The short skirts, the frightened eyes, it all added up to one thing. Caro recognised it. She knew what this was, and it pierced her insides like a knitting needle. She asked Nina if there was a boy so many times and she’d answered no. But Caro herself would have done the same. Denied everything, until she could deny no more. Nina lied. Her own shame had become her daughter’s. 

     Her plan was to sit in the dark entrance hall waiting for Nina. It was like a song running through her head – waiting for Nina, waiting for Nina. The old clock that had belonged to Robert’s father, that didn’t go with her décor, but Robert’s mother had insisted they have, made clicks and ticks like clock breath. The chimes had been turned off, at first they had still echoed through the house like a lost ghost. 

     Caro was unsure of the time when she heard Nina’s light footsteps on the river stones outside. She could hear them landing on the path, a sound of rock hitting concrete. Nina quietly unlocked the front door, and stepped in. The near full moonlit sky silhouetted her shape. 

     “Mum! What the hell are you doing?”

     For a moment Caro imagined what Nina must be seeing. Her mother, dressed in white pajamas, perfectly dressed for bed. Perfect, except for her face. She too was one of the faces on the wall. Nina turned the light on, the illusion lost.

     “What’s the matter?” Nina put her arm around her mother and led her into the kitchen. Nina was warming milk before Caro could even say a word. Dressed all in black, the opposite of her mother. Maybe everything was okay. Like those nightmares Nina had as a kid, when Caro would warm milk and tell Nina that everything would be fine.  Maybe Caro had suffered enough for the both of them. Nina heaped in chocolate powder and stirred the milk as it turned from white to brown. She poured it into two wide brimmed cups, added a sprinkle of cinnamon and placed Caro’s favourite cup on the table. Caro stared at the oatmeal colour on her expensive white tabletop. “Are you pregnant?”

     Nina looked up at her mother. “No. Why would you think that?” 

      Caro could tell from Nina’s face that question had been a surprise, a shock. Nina’s blue eyes widened but her cheeks didn’t flush. In the light of the kitchen, where everything was white, Caro noticed Nina’s dark hair had been cut. Sharply angled. Jutting out in line with her chin. 

     Nina slapped her hand on the table and Caro started.

     “Mum, look at me. I’m not pregnant. I’m not keeping anything like that from you.” Nina’s face softened and she stroked her mother’s arm tenderly. “Do you want me to ring Dad?” Caro shook her head slowly. “Let’s get you up to bed.”

     Caro wanted to ask Nina to stay with her, but she couldn’t. She was the mother. But she would have liked it all the same. She lay on top of the sheets, as if she was a sacrifice. A sacrifice to what? The gods of decorating? 

     When she woke later it was past nine. There was a cold mug of herbal tea, and the silence of a house almost emptied. She wanted Robert, but he wasn’t home until the next day. Her body was sinking, her insides were almost outside. Her day stretched out before her, a wasteland, nothing to distract. She reached out for her phone, quickly dialled. Ellen picked up on the second ring.

    Caro carefully picked out her clothes, the colours, the styles. Navy linen with a soft white silk scarf. She peered back at herself from the mirror in her bathroom. Caro disguised her face with primer and light blush. Liquid gold to outline her eyes. Her feet were bare, and for once she wasn’t wearing tights. Her legs were blotchy. Her white bathroom usually pleased her but today it just glared. If she’d worn white today she may have disappeared. A flash of green, a cheap shade, caught her eye. Caro leaned down, picked it up, inspected it. It was one of her pills, one she hadn’t taken for a while. Without a thought to hygiene Caro popped it in her mouth, held it in her teeth, then swallowed. It couldn’t do any harm.

     After white, Caro loved green. Mostly emerald like the stone. And British Racing Green. But not the bottle green knickers she’d been forced to wear at the children’s home. Caro had learnt to hate herself by then, the ugly stretchy clothes she wore made it worse. Everything about the home was ugly. From the so-called charitable women who ran it to the rows of iron beds lined up along the walls patchworked with damp stains. Caro’s bed was flanked by a big girl called Cheryl on one side. Cheryl was a bully, and a liar. She talked about a rich aunt coming to pick her up and how it was a mistake that she was here. She shoved anyone who challenged her, Caro never did. Cheryl lay next to her at night, listening to her sobs, and she knew. Held her pillow over Caro’s head as she caught her breath until the big girl relented, laughing her cruel laugh. 

     On the other side was Ellen. Ellen was quiet and her bed was next to the wall. All night she faced the wall, as if she was confiding in it. All day she never uttered a word. Caro respected that. 

     Caro hadn’t seen Ellen for a while. She felt bad that every time she reached out for her old friend, Caro was scared or worried. When Caro was worried, she regressed to the wretched teenager she’d been. Ellen had been the person she’d turned to then and now. The only person who knew her completely. 

     They sat on the sofas in the good room, as Ellen called it. Drinking coffee, Ellen was terrified she might spill it on the white linen. Her hair needed retouching. Her dark blonde roots showed. 

     “Oh, Carol. Can’t we sit in the other room? You’ll kill me if I ruin this couch.” 

     Caro shrugged. “The view from here is so peaceful”. Despite living in an overcrowded upmarket suburb Robert had managed to buy a sizable block. The lawns seemed to go into infinity. Another shade of green Caro loved, lawn green. Without the bowling. Caro looked across at her friend, her bad dye job, what colour did Ellen love? Nina loved black, which wasn’t strictly a colour, only an absence of it. Robert loved blue, peaceful, restful blue. The blue of lakes, of the sea. Clear and uncomplicated like the sky. Caro loved white, clean white. And green, for envy, jealousy and nature. 

     “What colour do you like best, Ellen? I’ve never asked you. I should know.” Caro squeezed her friend’s hands and stared into her clear eyes. The first thing Caro noticed about her friend, when she’d peeled herself away from the damp moldy wall in the home. Clear green eyes, like glass.

     “What are you talking about, sweetie?” Ellen’s eyes were huge now. Her cheeks flushed. “Is Robert home?” 

     “I must know your colour, Ellen. I can’t see you properly unless you tell me.”

     “Is Nina here?”

     “It’s just you and me and all the colours of the rainbow. Pick one” 

     Ellen jumped up and started pacing. She didn’t have Robert’s number. “Where’s your phone, Carol?”

     Caro smiled. “Tell me your colour and I will tell you where my phone is.” Her face cracked into a smile, she looked like a child. Ellen tried to remember if she’d looked like that last time they’d seen each other. It was all in her eyes. Black ringed with lack of sleep, dilated pupils. Dull circles almost hiding the blue.

     “It’s purple, darling. It’s always been purple.”

     “Good. I’ve hidden my phone. It has a strange energy. I can’t think. It wants to stop me thinking.”

     Ellen started tearing the room apart. Looking under the sofas, the coffee table. There weren’t many places to hide in this uncluttered palace. Ellen pulled her phone from her pocket. She had Nina’s number in her contacts. “Nina, where are you? Your mum’s not well. I don’t know what to do. She’s talking nonsense, can you come home?” 

     “Nina’s pregnant, she’s been raped.” Caro looked scared. Her face was blotchy. She tugged at her hair. 

     Nina walked in half an hour later, her pale face looming over her mother. “What is it, Mum?” Ellen took her to one side, told her about her mother’s fear of pregnancy and rape. Nina shook her head. “It’s not true.”

    While Ellen called Caro’s GP and set the wheels in motion for the next step, Nina held her mother’s hand. It was soft and cared for, her nails trimmed and neat. She only wore nail polish for special occasions. Nina didn’t think this was one such occasion. Caro spoke only once before her world lurched to another space, a space she could not control. 

