“Those incredible sunsets,” Angela said. “Remember those? All that rosé.”
“And you couldn’t get Daniel out of the pool, not for love nor money. Do you remember how cross he got, because he wanted to teach Ben to swim and we kept telling him Ben was way too little?”
Angela shook her head. “Did he? Did he really?” she asked, bending forward to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the carpet. “It seems impossible, doesn’t it? Thinking about it now, from here”—she gestured at the ugly room around them—“that we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.”
Carla’s own hands shook; her arms, her legs, her whole body trembled as she rose to her feet, as she stared down at her sister, lamenting their lost contentment. “Unimaginable,” she croaked. “It is, isn’t it? Just a few moments of carelessness, an hour or two of unthinking neglect, a door left open. And here we are.”
She remembered the way her sister stared at her then, glassy-eyed, her mouth working but making no sound.
Carla took another handful of ash, and brought it to her lips before she pressed it down, into the earth.
The One Who Got Away
They skip school, slipping out through the gates unseen. There’s a bus to and from town, one an hour, on the half hour. Hurry up! Her friend hitches up her skirt, sprints ahead, waving frantically to attract the driver’s attention. The girl half jogs, book bag slung awkwardly over her shoulder, large breasts bouncing. They board the bus, pass the smirking driver, pass the other sour-faced passengers.
The moment they get off the bus, the girl regrets coming. It is baking hot, pavements crammed with shoppers. There’s nothing to do here, nowhere to go. Listlessly they drag their feet, shop to shop, they look at clothes they cannot afford, they buy cigarettes from the corner shop, cheap ones, rough on the back of the throat. They smoke, lighting one from another, until they feel sick.
They go to the pub, but the barman won’t serve them. They sit at a table outside, skirts hitched up. Sunning themselves. The old blokes sitting at the next table give them dirty looks. A younger man approaches, he looks at them, looks at the friend, not at the girl, he smiles. He is ugly, his eyes too close together, acne on his neck, red raw. Her friend rolls her eyes. As if, she says, and she laughs.
Music starts to play from somewhere, a radio, a jukebox, the girl has heard this one before, something slow, a man’s voice soft and hoarse over acoustic guitar. In the hot afternoon sun, the girl’s skin is cold. She feels as though someone has poured petrol all over her, and yet there is a point at the back of her scalp, right where her ponytail is secured, that throbs with a vicious heat.
Something bad is going to happen.
TWENTY-FIVE
The basin almost full, her hands plunged wrist-deep into warm, soapy water, Miriam experienced a flashback so pin-sharp she recoiled. It wasn’t visual but a sensation—the sudden, surprising heat of arterial blood bubbling up through her fingers, the shock, immediately afterward, of disappointment. Of sorrow. No taking it back. She stood at the sink in her tiny bathroom, her arms in the water, unable to move for a minute, perhaps even two. Her right hand squeezed a nail brush and her left gripped the handle of pair of scissors, as if in spasm.
And then the moment passed, her hands relaxed, and she came back to herself. She pulled the plug and watched the soapy water run out, she replaced the brush and the scissors on the little shelf beneath the mirror. Carefully, she dried her hands before tipping a little antiseptic lotion onto a ball of cotton wool, which she applied gently to the scratches on her neck and arms. She took the strips of adhesive bandage she’d cut from the roll and applied them to the worst of the wounds, along the side of her left forearm.
When she was finished, Miriam returned to the main cabin and began to tidy up. She replaced the books that had tumbled from the shelves, she put her wooden box back in its place, and with a dustpan and brush she swept up broken pottery and soil, one of her herb pots having fallen from the sill. The plant itself, a little spike of tarragon, was irredeemable. Back aching, knees pressed painfully into the cabin floor, she worked methodically, trying her best to sweep away all traces of her confrontation with that vicious girl. She was angry, but her fury was controlled, simmering, right up until the moment that she discovered, under the table, one of Lorraine’s gold hoop earrings, bent slightly out of shape, and she started to sob.
Why must people take what does not belong to them? Why must they take what is hers, and ruin it?