Fiona Gibson - The Great Escape - The laugh-out-loud romantic comedy from the summer bestseller

‘Mum’s wedding dress was pretty, wasn’t it, Dad?’ Daisy beams at her father.

‘Er, yes. It was very nice …’ Ryan turns away and swills out the washing-up bowl noisily.

‘Mum’s dress,’ Daisy continues, eyes fixed determinedly on Hannah, ‘was white and low at the front like this.’ She draws an invisible V-shape to indicate a plunging neckline.

‘Well, that sounds gorgeous.’ Hannah smiles tightly.

‘And it was long with millions of sparkly beads sewn on, and the veil was so massive two people had to walk behind and carry it through the church, didn’t they, Dad? So it didn’t drag on the floor and get dirty. Didn’t they, Dad?’

‘Er, yes,’ Ryan croaks, now scraping the remains of the kids’ breakfasts into the bin.

‘Wow,’ Hannah says hollowly. Why don’t we get out the album, she thinks darkly, then we can all gather round and ooh and ahh over Petra’s incredible dress before I go to work, and I can show you how crappy and plain I’m going to look in my dumpy little shift that I must have chosen in a fit of madness …

‘Mummy looked beautiful,’ Daisy breathes.

‘I’m sure she did.’

Sorry, Ryan mouths from the sink. Taking a deep breath, Hannah pauses for a moment, focusing on the area behind Daisy, where the family-sized super-deluxe fridge stands proudly, with its ice maker gadget which once spurted frozen crystals in her face, causing Daisy and Josh to keel over with helpless laughter. It had never done that before, Daisy had informed her when she and her brother had finally managed to compose themselves. Well, of course it hadn’t. Petra had chosen it – she’d picked virtually every appliance and piece of furniture – and at times like that, Hannah couldn’t help feeling that the whole house was against her. ‘D’you want to see a picture of Mummy’s dress?’ Daisy enquires.

‘Daisy!’ Ryan barks. ‘Could you hurry up and get your shoes on?’

‘But, Dad …’

‘Sometime, maybe,’ Hannah says briskly, ‘but I’d better get off to work now. I’m running late as it is.’

As Lou pulls on her uniform – a brown nylon tabard bearing the soft play centre’s ‘Let’s Bounce’ logo across the chest – it occurs to her that the person who designed it might possibly be a pervert. Lou turns this thought over in her mind almost daily, and as she’s been working at Let’s Bounce for nearly a year, that makes it – well, at 8.30 am she’s incapable of working out the exact figure off the top of her head. But it’s something in the region of 230 times, which she fears is verging on obsessional. It can’t be normal to allow dark thoughts about play centre uniforms to occupy such a large part of her brain.

Yet that vile piece of clothing really ticks all the boxes, Lou thinks, teasing her curly auburn hair with a long-toothed comb and sweeping on powder and lip gloss at the dressing table mirror. No one, apart from people who go in for medieval jousting contests, wear tabards. Even worse, Dave, her boss, insists that said garment is worn on arrival at work and has even ticked off Lou’s friend Steph for not modelling hers on the bus on the way in. ‘You’re all walking advertisements,’ he’s fond of reminding the staff during his ‘motivational talks’.

In their bed behind her, Spike emits a long mmmmmm sound, and Lou turns to see a faint smile flicker across his lips. His eyes are closed, his dark lashes dusting his lightly-tanned skin like tiny brushes, his strong, defined jaw bearing its customary blur of dark stubble. Looks as if he’s having a pleasurable dream, lucky sod. Lou’s friends often tease her about living with a man with a super-charged libido, and she knows she should feel flattered that he’s so up for it, especially as they’ve been together for sixteen years. In fact, if anything, Spike’s sexual appetite has intensified as he’s grown older. Maybe it’s the tabard, Lou thinks wryly. ‘You up, babe?’ Spike has awoken from his reverie.

‘Yep. Running a bit late actually.’ Lou pads over to the bed and dispenses a speedy kiss on his slightly clammy forehead. ‘Gotta go,’ she adds, grabbing her bag from the floor, pulling on her tabard-concealing black trenchcoat and hurrying out of the flat, down one flight of dusty wooden stairs and into the hazy April morning.

It feels good to be outside. The flat seems even dingier when Spike isn’t working, which happens to be most of the time. It’s been six months since he last had a job, and the more time Spike spends in bed, or comatose on the sofa, the staler their surroundings become. Some mornings, like today, Lou is almost grateful to be escaping to Let’s Bounce. Although she loves Spike, and he’s still handsome and ridiculously youthful-looking at forty-eight, Lou can’t help worrying that his lethargy might engulf her completely until it’s too late to fight her way out.

Is sitting on your arse all day actually contagious? she wonders as she walks briskly to work. Does it become progressively worse, until the sufferer is unable to separate himself from the sofa apart from occasionally staggering to the loo? Spike can’t even be bothered to drop used teabags into the kitchen bin. He just lobs them into the sink, and every time she removes them – unwilling to start an argument over something as petty as teabags – Lou is seized by an urge to pelt them in his face.

She marches on, now feeling more annoyed with herself than Spike for allowing yesterday to slip away in a fug of TV and housework instead of making the most of her one day off. She always imagines Sadie and Barney taking their babies to some beautiful spot in the Cambridgeshire countryside for a picnic on Sundays. And Hannah and Ryan probably take his kids on a family walk in some particularly photogenic part of London – Primrose Hill or Hampstead Heath – like characters in a Richard Curtis movie. Lou sees expensive white wine being lifted from a coolbox and Ryan’s kids chatting nicely with Hannah, laughing at her jokes and feeling lucky that their dad has found himself such a cool girlfriend. And here’s Lou in York – not that she’s blaming York for the situation she’s found herself in – wearing a synthetic tabard on her way to extract stray nappies heavily laden with pee from the ballpool.

Still, she thinks, approaching the redbrick former factory which houses Let’s Bounce, at least there’s Hannah and Ryan’s wedding to look forward to. Six weeks to go now. A trip to London will shake her up. She’s made a pact with herself to get out of this crappy job by then, after which … well, she isn’t quite sure what will come after that. Something to do with Spike, she suspects. Something to change her life and lift her out of the humdrum existence which has somehow sucked her in. Yes, after the wedding she’ll do it. She’ll be refreshed and energised then. But it’s far too big and scary to think about right now.

Hannah cycles like a maniac, legs pumping and heart banging against her ribs. It feels good being out; in fact after the interrogation over breakfast, about weddings and veils and God , for Christ’s sake, having a toenail ripped off would feel pretty damn fantastic. Even though she’s lived in London for thirteen years, Hannah can still taste the traffic fumes on her tongue. It tastes of excitement and life going on all around her. Her childhood in a tiny fishing village made her yearn for a fast-paced city life: first Glasgow, where she’d studied illustration, followed by a succession of insalubrious rented studio flats and shared houses scattered all over north London. Now, as she zips between vehicles, heading for Islington, she feels the stress of her interrogation blowing away in the light breeze.