GISELLE GREEN

Pandora’s Box

Copyright

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

Copyright © Giselle Green 2008

Giselle Green asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9781847560674

Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007329007

Version: 2015-01-07

Dedication

To dearest Jonathan, who is a hope and inspiration to us all.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1-Rachel

Chapter 2-Rachel

Chapter 3-Shelley

Chapter 4-Shelley

Chapter 5-Rachel

Chapter 6-Rachel

Chapter 7-Shelley

Chapter 8-Shelley

Chapter 9-Rachel

Chapter 10-Shelley

Chapter 11-Shelley

Chapter 12-Rachel

Chapter 13-Shelley

Chapter 14-Rachel

Chapter 15-Shelley

Chapter 16-Shelley

Chapter 17-Shelley

Chapter 18-Rachel

Chapter 19-Shelley

Chapter 20-Shelley

Chapter 21-Shelley

Chapter 22-Rachel

Chapter 23-Rachel

Chapter 24-Rachel

Chapter 25-Rachel

Chapter 26-Rachel

Chapter 27-Rachel

Chapter 28-Shelley

Chapter 29-Rachel

Chapter 30-Rachel

Chapter 31-Rachel

Chapter 32-Shelley

Chapter 33-Rachel

Chapter 34-Shelley

Chapter 35-Rachel

Chapter 36-Rachel

Chapter 37-Rachel

Chapter 38-Rachel

Chapter 39-Shelley

Chapter 40-Rachel

Chapter 41-Rachel

Chapter 42-Rachel

Chapter 43-Rachel

Chapter 44-Shelley

Chapter 45-Rachel

Chapter 46-Shelley

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

When at last I saw her fall, it was exactly as I had imagined it would be. Her face was a white flash of shock, eyes wide open and full of surprise. I watched her hair riding up in tumultuous curls behind her, the light filtering through every strand, all in slow motion like some scene from a film where they slow everything down to savour every last agonising detail.

All the while that she fell I had the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the knowing that, oh god, I did that. It’s my fault. I should never have let her go. I could have saved her but I didn’t. I can’t believe that I didn’t. And the shocked, horrified part of me that had let her go turned on the bit of me that had wanted her to fall all along.

You needed to be free of all this. How many times have you thought that? You needed her to fall so that you could be free, didn’t you, Rachel? So you just let it happen. By the sins of our commission and omission…

You were responsible for her safety and her wellbeing and you knew this was going to happen and you just let it.

And I could not deny it.

How many nights had I lain awake fantasising about just such a scenario, my escape route from the prison that my life had so long ago become? Would it have made any difference if I had not succumbed to temptation and looked inside Pandora’s box? I really cannot say. I’m feeling too numb now. My world has crumbled, everything has gone. I don’t know anything at all any more.

And so she fell and I did nothing. And why? Because although I loved her, as long as we were yoked together I could never be free.

1 Rachel

Pandora’s box arrives on a grey Saturday in March, wet on its cardboard bottom where the postwoman has laid it down in a puddle outside our front door. My first thought is: I told my mother not to send it. I know what’s in it and I don’t want it.

I’m not even going to open it.

The box has ‘This will cheer you up’ scrawled in my mother’s handwriting along the top. But I know that it won’t. My mother, Pandora—who is emigrating to Sydney with her new ‘boyfriend’—has already told me exactly what she is sending:

‘Just some of your childhood things I’ve been holding on to. All your stuff, you know. Your school certificates and your medals and some old letters I kept. Photos of you and Liliana doing your dancing. God, what promise you two girls once showed!’ she had sniffed, remembering. She didn’t have to spell it out to me that we’d never lived up to that promise. ‘But there’s nothing I can really take with me all that way.’

Of course she can’t and, fair enough, I thought, I am forty-two after all. I can’t expect Mum to hang on to all my childhood paraphernalia forever.

I just wish she’d chucked it out herself instead of sending it on to me. There is something disquieting about having this stuff turn up at my door this morning; something I can’t put my finger on. I look at the box. It’s 7.45 a.m. and the children aren’t even up yet. The hallway is still dark when I pad through to the kitchen with the box, hoping for a tiny bit more light. The fact that she’s sent this to me…it’s as if I’ve been left holding the past in some way. My stomach catches tight at the thought. I feel as if I’ve just filled it with a bowlful of cold porridge.

What I want to do is just chuck the whole lot out without even looking at it—after all, why waste the time? Time is precious. Time is something I never have enough of, these days. The lino on the kitchen floor is freezing my feet and the scissors aren’t in the drawer where they’re supposed to be. My little kitchen faces north but when the sun shines I can see the blue sky in the distance over the tops of the houses and trees. When the sun shines all the pansies and daffodils struggling through in the garden don’t look so battered and lifeless. It isn’t shining today.

It’s all very well for Pandora, I think suddenly. She gets to jet off to sunnier climes with a new life and a new man. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Bernie asked me to join him out there.’ The memory of her voice fills my head again. ‘You know I’ve always wanted to emigrate but the time never seemed right till now. Bernie said he couldn’t possibly set up his new PR venture without me. Just think, at my age!’ The cold feeling in my stomach resolves itself into an uncomfortable patch of envy.

I’ve got the wintertime blues, that is all.

The cardboard box—underneath all the masking tape—looks vaguely familiar. Surely it’s got to be the same one that my mother has kept, tucked away in the back of her wardrobe for the last, oh, century or so?

It must be at least that long because that’s how old I feel. I set about one corner of the box with my little vegetable knife. It must have been at least a hundred years ago that I was young enough to have won certificates at school and drawn pictures that anybody judged worth keeping and…had Mum said medals?

I hadn’t won any medals. I pull a face as the brown tape sticks onto my hands, winding itself around my fingers as if it wants to tie me up. Liliana had won all the medals. All those championship rosettes for the under-fourteens’ ballroom dancing events. Yuck. I had hated those events. I was the taller one so I always had to be the ‘boy’. I didn’t remember anything much about them except that I hated them.

‘You will come out and visit us, won’t you? Just as soon as we’re settled.’ Pandora’s voice over the phone had been breathless, just the slightest edge of anxiety to it had warned me: just say yes, say you’ll come. Don’t bring up Shelley and the fact that she can’t fly so you won’t ever come, even assuming you could get the money together in order to do so…

We are trapped, basically: Shelley and me and her brother Daniel. I pull vengefully at one long piece of sticky tape that has been wound interminably around the top of the box.

My mother can’t—or won’t—see that.

Hell, she doesn’t even really accept the fact that Shelley is dying.

