LIZZIE looked at Oscar grimly. He looked back sheepishly, dark Spaniel eyes doing their best to appear sweetly soulful in the hope that she'd forgive him. Even at the age of six months, he was smart enough to know when he was in trouble. Pity her husband wasn't as smart, Lizzie thought.

'Bad dog, Oscar,' she snapped before trudging back into the kitchen to get some kitchen towels, the carpet cleaner and a bucket of water. By the time she got back, Oscar was gone. The small pile of doggy pooh on the new caramel-coloured rug in front of the fireplace was still there, however, and no amount of air-freshener was going to take the smell away.

'Michael, Fay, I thought I told you to let Oscar out first thing!' Lizzie roared at her offspring as she wrinkled her nose and starting cleaning up.
There was silence. Well, not exactly silence. Britney Spears' music blared from Fay's bedroom. But silence on the who-was-supposed-to-let-Oscar-out front.

Lizzie scrubbed and raged. What a great start to Monday morning. She'd known exactly who was going to end up looking after that damned dog when they got it the previous Christmas. 'We'll take care of Oscar,' Fay had said in injured pride on the day Scott arrived home with the little bundle of black fluff.

'OK, I believe you,' Lizzie had smiled, ruffling her eight-year-old daughter's dark hair. 'They've wanted a dog for so long,' Scott said, delighted at the effect his Christmas present was having. Fay was bright-eyed with happiness and Michael, a quiet, bespectacled twelve-year-old who was normally glued to his PlayStation, was rolling around on the floor with the puppy and demanding to know when they'd be able to bring him out for a walk.

'You should have discussed it with me first,' hissed Lizzie sotto voce.

'I thought you liked dogs,' protested Scott, doing his best injured innocence expression.

'I do, that's why I feel sorry for a dog that's going to be on its own all day and who won't be walked if it's raining or cold. I'm out at work until four, you're out at work until God knows when and the kids are at school all day. Who's going to take care of it and who's going to tidy up after it?'

'Don't be so negative,' Scott had said huffily. 'We'll all muck in.'

'Yeah, right,' muttered Lizzie as she finished cleaning up Oscar's little present. He was normally quite good about doing his business in the yard but he had to be let out in the first place.

'Kids! Come down and get your breakfast,' she yelled when she'd finished cleaning up, 'or you'll be late for school.'

It was already a quarter to eight and they all had to be out the door by ten past or they'd be late. Whizzing around the kitchen with the ease of someone practised at doing four things at once, she made toast, coffee, assembled sandwiches for the kids' lunch breaks and heated milk for Fay's cereal. Hot milk with cereal was the latest fad. Next week it would undoubtedly be yoghurt.

Fay, pretty in her blue school uniform with her long hair held back in a girlish headband decorated with tiny flowers, ate her breakfast daintily, one hand patting Oscar's soft head. Michael arrived in the kitchen five minutes before they were due to leave and wolfed down cereal and a piece of toast, cramming his food into his mouth without looking, engrossed in a computer magazine.

Leaving them to it, Lizzie went up to her and Scott's bedroom to collect her things. She did no more than glance at herself in the mirror. Looking at your reflection when you hadn't had time to wash your hair that morning was too depressing, she felt. When it was freshly washed, her shoulder-length chestnut hair swung glossily. But she'd been too tired to dry it this morning and it would look terrible and limp all day. Lizzie wanted her hair to be to blame for the way she felt. She didn't dare think that the two pounds she'd put on that weekend (two to add to the stone by which she was already overweight) were responsible for making her feel fat, middle-aged and about as alluring as a sumo wrestler. It was her hair's fault. She coiled it into a knot and promised herself she'd stick on a bit of make-up in the car. Grabbing her coat in case of April showers and her huge, bulging shoulder bag, she yelled at the kids. 'Let's go.'

She was holding the door open when she spotted the note Scott had hurriedly scribbled when he'd left the house at six that morning. 'Back late, don't wait up.'

Lizzie scrunched it up. Perfect. That made it the sixth week night where Scott had been home after eleven o'clock. Marrying a plumber meant you never set eyes on your husband. She might write into a women's magazine helpful hints section with that information: How to avoid ever seeing your annoying spouse -make sure you marry a plumber. He'll spend all day thrilling other women with his handsome, flirty face and dazzling them with his ability with a monkey wrench, and no time at all with you. Perfect for the woman who doesn't want any affection in her life but yearns for plenty of dirty soccer kit to wash.

'Kids!' roared Lizzie more loudly. 'Get a move on.'

