I Should Be So Lucky by Judy Astley Page A

hand on Thursday night. A couple of the lads, including our very own sweet Benedict Peabody, were arrested after a lot of noise complaints, but there was nothing definite they could hang on them. No real damage, just a lot of broken glass, kicked-about cans in the street, too much racket and the neighbours in those big wedding-cake-type houses having their beauty sleep disturbed.’
    The college seemed strangely empty after the past weeks of individual last-minute pre-exam tutorials, which were spent in equal measure calming students’ nerves and trying to gee up the too laid-back into some sort of work ethic. Viola, rushing from Bell Cottage, found she had time to chat to Amanda, and they were in the college staffroom with tea and biscuits and some gossip mags that another tutor had left. These reminded Viola , yet again, of Rhys. A photo of himself in one of these magazines gave him a buzz for days. He’d been hugely sulky that none of them were keen to give more than half a page to coverage of his and Viola’s wedding. ‘What the fuck else does anyone think I’m doing it for?’ she’d caught him saying down the phone to his agent, and she’d almost bailed out on the whole event right then till he apologized, saying he was just piling on the pressure. ‘Make the idle bastard try a bit harder,’ he’d soothed her, kissing her neck in the way that always made her shiver.
    ‘Oh Lordy, Thursday! I can’t help feeling the party was very much my fault, you know,’ Viola said, dunking a gingernut into her tea and watching with no surprise at all as the wet half fell to the bottom of the cup. ‘It was me that day who suggested they all go round to Benedict’s to watch
Wuthering Heights
on DVD, for a bit of last-ditch revision. I had a feeling as soon as the words were out that this wasn’t going to turn out well. The boy was just a bit
too
enthusiastic. He was texting before the class was over, a look on his face like he was up to something. Letting his thousands of Facemates know, I expect. I bet the photos of the carnage are up there for all their future employers to wince at.’
    ‘He’s a teenage boy, they’re
always
up to something!’ Amanda laughed. ‘You can’t take the blame for what they do. He’d have thought up some other reason to get the crowds in if he hadn’t already, what with the Peabody seniors being away and him having a free house. And bless him, I overheard him this morning in the corridor, grumbling that he wasn’t doing anything, just “cotchin’ wid da bredrin” and then saying the housekeeper had sorted the broken windows. Imagine having a housekeeper; wouldn’t that be heaven? You’d never have to plead for half a day off to wait in for the plumber. Anyway, he looked pretty pleased with himself, all bouncy and bumptious and with those two dippy girls hanging off him. His cred rating, or whatever they call it, must be way up.’
    Viola sighed. ‘I know I’m not
really
to blame, not deep down,’ she said. ‘But it’s sort of typical. One day,
one day
, I’ll suggest something, or
do
something, and it’ll all work out fine. No complications, no hassles, nothing going ludicrously wrong.’ She felt like curling up on the staffroom sofa with her hands round her knees and her forehead resting on them, like a child who thinks that by making herself smaller and keeping her eyes shut, she’ll become both invisible and unreachable. Miles had called her just after she’d spoken to Greg, saying he wanted to meet her for a chat soon, just the two of them. ‘A matter of importance,’ he’d told her, trying to sound mysterious, as if, after what had been said at Kate’s on Sunday, she wouldn’t have the first clue what it was about. It certainly wasn’t to discuss his promotion prospects or his wife Serena’s fury about her third-year-in-a-row failure to get into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition . How old did she have to be before life stopped being a series of