‘Hope springs eternal’, as she likes to tell me gaily every time she calls. Well, she is Pandora, so maybe in her world it does. I just wish I could tap into that eternal spring when I get faced with things like Shelley refusing to go to school because it is ‘a waste of the precious little time she has left’. And maybe Shelley is right. What does school matter, for her? She won’t need the exams. She won’t ever be going to university. She won’t live long enough to ever get herself a job.

It is an unfathomable thought, but it is the stark reality, a truth that winds itself like a steel cord around my heart every time I think about it, threatening to cut me in two.

I cut the masking tape away from my fingers with the knife and flick open the door under the sink to throw it in the bin. Damn it. Why did things have to work out this way? Nothing matters any more. Things only ever matter when you’ve got hope, and today I don’t have any.

My daughter might seem fine, but I know she isn’t. Recently her consultant has been keeping an even tighter check on Shelley. Our one-monthly check-ups have become fortnightly. Lately he even offered to make them weekly, even though there has been no real change in her condition for a long while. But there has to be a reason why he is tightening up on her care, doesn’t there? They warned me last year, after her friend Miriam died with the same condition, ‘Shelley doesn’t have long.’ But how long is ‘not long’? How long is a piece of string?

And how long do I really want to waste this morning, going through all this old junk? I stare at the space behind the little pedal bin. There is just about enough room in there for me to store this old box away without ever having to give it another thought. What do I care about old certificates and photos, anyway?

‘Mum? What was that, Mum? What did the postie bring?’

Shelley can be deadly silent on that wheelchair of hers. She must have oiled the wheels because I didn’t hear her come in at all. She looks wan in the pale morning light, I think, even younger than her fourteen years without all her usual Goth war-paint on.

‘Um, just some paperwork your gran sent through. I’ll have to plough through it sometime. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.’

‘And you’re putting it in the bin?’ She leans forward in her wheelchair to see what I’ve been up to.

‘No. Behind the bin.’

‘You don’t usually put stuff there,’ she notes. She knows I’m angry. She can tell, just like I can always tell what she is feeling. We spend too much time in each other’s company for it to be otherwise.

‘Are you upset because Granny Panny’s left the country?’ Shelley enquires sagely. ‘She was never really much use to you anyway, even when she was here.’

‘Well, what use would you expect her to be? She’s got her own life to live, hasn’t she?’

Shelley sits back, slender shoulders slumped. She is wearing the same pink pyjamas she wore last summer. She hasn’t grown much in the year when most of the girls in her class have shot up to about six foot, it seems. The rest of them have all begun to blossom out.

But something in Shelley’s face has definitely changed. There is a different look in her eye that I don’t remember being there before, a certain angle to her jaw that has made her face more defined, another year older, more worn by life.

And she shouldn’t be worn by life, why should she? She’s never had any fun, never been anywhere, never done anything. She doesn’t know yet what it is like to love or to be loved. How can she be so worn by life when she has never really lived?

‘This will cheer you up’ indeed! I shove the pedal bin in front of Pandora’s box with my foot and close the cupboard door. I’ll give the whole lot to Liliana when I see her. She’s into nostalgic memories and memorabilia. It isn’t of any use to me, that’s for sure.

As far as I’m concerned, the past is dead and buried, and all my hopes were buried years ago, right along with it.

2 Rachel

‘Why can’t I pull it down? I don’t want any “New Year resolutions” hanging up there for me. Daniel can keep his own if he wants to but I don’t see why I have to have any. It’s just plain silly.’ Shelley grimaces at me as I squeeze past her to get milk from the fridge. ‘It is March, after all.’

‘No.’ I push the door firmly shut with my elbow and take another look at the list her brother had Blu-Tacked onto the fridge door in January.

Family New Year’s Resolutions List (by Daniel Wetherby)

Daniel

1. Find mate for Hattie.

2. Ride bike without stabilisers (before I am eleven).

3. Help mum more.

Mum

1. Become famous artist and get rich.

2. Find cure for Shelley.

3. Buy the house on Strawberry Crescent.

4. Have a proper holiday.

Shelley

1. Get cured and be healthy and walk.

2. Get a boyfriend.

3. Do well at school.

‘If it’s March, that still gives us the next nine months of the year, doesn’t it? All we’ve got to do is find you a cure, make me a famous artist, buy that gorgeous property up on Strawberry Crescent and get you a boyfriend.’

‘Huh. Granny Panny is the only one of us who’s ever going to get herself a boyfriend, Mum. And the fame, the house and the cure are all non-starters, wouldn’t you say?’ She gives a little laugh. ‘I mean, you, famous? What could you ever be famous for? You don’t actually do anything, do you? Daniel’s mad. And you haven’t done any art since you left art college.’

‘He’s just a kid, Shell. You’ve got to let him have his dreams. Don’t you dare take his list down.’ I stay her arm as she reaches out to pull it off.

I don’t care if there’s no point in you going to school any more, I think suddenly. At least it gave us some respite from each other when you did.

I should never have given in to her on that point. I should have made her keep on going.

‘It doesn’t matter if it’s silly, or if none of it can come true. It matters that he’s still got things he’s hoping for in his life. That’s all. He wants us to have things to look forward to as well. That’s why he wrote us lists, don’t you see?’ Her comment that I don’t actually do anything is one that I choose to ignore. Oh, I do things all right. She just doesn’t see it because everything I do is invisible. I’m like the invisible thread that holds the whole fabric of our household together—but she’s right, it’s not something I’m ever going to become famous for.

‘Oh don’t worry, Mum.’ Shelley’s voice is suddenly dripping with sarcasm. ‘He can leave it up there if he likes.’ She turns to gaze through the window where a sudden squall has sent a splatter of rain across the glass. Outside, a disused flowerpot is rolling up and down on the patio. We are supposed to be planting seeds this weekend. I don’t suppose we’ll get round to it now.

The kettle boils and I fill up two mugs with some coffee. There is a moment’s silence. A truce.

‘So. Are you going to tell me what’s in the box from Granny then, or what?’ Shelley’s voice is amicable, conciliatory. She seems to have forgotten about the resolutions list already. She feels more like the old Shelley when she’s like this, more like the daughter I remember. When she’s all done up with that black lipstick she favours these days I hardly recognise her.

‘I think I’ll go for “or what”’. I pull a face at her. She should just take the hint that I don’t want to talk about it or accept what I tell her at face value. But teenagers never do.

‘It’s something to do with Aunt Lily, isn’t it?’ Shelley sucks on her lower lip, pensive. ‘Why don’t you two ever meet up? Are you making arrangements to meet up sometime soon?’