     “It was the green pill that did it.” 

Tilly sat on the bus. It was her first trip in years. The smells surprise her, after years of car travel, her own little world of warmth and peppermints. The bus is a miasma of over-applied cheap perfume and body odour. Her last trip in the late eighties had been an assault of cigarette smoke, sometimes hairspray, which always worried her. Hair lacquer being so flammable. 

    Her car had abandoned her only weeks after her husband had. Mark had put on his coat after dinner and had said simply, “I’m off then,” picking up the small suitcase by the back door. She hadn’t even noticed it. A horrible tartan thing in green and blue. Campbell tartan? They weren’t even popular amongst the Scottish. The closest Mark had got to Scotland was the biscuit tin he presided over at Christmas. Butter shortbread. 

     Now Tilly took the bus to work, alongside harassed mothers and haunted young men. Today the bloke in the seat in front of her gave off a strange smell of something sweet and rotten. Human compost. If he sat here long enough, he may well sink into a heap.  The bus shuddered to a halt. Not her stop yet, two more to go.

     “Morning,” the human compost heap had risen, like Jesus. He looked a bit like Jesus, but with a rolled-up newspaper under his arm and only a hint of a holy beard. Tilly nodded in greeting as he moved towards the middle doors. But he looked clean as he left the bus, taking the steps jauntily, down into the world.  The man who had sat next to him turned and grinned at her. No front teeth. The sweet rotting smell prevailed.

     The walk to the bus stop from work was longer than she’d ever imagined when she’d driven it, especially in the rain. Her umbrella was still in the footwell of her Astra, crushed up into square metal. Hanging by a crane no doubt. Pity her husband wasn’t still in it. Folded in a squashed heap, rather than leaning over Mary from the fruit shop, in her dingy little flat above the store. Turns out her hapless flirting had been just for him, not every man who came into her store. Tilly had to walk to the other side of town for her fruit and veg now. Trying to find her usual compassion she pushed down spite and popped a chewy mint into her mouth.

     It had been a good day. Tilly loved her job, making people look good for the last time. Choosing outfits with the bereaved. A subtle dress, a smart suit, nothing too funereal, but nothing clown-like.  

     The bus trip home always felt a little lighter. The fact that she was going home again, and the bus was filled with professional workers like herself. Her raincoat was wet around the shoulders, her hair a cold damp helmet. She should think about having a colour to lift it. Sharon, her hairdresser, always called it that. ‘A lift darling, that’s what you need’. As if that would change anything. Make better life choices, stop the bile rising inside her. 

    She’d nipped into the supermarket on the way home, her reusable plastic bag contained a couple of ready meals to see out the week. Tilly took great pleasure in piercing the tight film and popping it in the microwave. Mark hated microwaves. He liked freshly cooked, not that he did anything in the kitchen. Mary had better like cooking after a day on her feet weighing potatoes. Tilly smiled, and the woman across the aisle who was still wearing her plastic rain hat smiled back in solidarity. 

     Next day the sun was shining. It shone in through the bus windows, filtered through the dirt. The smiling woman from yesterday patted her seat before sitting down. A cloud of dust escaped causing the man in the seat in front to sneeze. Best leave the dust there, Tilly thought, and sneezed herself. The bus driver wasn’t the usual morning one. He was young. Looked too young to drive. He whistled a tuneless unrecognisable song. It made Tilly feel warm inside, and outside because of the sun. Her dad had been a whistler. His favourite song, which he whistled daily, was The Sun Has Got His Hat On. Hip-hip-hip hooray thought Tilly as she rescued her book from her bag. She placed it on her knee, looked out of the window. Mary’s overblown come-hither breasts. Her long over bleached hair which sometimes dipped into the green beans as she shovelled them into paper bags. Large cheap gold earrings that made her look like a cut price fortune teller. After six months Tilly was starting to emerge from the control of her ill-chosen husband. Mark was graced with the good looks he thought would get him through life. Golden blond hair, chiselled jaw, clear blue eyes. She’d done the choosing of course. Mark was a beautiful man on the outside, but he had a shrivelled soul. Perfect for his job as a financial advisor. Satisfied, Tilly picked up her book. 

     It was still bright and warm as Tilly made her way to the bus stop again that evening. She toyed with getting off the bus a stop or two earlier to make the most of the weather. She decided she wouldn’t. Mark had called her, halfway through a tricky part of her work. She’d sworn under her breath.

     “I was wondering if I could pick up the rest of my stuff,” he said.

     His stuff had been sitting in a cardboard box in the utility room since the week after he’d slipped out the back door. It wasn’t much. A football trophy from his school days. Tilly suspected it was a participation medal as he’d never shown any sporting prowess. Old books and attempts at creative writing. He’d attended night classes at the community centre for a while, had read his pointless poetry to her while she begrudgingly cooked their evening meal. His words quotidian, no rhythm to them 

     “Sure.” Tilly murmured.

     “Saturday morning then?” without even checking if she was free. She was free. Free as a bird. They agreed on 10 o’clock. 

     There wasn’t much to pick up after ten years of marriage. Mark had moved in with her, with nothing much to his name. The furniture was hers, the electrical goods too. She’d stored the microwave in the loft and had rescued it the week after Mark left. Tilly no longer cooked, just waited for a ping, more rhythmic than Mark’s poetry. No Saturday morning trips to the fish market to buy Mark’s haddock. No one to tell her what to do.

     Homeward bound in full sunshine. The newspapers called it a heatwave. The country wasn’t made for the heat. On the bus men were jamming their fingers into too tight collars. Women in summer finery. Dresses usually unworn hung at the back of the back of the wardrobe. Now they were out and proud, bright colours shouting at each other across the gangway. A middle-aged woman in teal stood out, tears coursing silently down her face. A failed office romance? Tilly didn’t wear a light summer frock, it would be considered unprofessional and frivolous. She wore a neat navy skirt, teamed with a light cotton blouse in white or grey. Flat pumps, no tights, that was her contribution to England in the heat. She carried a matching suit jacket in case it got cool. The air-conditioning could be fierce in her line of work. She put on her white coat before starting work. The surgical smell in the room, on her clothes, her hair. 

     Mark had come around on Saturday morning as he’d threatened, surprised at how neatly Tilly had piled up his cartons of things. She didn’t think he’d expected that. Or that she had the microwave out. She’d been tempted to light up a cigarette to annoy him further, but she hadn’t smoked in years. Tilly considered chewing gum, twirling it around her fingers defiantly while she listened to him drone on about his job, his life. Not mentioning Mary once, but Tilly knew. She could almost smell the beetroot on him. 

     Monday morning, three weeks after taking the bus, Tilly noticed a pattern to the way people sat. Smiling woman on the side seat, compost and toothless near the back, a huddle of unhappy youth nearby, smelling of desperation and Lynx Africa. Professionals near the front and side exists, to be near the doors. One man in a suit opened up his newspaper, the same one that had announced the heatwave, and a front-page splash about a local paedophile who had moved into the area. He stared daggers at anyone who tried to sit next to him, trying to keep his seat free. Should have bought a broadsheet, not a tabloid. Even Tilly sat in more or less the same seat. She’d had to remove gum with an old receipt from the back of the seat in front of her more than once.

     Tilly was tired. Dealing with Mark over the weekend had exhausted her. His controlling manner was still there but she was learning how to deflect it. Tilly fell asleep, her face sliding slowly down the dusty window. She woke up at the bus stop before her own. A small crowd of schoolchildren were laughing at her face, distorted by the window, from a bus stop. Part Munch, part stroke. She could smell mint. There was chewing gum in her hair. Her life was dropping again, since Mark, dripping like stalactites. But she would not have to see him again. Tilly was finally letting him go. She didn’t feel the tears that ran slowly down her face. The man beside her fidgeted bringing her awareness to the present. Not tears of heartbreak but of resignation. Time to move on.

