There was no book group. Caro didn’t even read fiction. She only moved her interior decoration books around her circular mid-century coffee table. Her favourite was the decorating style of The Hamptons, but she liked the one, called simply, Tuscany. The warm light on ancient walls was magical but The Hamptons was more her style and reminded Caro of the only fiction book she had ever liked. The Great Gatsby. How the characters were wildly sophisticated, with secrets. The book made Caro feel she wasn’t such a bad woman after all.

     While not attending her fictional book group Caro had done what she’d always done. Lied. And driven round for hours and hours. Concentrating on the road and listening to talk back radio. Caro didn’t like to be alone with her thoughts. Her thoughts ganged up on her, bullied her. When she reached a bay two hours from home, she pulled over and watched the inky blue sea wash the sand back and forth. Listened to the loud whoosh and pull of water.

     She got home later than usual. The house was in darkness except for a blaze of yellow in the hallway, shining on Caro’s pottery collection placed begging for attention on her Danish sideboard. The light meant Nina was home. The quiet meant she was in bed. She’d let her daughter sleep.

 Caro dropped the pink glass she was holding, it shattered on floorboards. Rose coloured glass in shards. She looked at the wall and her face mirrored the three tortured faces twisting back at her. It was like peering into hell. The pristine Cloudy Bay paint colour she’d chosen so carefully was now matt black. Caro could feel herself falling, nothing to hold her back. She’d spent her life painting out the horror of herself. Nina had painted her back in. Those hideous faces. They were her. The person she’d escaped from. Was Nina rebelling her decorating choices, or was she rejecting her own mother? Nina had certainly escaped the house in a hurry again this morning. 

  Her foot throbbed as she struggled down the stairs. In the kitchen Caro pulled splinters of glass out of her foot with a tweezer. The red of her blood looked bold against the white marble tiles in her kitchen. Her head spun with pain. Nina had heaped all her beautiful things into an ugly pile on a twisted sheet. Her record player, her music box. Crystal figurines and glass coloured pots. To Caro it looked like a crime scene. A kind of murder. 

One of Caro’s many foster mothers turned on her in a foul-smelling kitchen. The chip pan on the stove. She held a kitchen utensil and was waving it in Caro’s face. Only back then she’d been called Carol. “You dirty girl. Where have you been?” Carol had been out for a milkshake with her friend, Ruth. “I can smell men on you! You disgust me. Get out! Get out!” Carol ran to the bedroom she sometimes shared with other skinny teenage girls. She sank down on the other side of her bed, next to the old creaky wardrobe, hugged her knees and sobbed while the family ate their dinner. Her foster parents, Jim and Doreen, and their mean spirited son Wayne. They liked to think they were good people, but Doreen was mad, and Jim looked at her in a way that both men and boys did. Not Wayne though. His body was too large for a child, his face pink and sweaty. He had said she was ruined. His mother’s words Carol was sure. Yesterday Wayne had smirked at her in a way that made her insides shrivel. “Your mum was a prostitute. Do you know what that means?” Carol didn’t but she knew it was bad. She turned and ran. Ran down the streets of her temporary home, they were always temporary. Passed the dirty house fronts that were optimistically called cottages. Down to the place where brick and tarmac turned to grass. The swing set was empty. Carol sat down on the middle swing, her heart slowing, her heaving chest returning to normal. Pink cheeks returning to white. The sweat under her hair. The name Wayne had called her mother. Prostitute.

Caro washed up the breakfast things, wiped the table clean. Pushed each Louis Ghost chair under the table. Righted the mess. What would she do about Nina’s wall? Another wall Nina had put up between them. Robert would know what to do. And where was Nina? Was she out there drinking harmless milkshakes, or was something more sinister? 

Years after nasty Wayne had taunted her, Caro had bumped into her social worker and dared to ask about her past. She couldn’t do it at 16, she’d been too scared. She’d just believed that arsehole Wayne. “No, darling.” Martha had reached out to her, “she was just a teenage girl with no family support. Sadly, much like you.” 

     Fire like molten metal had run through her blood, she couldn’t hear what Martha was saying over the rush of her shame. Caro believed she had inherited her mother’s bad blood. 

She’d dragged Robert up to Nina’s bedroom the moment he walked in the door. Nina was still not home. “It’s just teenage rebellion, Caro.” Robert didn’t understand that their daughter was rejecting her, judging her. Her husband grabbed her hand clumsily. “You were close to her, but this is normal.” Robert pulled her hand to his mouth and kissed it.