‘You’ve been eavesdropping,’ I accuse her.

‘I can’t help it if I occasionally overhear things,’ she counters. ‘This house isn’t exactly massive, is it?’

‘Well no, it isn’t.’ Not as big as the one we lived in before Bill and I split up, which is the subtext to her comment, I know. But there is nothing that can be done about that. ‘However, it would be polite to…move somewhere else in the house if that happens.’

‘If I moved far away enough in this house I’d end up next door,’ she observes. ‘Come on, Mum,’ she adds before I can reply. ‘What’s the big secret? Just tell me what’s in the box? Why are you trying to hide it?’

‘Oh, fine!’ I kick the pedal bin out of the way and heave the box out again. The cardboard sides are soft and a bit mushy and the whole thing smells musty, like the dark secret place at the back of unused cupboards where nobody ever goes and the spiders breed, un molested, for years. You’d think Pandora would have rummaged around for a new box before she posted all this stuff off.

‘Here we go, if it will keep you quiet, madam.’ It isn’t a big secret after all. There is nothing in there that matters; just a load of old dust and memories I’d rather not be dredging up at this moment. But it’s guilt that makes me cave in to her, guilt about the fact that she might not be around to ever see any of it, if I wait too long. ‘It’s just some old keepsakes, photos and things that Granny sent over. Most of it will go to Lily. When we meet up.’

Once the masking tape is all off the side flaps of the box fall open limply, revealing a pile of yellow-stained envelopes. Most of them seem to contain photos. A few hold old birthday cards, flowery and beribboned with ‘to our darling daughter’ on the outside. On the inside of one of them, all embellished in curlicues, are the words ‘from Pandora and Henry’.

‘Who’s this, all dressed up like a dog’s dinner?’ Shelley pulls my attention back to one of the photos. ‘She looks vaguely familiar.’

She’s found a picture of me and Liliana in our dancing outfits. I, as usual, being the taller, slimmer one—albeit two years younger—got to be the ‘male’ partner, dressed up in a tuxedo with my dark red hair cut appropriately short. Thankfully, though, Shelley hasn’t even noticed me. It is Lily she is frowning at; Lily with her long blonde bubbly curls and that frilly dusty-pink dress with all the sparkly sequins sewn into the hem. I take the photo from her for a minute, feeling my fingers trembling, even after so many years, as a gush of unhappy memories comes flooding back.

‘I can’t believe she kept that!’ I make as if to tear it in two and then change my mind because, after all, Lily might still want it.

‘It’s Aunt Lily, isn’t it?’

‘It is. She always got to wear the most beautiful dresses.’

‘Oh, Mum!’ Shelley’s face crumples in mirth. ‘You didn’t really think that dress was beautiful, did you? The only thing she’s got on that’s halfway decent is that string of blue beads around her neck.’

‘Well, actually…’ I do a double-take of Lily’s glammedup version of a ra-ra skirt before dropping the photo back into the box. Shelley is right. How things change! That dress really does look rather hideous. ‘Okay Point taken. It was the kind of thing we thought was beautiful at the time. One of these days you’re going to look back at yourself wearing all that Goth war-paint…’ I stop and catch Shelley’s eye. ‘Oh, Shelley, I’m so sorry. You won’t, will you? I can’t think that way. I just can’t get used to thinking that way, it’s so unnatural.’

‘It’s all right, Mum.’ Shelley’s wide blue eyes are calm and focused. ‘It’s funny how Pandora kept all those things for so long, though, isn’t it? Look, she’s even—she’s even kept that necklace in here. The one that Lily’s wearing.’ Her nimble fingers dive in and pull it out. She holds it up to the light so we can both see. Oh, but I had forgotten that necklace! Its pale blue nuggets of rounded sea-glass are all held individually in place by a tiny filament of gold wire. The central portion of the necklace is a darker blue stone—also sea-glass though you’d never know it—it’s so dark it could be lapis lazuli—and that is framed by the iridescent halo of a cut-out piece of mother of pearl.

‘It looks just like something a mermaid might wear,’ Shelley breathes. Exactly, I think, and her comment makes me smile. I designed it with a mermaid in mind, all those years ago. I collected all those bits of blue glass myself, on solitary walks, trawling along the coast of Cornwall.

‘Can I keep it?’ my daughter begs, and I shrug. Why not? If Lily were here she would claim that it was hers, that she always wore it. But the truth is, I found the glass, I designed it, and I fashioned it up with the limited tools that I had at my disposal. My friend—a lady in the second-hand jewellery shop—had cut the mother of pearl into shape, but she’d shown me how to do everything else. The only thing I wasn’t allowed to do, I realise now, was actually wear it. It so happened that the colours and the theme were a perfect match for the dance outfit that Lily was wearing that season. I had to give it over to her. Oh, I wasn’t exactly forced. It was just the kind of thing we were expected to do, back then.

‘All these things—I mean, they must have been so precious to Pandora once. Maybe to you too?’ Shelley glances at me curiously but I look away. She will never really know the truth about that.

‘The things that matter to us change,’ I say simply. ‘What mattered so much yesterday doesn’t matter so much today. What matters today, we might not give a fig about tomorrow.’

‘When you look at it that way,’ Shelley is scanning Daniel’s list on the fridge again, this time looking quiet and thoughtful, ‘maybe those resolutions aren’t so stupid after all. Maybe it means we should just make the most of things while they’re important to us. For instance, we could still get Daniel the second tortoise, couldn’t we? Hattie could have her mate. And I was thinking…we could still take that holiday. Just you and me. Daniel’s away on scout camp the week of my birthday. I’d really love it if we could go down to Cornwall, back to Summer Bay for one last time. It could be this year’s birthday present for me. That shouldn’t break the bank too much, should it?’

‘Do you really mean that?’ I watch her fasten my necklace around her throat and I feel my heart thudding in my chest. It’s been so long since Shelley expressed any real interest in anything at all. If my daughter could only be interested in something, if she could only have something to live for, then she might live a little longer, a little better. She might have a little more joy in whatever days she has left to her. ‘I would love to take a trip down there with you. Are you sure you don’t want to go when Danny can come too?’

‘No!’ Shelley comes back vehemently. Then she recovers herself and smiles. ‘I just want some special time with you. While we still can, you understand?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘And Dad won’t mind?’

Bill, of course, will have to be consulted. He always likes to be included in whatever plans are made for Shelley, and that’s fair enough. But my ex-husband has his new wife and their young child to think about these days, doesn’t he?

