Kismetology

For Mum. Who is absolutely nothing like the mum in this book.
Honest. I love you.

CHAPTER 1

If I could give one piece of advice
to every teenager in the world, it would be this: when you move away from home,
move far, far away, and never look back. My biggest mistake? I didn’t move far
enough. In fact, I only moved three houses down the road. The perfect distance
for my mother to interfere in my life, even more than she did when I lived
under her own roof.

"Mackenzie, your curtains aren't even straight,"
Mum complains from her place on our sofa. "I don't know how you can put up
with such a mess."

"How can curtains not be straight, Mum?"

"There’s at least six inches more to the left than to
the right, and the join in the middle is wonky."

Dan rolls his eyes and gets up from his armchair with a
groan.

I know how he feels.

"Don't be long, Daniel, you'll miss
Eastenders
,"
Mum calls after him.

"Sir, yes sir," Dan mutters, doing an army salute
behind her back.

In all fairness to my mum, maybe my announcement that I was
moving in with Dan came as a bit of a shock to her. After all, we’d been dating
for a year, but my mum had only known him for six of those months. I was a bit
reluctant to introduce them, especially after the
incident
with an
ex-boyfriend—the first and, up to that point, only boyfriend to ever meet my
mum—where she'd nearly run him over with a wheelie bin (accidentally) and then
put a brick through his car window (she was killing a wasp).

"Can't you get him to brush his hair once in a
while?" Mum asks when Dan has left the room. "He makes the place look
untidy. And don't even get me started on that shirt."

"Leave him alone, Mum," I warn her. "And stop
your bloody dog peeing in my houseplant again, it's dying."

"Oh, Mackenzie, you'll never guess what happened to me
today," Mum says animatedly. "Go on, guess."

"I have no idea, Mum."

"I almost got a criminal record. Can you believe that?
Me! With a criminal record!"

"I'm honestly scared to ask, but how on earth did you
manage that?"

"I nearly got arrested in the park!" She says
excitedly.

Only my mother could be excited about getting arrested.
"What happened?"

"You know Baby's crocodile outfit, right? I did a
really good job of making it, didn't I? I made it look really realistic?"

I nod.

"Baby was off his lead in the park, doing his business,
you know, as dogs do. And suddenly all these police surround us. Two animal
control vans pull up, there's a helicopter overhead, there are even a couple of
men with tranquilizer dart guns poised and ready to shoot."

I rub my hand over my eyes. "Why?"

"Well, it turns out that someone had seen Baby in the
park and thought he was a real crocodile. She'd called the police in case he
ate the children."

"Oh, Mum, really?" I groan.

"It was so exciting! I think I might even be on the
news tonight!"

She thinks this is exciting? Embarrassing would be my
preferred term. Very, very embarrassing. "So what happened?"

"The police quickly realised their mistake. But one of
them did take me aside and ask if I could not bring Baby to the park in that
attire again. Then he gave us a lift home in his police car. He was ever so
nice about it."

"I'm sure he was."

"How anyone could mistake my Baby for a crocodile is
beyond me. He's hardly crocodile size, is he? The woman must have been blind as
a bat."

"Well, you do insist on dressing him up as potentially
dangerous animals. And walking him. In public. It's really quite
disturbing."

"Oh, nonsense. I like trying out the sewing patterns I
find on the internet. It keeps me busy."

Something has to, I suppose.

"Come here, Baby." Mum pats the sofa and the
Yorkshire terrier, which is practically surgically attached to her, comes
running over. "Don't listen to that big, mean lady. She loves you
really."

Baby is currently dressed as a ladybird. No, really. Mum's
hobby of making these outfits for him is getting out of hand. He jumps onto the
sofa and sinks his teeth into one of my twenty quid cushions.

"These cushions were expensive." I yank them out
of his way.

"He likes the tassels," Mum responds.

This is our nightly routine now.

On our one-year anniversary, Dan had proposed that we move
in together. My mum wasn’t overly thrilled by the turn of events, until she'd
found a little house available to rent and paid the deposit without even asking
us. The house happened to be three doors away from her place.

We should have known better.

Dan was indifferent to the fact that my mum had decided
where we were going to live and paid a deposit without even telling us. It was
one less thing that he had to do. And I couldn't really be mad at her, she was
only doing it out of the goodness of her heart. Presumptuous, yes, but
ultimately only trying to be helpful. We'd signed a one-year lease two days
later.

Since then, Dan has been a gem. Not many men would put up
with my mother being an almost permanent third wheel. Not many men would run
her cat, Pussy (no, really), down to the emergency vet at three o’clock in the
morning because it looked a bit peaky. It was fine. A screeching woman yelling
that it looked off-colour had just woken it up from its sleep. I look peaky at
that time of day too. Dan had offered his car as transport and we’d roared off
down the road at breakneck speed, scaring the poor cat half to death. Then Dan
and I had sat in the parking lot for half an hour, while the vet determined
that there was absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with Pussy.