     Now it was raining again, and Tilly still didn’t have a brolly. Her client today was a woman in her forties, with lovely hair. Waves of red curling around her head. Tilly had used deft brushstrokes on her cheekbones, a neutral lip shade, nothing to scare the mourners. Working with the dead meant you could never block it out, not entirely. 

     Every morning death waited for her, in chilled drawers with identifying tags on their toes. What had this woman died of? Did she have a grieving husband? Children? It didn’t really matter. Here and now Tilly would make her beautiful. Holding a photograph given to her she would make sure that the deceased woman would look as close to the one that had walked the earth. 

     Tilly behaved with respect and dignity. Her client would never see these acts of kindness. But she was good at her job. That much Tilly was sure.

Nina could feel her mother’s eyes on her, at breakfast, at dinner, and any time she left the house. Did her mother know? Was Nina giving out some kind of scent, like animals do. She wasn’t really lying when she’d said there was no boy. Gus had made himself invisible since that day. Nina missed her dad. She hated it when he was away on business, the space he left between her and her mother. The awkwardness of silence, words were even worse. It felt like they were each following the wrong script. Nina sometimes wondered if her mother had ever been young. She couldn’t imagine it. Perhaps Caro had been born in a carefully tailoured suit, wearing Tiffany rings. Nina wished she’d known her maternal grandmother. There was a huge gap in the family tree where she should sit. Just a name, her mother had told her once, begrudgingly. Flora Harvey. Nina imagined a small woman with fluffy hair, smelling of flowers. Like her name. 

     After Nina had left the house, after her mum had asked her about a boy, she wandered the streets. The dark streets. Nina texted him.

     Please answer Gus. I have to see you. Xx

     No answer. Nina tried again. We don’t have to meet at your place. The park?

     Hopeful, Nina walked towards the park. She was on the swing when Gus’s reply came through. 

     Give me five minutes.

     Nina waited, her stomach mashing together. She could feel her blood rising. She urgently needed to see him, but she didn’t know what to say. What was there to say? You and your body changed me forever. How could she say all that, without dumping more shit on poor Gus? Poor Gus.

     Nina didn’t find out that night. Gus didn’t show. Five minutes later he texted sorry. Just one word, that lit up the  screen as she sat on the swing sobbing, a sense of loss rising through her torso. Grieving for something she hadn’t really known she’d had in the first place. Nina didn’t blame Gus, she blamed herself. She dragged her sleeve across her wet face and walked slowly home, wishing she could confide in her mother. It had always been Daddy, but this wasn’t like sharing skinned knees or bullying from the popular girls at school. She was growing up. She only had two friends and it looked like she’d lost one of them. Gus had reacted just as she’d feared. He’d rejected her. What was wrong with her? Nina tried to see herself as Gus must have but she couldn’t bear it. She felt ugly. Keep it inside, don’t share it, it’s too awful to share. You are awful. The words circled her thoughts like enemy fire. 

Almost a week after the swings, and Gus bottling, Kaitlyn texted. A week of self-loathing and avoiding her mother. Nina could hardly leave the house without her lying in ambush, skulking in corners. They ate together but her dad was home now so Caro didn’t try to talk about anything other than the ordinary. She considered talking to Ellen, but she’d not been around for a while. When she wasn’t at school, Nina spent her time in her bedroom. Sitting in silence, looking at the wall her friend had painted. The wall seemed to vibrate, sometimes it seemed to speak to her but only in rhythms. Nina listened to loud music, or music loudly. Florence and the Machine, Florence’s angry voice throbbing within the walls. All the anger pulsated in the faces Kaitlyn had created. And then her phone bleeped. Kaitlyn: Coffee? xx 

     Nina arrived at the café early. It wasn’t the usual one in the shopping centre, this cafe was near the river, painted in bright blues and yellows. Nina had never been here before. She sat at a table outside, rebuffed the man with a fashionable beard and an apron. “I’ll wait. My friend will be here soon.” She hoped this was true. Sugar had been spilt on the table, the man had missed it, Nina drew patterns in it, circles at first. When she realised the circles had become faces she stopped, swept the sugar aside, wiped her hands on her jeans. 

     “Hello, you!” Kaithlyn leaned down to hug her. “Let’s get coffee, and doughnuts. My treat.” Kaitlyn waved vigorously to the bearded man. She clasped Nina’s hands tightly, it felt to Nina as if Kaitlyn was her anchor. She was shocked at how sane she felt, and how the past week had wobbled and lurched and worse. How long had this been going on? Since Gus? Or before. 

     “What’s the matter, Nins? Your eyes, they’re so black. Have you taken anything?”

Her friend’s face changed, a vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. Nina shook her head violently, not to deny that she’d taken drugs but to shake the thoughts tightening in her head. The thoughts had a colour, they were grey, and tasted metallic, like the barrel of a gun. 

     “What’s happened, Nina?”  

     Her shame of the past days landed in her cheeks, red and raw. Tears followed, stinging her eyes. Nina felt ugly. She was ugly. That’s why Gus hadn’t returned her texts. He was disgusted by her. These thoughts had been circling dangerously for days. Kaitlyn rubbed her shoulders. “You can tell me, you know, Nins. It’s fine. I’m your friend.”

     Kaitlyn waited until Nina’s tears stopped, as her body gave up its last shudders. Kaitlyn held her shoulders gently. Nina held onto these moments, things would change once Kaitlyn heard what she’d done. 

     Eventually did Nina stop, Kaitlyn handed her a paper tissue she’d wrestled from her backpack. Nina wiped her eyes, clutched the soggy hankie in her fist, “Gus”, she breathed.

     “What about Gus?” Then Kaitlyn’s eye’s widened and Nina clenched in wait for her reaction. “Do you mean? No. I can’t believe it! I told him. The bastard!” Nina looked up, her friend’s hands still clutching her shoulders. Bastard? “I’m so sorry, Nina.” 

     “I thought you’d been angry. I don’t understand.”

     “I knew he liked you, I warned him not touch you. You’re so young.”

     “I’m the same age as you. And I started it. I comforted him, held his head here.” Nina slapped her forehead. “It’s my fault.”

     Kaitlyn wiped a palm across her friend’s cheek. “It was your first time, wasn’t it?” Nina nodded. “You may be the same age, but you’ve not had the same life experiences as Gus and I. Seriously, you are so fragile.”

     “I am?” Kaitlyn took her in her arms, squeezed her tightly, as if Nina might turn and flee. Nina took a deep breath in, then out. She felt safe. For the first time in a long time, she felt safe.

Only days before Nina had cast an eye through the bottles in her mother’s medicine cabinet, the one she thought Nina didn’t know about. The names on the bottles blurred and Nina rubbed her tears away angrily. Zoloft, Seroquel, other names she couldn’t pronounce. A full unopened bottle of lithium. Prozac. Xanax. Her mother had all these pills just to function. What the fuck? Nina knocked over the cannister of Prozac, it fell to the floor, and green pills scattered everywhere. Vibrant against the white marble tiles on the bathroom floor. She scrambled, reaching out for the tablets, flattening to eyelevel so she wouldn’t miss one. What would it matter if she was going to take them them all? Was she feeling suicidal? She had several ways to end it right here in this bathroom. Nina didn’t hate herself any less, but she didn’t want to stop living. Not yet. When she was certain all the pills were back in their container, trying not to think of the germs they may be harbouring, one pill had been lodged behind the toilet, she walked away and phoned a friend. Kaitlyn.