‘I’ll square it with your dad,’ I tell her decisively. And Daniel will have to be managed somehow because he’ll no doubt want to be in on it too. But then Daniel has his scout camp to look forward to, so why shouldn’t Shelley have her special time?

‘Don’t you wonder when it happens?’ Shelley is still thoughtful, looking at the box. ‘When do all those precious things become…just a pile of old junk?’

It happens when we’re not looking, I think. At the same time that those crows’ feet appear, which we tell ourselves will disappear when we get a good night’s sleep. When our dress size creeps up from a ten to a twelve and then a fourteen. When we’re not looking.

‘It happens when we cease to care,’ I tell her.

‘But if you don’t care,’ she whispers, ‘why were you so upset that Granny Panny sent it all on to you?’

‘I’m not…’ I begin, but there is little point in lying to Shelley. I edge over to the kitchen sink and throw the dregs of my coffee away. ‘Maybe you have never heard the story of Pandora’s Box?’ I say to her at last. ‘In Greek myth, Pandora was a beautiful and foolish woman who, out of insatiable curiosity, opened a box that she had been warned she should never open. The minute she opened it, out flew all the spites: Old Age, Sickness, Envy, Disloyalty, Deceit…in short, everything that makes mankind miserable.’ I trail off.

‘Come on, Mum. This isn’t a magical box. It isn’t going to release a load of nasty stuff into the air just because we’ve opened it up to look inside. You don’t really believe that, do you?’

‘Of course not literally,’ I say. A shiver goes through me then. I’m not superstitious. I’m not really going to be opening up the past just because we’ve opened up that box, now, am I? I was never allowed to look inside Pandora’s private box when we were kids, that’s all. Old habits die hard, and all that.

‘I think we should put it away now,’ I say. Shelley opens her mouth to protest but I add, ‘Maybe I’m just scared that there’ll be something in there I don’t want to see.’

My daughter nods wisely. She doesn’t ask me what this thing might be. Instead, she comments, ‘I have heard the story of what was Pandora’s Box, Mum, and you’ve left one of them out.’

‘And what might that be?’ I arch my brows. A ray of sloping sunshine appears for a moment across the kitchen worktop, making long shadows of our coffee cups. Outside, the squally wind is chasing the clouds across the canvas of the sky, opening up small patches of blue.

‘Hope,’ she says simply. ‘You’ve left out Hope.’

3 Shelley

I have decided that when dawn breaks on my fifteenth birthday, that is the last day I will ever spend on this planet.

I am not depressed and I am not angry with my parents.

I am not insane, neither am I frightened of Death.

I am frightened of dying, however, in the way that I inevitably will if I don’t take matters into my own hands. I meant what I said to my mum about hope, though. I do have hope. But it’s for the others who are going to be left behind after me, that’s all.

I have a poster-sized photograph of me and Daniel in my bedroom. It’s one of my favourites of the two of us and it was taken nearly ten years ago because in it I’m five and Daniel is just one. It’s an ‘action’ shot. We’re both in our swimsuits on this huge empty beach in Cornwall. I’m jumping off a rock with my eyes closed and my arms in the air. I love the smile on my face. Whenever I look at that photo I remember what it must have felt like to be free. We called that our ‘jumping rock’. It seemed so huge to me then, but we went back to Summer Bay three years ago and the rock was still there in the same place, same green algae and footholds all over it, jutting out of the sand at the head of the beach and, guess what…it had shrunk!

Well of course it hadn’t really shrunk. The rest of the world—including us—had just got bigger. Daniel kept jumping off it, showing off, because in my photo he’s just a baby sitting on the bottom waiting patiently for me to jump and here was his chance to take on a more active role. I wasn’t completely confined to Bessie—that’s my wheelchair—three years ago, but neither were my legs strong enough to jump. This time I was the one sitting on the sand waiting, so Mum took a photo of that and Daniel’s got it on his wall, and it kind of evens up the balance of power as far as he’s concerned.

He’s like Mum there, see. They both have this immaculate sense of fairness and justice about things. I may only be fourteen but I know damn well that life isn’t fair. Maybe it’s genetic or something, I don’t know, but some people never seem to work that one out. That’s Mum’s fatal flaw; that’s how I’ll get her to come round to my way of thinking in the end. You’ll see.

Anyhow, this photo of the last time I felt really free, it’s given me the idea of how I want it to be on my last day.

I have decided that I will go down to Summer Bay in Cornwall and I will jump off a cliff, and that way, for those last few moments of my life, I’ll be flying. I won’t die in my bed all shrivelled up and cold as my limbs finally atrophy to the completely withered stage. I’ll be flying through the sunshine. It’ll be a hot, peaceful, blue-skied day. We’ll do it in the early morning—I was born at 6 a.m.—so there’ll be no footprints in the sand. The sea will have wiped everything clean from the night before. There will be no marks there before I make my mark.

I’m not bothered about the impact. It will be so quick I just won’t feel it. I’m focusing on just that one moment when I go over the edge. I’ll be like a white bird—a seagull—twinkling in the sunshine. I’ll feel the warm air rushing up through my hair and I’ll be…well, I’ll be released.

I’ve struggled with this whole plan for a while because I was worried that I might be being a bit, well…selfish. Everybody else is going to suffer and I hate the thought of that. Then I think—hell, they are going to suffer anyway. This way we’ll just get it over and done with. A long, protracted death with every vein stuffed with needles, tubes down my throat to aid breathing when the lungs cave in and a tiny bump under the bedsheets where my shrivelled legs should go is even worse.

I haven’t forgotten Miriam. One day she was just like me—she was okay enough, with the same disease, but still okay. Then suddenly…poof! It all went downhill for her. I heard them say she was lucky; that it could have taken much longer, but no, she was lucky. What if I’m not so ‘lucky’?

‘Did they give you an initial diagnosis of MS?’

The first time I ever saw Miriam we were both sitting on the green benches outside Neurology. She had brought crossword puzzles and drinks and things and she seemed to know everyone in the department by name. I, on the other hand, was just sitting on my hands, feeling sick to my stomach with nerves. I remember I couldn’t take my eyes off her wheelchair. I wanted desperately to ask her if she’d always been like that or whether it was this illness that had done it to her but at the same time I really didn’t want to know.

‘Hi,’ she’d started again when I didn’t answer her. ‘I’m Miriam.’

‘Uh, yeah. I’m Shelley. Yeah, they did. They thought it was MS. At first.’

She had taken a thoughtful sip of her juice carton through a straw.

‘And now?’