     There was only one person Caro could rely on, and it would be a mistake but her need for someone to see it from her point of view overruled. 

     “Ellen, it’s me. Lunch at my place tomorrow?”

     Nina had come home later and left early yet again, avoiding her mother. Caro felt sick and couldn’t eat. She put out a few bowls of gourmet chips and activated almonds and waited for the sound of the doorbell. When it came, Caro startled. 

     “If you’re wanting to get heavy, Caro, a few bowls of snacks and sparkling water isn’t going to cut it.” Caro nodded. She took Ellen to a sophisticated bar that did good food. Quinoa and kale salads and wagyu steaks. Caro always considered steak a man’s choice. The bar was far enough away from home to avoid bumping into friends. They took Caro’s Peugeot. Ellen took charge once they got there, choosing a window seat, selecting a good white from the menu. Caro let her. Ellen looked at her quizzically. Her body leaning in, her ice blue eyes showing concern. Despite the years, and the lines on her face, Ellen always looked the same to Caro.

     “It’s Nina.”

     “I thought it might be.” Ellen smiled warmly and Caro wondered, not for the first time, why she kept her friend at such a distance. Nobody knew her better, but most of the time that scared her. Ellen could shatter her life with loose words. “Come on, Carol. Spill.”

     Ellen watched carefully as her face screwed up then released as she started telling her about Nina’s wall. She ranted and when she’d finished furious tears that had built up escaped from her eyes. “And the three faces, they must be Robert, Nina. And me. Ugly, Ellen, so ugly.”

     “What did they look like?” Ellen stopped eating her steak, blood smeared across her plate. 

     “You know The Scream by Edvard Munch? It was like that, only more terrifying. Can Nina see in my face the life I lived before?”

     Ellen stopped herself from snorting, instead she grabbed her friend’s arm across the table. “You know that’s mad, don’t you? There’s no way she could know unless someone told her.” Ellen took a tissue from her handbag and handed it to Caro. “She’s not a face reader, or a mind reader, come on. Only I know. Not even Robert.”

     Caro looked horrified. “He can never know. Nor can Nina. That will be the end.”

     They ate their overpriced food and Ellen drank too much criminally expensive wine, still the same, filling her boots until the next time Caro paid. They didn’t talk about Nina again. Ellen talked about how hard work was now. Her days of selling herself were long gone and she’d retrained as an aged care worker. The work was depressing, and the pay was low. She could hardly afford the shabby apartment she lived in. Unlike Caro, Ellen missed the old days. “I’m still servicing old men.” The two friends laughed. 

     Caro poured a drunk Ellen into an uber and walked home. Her lunch hadn’t vanquished her fears but she felt lighter after spending time with her friend. But there was no one Caro knew who felt the fear that ran in her veins every day. And it wasn’t just the shame that frightened her, it was the fact that in the end Caro had loved her work. Not the sex with faceless men, but the luxury it afforded her. Her beautiful apartment in the city with its view over the park. Her manipulation of men who needed something from her. Her eventual manipulation of poor Robert was what she felt ashamed of most of all.

Back home her husband sat in a chair on the back deck, reading a newspaper. He wasn’t the most handsome of men, but he had the kindest face. Caro had met unkind men, cruel men, men who made her feel like filth. She leaned down to kiss Robert and took in his scent of lemons from the soap she bought at the health food shop. As her heart filled with love, her insides filled with guilt. Her present was far from her past, but it felt like it would be part of her tomorrow, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

The next chapter in a book I’m blowing the dust off.

Nina managed to dodge her mother’s perfect packed lunch by awkwardly breaking into a run. Her black ripped jeans were not given to sudden sprints. Nina didn’t want to waste the lunch, she didn’t hate her mother that much, plus it was waste, and she hated waste. But Gus and Kaitlyn would tease her mercilessly about her posh mummy lunch to go. Nina ran down the pretty suburban street she had lived all her life. Manicured lawns and sprinkler systems. A neighbour’s gleaming classic MG sports car, 4WDs that had rarely seen mud. Mud was honest, mud was real. 

     She could hear her mother thinking downstairs last night, even though Nina had been upstairs in her room. Her quiet mother’s thoughts were sometimes so loud Nina wanted to put her hands over her ears. She couldn’t hear what her mother was thinking, the sounds were like the echo of pipes. Last night when Nina looked at her face in her bedroom mirror, she saw sharp eyes full of sadness and fear, her cheeks streaked with black eye make-up. Sadness that hit her, reckless and inhibited, sometimes full of rage. Where did it come from? Her kind but disengaged father? No. It had to be something thin, dangerous, that ran from her to mother in an invisible line pulling them together. Nina couldn’t explain it, but she needed to run from it.