The traffic had been bad but not bad enough to give Lizzie the chance to apply a bit of eyeshadow or lipstick in the traffic jam. So when she ran from the carpark towards the imposing office block that housed Sycamore Life Assurance Inc, she was barefaced, panting and only just on time so there'd be no chance to slope off to the canteen to get a quick cappuccino.

She nearly tripped over a bit of scaffolding from the building site next door. A gang of builders on their first tea break of the day watched her impassively. Nobody whistled or called out to her.

Nobody whistles at frumpy forty-year-olds, she thought miserably as she climbed the front steps to the office, conveniently forgetting that she used to hate builders cat calling when she was younger, slimmer and more confident. With slinky clothes showing off her curvy figure and plenty of mascara setting off glinting blue eyes, Lizzie had made more than one builder get the cement:sand ratio wrong over the years.

'Good weekend?' asked her friend, Margaret, as Lizzie swung herself into her seat on the fourth floor office and booted up her computer.

Lizzie typed her password in with more force than was strictly required.

'Don't ask. Scott was gone most of the time. Working, he says. I don't know. If he's not playing soccer, he's round his mate's house watching Sky Sports. I mean, I never see him these days.'

'Oh,' said Margaret. 'I understand. Would a coffee help?'

Lizzie smiled for what felt like the first time that day. 'You're a life saver, Mags. What would I do without you?'

'Die from caffeine withdrawal symptoms,' joked Margaret.

As Margaret headed off to the lifts, Lizzie berated herself for being ungrateful with her lot. She had a husband and kids after all. Poor Margaret was childless, recently-divorced and so keen to get out of her house after a lonely weekend that she was always in the office at half seven on Monday mornings. She'd have loved to have kids and dogs running around, even dogs who pooped all over brand new 75 per cent woollen rugs. Feeling guilty, Lizzie attacked the pile of work she had to get through today.

Her e-mails were the usual litany of problems: a woman in the Donegal office was irate because one of her policy-holders had been overcharged for a year and still hadn't received either an apology or back money. Some new guy working in the Galway office had sent an e-mail saying hello. It was an amusing e-mail, really, much more chatty than the usual ones she received.

Nick, that was the new guy's name, sounded upbeat and good fun in an endearingly youthful way. He ended his e-mail by saying:

Do the Sycamore people ever get together for parties? It'd be nice to meet some colleagues. I feel like the youngest person in this office. The rest of them are about a hundred!

Laughing, because she'd met all the Galway people and they were anything but staid, Lizzie typed back:

Yeah sure. You're obviously the life and soul of the party, like me. Well, us youngsters aren't well catered for in Sycamore. I mean, they complain when I get in late on Mondays because I've been out all weekend clubbing. But what can you do? A girl's got to earn a living somehow. Now, if you're taking over from Elaine, we better discuss business or we'll both be fired.

Scott didn't get home until half twelve that night. Lizzie woke up when Oscar started barking frantically but she was still too sleepy for conversation when Scott slipped into the bed beside her.

'Hello,' she muttered, burying herself further under the duvet. Within minutes Scott was snoring. Typically, Lizzie was now somehow wide awake. She lay seething in wakefulness and watched the alarm clock digits slowly reach five before she fell into an uneasy sleep.

When she dragged herself out of bed at seven, Scott was gone and she felt and looked like a zombie. Her hair would have to exist another day without washing.

Nick was much perkier this morning.

Nice to meet someone my age. You sound like a bit of a babe, Lizzie. Any chance of you coming to Galway for some 'work'? I bet I'm just your type: twenty-nine, athletic and single.

Lizzie blushed as she read his e-mail. She hadn't meant it to sound flirty and young but she could see how it had. Nick thought she was his age, a youngster who liked clubbing, instead of a woman who had stopped buying bikini knickers because the big ones held her backside in better.

She was about to e-mail back sternly, telling him she wasn't what he thought. But something changed her mind. What the hell, she thought irrepressibly. It was only a bit of harmless fun, after all.

Bit risky calling me a babe, isn't it? You never know what people are like until you meet them? she typed. I could be some boring, married old dear who lives in thermal vests and woolly tights for all you know.

Nick answered back quickly. Yeah, but I can tell you're not.

Slow down, Tiger, Lizzie wrote, her eyes sparkling. A guilty thrill whizzed around inside her: she shouldn't be doing this but it was fun. Nick fancied her. It was nice that someone still did. Anyway, nobody need ever know. It was all utterly harmless after all.

' I'm going on a diet, Mags,' Lizzie announced. 'I've got to lose some weight or I'll never be able to fit into any of my summer clothes.'
'We both said that last month,' Mags said gloomily, half-way through an apple Danish.