‘Now they think it might be something called AMS.’

‘Atypical Myoendocal disease.’ Her eyes had beamed at me. ‘Same as me, then. Welcome to the club! We’re very unique, you know. We’re less than one in five million.’

‘I feel honoured,’ I’d muttered under my breath.

‘You should feel honoured,’ she’d laughed, and I remember her blue eyes had been warm and bright with humour. ‘It means you now get the best consultant on the block; the gorgeous Doctor Ganz.’

‘Uh-huh.’ I’d already met him. He seemed kind. I didn’t think there was any danger I would be falling in love with him, though.

‘Just remember that I saw him first,’ she added, but there was a more important possibility rearing itself in my mind just at that moment.

‘Does it mean, if it’s atypical MS, that there’s any chance we could get better?’

That was the one and only time I ever saw a shadow cross Miriam’s face.

‘You don’t get better from this, Shelley,’ she told me. ‘It’s atypical, because it actually…’ she hesitated, ‘look, I guess I’d better let them explain it all to you when you go in. They’ll put it so much better than I ever could. Have you had an MRI done yet?’

‘That thing where you go in the tunnel and they look to see if there’s any nerve damage?’ I’d nodded but she didn’t say any more and I’d guessed, correctly, that she’d just been trying to distract me. Miriam was the one good thing to have come out of all of this. She was the best friend I ever had. She really was one in five million.

But the thing is, it was like she was a friend travelling the same road as me, only she happened to be further up ahead than I was. Every time she got a new symptom, I knew it would be only a matter of maybe six months to a year and then I would get it too. She never had any pain until the end, and neither have I had any yet. Nor do I want to. Dr Ganz kept saying to me that these things were all very individual. Nobody could predict how it would go. Not enough people had been studied to make any hard and fast conclusions. The only hard and fast conclusion that I know of is that the condition is, in the end, fatal. Miriam came to the end of her road. It’s a year later for me. I don’t need anybody to spell out what that means. I guess the thing I detest most about my situation is the inevitability of it. I’m like a fish caught in a net. There is no way out. Apart from the way I have thought up.

Which brings me back to my plan. At least this way I will be drawing my own last breath. And the air I draw will be warm and sweet and full of birdsong and the gentle crash of the waves on the shores of Summer Bay.

I can’t do it by myself. It’s not something I can do alone, and I don’t really want to be alone at the end. Now all I have to do is persuade someone to help me do it.

4 Shelley

SugarShuli has come on MSN just now. She must be having a day off again. Like me, she doesn’t see much point in going to school but her reasons are different to mine. Her parents are bringing a boy over from Pakistan for her and she’s supposed to marry him just as soon as she’s legally allowed.

SugarShuli says: I’m off sick. How are you?

ShelleyPixie says: Okay. What’s up?

SugarShuli says: Nothing really. Just didn’t see much point in going in. What are you doing?

ShelleyPixie says: Right now, talking to you. I’m waiting for Krok to come online so if I go quiet…

SugarShuli says: Krok your bf?

ShelleyPixie says: Sort of. Online thing.

I haven’t actually met Krok of course, not in the flesh, but he’s sent me a picture of him and his mates when they were doing a gig in a pub in Hammersmith. Krok plays the bass but what he really wants to do is produce music. When he grows up, he says. He’s nineteen now, so I’m not sure when that will be.

Krok has got this dream: he’s going to set up his own recording studios one day and bring on a load of new young bands playing real music—real musicians, he says, not just pretty people prancing and miming. He says most real musicians are ugly. He isn’t. He has longish hair and the deepest blue eyes. Irish eyes, he tells me. He’s got a cheeky smile.

SugarShuli says: You two going to meet?

She means him, I suppose. Are we going to meet? I wish, I only wish I could. Don’t know how it would happen, though. I also worry that he might be put right off me if we ever did. It’s better this way. On the other hand, Daniel might be right with his list of resolutions. We don’t get forever. And I’m getting a lot less of forever than most people count on. I keep thinking that if there are things I want to do then I’d better get on and do them.

ShelleyPixie says: Yep. Sometime soon. I’m going to meet him.

SugarShuli says: I’ll be meeting Jallal soon too.

Surinda—that’s her real name—takes all this marrying Jallal business in her stride. She doesn’t seem to mind. It’s all part of her expectations, she tells me. She says it’s much harder for those people who have to go out and find someone and decide who to marry all for themselves. Hmm…

ShelleyPixie says: Good looking?

SugarShuli says: I haven’t seen a picture yet. He comes from a good family and I am assured they have money. That’s what counts, isn’t it?

ShelleyPixie says: Christ.

SugarShuli says: You know how it is.

Hang on a minute, I think Krok has just logged on so she’ll have to shut up for a bit. Krok is more important. I haven’t spoken to him since last Thursday. He’s got a busy schedule at the moment.

Krok says: Hey Pixie.

ShelleyPixie says: Hey Krok. How’s it going? Been missing you.

Krok says: Sorry, Pixie mine. Been following up on your advice so don’t be cross.

ShelleyPixie says: How so?

Krok says: I’ve been trying to get some funds together. My mate Bruno and me, we’re going in for that quiz show you were telling me about.

ShelleyPixie says: You never!

Krok says: We are. Don’t know if we’ll get selected but we’ve been short-listed down to the final fifty so keep everything crossed for us!

ShelleyPixie says: You’re going to be on Beat the Bank! OMG!

Krok says: Well, maybe. We’ll find out in a couple of days. Just wanted to let you know, sweetheart. It was U gave me the idea. What if I win the million pounds? What then?

ShelleyPixie says: You’ll make your dream come true. Yay!

Krok says: Send me a pic.

ShelleyPixie says: I haven’t got any recent ones.

Krok says: Send me one anyway.

ShelleyPixie says: I’ll see.

Krok says: Are you afraid I won’t like what I see?

ShelleyPixie says: No. I’m not that ugly.

Krok says: You have a heart of gold, Pixie. How could you ever be ugly? Marry me?

ShelleyPixie says: Only if you win the million. LOL.

He’s joking, by the way. He knows I’m on this time-limit thing. He knows I’m not going to last all that long. I told him about all that at the beginning. He’s gone quiet now. He’s probably talking to three girls at once. He’s asking them all to marry him. Guys who look like him don’t lack for girlfriends. Oh well. Where’s SugarShuli?

ShelleyPixie says: Still there?

SugarShuli says: Still here. Where’d you go?

ShelleyPixie says: Krok just came on. You wont believe it. He’s been chosen as a finalist on Beat the Bank.