As their coffee grew cold, and the doughnuts hardened in the sun, Nina told Kaithlyn all about that afternoon, when she’d gone from rebellious teen to scared woman. How she’d misread it, how Gus had not been in touch, hadn’t even realised that it had been her first time.

     “I’m sorry. This happens so often, Nins, it really does. Our bodies development before we mature as people. It’s a design fault I’m sure. But Gus is in the wrong here. He’s in so much shit now.”

     Nina’s face dropped, her mouth twisted. “You can’t say anything, Kaitlyn.”

     “It’s not your fault, you know that don’t you? It’s no excuse but Gus hasn’t had been parented. I’ve tried to teach him about women, and responsibility. Growing up with the brats I’m under no illusion what casual sex can result in.” Kaitlyn smiled. Despite herself Nina did too. Kaitlyn loved those brats.

Caro noticed a difference in Nina. In the way Nina wore her school uniform now she had started back at school. A button or two loosened, showing the silk bow of her bra. Nina’s skirt appeared shorter, and it wasn’t because of weight gain as she was still skipping breakfast. She left the house in the morning, a fake smile pasted across her face, picking up an apple from the fruit bowl. 

     Last night Nina played with the meal Caro had prepared. “Are you going out tonight?” Caro asked. 

      “Later. Kaitlyn and Gus both have work.”

     “You’ve hardly mentioned Kaitlyn but you haven’t mentioned Gus at all.”

     Nina smiled her enigmatic smile, the one Caro had mastered a long time ago. She saw through her daughter’s and wondered if Nina saw through her own guarded smile. The idea worried her, and she almost forgot to question her. If Nina could see through her smile, what else could she see through? Caro had kept so much of herself deeply hidden, the thought of her daughter uncovering even a handful of secrets, finding the underbelly of Caro’s life, frightened her. 

     Caro scraped the salad debris into the compost bucket and pulled herself back. She wanted to ask Nina about boys and sex. Basically, the stuff that she didn’t want to share about herself. 

     “Is there a boy?” Caro catches Nina as she reaches the door Caro sees her face drop briefly. She quickly rearranges her expression, there’s a flicker of something, then it was gone. “No Mum. There is no boy.”

     The thought of her little girl out there among boys who want her, like her, love her even is confronting. But there may be boys who hate Nina, and they are the ones to watch. Men who encourage intimacy but will cause Nina shame. Caro knows her own shame will kill her one day. It’s too much ugliness to keep inside. She knows this on one level, but still a bolt of shock runs through her body. She clasps the kitchen bench top until her knuckles turn white. Perhaps she’ll die without escaping this beautifully decorated prison she’s carefully constructed.

A young Carol hid between two empty houses on the new housing estate. She liked to come here and peer in the windows, dreaming of living in one of the new builds. Everything was fresh, so unblemished. Carol imagines completing menial tasks, vacuuming the stairs, taking the rubbish out to the specially made place where the bins were kept. Today she was hiding from Wayne who was coming for her. She could hear his big shoes clumping on the concrete. Carol holds her breath but suddenly he appears at the end of path, a sickening smile on his big stupid face. A shadow from one of the houses darkens his features. Then he’s all over her, hands pinching, grabbing. She tries to scream but one of his huge hands is over her mouth, her nose. Carol can’t breathe, she feels his sweaty body pushed hard against hers. His other hand thrusts between her legs, he rips at her underpants. It hurts. A pain like no other rocks through her. 

     “Tell anyone and I’ll kill you.” Wayne spat on the ground and left her. Carol sank to the floor, sobbing, her breath ragged. 

Caro regains her strength and pours a large glass of wine. She hopes Nina’s first time is kinder. She wants to warn her about what can go wrong. The bruises and bite marks she had to hide for weeks. The disgust on Wayne’s face when he looked at her. But she doesn’t. 

     Carol had no mother to go to, she only had Wayne’s horrible mother who hated her. When Carol forced herself to go home that day the sun was going down. Avoiding that great galumphed brute. She ran upstairs to throw up her dinner in Doreen’s toilet. The mess matched the rest of her bathroom suite, a pale orange. Apricot Delight, Doreen boasted.    There were days Carol almost forgave Wayne for what he’d done, he didn’t have a hope being the progeny of Frank and Doreen. But more often she wasn’t so generous. He could have impregnated her. His seed, luckily for her, was as useless as the rest of him.

     Nina had still not come home as Caro sat on the white sofa in her lounge room. She hadn’t drawn the curtains yet, she watched the sky change from a colour palette of summer to inky blue. She hadn’t moved for hours. The dregs at the bottom of her wine glass beside her, her attempt at a coffee nearby, growing cold with a skin on the top. Caro craved a cigarette, she hadn’t had one for 20 years, but she hadn’t visited that particular memory for as long. Robert was due home in an hour or two. Too late for dinner but he would be home and holding her in their bed tonight. He was a patient man. A loving man. Caro knew the difference.

     She’d met him in a city café, crowded with people, hardly any room to sit. It was winter, the windows were steamed up. Caro had squeezed into the booth where he had work papers all over the table. She’d heaved her handbag onto her seat, knocking his cold coffee all over his papers. Caro flinched, expecting the worse. “Oh god! So sorry.” Grabbing paper napkins from a dispenser on the table, making it worse. 

     “Don’t worry. I wasn’t enjoying it at all. No harm done.” He looked up and smiled. His reaction, his pale blue eyes full of kindness, warmed her insides. He was so unexpected. 

     Their first date had been a gallery just out of town. One of the forgotten impressionists. Caro had never heard of him anyway. They walked round a nearby park, Robert had made a picnic lunch for them. He’d even cut the crusts off the grated vegetable sandwiches. Packed a couple of glasses for the New Zealand wine which was still cold. Strawberries for afterwards. It wasn’t an imaginative picnic, but he had thought about it. He was dressed in a button-down shirt and pressed trousers, his blond hair fluffed by the breeze. He was unlike anybody else she’d met in her short ugly life. He smiled at her with his whole face, and Caro decided right there that she would have to keep her history secret. No one could be that kind, not even him.

Nina enjoyed avoiding her mother. Leaving early, avoiding her schedules which were set in stone. Had she always been this boring Nina wondered? The moments they passed each other, in the kitchen, at the bottom of the stairs, her mother’s face looked grim. Immovable. Sometimes Nina wished she wasn’t there, that it was just her and her dad. She had been close to her mother once, not that long ago. But Nina knew eventually she had to face the reckoning.

     It was Sunday morning, Nina thought Caro had gone to church. She was a Hillsong fundie. Nina had even attended church with her a couple of times. She’d watched her mother’s face change, it almost melted, tears would stream down her face. She looked both happy and sad at the same time. Her mouth moved, seemingly in anguish. A bit like the faces on Nina’s wall, except with perfectly groomed hair. This Sunday Caro was waiting to ambush Nina in the kitchen. She sat nursing a cup of Earl Grey, Nina could smell its perfume. A half smile on her lips which wore weekend lipstick. Weekend lipstick was more subtle than weekday shiny red. A glossy shade of nude. She indicated a chair with the incline of her head. There was no escape today. Nina sat down in one of those fucking French chairs, scraping it across the wooden floor. Caro flinched.

    “What’s with the wall, Nina?” Her mother dipped her chin and looked upwards at her, like Princess Diana. Nina wondered if that’s who she modelled herself on. 

     Nina sighed. Looked down at her bare feet. “It’s art, Mum. Just art.”

     Caro drew a circle on the table, as if picking up dust, where there was none. “Art? What art? Edvard Munch? The latest Banksy? What’s wrong with Monet?”