'This time I mean it,' Lizzie said firmly. She could hardly pretend to be a hot young thing if she didn't make a bit of an effort, after all.

Scott worked late for most of April but Lizzie didn't nag him about it. Instead, she went for a power walk every evening, striding out for three energetic miles with a delighted Oscar. Tired from the exercise, she fell into bed each night and was fast asleep by half ten, usually an hour before Scott arrived home. She got her hair cut too; a sharper chin-length cut that was easier to manage in the mornings and somehow younger looking. She dyed her eyelashes at home one Saturday and Margaret remarked that it was amazing how much difference it made to Lizzie's beautiful eyes.

'You don't have to bother with mascara,' Lizzie explained, although she did bother these days.

By May, she'd lost four pounds and regained the spring in her step.

'It's not losing weight that matters,' she told Margaret. 'It's feel better, livelier, more in control of my life.' She didn't voice the feeling that having a long-distance admirer had something to do with it. It wasn't about Nick.

One morning, he wrote that he was going to Morocco with some pals for two weeks and Lizzie gaily replied that she and the girls were thinking of spending two weeks in an apartment in Ibiza in June.

I don't know if the local lads will be able for us, she wrote. Five prime specimens of Irish girlhood launching themselves on the unsuspecting Spanish lads.

Nick sounded wistful: Sounds great. Any room for a bloke on this trip?

At lunchtime, Lizzie raced into the city centre to go shopping. It was Fay's birthday the following week and she'd said what she really wanted was a voucher for Planet TeenGirl, a trendy new shop full of teeny little T-shirts and minuscule cotton dresses with flowers embroidered all over the place. When Lizzie sprinted back to the office with the voucher, hair flying and her flirty pink linen skirt riding up firm thighs as she ran, the builders next door went on red alert.

'Come in here darlin',' one shrieked. 'You'd make an old man very happy.'

'Forget him,' shouted another. 'I'm your man.'

Lizzie laughed and blew them a kiss. Men, huh.

In June, Nick sadly told her he was going to work with another company. Guess we'll never meet up now, Babe, he wrote. Pity, we could have had such fun together.

Lizzie was sad he was going. He'd meant a lot to her, more than he'd ever known.

It's been great, she wrote. But life goes on, Nick. Meeting would have ruined it all. Take care of yourself.

She felt a smidgen of remorse as she pressed the 'Send' button but it was only a smidgen. Nick had been fun, better than Prozac that was for sure. His long distance admiration had given her back her zest for life. It was weird, she knew, but having someone to flirt with in that cyber-net way had been what she'd needed. A pick-me-up. Something to remind her that she was more than a mum and a wife. She was a person, maybe even a babe. She had a husband she loved and kids she adored, but she was still a person someone could fancy.

That weekend, Scott took the family out to dinner. He had special news for them.

Lizzie, looking healthy and glamorous in a slinky grey dress she hadn't worn for years, thought how exhausted poor Scott was looking. His handsome face was pale because he never had a moment to enjoy the sun and he looked older than forty-two. Poor darling, she thought, stroking his hand across the dinner table. He needed a break.

'I know I've been working really hard and I know that it's been tough on all of us, particularly you, love.' He looked searchingly at Lizzie. 'I wanted to keep this a surprise until I knew for definite that I could afford it, but I've been trying to earn some extra cash because the guys at work want to buy a holiday cottage in France and I needed my share of the money. But,' he hesitated, 'only if you think it's a good idea. I'm sorry for keeping it a secret but I didn't want to get your hopes up until I knew I could manage it...' His voice trailed off, unsure.

Lizzie took both his hands in hers and smiled a heartfelt smile. 'I love you,' she said, 'and I think it's a wonderful idea.'

Margaret had a copy of the company newsletter and was looking through the gossip section at the back where photos of company parties were usually printed. 'There's a photo of that nice bloke you know in Galway,' she told Lizzie. 'It was his leaving do. They hired a kissagram, according to this.'

Lizzie peered over Margaret's shoulder at the photo. Looking mildly drunk and very happy, the Galway office crew were scrunched up beside a bar, all waving glasses or balloons. Lizzie looked carefully for Nick. She recognised everybody apart one person: a portly, shiny-faced guy in his late thirties who'd clearly lost the battle to keep his hair and had long since given up the fight to keep his waistline. Beaming at the camera, he had one hand around a full pint of Guinness and the other round a girl semi-dressed as a policewoman with most un-police-like fishnet stockings.
Lizzie scanned the caption. There it was in black and white. The handsome, young, lively Nick was really a sweet-faced, thirty-something bloke.
'Funny,' she said smiling, 'that's just how I pictured him.'

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