Surinda watches this every Saturday evening. It’s what brought us together in the first place. She’s hooked on it, like me.

SugarShuli says: He never is!

ShelleyPixie says: It’s true.

SugarShuli says: When will he know? OMG. Could he get us tickets to be in the audience do you think?

That’s a thought that hadn’t occurred to me.

ShelleyPixie says: Might do. If he gets in. Would you even be allowed to come? Don’t know if Mum would take us. Actually I don’t even want my mum to take us. Mum always has to be in on everything. I want to do this without her. Maybe Surinda could help me?

SugarShuli says: I’ll tell my parents it’s a school project. I’ll come if your mum can take us.

ShelleyPixie says: No, Mum can’t do it. Can yours? What about we two go alone?

Krok’s back.

Krok says: Sorry, Pixie. Phone call interrupted there. I’m supposed to be working at the moment too.

ShelleyPixie says: Who wants to hire DVDs at this time in the morning?

Krok says: You’d be surprised. Never mind the shop, though, Pix. I’ve got a stint at the recording studio this afternoon.

ShelleyPixie says: Cool. Hope they give you a job.

Krok says: It’s all good experience. They like me helping out. Maybe they’ll hire me eventually!

ShelleyPixie says: They should.

SugarShuli says: Hey, Krok, I’m Surinda.

Hell, where did SHE come from?

ShelleyPixie says: Private conversation, SugarShuli.

I’m going to kill her.

SugarShuli says: Sorry. Good luck with the Beat the Bank thing, man.

Krok says: Thanks.

Krok says: Who’s that?

ShelleyPixie says: Just a friend who wants to come with me when you send me tickets to see the Beat the Bank being recorded.

Krok says: Will do. Got to go now, Pixie.

ShelleyPixie says: Speak soon?

Krok says: Very soon. Bye bye, sweetie.

He’s gone.

SugarShuli says: He’s cute, Shell.

ShelleyPixie says: You’ve been looking in my photos file?

SugarShuli says: Why not? You can look in mine.

ShelleyPixie says: You’ve got nothing in there. Not even Jallal.

SugarShuli says: Are you sure your mum can’t take us? Ask her again.

ShelleyPixie says: Yep, okay, speak later.

Silly cow. She could help me get there. We could take the train.

I shouldn’t complain I suppose. At least Surinda from my form class still keeps in contact with me, which is more than Michelle and the others have done since I stopped going to school. They say they’re really busy. I know some of them are seeing boys and the ones who aren’t are just hanging out hoping to see some boys or else they’re studying. I don’t know why I don’t want to hang out with them any more. I just don’t see the point. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t think so much. Life would be a lot easier.

If Krok sends us the tickets I think I’ll have to make an excuse. I don’t even want him to have a picture of me, much less actually see me in real life. I couldn’t cope with that. It’s not going to happen. I’m not even going to ask Mum so Surinda can forget all about that. I know what she’s like, though, she won’t let it go now.

I wish I’d never told her.

5 Rachel

‘Coo-eee?’ Annie-Jo’s special-edition turquoise Mazda Berkeley MXS just pulled up in the drive. I can hear her Josh and my Daniel clambering out, chasing after one another, laughing. They’ll be round the back in a minute, dark curls crashing against short blond spikes, racing up the new treehouse my old friend Sol has installed in the oak tree for Daniel.

My hands are deep in the earth. I’ve been digging a trench so I can insert a palisade of sticks like a little fort; somewhere we can put Daniel’s tortoise Hattie so she won’t be able to escape. It’s seven thirty and the last rays of the sun are beginning to slope over the rooftops, bright yellow and a bit chilly now, the sky just getting shaded in with patches of grey.

‘You’re back early?’ I scramble to my feet, wiping earthy hands behind my back before hugging my old friend. She is looking far too nice for me to get soil all over her. I take her in a little wistfully: ‘You’ve been out celebrating something today?’ She’s dressed in an elegant skirt and a soft white blouse and she looks…radiant somehow. The thought that she might be pregnant again crosses my mind. She is five years younger than me; it is still possible, after all. Her new husband Bryan has adopted her two but they don’t have any children between them. Not yet.

‘Oh no!’ she laughs dismissively ‘Just been running around town doing errands, you know the sort of thing. Nothing special. We’re going to be “lunching” next week, though. Would you like to come? Say you will. My treat.’ For a moment she smiles at me and I catch a glimpse of the old Annie-Jo; the one who would have come to visit me wearing torn jeans and a faded T-shirt with baby-food stains still on it. That Annie-Jo would have flopped down beside me on the grass and we’d have finished off Hattie’s palisade of sticks together in no time. This Annie-Jo looks like she’s just had her nails done. She isn’t going to be up for any digging.

‘See what day you’re going. I might come. I’d like to.’ I do want to have lunch with Annie-Jo, but probably not with all her new friends. We’d see. ‘I suppose we’d better get you inside then. I can’t have you out here drinking tea in your finery.’

‘Where’s that old garden bench we used to sit on?’ She looks around, frowning.

‘I threw that away two years ago, Annie-Jo!’ I laugh at her, but it surely can’t have been two years since she last came and sat out in the garden with me? When our children were little we practically used to live in this garden. Her daughter Michelle is just a month older than Shelley, and she had Josh pretty much around the same time I had Daniel. In those days Annie-Jo was a single mum, struggling on her own in a bedsit. Now she’s married to Bryan and they live in what I can only describe as a mansion in the better half of town. How times change!

Now that she’s noticed the missing bench, she’s looking around at other things, reluctant to go in, taking in all the modifications that have crept up on this garden over the years.

‘Where’s that orange rose “Maria Tierra” I bought you for your thirtieth?’ she asks suddenly.

Heavens, we are talking about over a decade here; where is it?

‘Bill kicked a football into it repeatedly one summer and it never recovered,’ I recall at last. He broke my rose bush, I think, with an unexpected flash of irritation, and now he isn’t even here to help me with Hattie’s palisade, not to mention the children.

‘You’ve got a vegetable patch,’ she comments, ‘and a herb patch!’ For some reason the enthusiasm in her voice warms me right through. I don’t let on that I only put those in because I thought they might save me a few pennies. ‘I’ve been telling Bryan I want one of those put in, for ages, and you’ve got there before me,’ she accuses.

‘The vegetable patch is something Sol does with Daniel, on and off. The herb patch is mine, I planted it a year ago and I’ve managed to kill off even the mint. You remember I gave you a bunch of mint last summer?’

