The Single Mums' Secrets - Janet Hoggarth Page 0,2

of my training, the cadavers preserved with a rubbery-scented chemical that still couldn’t mask the smell of death.

However, inspecting Nigel on the cold mortuary slab, an unexpected surge of nausea swelled inside me threatening to expel my coffee from earlier. I was glad Louise hadn’t witnessed that his head had been partially severed from his neck, like an axe murderer had been caught in the act leaving the job half finished. You can’t un-see stuff like that…

*

I silently mimed the stuffy words of the hymn, not wishing to inflict my singing voice onto the congregation. I surreptitiously eyed Louise as she stared dry-eyed at the order of service, her hands clenching the paper, its edges curling into the centre like one of those tacky fortune-telling fish. I couldn’t imagine how she was even here, standing up, breathing in and out; the pain must have been crippling. I thought she was coping surprisingly well. A sudden pang of guilt speared me in the belly. I could move in with her, but I did really love where I was in the Mews. I’d ended up there after Tom and I had split up and a chance conversation at the surgery had managed to solve my housing woes…

‘Are you still looking for somewhere to live?’ Margaret the practice manager had asked me a few weeks after everyone had found out that Tom and I were no more. In effect it was I who had caused the break-up so it only felt right that I should move out of our three-bedroomed terrace in Peckham. Neither of us wanted to buy the other out, so it was decided we would sell. I’d been temporarily living in Louise’s spare room, something I wasn’t exactly relishing. Louise and I hadn’t lived together since we’d been home in the uni holidays, sharing the same family bathroom and using the place as a dosshouse in between holiday jobs and sporadic social lives.

‘Yes. Do you know of somewhere?’ I’d answered Margaret.

‘I do actually. A woman I go dog walking with is looking to temporarily move out of her four-bedroomed house in a local gated development. She needs someone trustworthy to take it on as it’s a shared house with student lodgers. Might be a good stopgap instead of paying full whack for your own place. Jo’s quite a character too…’

‘I’m not sure I want to babysit students… Give me her number and I’ll have a think about it.’

After another week had slipped by unnoticed and I still hadn’t perused all the details from letting agents clogging up my inbox, I decided to ring this Jo woman.

‘Darling, come round this evening. You can meet the others too. It’s one big happy family in the Mews.’ She sounded loud and over the top and I imagined someone who resembled the love child of Scary Spice and Graham Norton. She was neither.

‘Come in, come in, would you like a glass of wine?’ Jo was a stocky woman who reached just above my shoulder. Her long black hair reminded me of the unsettling girl from The Ring but she was charm personified; I liked her immediately. She looked about the same age as me, early forties. I declined the wine and she introduced me to the other three housemates, who all appeared to be wet behind the ears but harmless-looking.

There were a million pets barking and mewling. ‘Don’t worry, the animals will be coming with me, unless you’re really called Doctor Dolittle?’

I followed her up two flights of stairs to a room at the very top of the house next to Jo’s office, which wasn’t rented out as a bedroom, and surveyed my prospective new bolthole. A large double bedroom with black lacquered furniture, a giant TV mounted on the wall, and a walk-in wet room. I walked over to the window and looked down on the street below. Other houses and some half houses faced me. It felt like a zoo after all the visitors had gone home. There was a little girl whizzing up and down the pavement on her pink scooter until she was called in by a tall blonde woman I assumed was her mum.

‘They’re Grace and Ali – they’re lovely.’

‘How long are you moving out for?’ I asked Jo turning round, reviewing the room once more.

‘Six months. I have another property that needs doing up and it’ll be easier if I just live in and do it.’ I took account of the easy commute to my Nunhead surgery. I