Spicing Things Up

If only she’d listened when Jeff had first told her – but at the time it just hadn’t seemed that important!

- Cathy Taylor

Christine peeped through the blinds and watched her husband strut along the street.

There was no doubt about it; Jeff had a spring in his step that hadn’t been there before he’d joined the archery club six weeks ago.

Barebow archery was Jeff’s latest craze. Since he’d had what he called ‘a bit of a health scare’ a few months ago he’d determined to live life to the full. This meant pursuing a variety of hobbies.

He’d tried his hand at watercolor painting, whittling, wild swimming and birdwatching, but abandoned all of them. All except archery.

As Christine padded to the kitchen to make tea, she tried to remember what Jeff had told her about the archery club members the previous evening.

He’d mentioned someone called Rex, a long-distance lorry driver; George who talked about nothing but football and Alice who had been an extra in a film nobody had heard of.

At that point, Christine had tuned Jeff’s voice out so she could concentrate on the quiz programme she was watching. She’d vaguely heard Jeff saying something more specific about one of the women archers – that the two of them went way back, but try as she might, Christine couldn’t remember him ever mentioning her before.

She knitted her brows and tried to dredge up what Jeff had said about her. But all she could think was that he’d mentioned something about her legs and ginger hair.

‘Just because he’s mentioned here doesn’t mean there’s anything going on,’ Christine’s best friend Sandra said when they met for lunch later that day.