     Nina burst out laughing. She hated Monet. “Well, it’s not Banksy. Kaitlyn did it.”

     “Kaitlyn? Who the hell is Kaitlyn? And how the hell am I supposed to paint over that monstrosity. It’s practically blackboard paint.”

     “You don’t get it, Mum. You don’t paint over it. It’s a piece of me in this huge show home I don’t feel part of.”

     “I always consulted you. Remember that sugar pink and white tulle theme.” 

     “I was trying to fit in at school. What about when I dug my own coffin in the sand at the beach? You only remember the things that fit in with your idea of me, as your daughter. But I’m me. Nina. You look at me, but you never fucking see me.”

     That half smile again. Nina knew her mother was running a mantra through her head. It went, it’s only a phase, it’s only a phase. Well it wasn’t. She was growing into who she needed to be. No more tulle and pastels. Nina could feel herself edge towards a darkness that was both exciting and hers. Perhaps it was exciting because it was hers. She stood up, knocked one of those see-through chairs to the floor. Her mother couldn’t see through her anymore. Nina’s parting shot, a knife that would hurt.

     “It’s you. There’s something wrong with you.” In measured tones, she didn’t shout. 

     Nina walked away, didn’t run this time. She imagined her mother clutching herself, leaning over her perfect kitchen table. Not a hair out of place but her face as if it had pushed itself out of place. Nina’s pace quickened as she felt a small stab of guilt, walked to the corner of our road and the main road, dragged her phone from her jeans pocket and texted the two only people who understood. 

     No reply from Kaitlyn. Gus agreed to meet her at his house. He was finishing up a job for his dad. Kaitlyn had been in touch with him. She was minding the brats. Nina had never been to either of their homes. Gus texted her the address, it was a long way from Nina’s home. It literally was on the other side of the tracks. Nina crossed a level crossing and headed towards a part of town she hadn’t known existed until now. The brickwork of the houses became a muddy brown. It was a rural scape in monotone. No front gardens, no flowers. The smell of  overcooked vegetables wafted. 

     Nina hadn’t eaten. Her body felt good. Thin and spare. She was growing into herself at last, softness hardening. She could feel her senses vibrate and hum. Gus stood at the door, smiling down at her. His hair was wet, his feet bare. She could smell cheap shampoo.

     “Welcome to Chez Gus, wipe your feet on your way out.”

     Gus was always joking but today his eyes looked nervous, sad even. Nina sat down on a rickety dining chair that was not remotely French. Gus sat opposite. “Mum’s found the wall.” When she looked up, into his eyes, she realised that her mum finding a bit of DIY decorating was not a real problem.

     “I wish my dad would care about anything I do.” Gus’s face screwed up, his eyes were the most haunted Nina had ever seen.

     “Christ, I’m sorry. I must sound self-obsessed to you.” Nina boldly reached out to grab Gus’s hand, she squeezed it. Gus fiddled with a friendship bracelet on his wrist. It was faded and fraying. Her body pulsed selfishly. A small voice inside her, I want him, not really knowing what this meant. Nina stood, went over to Gus and held his head against her chest, like she’d seen her mother do to her father when he was exhausted from work. Gus must be able to hear her heart thumping against her ribcage. “What’s wrong?”

     “I’m so lonely here. Dad’s never home when he’s seeing someone. I have to find work. I’m overwhelmed.” 

     Nina’s insides lurched with empathy, but also longing. How they got from there to the kind of kissing that stops you breathing she wasn’t sure. But then Gus picked her up, and in one move, carried her to the sofa. She’d worn a skirt that day, a rare event, it made what came next easier. 

     Afterwards they re-arranged their clothes and Gus fished out a squashed cigarette packet from his jeans. He lit two, passing one to Nina, forgetting that she didn’t smoke. She thought it was the most romantic gesture she’d ever experienced. 

     Only it wasn’t. When Gus spoke, it wasn’t of what they had just done but how to keep it quiet. “Please don’t tell, Kaitlyn. She won’t like it. She’s my oldest friend.”

     Nina nodded. Put her cigarette out and made excuses to go. Did Gus not know that this was her first time. It was supposed to be special. Nina, in the days of feeling close to her mother, had asked her about her own first time. Her mother had visibly paled, she’d talked about a boy in the town she’d lived in but when Nina had asked his name, her mother had hesitated. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.” Even then Nina had known that you would always remember your first, even if it was a bad experience. That was probably the beginning of their separation. Nina knew her mother had lied to her. She felt unloved and used now, after Gus, but it was possible that her mother’s first sexual encounter had been much worse. 

     How was Nina going to face Gus, or Kaitlyn now? They were her only friends. She couldn’t lose them. She’d keep Gus’s secret for him, even though it hurt her. 

The next time the three friends met was a week or so later. Gus had found a job packing bags at the local mini-mart, Kaitlyn had started a part time art course. Her mother had managed to save some money from taking other people’s children in. Their days were full. Whereas Nina’s were empty. Hanging around her colossal home was lonely, but somehow it was even more lonely when her mother was home. Caro tried but Nina didn’t want to know. Her father was away more which meant Ellen came round some evenings. She liked Ellen, she was fun. She was also honest and upfront. The opposite of her mother.

     In the end Nina started going back to school. The experience with Gus hadn’t been ideal, she still thought of him. Her body remembered him where he’d touched her. But she had changed, she felt more confident. Clothes hung differently on her. Her head held high, she felt less of a child, more a woman. The girl’s at school still treated her with disdain, but the eyes of their boyfriends who met them after school would linger on Nina, where before they had laughed, or whispered cruelly. Nina felt a power she’d never felt before. Her walk changed, her body had become more fluid. In the mornings she dressed more carefully. She wore her skirt a little higher, unbuttoned another button on her shirt. 

     But Caro noticed. She noticed the change in her daughter, and it frightened her. 

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.

     

Trying something different. This is a novel I started a few years ago.

Chapter One

It didn’t help that Ellen had come to supper that day. They had sat around her beautifully painted kitchen table. Caro wouldn’t invite Ellen into her dining room, it looked over the lawn, with views of the city lights after dark. It was the kitchen and potluck suppers for Ellen. Caro’s perfect white kitchen, always in fashion, French Country White, white cupboards, whitewash. Whiter shades, pride of place her transparent Louis Ghost replica dining chairs. Ellen had sat in one of them, tipping her head back in laughter, showing her mercury fillings. 

     Caro had served fig and greens salad, knowing that Ellen would leave her goat’s cheese on the side. If only their past could be left on the side, toyed with briefly but never touched again. Ellen wasn’t ashamed of who she was or the person she had been. Not so Caro.

     “We were young, easily led. Didn’t you enjoy any of it?”

     Caro had and she was more ashamed of that fact than anything else. Shame rose up from her groin, rising across her stomach, her breasts and settling there, making it hard to breathe. “I have something good here. Something worth preserving.”

     “Darlin’, it ain’t worth preserving if you don’t even like yourself.” Ellen shook her head, a tight smile on her lips. Caro knew she was dying for a cigarette. 

     Then Robert had come home early, ducked his head through the door. He saw Ellen rocking back on Caro’s prized kitchen chairs and caught his wife’s eye with a smile. Ellen was now talking about her unreasonable boss at the casino. Showing her legs under her short skirt, blotchy legs due to bad circulation. Caro wasn’t listening, she was scratching at the paint on her perfect table, lilac, Porter’s finest. He’d raised an eyebrow, Caro had smiled. She felt warm despite her anxiety. He’d always had that effect on her. 

     “Hello ladies. How was your evening?” Caro knew he meant that the evening was over, and Ellen should leave. 

     Ellen leaned forward. “All the better for seeing you, Bobby.” 

