The Opposite of Success by Eleanor Elliott Thomas EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Eleanor Elliott Thomas
- Language: English
- Genre: General Humorous Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
LORRIE
The worst day of Lorrie Hope’s life began like all other days that year: she
was summoned out of a dream by the sound of a voice calling out for a
mother.
Lorrie rolled over.
‘Mama?’ called the voice.
Mama is dead. The thought drifted in from the outer shores of her
consciousness. It definitely seemed possible that she was dead.
She was already beginning to let herself sink back into oblivion, when—
wait. Lorrie opened her eyes. Weird, but she couldn’t remember dying. Was
dying the kind of thing a person would just forget?
She picked up her phone from the bedside table to check the time. Fuck.
Fuck it. Fuck it all. She was alive, and it was 4.47 a.m. Still indisputably
night-time, but just close enough to morning that there was no way she was
getting Clara back to sleep in her own cot.
‘Mama!’
Lorrie stretched, arching her toes forwards and backwards a few times
before sitting up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and planting her
feet on the floor. She was immediately seized by a powerful urge to lie
down again.
‘Mama! Mama! Mamamamamama!’
She looked across the bed at Paul, who was emitting a whistling purr
each time he exhaled. The silhouette of his body underneath the doona rose
and fell in the contented rhythm of a resting man, a man untroubled by the
harrowing wails of the banshee down the corridor. Lorrie’s eyes narrowed.
Was he really asleep? Through all this racket? Was it scientifically possible?
It happened that the easiest way to soothe their younger daughter was to
stick a nipple in her mouth, and that Lorrie was therefore the parent best
placed to deal with her in the middle of the night.
This was not Paul’s fault;
of course it wasn’t. Paul had not created the situation in which she found
herself. Yet, at moments such as these, moments when Lorrie woke up
desperate, hungering for sleep like a sweaty, shivering addict, she was filled
with a vigorous certainty that it was, in fact—definitely, absolutely,
unquestionably—100 per cent Paul’s fault. The evidence was unequivocal.
Lorrie was awake, while Paul remained asleep. Fuck you, Paul.
She shuffled to Clara’s room. Clara was standing in her sleep bag at the
edge of the cot. She had stopped calling out once she heard the familiar
thud-thud-thud of Lorrie’s slow morning steps moving towards her. Lorrie
reached in and lifted her up, and Clara’s shaggy, oversized head nestled into
the crook of her neck as she carried her over to the armchair on the other
side of the room. She laid the child across her lap, pulled up her T-shirt and
let Clara sleepily latch on to her breast.
It wouldn’t be long before the kid was too big for this. Clara was two and
a half, and Lorrie already felt a bit self-conscious about breastfeeding a
person sophisticated enough to talk in simple sentences and lift a single,
sardonic eyebrow for comedic effect. But a few times each day, Clara
would hover over to Lorrie and throw her a conspiratorial smile. ‘Bosom?
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