‘Oh yes,’ Annie-Jo is still looking around as if she’s never been in this garden in her life, ‘so you did. Sol helps Daniel with his vegetable patch, does he? Lucky you.’

‘How so?’

‘He’s a good-looking guy, Rach,’ she grins at me coyly. ‘There are plenty of women I know who wouldn’t mind having your boss around to help out with their gardens…’

I figure I’d better not mention that it was him who installed the treehouse or there might be ‘plenty of women’ putting two and two together and ending up with five.

‘If you’re thinking of him as a potential partner for me, darling, I thought you knew, he doesn’t swing that way.’

Annie-Jo laughs dismissively as if this is just a tinyweeny little blot on the horizon; some minor irritating male habit that any good woman could train him out of.

‘Last I heard, he’d broken up with his partner—Adam, was it? Maybe he’s not gay after all? It does happen, you know. Sometimes the right woman comes along…’

‘No,’ I laugh at her. ‘No, no, no!’

‘He’s got his own successful antiques business,’ she carries on regardless, ‘he’s delightful. He clearly likes your children. And he likes you. Maybe more than just a bit?’

‘Such a pity I don’t fancy him, though.’

‘Fancying is a luxury afforded only to teenagers and rich women!’ Annie-Jo scoffs. ‘You’re forty-two now, Rach. If you don’t want to be stuck on your own forever you’ve got to start getting realistic. Take what’s available, if you catch my drift.’

Whatever makes her think that Sol might be available? He might have broken off with Adam (‘He’s getting so old, Rach, he’s really let himself go!’) but now he is besotted with Justin. Hell, I’m not even going there.

‘That smacks of desperation, my dear, and I’m not desperate.’

Whatever has brought that on, I wonder? I’m not even looking for a man. All I ever think about are the children, especially Shelley, she takes up all the space in my thoughts.

She is dying, how can it be otherwise?

‘How’re you and Bryan doing?’ I glance surreptitiously at Annie-Jo’s belly as she perches on the low garden wall. It is as flat as ever, but that’s just Annie-Jo; she could be six months gone but she’d keep her figure to the last.

‘Doing great. Just great.’ Annie-Jo smiles. Her right foot is swinging languidly, crossed over her left leg. ‘A little tired, that’s all.’

‘I thought you were looking a little tired,’ I prompt. Is she going to ’fess up here?

‘His mother’s just downsized and we’ve inherited all her antique rosewood furniture. It’s Japanese. Very rare. Absolutely gorgeous, but I’ve had to redecorate and rethink the entire lounge to make it fit.’ She pulls a ‘this is so tedious’ face but I know underneath she is thrilled. Being hooked into someone like Bryan means she can inherit the kind of things she once would only have dreamed of.

‘Wow!’ I enthuse. I’m just hoping that the growing sensation of envy I’m feeling isn’t showing in any way. Annie-Jo gets to inherit antique Japanese furniture. I get Pandora’s bloody box. But I don’t want to be envious. Envy is one of the Spites, isn’t it? Pandora’s box is working overtime here.

No, I’m happy for my friend, of course I’m happy…it’s not that I even want any more babies or to get married again. I mean, okay, once upon a time I did. Bill and I were actually discussing the possibility of going for a third child when all Shelley’s troubles appeared, and, like a tropical storm, blew our whole lives away.

Anyway, maybe it’s just as well that never happened because I’ve got too much on my plate now as it is. I just want…hell, I’m not sure what I want. I want a miracle to happen and for Shelley to be well. If you live in hope of a miracle then it doesn’t seem fair to hope for ordinary things like a normal life as well.

‘And of course, Bryan’s just got the Risling contract. I mentioned that, didn’t I? He’s taking us to Barbados in fact, in a couple of weeks. He says he’d like to celebrate it in style.’

‘Wow.’ What else can I say? I’m dying to ask if the Risling contract is all they are celebrating, but if she isn’t telling then I’m not asking. I cast my mind back to the day, eleven years ago now, that I’d driven her down to the chemist for a pregnancy test when she was expecting Josh because she’d been too frightened to do it by herself. I don’t know if she’s thinking about the same thing herself, or whether she’s thinking about anything very much at all. Her gaze spreads out over the garden, back to examine her nails and then to some non-existent specks of fluff on her skirt.

‘Sounds great,’ I enthuse, but she doesn’t elaborate. We both fall silent for a bit after that. Is she bored?. Maybe it is me? I don’t have much to talk about these days that comes within her sphere of interest, that is the problem. What is she interested in, though? She has Bryan, and they have an idyllic lifestyle. They always seem so besotted with each other. I wish she and I could just talk to each other, the way we used to. We used to be able to talk about anything. I remember the time she thought her fella of the moment was seeing someone else and I’d ventured to tell her that I thought maybe Bill was seeing someone too. Because he’d become all withdrawn and defensive. I’d only said it to make her feel better. I hadn’t known then that Bill really was seeing someone else. I had never even imagined it could really be true, but afterwards Annie-Jo had been convinced that I’d ‘sensed it all along’. For ages, she’d been the only person who’d known about it, till he moved out and the cat was out of the bag. ‘So…things still as good between the two of you?’

‘Of course!’ She’s been biting her nails and she stops abruptly. I remember A-J used to be an inveterate nail-biter but she obviously doesn’t do that, these days, and gives me a dazzling smile. ‘Bryan is all I ever wanted in a man. I just hope that one day you find the happiness that I have,’ she tells me solicitously.

‘You’ve been lucky,’ I tell her, and I push down the bitterness that surfaces suddenly and forcefully from nowhere. A man in my life would be great; maybe, one of these days.

Just at this moment I would settle for far less, though, just the friendship of an old, long-time friend. The kind of friend that takes on board your troubles, wherever you’re at in your life at the time. We used to be like that. I remember the time Annie-Jo had been so fraught and sleep-deprived that she’d taken her daughter out to the shopping mall in her pushchair and left her there, outside Mothercare. I hadn’t believed her at first but when she didn’t produce Michelle I’d got straight in the car and gone down there myself. Lo and behold, the child had still been there; fast asleep in her buggy. I’d suffered the few dirty looks I’d got from onlookers in silence as I’d wheeled her quickly away. I wondered if Annie-Jo remembered any of that now; the way we used to be.

I want the old Annie-Jo back, but she isn’t the old Annie-Jo and I’m not the Rachel I used to be when I was ‘Rachel-and-Bill’, either. Whatever happened to us?

‘The boys will be all right up there, will they?’ She glances towards the treehouse, which is a super-duper all-singing all-dancing one with bells on, typical of Sol. Of course they’ll be all right. Annie-Jo never used to fret about Josh either. It was me who was the fretting type. These days I’ve realised we actually have control over so very little in our lives, I just coast along as best I can.