     “I have an early start.” Robert stood behind Caro and kissed the top of her head. He grabbed his coat and briefcase and exited stage left. At least he left the kitchen and wouldn’t appear again until breakfast. 

     Ellen had knocked back the wine. “Don’t worry. Nina’s nothing like you.” She flicked her box-dye hair back. “I mean she’s not like Robert either but if you’re worried about who she might turn out like I wouldn’t, Caro.” Caro stood up and started clearing the table. Nina was late. She didn’t want a pissed Ellen seeing her daughter, alcohol loosened her tongue, loosened everything about her friend, Caro thought nastily. She wished she hadn’t brought her daughter’s worrying behaviour up with her old friend. Friend or foe, friend or foe. Words spun as she started washing up the glassware, French again, bought on a tour of the vineyards before Nina was born. They’d hired a red sports car, driven through Provence. 

     “Can I give you a hand, Carol?” Ellen cooed. Caro’s back stiffened. “Don’t call me that.” Caro shivered, the nights were still cool. Ellen wore only a short denim skirt and a tight orange tank top. Only a strong complexion could get away that shade of orange. It made Ellen’s freckles dance busily. 

     “Don’t call you what?” A figure appeared in the doorway. Long dark hair, the same shade Caro’s had been once. Washed out jeans and a grubby purple tee-shirt with the logo of an old metal band from the 80s. Chewing gum, eyes glassy. Was her daughter taking drugs?

     “Hello darling. Ellen was just leaving.”

     “I guess that’s my cue.” Ellen recovered the high street brand denim jacket from the back of her chair. Caro wished she wouldn’t use the back of her beautiful chairs to hang her coat on.

     “I’ll call you a cab.” Caro retrieved her phone from the side. She had an uber account for Ellen’s visits. Caro leaned against the kitchen cupboards and sent a message to the ap.  

     “I’ll wait outside. I could do with a smoke.” Ellen air-kissed Nina and giggled. “I think I would have made a lovely godmother.” She lurched out of the kitchen, blowing kisses to Nina and Caro.

     Nina stared at her mother, her steely gaze confronting. “She’s fun, isn’t she?” Then she turned round and headed up the stairs. She’s fun meant Caro wasn’t. She knew she wasn’t, it was as if all the fun had been used up. Now she was trying to keep her perfect together.

With Ellen gone, back to her cheap little unit, Caro could still smell the sadness that seeped through her skin. Caro wondered if other people could smell it. Alone in her perfect kitchen drinking Riesling left over from Christmas. That morning she’d searched in the back of the pantry for it, on her knees. Ellen hadn’t noticed. The Riesling had been a gift from a neighbour. Caro held the stem and turned the wine glass in her hands, her fingerprints obscuring the pale liquid, smudging the light. The light fractures colours from the crystal droplets of her New York chandelier that Robert had bought her for her last birthday. It caught the highlights in Caro’s hair. She wore it short these days, and as blond as she could get away with. Beauty, as always, blotted out the ugly. At least for a moment. Ugly moments were popping up to haunt her more and more.

     Robert was deep in sleep when Caro crawled into her side of their bed sometime after midnight. 

The light found Caro’s face around dawn. She could hear Robert whistling in the shower from the ensuite. She loved the cool spring mornings that didn’t bring her out in a sweat, like summer ones did. If she pulled on her exercise gear, hanging from hangers in the wardrobe, expensive shades of mauve and blue, she’d be able to make quinoa porridge for Robert before he left. 

     In the kitchen Caro opened windows to let out the stale air from the night before, while the quinoa gently cooked on the stove top. She tidied Ellen’s visit away, but the air needed clearing. If she were the type Caro would have probably lit sage and waved it around the corners of her kitchen. 

     “Sorry love. I’m late. Slept so well.” The sight of Robert in his suit, carrying an overcoat and dragging his case on wheels made Caro’s heart jump. Her clean man. She could smell him, lemon and a heady herb, rosemary perhaps. She stopped stirring his breakfast, maybe Nina could eat it. Caro wouldn’t, it would sit in her stomach, ruin her yoga class. Caro walked over to her husband, re-tied his tie. Starred into his blue eyes, already distracted by the day ahead. 

     “Dinner then? I’ll see you at dinner.”

     “I’m away tonight, that meeting in Melbourne. Remember?”

     Damn Ellen. She always unsettled her, made her forget the now, but never her past. Robert away, what would she do to fill the time? Nina perhaps, a girl’s movie? 

     “Sure. I’d forgotten. Stand still.”

       That slow lazy smile of her husband’s. She had his gaze now. “How late did that Ellen keep you up last night?”

     Caro shrugged. “She went home as Nina came in.”

     Robert left with an empty stomach and a quick kiss that pleasantly burned Caro’s lips for a moment. She wanted to hold on to him, his arms grounding her giddiness. 

     Keeping busy was Caro’s raison d’etre. Cooking meals, yoga classes, interior decorating. Creative ways to stop the ugly noise. She had the day in front of her, and the night after that. Nina walked into the kitchen. Caro turned to her holding the pan of quinoa, smiling, doing a knockout impression of Margaret Fulton.

     “Porridge, darling?”

     Her daughter sneered. “No thanks, Mum. I don’t do breakfast.” 

     Nina moved through the kitchen like a vampire, quick movements, pale face, dressed all in black. Then she was gone. Gone before Caro realised Nina wasn’t wearing school uniform. She ran to the hallway, opened the front door, no sign of her daughter. Caro was clutching a school lunch in her hand, handmade sushi rolls in a brown paper bag. She’d attached a sticker with a smiling cartoon face on the outside. Nina has once loved Caro’s lunches. What was her daughter going to eat now? Greasy chips and donuts? Caro stood in the doorway, visible to the neighbours, in her exercise gear and clutching a cut lunch in a bag. She retreated back into the house, closed the front door.      She would have loved to have a mother like her rather than the car crash she’d grown up with. She couldn’t tell Nina the stories of her teenage years, maybe she never would. Nina barely resembled the cute, plump princess loving little girl who squeezed Caro like she would never let go. Caro sat down and ate the porridge straight from the pan, without using a table mat. It ran down her chin, she kept shoving it in her mouth. Fuck yoga. Fuck her perfectly painted kitchen table. She would touch it up later with the spare tin she kept in the garage. 

Tilly sat on the bus. It was her first trip in years. The smells surprise her, after years of car travel, her own little world of warmth and peppermints. The bus is a miasma of over-applied cheap perfume and body odour. Her last trip in the late eighties had been an assault of cigarette smoke, sometimes hairspray, which always worried her. Hair lacquer being so flammable. 

    Her car had abandoned her only weeks after her husband had. Mark had put on his coat after dinner and had said simply, “I’m off then,” picking up the small suitcase by the back door. She hadn’t even noticed it. A horrible tartan thing in green and blue. Campbell tartan? They weren’t even popular amongst the Scottish. The closest Mark had got to Scotland was the biscuit tin he presided over at Christmas. Butter shortbread. 

     Now Tilly took the bus to work, alongside harassed mothers and haunted young men. Today the bloke in the seat in front of her gave off a strange smell of something sweet and rotten. Human compost.. If he sat here long enough, he may well sink into a heap.  The bus shuddered to a halt. Not her stop yet, two more to go.

     “Morning,” the human compost heap had risen, like Jesus. He looked a bit like Jesus, but with a rolled-up newspaper under his arm and only a hint of a holy beard. Tilly nodded in greeting as he moved towards the middle doors. But he looked clean as he left the bus, taking the steps jauntily, down into the world.  The man who had sat next to him turned and grinned at her. No front teeth. The sweet rotting smell prevailed.

