Star Fish by Nicola May Page A

compunction. But my low self-esteem, which rose and fell on a regular basis, suddenly perked up again. He had obviously liked me – a lot. My loins were doing the thinking for me. The false Declan O’Shea was gorgeous and he had made me laugh. He had also made me orgasm in seven different languages. I had to see him again – but how?

– Ten –
    Pisces: The new moon in Aquarius spells fun today. Take the time to catch up with some old friends.
    ‘Oh my God, sweetie, I just saw six of the little darlings poking their heads up at me.’
    Brad shrieked with a white mask over his mouth.
    ‘Where? Where? I thought they were all dead.’
    ‘You’ve frightened them now.’
    Brad and I were in my garden checking out the frogs in my pond, he looking like an extra from Holby City I love my house, especially my garden. It is a two-bedroom Victorian terrace and I have at last decorated every single room. It has a little square courtyard area with an archway of honeysuckle leading to a ten-foot strip of grass with rose borders each side and then further on is ‘The Pond’.
    I had always wanted a pond. I was so excited when I first viewed the house and saw the pond from the upstairs bedroom window that I squealed, jumped up and down and then kissed the estate agent full on the lips. Which wouldn’t have been so bad apart from the fact that the estate agent was a sixty-year-old she, with a moustache.
    Every year, the frogs carried out their mating ritual (watched over eagerly by me and Penelope), leaving behind their tiny black dots of babies in the hazy clouds of spawn that decorated the secret green surface of my pond. My ritual every morning after breakfast was to run down the garden to my pond to see the progress of my babies. They were defying all of my childhood knowledge of tadpole development in the fact that they were refusing to grow. I was so concerned that I had been feeding them raw minced steak. This resulted in the pond turning into a stinking shrine to my frog family.
    It has also resulted in Penelope sitting on the edge of the pond sneering at me with jealousy for making such a fuss over pondlife. If it hadn’t have stunk so much I’m sure that he would have just dived in and eaten them all despite his fear of water. Penelope was a huge part of my life. His connection to James Crook was the only low point, as in one of the few romantic moments in our time together James had bought me Penelope as a birthday present.
    Yes, Penelope is actually a tom. I was both delighted and disappointed when I went to the vets to pay the bill for what I thought was tubes being cut and was informed by a very young snooty female vet that. ‘Ms Anderson, your pet is actually a male and I have removed his testicles.’
    Delighted, because the bill was quite a bit cheaper! Sad because I knew that Penelope would be confused for ever as I couldn’t change his name: it really suited him. Well, I did consider it momentarily, but couldn’t think of a male equivalent of anything that sounded remotely like Penelope.
    Living with me, Penelope has heard more swearing, more heart rending stories, and licked off more tears than anyone else I know. In fact, I’m sure I once heard him squeak, ‘Shut up!’
    I say squeak because he had a nasty accident as a kitten which destroyed his miaow box. I used to live in a one-bedroom flat that had a hot water system that was put in before they were officially invented, I reckon. I used to be able to make a reasonable cup of tea from the hot tap, it was so boiling. One day I went off to work one day and Anna, having stayed over night on my collapsing sofa bed, decided she’d have a nice long bath before she went home. The water came out of the bath taps so slowly that a bath took an hour to run which was actually quite handy because by the time you were ready to get into it, the water had cooled to exactly the right temperature. If you needed to top up you had to make sure your toes were well out of