     Gus and Kaitlyn were waiting for her at the café in the mall. Only Nina was skipping school, Gus and Kaitlyn had dropped out already. Skipping made it feel light and childlike. Nina stifled a laugh. Their irrespective parents hadn’t guessed her friend’s truanting, although Gus and Nina never wore uniforms. She knew Kaitlyn’s mother worked hard and long hours, and Gus’s dad was hardly home. Their parents didn’t decorate houses for their friends. They were lucky if their houses were adequately furnished. That was real. Not ghost chairs in the kitchen, named after a dead French king.

     When she was with Gus and Kaitlyn, gathering in a café in the local mall, all wipe-clean surfaces, they’d made up pasts for the people they saw, waiting for lunch, walking by hands full of bargains. “A perfect place for murder,” Gus laughed. “Laminated tables.” Gus was always talking about murders, he read a lot of crime fiction. “laminated surfaces are ideal.” An old man sheltering from the rain became their focus. Drinking hot tea as steam evaporated from his out-of-date raincoat, his soaked umbrella propped up beside him. “A former KGB spy who worked as a double agent and got separated from his wife in Belarus.” Kaitlyn grinned, her dark spikey hair sticking up in all angles.

     “Brilliant! What about a Vietnam Vet whose brain was destroyed by Agent Orange. He recently bashed a young man wearing a hoodie. who swore at him in a bus shelter. He thinks the rain has washed off the blood but if you used one of those ultraviolet wands that forensics pathologists have you can see it clearly, in purple.” Gus smirked proudly, his mouth filling his face. Eyes sparkling with mischief, blonde curls to his shoulder. He often threatened to get dreads but Kaithlyn and Nina knew these were only threats. 

     They look at Nina. It was her turn. “Charles Turner, his wife, Gwen, was desperate for children. They tried but with medical science not yet developed Gwen died without ever conceiving. She was the love of Charles’ life. He couldn’t move on and stayed in the house they’d lived in, despite the neighbourhood going down the tubes. One day a robbery went wrong, and he was killed in his own home. But the connection with their marital home is so strong he doesn’t know he’s dead. He roams the neighbourhood still mourning his wife, not realising he can find her in the afterlife.” Nina stopped, sipped her tea. They look over to the old man, who’s watching them quietly, drinking them in.

     “G’day.” He smirks. The three friends’ shudder. The man laughs. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” 

     The three friends leave the café and walk to an abandoned car park close to the mall, chained off awaiting building work. 

     Everything looks wonderful, but it has been knocked off kilter.

     “Mum’s screaming her head off again.” Kaitlyn’s mother had four other kids and a voice that could reach Mars, according to Kaitlyn. “She claimed I’d nicked five bucks from her purse. How does someone that disorganised know exactly how much money she has in her purse?” 

     Gus smiled lazily, “so, did you?”

     Kaitlyn grabbed a folded note from inside her boot. “Hell, yes.” Nina hid her discomfort with a laugh. “Those kiddies get everything. I mean, I love them but they’re the bane of my existence.” Kaitlyn’s face washed with warmth. “Oh okay. I ran out of cider money.” Kaitlyn shrugs.

     “If I had a mother, I’m sure I’d do the same.” Gus’s mother had died when he was four. He lived with his father, who when he wasn’t home, he was on a Tinder date meeting women in bars or hooking up in a dark alleyway. 

     “There’s something not quite right about my mum,” blurted Nina.

     “The Interior Decorator.” Gus lit a cigarette. “Bringing the Hamptons to the North Shore.” A mince in his walk, pretending his ciggie was in a holder. “Oh, daarling! I do love what you’ve tried to do with the place. It’s amaaazing.”

     Nina felt a shudder of betrayal as she laughed with her friends. 

     “I know, I know, but it’s as if that version of her lies on top of another version of herself. I don’t really know what I’m saying.” Nina crushed her cigarette with her foot. She hates the taste, and the smell, but she doesn’t want to disappoint her friends. The first she’s had since primary school. Friends, not cigarettes.

     “Well, I do know.” Kaitlyn jumped from the swing. “Let’s paint the fucking Hamptons out of Nina’s bedroom”  

     We’ve talked about it. Time to do it.” Gus bowed to his friends.

     “How are you getting on with the wall?” Kaitlyn asked Nina.

