When the story broke...

When Gina came home from the job interview, I was on my hands and knees carefully dotting ant poison around the perimeter of the pantry. I felt bad about the ants, so earnestly scouting and foraging to feed their community, taking in my treacherous offerings without realising they were harbingers of death, but I couldn't afford another invasion of the pantry. It was not just the cost of replacing all the open packets of sugar, biscuits, even raisins and dates. It offended my 'waste not' values to throw it all out. I did try brushing ants off the dark chocolate TimTams but a certain odour remained and spoilt the flavour.

I put the lid back on the tube and jumped up to give Gina a hug, then leaned back to look at her and ask, in a warm, level tone, 'How did it go?'

I knew of course, from the sound of the front door slamming and her bag hitting the floor, but it was best to show I was good old Jo, always on her side. Sometimes that fitted her narrative of 'Jo and me against the world'. I dreaded those other times of cold silence when I was deemed to be more alien than ally,

She turned her face away from me and slipped out of my arms, heading towards the liquor cabinet. I held my breath. Last month in the virtuous glow of dry July we had got rid of the gin and brandy and agreed to buy only one bottle of wine a week. I knew there was just a dusty half-bottle of crème de menthe in the cupboard which had survived the cull only because neither of us liked it and we thought it would be funny to offer it to guests.

She slammed the cupboard and turned on her heel.

'I'm going out.'

I let out my breath in a sigh. I suspected she would be going to her friend Sal where it was very likely the brandy bottle had taken up residence, being too precious to pour down the sink. Though to be fair, there hadn't been much in my gin bottle and I didn't miss it like an old friend the way Gina felt about her brandy.

I put away the ant poison, put the steak back in the fridge and got my phone out to order pizza.

We carried on for some months after that but it was the beginning of the terminal phase of our relationship. She came home later and later, casually mentioning that she'd called in at Sal's or some other friend's on the way. She ducked away from my kisses but I knew there was brandy on her breath and I was hurt by the betrayal.

But she did get the job. She was called back for a second interview and after an agonising delay was invited to join the breakfast radio team. I began to hear her voice in the mornings, the cheerful banter with her colleagues, joining in the jokes and news and weather reports that accompanied the start to my day.

The job seemed to drain all the good nature out her. She was sullen and withdrawn at home, when she was home at all. It made me feel as though I lacked the sparkle of her workmates, just dull old Jo in her dull office job. I tuned my clock radio to the concert programme and tried to get off to work in a calm mood, until the evening I came home to find her share of the household belongings had gone. Somehow she had packed up without me even suspecting. There was a single rose on the table lying across a note which said 'Thanks Jo. It was fun.' I felt about the size of an ant. She hadn't even said why she was leaving.

However, the best revenge is to live well and when I'd picked myself up and asked Chat GPT a few pertinent questions, I realised that without having to worry about Gina I had a lot of free headspace and the 'hobby' that I had always wanted was to write. I joined a group at the library and began writing.

They were all very animated about the fun they'd had doing JuNoWriMo – writing a novel during the month of June. It was now actually October but hey, the strategy could still work. I set myself to produce a certain word count every evening and the group seemed to like the extracts I read out in our sessions. In the spirit of writing fiction I let myself go – all the resentments about my relationship with Gina were turned into witty anecdotes, all my speculations about what she was doing when she was late home could be spelled out in detail as if they had really happened. It was fun!

It's a long process writing a novel and it takes even longer to publish one, assuming you find a publisher to take it on. I was lucky, I guess. With the group's help I found a boutique press who liked the 'authenticity' of my work and who found the tale of an intense relationship with a woman who probably drank too much and who was in the public eye (I promoted 'Gill' to breakfast TV), edgy enough to take a chance on. I was on Cloud Nine, confident that I had changed the names to protect the guilty and success would be mine. I took all the calls the marketing manager set up for me. I did radio interviews, got reviewed in well-read magazines, and then reached the pinacle – a piece for Seven Sharp!

When the story broke, the call from breakfast radio slipped under my guard like a Trojan horse.