‘Look at the three of you!’ Fen cried, pointing as Lexi flicked through the pages.
Bella angled her head to see a photo of her, Lexi and Robyn in wellies, posing with their fingers in the peace sign.
‘Glastonbury,’ Lexi grinned. ‘We must’ve been, what? Seventeen?’
Robyn nodded.
Bella remembered driving there, leaving her car in some random field before walking for miles with borrowed rucksacks on their shoulders. When they arrived at the festival gate, they paid a fiver to be let in through a hole in the fence, which a teenager held open with wire-cutters. It was one of the muddy years, and they’d painted tribal mud stripes on their cheeks and worn wellies and denim shorts, nests of flowers woven into their hair, glitter glimmering beneath the streaks of mud.
Bella glanced at the next photo, feeling her heartbeat accelerate. It was taken in a swimming pool, Lexi riding high on the shoulders of a guy from sixth form. It had been edited to include only him and Lexi in the frame – but if the photo had panned out, Bella would’ve been right there in the pool, Robyn on her shoulders.
She may have been cropped from the photo, but Bella had not forgotten that night. Not a single moment of it. The dull thud of a skull against concrete. The fresh blood on the poolside. The long wait in A&E, her wet bikini soaking through her dress.
She heard a collective gasp and looked across the table.
Lexi was holding the final present. There was a perplexed crease in her brow. ‘Wow … I can’t believe … Gosh, thank you, Eleanor.’
Two pink spots of colour rose on Eleanor’s pale cheeks. Her voice sounded tight, defensive, as she said, ‘The email said to make something … I didn’t know what … these are the only things I make.’
Lexi needed both hands to hold the heavy bronze sculpture. It was a dancer, head tipped back, throat exposed, hair trailing down a slender, muscled back. The expression was one of rapture, eyes closed.
It wasn’t just any dancer. The detailing was clear, the expression sculpted with skill and precision.
It was Lexi.
‘Ladies,’ Bella announced, grinning, ‘I think we have a winner!’
11
Eleanor
Eleanor had got it wrong. She realised it immediately. She knew the moment Lexi had opened that first present, a silly slip of sequins harking back to some club night out.
As everyone crowded around the sculpture, she felt her skin flushing hot to the very tips of her ears.
‘Wow!’ Ana said. ‘You made this?’
‘I’m a sculptor.’
‘It’s absolutely incredible. The detailing. Lexi’s expression … You’ve captured her exactly. Eleanor, you’re so talented.’
She wanted Ana to stop talking. She wanted someone to say, Hey, come over here and look at the moon. The sea. A gecko eating a cricket. Anything!
This was the sort of thing she invariably got wrong. At the time, it seemed so obvious. Make something for Lexi = sculpture. And since she’d no idea what type of thing Lexi liked, except for her brother, she’d thought, Dancing!
She’d enjoyed modelling the clay ready for casting. She’d meant to keep it simple, do the lines of her body, the muscle tone, but then it was all coming together so well and she had that amazing feeling of being lost in her work. It was so nice not to be thinking about missing Sam. To just be working, creating. So she began to work the clay to form the features, the eyes, the full lips, the straps of her leotard. And so it became Lexi.
When she’d finished, she’d looked at it beneath the studio lights and knew it was good. One of her best. She wondered if it would be better given as a wedding present – something she could gift to them as a couple – but then she’d have had nothing for the hen present, so she’d decided to bring it after all. She’d barely managed to fit anything else in her bag because it took up several kilos of her weight allowance. So now she was stuck out here with two changes of clothes and a bronze sculpture of her sister-in-law.
If Sam were here, he’d have kissed her on the head and said something easy like, ‘EJ, it’s gorgeous. You should be proud.’
But what she felt was shame. It was her default emotion. It’s what comes when you’re familiar with standing in line at the school canteen and having someone whispering at the back of your neck, Freak. Move. You’re putting me off my food. Or when you know how it feels to sit alone at the front of the school bus, shoulders rounded, waiting for the pelt of an exercise book, a tennis ball, a shoe, to clunk you in the back of the head. You swallow that stuff whole and tell yourself you probably deserved it.