“What is this?” she said, turning to me. “Is this what they want you to paint inside the Longing?”
I nodded, and she laughed.
“They’re taking the piss a bit.”
“A bit, yeah.”
She looked again at the symbol. “Yes. That is indeed a swastika.”
I felt my heart sink. “I can’t paint bloody Nazi symbols,” I muttered, though I had no choice. I needed the money.
“Well, the swastika is a Nazi symbol,” Saffy said. “It’s also a Hindu symbol. And a Buddhist symbol. And Roman, and ancient Greek.” She laced her fingers and lifted her blue eyes to mine. “You want me to go on?”
I was puzzled. “So . . . he’s not a Nazi, then.”
“Who’s not a Nazi?”
“Mr. Roberts. The man who wants me to paint the Longing.”
She shrugged. “Maybe he is. All I’m saying is that the swastika’s been around since three thousand BCE. So has this symbol.” She pointed at the overlapping triangles.
“It has?”
“It’s a variation on the Borromean rings, or the Holy Trinity. You can’t remove one without removing the other. It’s a sign of infinity.”
“What about this one?” I asked, pointing at the one that looked like an Egyptian hieroglyph.
“Ah,” she said. “I could tell you what that one means, but it’ll cost you.”
I stared at her. “How much?”
“Twenty quid.”
Twenty quid could buy a week’s worth of groceries for the four of us. She held out her hand, expectant.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll go to a library.”
“Maybe you should think before you judge everyone to be a Nazi, Liv.”
The “Liv” stung, just as she’d intended. “Maybe I should.”
At that, she tucked her book under her armpit and got up sharply to leave, knocking her tea across the table and all over the mural.
“Saffy!” I yelled. “Look what you’ve done!” I lunged forward to snatch the mural away, but the tea had covered the page. All I could do was hold it up, allowing the tea to slide off so that it wouldn’t soak through.
“It’s just a fucking piece of paper!” she shouted.
“Just a piece of paper?” I said, desperately flapping the sheet to get the liquid off. “This is the only copy of the mural I’ve got!”
“Well, just ask for another one,” she said, hurling her cup into the sink with a clatter. “Last I checked, a piece of paper was pretty easy to come by. Or are we really that poor?”
I reeled at her comment, at how unapologetic she was. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I think you should ask yourself the same question,” she said, turning and squaring up to me. She was already four inches taller than me. “Dragging all of us in the middle of the night to the back of beyond. You think that’s good parenting?”
I knew what was buried inside that horrible question, the torrent of accusations folded within it. “Maybe it isn’t good parenting,” I said, trying not to show how much her words stung. “But when you have kids, you can show us all how much of a better mother you are than me . . .”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve certainly kept the bar low.”
Before I knew what I was doing I lifted a hand and slapped her hard across the face, a loud crack ringing through the air. She clasped a hand to her cheek, staring at me with wild horror.