     The walk to the bus stop from work was longer than she’d ever imagined when she’d driven it, especially in the rain. Her umbrella was still in the footwell of her Astra, crushed up into square metal. Hanging by a crane no doubt. Pity her husband wasn’t still in it. Folded in a squashed heap, rather than leaning over Mary from the fruit shop, in her dingy little flat above the store. Turns out her hapless flirting had been just for him, not every man who came into her store. She had to walk to the other side of town for her fruit and veg now. Trying to find her usual compassion Tilly pushed down spite and popped a chewy mint into her mouth.

     It had been a good day. Tilly loved her job, making people look good for the last time. Choosing outfits with the bereaved. A subtle dress, a smart suit, nothing too funereal, but nothing clown-like.  

     The bus trip home always felt a little lighter. The fact that she was going home again, and the bus was filled with professional workers like herself. Her raincoat was wet around the shoulders, her hair a cold damp helmet. She should think about having a colour to lift it. Sharon, her hairdresser, always called it that. ‘A lift darling, that’s what you need’. As if that would change anything. Make better life choices, stop the bile rising inside her. 

    She’d nipped into the supermarket on the way home, her reusable plastic bag contained a couple of ready meals to see out the week. Tilly took great pleasure in piercing the tight film and popping it in the microwave. Mark hated microwaves. He liked freshly cooked, not that he did anything in the kitchen. Mary had better like cooking after a day on her feet weighing potatoes. Tilly smiled, and the woman across the aisle who was still wearing her plastic rain hat smiled back in solidarity. 

     Next day the sun was shining. It shone in through the bus windows, filtered through the dirt. The smiling woman from yesterday patted her seat before sitting down. A cloud of dust escaped causing the man in the seat in front to sneeze. Best leave the dust there, Tilly thought, and sneezed herself. The bus driver wasn’t the usual morning one. He was young. Looked too young to drive. He whistled a tuneless unrecognisable song. It made Tilly feel warm inside, and outside because of the sun. Her dad had been a whistler. His favourite song, which he whistled daily, was The Sun Has Got His Hat On. Hip-hip-hip hooray thought Tilly as she rescued her book from her bag. She placed it on her knee, looked out of the window. Mary’s overblown come-hither breasts. Her long over bleached hair which sometimes dipped into the green beans as she shovelled them into paper bags. Large cheap gold earrings that made her look like a cut price fortune teller. After six months Tilly was starting to emerge from the control of her ill-chosen husband. Mark was graced with the good looks he thought would get him through life. Golden blond hair, chiselled jaw, clear blue eyes. She’d done the choosing of course. Mark was a beautiful man on the outside, but he had a shrivelled soul. Perfect for his job as a financial advisor. Satisfied, Tilly picked up her book. 

     It was still bright and warm as Tilly made her way to the bus stop again that evening. She toyed with getting off the bus a stop or two earlier to make the most of the weather. She decided she wouldn’t. Mark had called her, halfway through a tricky part of her work. She’d sworn under her breath.

     “I was wondering if I could pick up the rest of my stuff,” he said.

     His stuff had been sitting in a cardboard box in the utility room since the week after he’d slipped out the back door. It wasn’t much. A football trophy from his school days. Tilly suspected it was a participation medal as he’d never shown any sporting prowess. Old books and attempts at creative writing. He’d attended night classes at the community centre for a while, had read his pointless poetry to her while she begrudgingly cooked their evening meal. His words quotidian, no rhythm to them 

     “Sure.” Tilly murmured.

     “Saturday morning then?” without even checking if she was free. She was free. Free as a bird. They agreed on 10 o’clock. 

     There wasn’t much to pick up after ten years of marriage. Mark had moved in with her, with nothing much to his name. The furniture was hers, the electrical goods too. She’d stored the microwave in the loft and had rescued it the week after Mark left. Tilly no longer cooked, just waited for a ping, more rhythmic than Mark’s poetry. No Saturday morning trips to the fish market to buy Mark’s haddock. No one to tell her what to do.

     Homeward bound in full sunshine. The newspapers called it a heatwave. The country wasn’t made for the heat. On the bus men were jamming their fingers into too tight collars. Women in summer finery. Dresses usually unworn hung at the back of the back of the wardrobe. Now they were out and proud, bright colours shouting at each other across the gangway. A middle-aged woman in teal stood out, tears coursing silently down her face. A failed office romance? Tilly didn’t wear a light summer frock, it would be considered unprofessional and frivolous. She wore a neat navy skirt, teamed with a light cotton blouse in white or grey. Flat pumps, no tights, that was her contribution to England in the heat. She carried a matching suit jacket in case it got cool. The air-conditioning could be fierce. In her line of work. She put on her white coat before starting work. The surgical smell in the room, on her clothes, her hair. 

     Mark had come around on Saturday morning as he’d threatened, surprised at how neatly Tilly had piled up his cartons of things. She didn’t think he’d expected that. Or that she had the microwave out, and wasn’t in tears. She’d been tempted to light up a cigarette to annoy him further, but she hadn’t smoked in years. Tilly considered chewing gum, twirling it around her fingers defiantly while she listened to him drone on about his job, his life. Not mentioning Mary once, but Tilly knew. She could almost smell the beetroot on him. 

     Monday morning, three weeks after taking the bus, Tilly noticed a pattern to the way people sat. Smiling woman on the side seat, compost and toothless near the back, a huddle of unhappy youth nearby, smelling of desperation and Lynx Africa. Professionals near the front and side exists, to be near the doors. One man in a suit opened up his newspaper, the same one that had announced the heatwave, and a front-page splash about a local paedophile who had moved into the area. He stared daggers at anyone who tried to sit next to him, trying to keep his seat free. Should have bought a broadsheet, not a tabloid. Even Tilly sat in more or less the same seat. She’d had to remove gum with an old receipt from the back of the seat in front of her more than once.

     Tilly was tired. Dealing with Mark over the weekend had exhausted her. His controlling manner was still there but she was learning how to deflect it. Tilly fell asleep, her face sliding slowly down the dusty window. She woke up the bus stop before her own. A small crowd of schoolchildren were laughing at her face, distorted by the window, from a bus stop. Part Munch, part stroke. She could smell mint. There was chewing gum in her hair. Her life was dropping again, since Mark, dripping like stalactites. But she would not have to see him again. Tilly was finally letting him go. She didn’t feel the tears that ran slowly down her face. The man beside her fidgeted bringing her awareness to the present. Not tears of heartbreak but of resignation. Time to move on.

     Now it was raining again, and Tilly still didn’t have a brolly. Her client today was a woman in her forties, with lovely hair. Waves of red curling around her head. Tilly had used deft brushstrokes on her cheekbones, a neutral lip shade, nothing to scare the mourners. Working with the dead meant you could never block it out, not entirely. 

     Every morning death waited for her, in chilled drawers with identifying tags on their toes. What had this woman died of? Did she have a grieving husband? Children? It didn’t really matter. Here and now Tilly would make her beautiful. Holding a photograph given to her she would make sure that the deceased woman would look as close to the one that had walked the earth. 

     Tilly behaved with respect and dignity. Her client would never see these acts of kindness. But she was good at her job. That much Tilly was sure.

 I leave work early.  It’s a twenty-minute drive to our local supermarket, that’s a forty-minute round trip.  Enough time to prepare a decent meal for two, watch an episode of a costume drama on the telly or make in-roads into my book group’s latest novel.  The time it would take Tim to jog around the park, to play retro Pacman on his phone.  Or maybe fool around with me, Anna.  His wife.   

     But Tim doesn’t know how long it takes to get to the supermarket, he doesn’t even know where it is.  And what started as a kind gesture on my part when we moved in together is now wearing great big staring holes in it.  Five years of marriage, of dreams not realised.   