The house being so near had softened the blow of me moving
out and leaving Mum with only her yappy little dog and not-sick cat for
company.

"You can pop in anytime you want," I'd told her.

I had no idea that translated into "come over every
night and bring the dog and cat with you" in mum language.

The night we moved in, just as we’d settled down together on
our new sofa with a glass of wine each and switched on our newly installed satellite
TV, my mum’s special knock-knockknock-knock on the door reverberated through
the living room. We looked at each other with dread and Dan groaned.

My mum came in, took her shoes off, sat down on the sofa,
helped herself to a glass of wine and put on
Coronation Street
. She
didn’t actually watch
Corrie
, but proceeded to criticise our carpets,
our uncomfortable sofa (it wasn’t) the colour of the walls, the way the walls
clashed with the curtains (they didn’t) the heat in the room (it was too hot)
and the shirt Dan was wearing (I’d always quite liked him in it). Within three
minutes, Baby had peed on my new plant. I don't have the best of luck with
plants anyway, but I'm sure the dog pee didn't help the plant's life
expectancy.

This routine has continued almost every night in the three
months since we moved in. In comes my mum, on goes
Emmerdale
,
Corrie
or
Eastenders
, and out comes Mum’s opinion of everything from the
wattage of our light bulbs to the colour of Dan’s socks.

CHAPTER 2

"You’re looking a little podgy
tonight, Daniel," Mum says as she sits down on the sofa the next night.

"Mum!" I shriek. "You can’t go around saying
things like that to people."

"Oh nonsense, dear. Besides, Daniel doesn’t mind, he’s
practically family, isn’t he?"

"Now, seriously." She turns back to him.
"Have you thought about trying Weight Watchers? My friend Tabitha lost six
pounds with their points system."

Poor Dan smiles and nods pleasantly as my mum launches into
a detailed and lengthy explanation of Weight Watchers, which eventually ends
with her promising to bring their registration phone number the next time she
pops round, and me wishing we’d moved to a different continent.

"Stop it, Mother," I interject. "Dan doesn’t
need to lose any weight. Unlike your little dog over there. Haven’t you noticed
Baby’s been looking a little fat lately?"

"Oh dear, I did notice his jumpers have seemed a little
snug recently, but I assumed they’d shrunk in the wash. Do you really think he
needs to lose weight?"

I shrug. I only said it to get her off the topic of Dan. I
honestly don’t care whether her little pee machine needs to lose a few pounds.

"He does look a little podgy," Dan says with a
gleam in his eye. I know he’s only saying it to wind her up.

"Oh no, don’t say that," Mum says worriedly.
"Maybe I’ve been feeding him too many biscuits." Said by most people,
this would generally mean dog biscuits, but said by my mother it means that
Baby the Yorkie regularly snacks on digestives, malted milks and custard creams.
All of which are fed to him on a fork while sitting at the dinner table. I kid
you not. This is one spoilt dog. One spoilt fat dog.

After Mum leaves, I sit down beside Dan and he puts an arm
around me.

"Don’t pay any attention to her, babe." I lean up
to kiss his cheek. "You look perfect to me."

He shrugs. "She's right. I snack at the restaurant all
the time. It must be showing."

"It's not. Besides, you're a chef. If you never ate
what you cooked, you wouldn't be a very good chef, would you?"

"So being fat means I'm a good chef?"

"You're not fat."

"She just really doesn’t like me, does she?" He
leans his head against mine.

"It’s not that," I sigh. "It’s just…"

What? What is it?

"I have no idea," I finish lamely.

And I don't. I don't know what Mum's problem with Dan is.
Dan is lovely. I mean, okay, he's a little bit predictable, and maybe some
people (read: my friend Jenni) might think he's a bit boring. And no, our
relationship isn't exactly a bodice-ripping passion-filled love affair that you
read about in musty old books, but it's reliable and very nice. I was single
for a long time before I met Dan, and it's really good to have someone to share
your life with.

Something has to be done, and sharpish.

It is while watching the film
Clueless
that night that
an idea comes to me. Dan and I are lying in bed, he’s reading the latest Harlan
Coben, while I’m watching the Alicia Silverstone classic that defined my
teenage years on TV.

While watching Cher and Dionne trying to fix up Mr. Hall and
Miss Geist, I realise what I have to do. I sit bolt upright in bed as it hits
me.

"Dan, that’s it." I turn to face him, grinning.
"My mum is miserable so she wants everybody else to be miserable too. We
have to figure out a way to make her sublimely happy."

"Gee, that should be easy."

"A man, Dan. She needs a man."

Dan looks at me like I’ve gone insane. "There isn’t a
man on earth who would put up with that," he says finally.

I whack him lightly on the arm. "She’s not that
bad."