     “Actually, I’ve already bought the paint.” Nina laughed.

     “Have you worked out what you want to paint on the black wall?” Kaitlyn chipped in. Kaitlyn was a bit of an artist, Nina knew she wanted to help.

     “Faces. Big disturbed faces. Sort of The Scream but more terrifying.”

     Kaitlyn smiled with relish. “Now you’re talking, Nins.”

It was Kaitlyn’s idea to decorate her bedroom, but all three of them had agreed on a plan. Nina used the money Caro had given her for a dress she’d promised she would buy for her mother’s birthday meal out. Paint would make a better statement. Nina had picked up two tins of matt black paint, and one of white gloss. She spent the next day painting one wall black. Her mother was at a friend’s place doing something chic with striped wallpaper, Caro said it was back in, in muted shades of grey. Nina wore black clothes to paint a black wall, she laid newspaper on the carpet. It took two coats to cover the pale lilac wall that was almost grey. The subtlety of it made her want to scream. 

Thursday night Dad was away on business. It was her mum’s monthly book group, although Nina had never seen her read a book. Carefully chosen interior decoration books graced their coffee table in the lounge room, but Nina never saw her mother even pick them up. But Nina was grateful for book group, it meant she had the house to herself for a change. She smuggled  alcohol from the drinks cabinet to her bedroom. A full bottle of vodka, and half a bottle of gin. She didn’t think of mixers, she was very new to rebellion. 

     Matt black would be impossible for her mother to paint out. Nina hugged her knees and took a sip from the vodka bottle. Its taste assaulted her throat and warmed her. Excitement and danger swept through her body. Nina’s home swallowed her whole. The white painted walls, the pale carpets, stripped wooden floorboards. Sucked down into absence with nothing to cling to. Pale elegance overwhelmed her. Her dad called it hostage heaven, even he felt a bit trapped in its white rage. Nina couldn’t understand her mother, what made anyone design without a sense of colour, of life. The absence of colour blinded her.

     Just as the sun went down Nina let her co-conspirators in, all dressed in black. Kaitlyn fake air-kissed her, and Nina led them up the stairs. Friends. That word felt so good when in the past it had only taunted her. Gus whistled. “Blimey, Nins. This place is huge. 

     “Keep going. The scene of the crime is second on the left.” Nina felt a mixture of pride and shame. This over decorated palace had never felt like home to her, more like a movie set. 

     She’d laid down old sheets on top of the newspaper, high thread Egyptian cotton. The matt black wall, her chosen canvas, was primed. Kaitlyn’s artwork could begin. Nina opened the paint can, Kaitlyn sat back, getting a sense of her canvas as she lit a cigarette.

     “Do you mind, Kaithlyn? Mum will go mad!”

     “I’ll hang out the window?”

     Nina nodded. “I’ve got vodka.” The top Russian brand sat newly opened on her dressing table, next to the exquisite music box her dad had picked up on his travels. London, she thought, no, Vienna. Nina liked the idea of cleared surfaces, her new look bedroom, no exquisite clutter. She looked around and saw so much of her mother in her room. Discreet little shelves adorned with crystals and fake bird nests. Her duck egg blue record player. Her mother’s taste suffocating her own. Nina had no idea who she really was but the feelings inside her were not pastel. 

     Kaitlyn got to work. Gus poured vodka into little pink glasses he’d found on top of a shelf. One shot down Nina realised she hadn’t eaten at all today. She felt exhilarated, in control. Her head swam. She felt sad but fought tears and started to laugh once more. Her friends made her laugh. 

Her mother wasn’t here to make sure she ate. A memory of her fourteen-year-old self, refusing to eat the dinner her mother had made her. Nothing was wrong with the food. A light salad with nuts and grains. A piece of chicken cooked to perfection. Nothing wrong with the food, but everything wrong with Nina. Unprepared for the world, not wanting to go forward into her future. She would refuse to eat and never grow, she could stay here in this house. Invisible. Like the fucking chair she sat on.

Nina jolted. Kaitlyn was talking excitedly. “Is this the sort of thing?” Her friend pointed at screaming a face on the wall. The face looked terrified, exactly how Nina felt inside. Horror ripped through her. Then recognition. More Nina than duck egg blue record players and pop music. More than the Hamptons and perfect stripes.

     She smiled, swatted a single tear. “I love it!”

     The three friends stopped, their young faces turned to the tortured face on the wall. “I’ll do three, shall I?” 

 Nina was no longer alone.