instead. As it turned out, I was to be denied any satisfaction from even this simple pleasure.
    Stan hadn’t moved from his previous position. I walked round him, took careful aim and planted a kick on his arse that would have impressed Nick and Robin’s rugby-playing chums. There was no reaction. Stan’s body jerked with the force of the blow – and that was it. Disappointing or what?
    I don’t know at what point it occurred to me to go through Stan’s bag. Somehow he had come to personify everything that was wrong with my life at that point, if only by denying me the satisfaction of a reaction to my violent impulse. As such, he was now exempt from my normal moral code. This was extremely dubious logic. Before I had a chance to think too hard about it, I was on my hands and knees in the bedroom, rifling through the contents of the Gucci suitcase.
    In my experience, snoopers never find anything that will make themselves feel good about their actions, but if they’re lucky, they will at least find something that will justify the search. Well, lucky bloody them. Their names clearly aren’t Jennifer Stern.
    There was his electronic digital data thingy, but I had no idea how it worked. Anyway, it was bound to be password-protected, that much I did know. I found his mobile and