     I collect a trolley from outside the shop, push it through the automatic barrier which flings itself open with an enthusiastic welcome, and head towards fruit and veg.  I’ve almost forgotten what a lettuce looks like, freshly picked from the soil.  The shelves are lined with cellophane packets, they throw in a bit of this and a bit of that, market it as Caesar if it has croutons, Australian style if it contains grated beetroot and charge us five bucks for the convenience.  I’ll mix my own leaves if you don’t mind.   

     Are these lemons waxed?  I want to grate the rind.  Does anyone know?  No one stands still long enough to ask.  Busy, busy, chop, chop, bang, bang. 

     It’s Friday today and Tim likes fish on Friday.  That’s why I need lemons, and salmon.  I join the queue with an older woman with a defeated face, raincoat squeezed tight at her middle and a dark-haired man with a toddler hanging around his feet.  The girl behind the fish counter looks twelve.  She has one of those disposable hats over her hair.  It’s not a good look.   

     “Can I order a couple of large pieces of salmon?” 

     “Do you mean order or buy?” 

     She arches an eyebrow.  Is this girl for real?  She obviously thinks she’s dealing with some pig-shit thick housewife.  Should I tell her I have a job, a better job than hers.  And they don’t make me wear unflattering head gear. 

     “Of course, I mean to bloody buy!  Do you think I’m ordering two pieces of salmon for Christmas?”  My face feels hot, and my heart gets a leg up from my chest to my throat.  I turn away, muttering obscenities.  I have to get out.  People in the fish queue are staring.  I abandon my trolley, a sign of failure, bare empty bars, and walk.  I’d like to say to friends at a later date that I walked away with dignity, but it wouldn’t be true.  The girl with the plastic hat and arched eyebrow had caught me ‘on the hop’ as my mother used to say.  When I was a child I didn’t know what ‘on the hop’ meant but it was usually followed by a small explosion.  I would watch Mum’s colour rise.  It started on her chest, pink where it had been white and freckly, like the time Dad had laughed with Mrs Flowers. It rose like mercury in a thermometer, along her neck, invading her face, and then she would roar.  As I did, in the car park, slamming my hand painfully against the steering wheel.   

     I didn’t go into the kitchen and unload the groceries.  I sat in a chair with my coat on. 

     “Do you want help with the bags?  They’re in the car, right?” 

     I shook my head. 

     “What, no fish?” 

     I looked at Tim.  A prickly sensation surrounded my heart.  My breath shortened as he looked at me.  I was constrained by his expectations of me, and mine of him.  Could we find a bridge between them, or even a scrabbly path?   

     “Fancy a curry?” 

     I nod.  Tim smiles, problem solved.  As if what we had for dinner was all that was wrong. 

     When I was seven, I lost my mother in a crowded shop.  I had followed her confidently through the department store, not realising there was more than one blonde lady wearing a red coat.  I remember crying a little and a woman in blue taking me to an office to wait while she asked a man called Harry to make an announcement over the PA system.  I wasn’t bothered, I felt important.  An announcement had been made about me and everyone in the shop had heard it, and there were sherbet lemons.  How much of this memory can be relied on?  Surely the very act of being lost should bring about grief or pain.   

     At school I learnt about the signposts in England being removed during the Second World War, in the event of a German parachuting in.  Without signposts they would get lost very easily.  In the country inside me there are no signposts.  It’s dark and raining and there’s a cold wind.  I cannot pin-point the moment I was parachuted in, it seemed to creep up on me.  One minute I am married to a good-looking paramedic who held my hand when my cat died.  I have an exciting career in advertising and an ability to eat a packet of Hobnobs and not put on weight.  Now I feel like one of those photographs taken in the seventies; faded and curling at the corners.  My husband is losing hair and patience, and every day I write advertising copy for incontinence pants and support stockings.  Those Hobnobs?  They go straight to my thighs. 

     Saturday, late afternoon, it’s humid as I put on formal clothes. 

     “We’ll be late.”  Tim looks at his watch, lines like sentries on his brow. 

     “So?”  I’m trying to pull on my tights without snagging or tearing. 

     “It’s a wedding, it’s rude to be late.  Unless you’re the bride.” 

     “It’s not a wedding, it’s a vow renewal.” 

     “Same thing.  Why are you wearing black?” 

     “I always wear black.  Damn it, that’s my last pair!”  I throw the tights to the floor.  “Let’s get this over with.” 

     I can hear music as Tim pays the driver.  A string quartet, girls in pale gauzy dresses move elegantly to the sound of violins.  Exotic canapés are passed around by waiters in crisp white cotton.   

     Desiree, a celebrant by profession, arrives at a clearing around which we, her guests, are arranged.  Desiree and Giles are celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary by renewing their vows.  I wasn’t sure I wanted the bright light of their success cast across the shadow of our failure.  She is carrying a silver bucket which appears to be filled with stones.   

     Desiree clears her throat and begins.  “Giles and I went on a holiday recently, we’d been having a few difficulties and thought time together would help.” 

     Giles stood next to her, a full head shorter, looking uncomfortable. 

     “Giles and I had an argument.  I stormed into the sea and when I came out, I looked down and noticed my wedding ring was missing.” 

    As Desiree spoke, she walked amongst her guests with a serious face, handing a stone from the bucket to each of us.  They were large stones, heavier than they looked.  Grey and brown but smooth as if they had been handled many times before.  Tim and I took one each and exchanged a brief look.   

     “We spent the rest of day looking for the damn thing and by five o’clock I’d given up on the ring.  And our marriage.” 

     Giles was breaking into a sweat and trying to wedge a finger between his neck and the collar of his shirt. 

     “Just as I had mentally finished dividing our dvd box set collections, Giles burst in with my wedding ring in his hand.”  Desiree beamed at us, tears in her eyes.  “And I knew I was exactly where I should be.” 

     Tim leaned into whisper to me.  “What do we do with the stones? 

     I shrugged my shoulders.  “Stone them?” 

     A bubble-like champagne fizzed and warmed, elicit.  I grabbed for Tim’s hand as we tried to contain ourselves and keep straight faces. 

     Desiree stood tall, her broad shoulder pulled back.  “You might be wondering why you, our treasured friends, are holding stones.” 

     Tears were sliding down Tim’s face and his eyes were sparkling.  I had scarcely noticed how dull they had been become. 

     “I want each and every one of you to close your eyes.”  We obeyed.  “Now transmit your well wishes, your love and your joy for Giles and I, onto those stones gathered on the very beach where I lost my wedding ring and nearly walked away.” 

     I looked at my husband, his face was flushed with mirth. 

     “Giles will now collect your stones.” 

     Giles came forward with the bucket as Desiree gave him an encouraging nudge. 

     “We will keep them in a Grecian urn we bought on our honeymoon.  If we doubt our love, we will hold one of your stones over our heart and accept your blessings.”  

     I loosened my grip on Tim and our eyes met. 

     “Cab, pub, eat, bed?”   

     I smile.  Our old saying, when we wanted a Saturday evening just the two of us.  I hadn’t heard it in a while. 

     “Come on, Anna.  Let’s go.” 

     “We can’t go without saying goodbye.” 

     Suddenly Desiree is behind us, resplendent in lilac, acres of it.  “Tim, I saw your tears, you sentimental old thing.” 

     Later in the cab into town, we held hands and sat in a silence broken by my husband.  “Would you like to renew our vows, Anna?” 

     “Nup.  It’s not us, is it?” 

     “We don’t need rocks.”  Tim’s face, the most relaxed I had seen it in long time.