‘They’re going on scout camp, aren’t they?’ I remind her. ‘They’ll have to put up their own tents and grill their own sausages.’

‘Ah yes, that reminds me.’ She turns at last and is following me into the house. ‘You have to pay the remainder of camp monies owing before next week. Arkaela needs the money before Thursday.’

Shit, I’d forgotten. I didn’t like to ask Bill to help out but I was going to have to; it was either that or the gas bill would get put off again.

‘Fine.’ I wave a nonchalant hand at her. I know that one hundred and fifty pounds is precisely nothing for Annie-Jo these days; I don’t want her to guess what hardship it is for me. It is stupid pride on my part, I know. When Annie-Jo was in her bedsit days I couldn’t count the times Bill and I helped her out with food and nappies and things. We never had much either, but we had so much more than she did. She’d probably help me out too if I let her.

I turn away, so I don’t have to catch that hint of detached pity in her eyes.

‘I’ve got the money,’ I tell her, ‘I just forgot.’

‘Well it’s hardly any wonder.’ She follows me through the lounge into the kitchen. ‘You’ve just had that fabulous treehouse put up; Daniel was telling us all about it on the way here. It must have taken a while to do. And workmen about the place can be so distracting.’ She nods towards the boys in their den. We can see the treehouse quite easily from the kitchen table and she doesn’t take her eyes off it. ‘That must have cost you an arm and a leg.’ She glances at me sideways. ‘Unless Bill did it for his elder son?’

‘Not Bill.’ I shake my head.

‘No?’ She sips at the tea I put in front of her. No sugar these days, I’ve remembered that. ‘Mind you, he wouldn’t have too much time on his hands as I hear. Things being what they are at home.’

This is Annie-Jo in her incarnation as gossip queen. It’s what they do at the Maidstone ‘Domestic Goddess’ meetings when they’ve done with other matters. It’s taken her off the scent of who put up the treehouse for me, though, so I’m grateful for that.

‘How are things at Bill’s home?’ I smile at her.

‘Fraught, I hear.’ She gets the gen from her sister-in-law who goes to the same NCT group as Stella. Annie-Jo still thinks I want to hear all the gossip about Bill. I used to, five years ago when we’d first split and it was still rankling that I was the one left on my own while he’d moved on and found someone else. I don’t any more.

‘Poor things.’ I sidle over to the sink and give my hands a good rinsing under the tap while she stares out over the garden as if the boys might disappear any minute. ‘Nikolai isn’t letting them get much sleep, I hear.’

Annie-Jo gives me a significant look, but her lips remain firmly pressed together. Is she remembering the ‘pram in the mall’ incident or is she thinking about something else altogether?

I am resisting the temptation to ask when Shelley suddenly wheels herself in the kitchen. She wants to back out straight away, I can tell by the look on her face, but she’s been spotted so she can’t.

‘Aunt Annie-Jo! Hi. How’s Mickey?’

‘Michelle is…she’s doing great, Shelley.’ Annie-Jo averts her eyes. She sounds embarrassed. ‘She said to say “Hi” and she’ll come over and see you very soon.’

‘It’s been a while.’ Shelley’s eyes narrow. She hasn’t missed that Annie-Jo is practically squirming and neither have I. ‘Did she get my birthday card?’

‘I’m sure she did.’ Annie-Jo is looking vague again. ‘Thank you so much for that, dear.’

‘Did they have a good time?’ Shelley wheels over to the fridge to pour herself some milk. ‘At Mickey’s birth day meal, I mean. I heard they went to some lovely restaurant?’

‘Oh, yes, thank you, dear!’ Annie-Jo clears her throat. ‘She had a lovely time, thank you. She thought you…maybe wouldn’t…with the wheelchair, I mean, as you can’t dance…’ She takes a great gulp of her tea and uncrosses her legs. ‘I suppose I really should be making a move, though. I’ll tell Michelle you asked after her.’

I’ve got the strangest feeling, like I’ve gone pink right up to my ears. The girls had been going to each other’s parties since they were one. I have whole albums full of their party pictures. They spent years doing horse-riding and ballet together and then, later, when Shelley got ill and became too weak for all that they used to go round each other’s homes and do things that Shelley could do, playing board games and sewing, listening to music. I know they haven’t been as close for some time, like Annie-Jo and me they’ve drifted apart, but I didn’t realise things had got this bad. Why hadn’t Michelle asked Shelley to her party this year? Annie-Jo is clearly embarrassed about it. I want to ask but something stops me…they will have their reasons. There will be some excuse. It is too late now, whatever the reason is.

‘Look, I’ll give you a ring about lunch next week, okay?’ Annie-Jo has picked up her keys and is rapping on the kitchen window to draw Josh’s attention.

Sod lunch. She can stuff it.

‘I’ve got a feeling we might have some work for you if you do come. Do you still do that calligraphy? It’s a shame, really. What with your qualifications in the fine arts and so forth. You even got a diploma, didn’t you?’

I shove both our teacups into the sink. A degree, actually! I got a degree. But I am so steaming that I don’t even want to answer her.

‘You always said you’d like to use that professionally didn’t you? I remember that. And calligraphy was something you always wanted to do.’

No I bloody didn’t! Whatever makes you say that? I think. I never wanted to do calligraphy professionally. It calls for a degree of perfectionism and skill that, yes, I can muster, but it nearly kills me. I’d far sooner be slapping paint randomly over a huge canvas. In fact, what I really wanted to do, the only thing I ever really wanted, was to design and make my own jewellery. I haven’t told many people in my life about that particular ambition—even Shelley doesn’t know—but I know for a fact that I shared it with A-J. Even now I can see us, sprawled in front of the kids on the swings in the park, and scheming, the way mums do, about what we were going to do with our lives once we’d regained some measure of freedom again. I was going to design this fashion jewellery line, and A-J was going to be my model and dazzle everybody showing off my pieces on the catwalk.

It was a pipe dream. We never did anything about it, of course. We never got the chance. But she knew damn well that I never wanted to be a calligrapher!

‘Yes, Mum does the most beautiful calligraphy.’ Shelley jumps in and answers for me and I am so surprised that I say nothing. ‘What’s the work?’

‘Invitations. We’ve got a big “Domestic Goddess” do coming up in the summer and we want someone who can do the invites professionally. The woman who used to do it has just moved and we usually use one of our own for any little jobs.’ Annie-Jo looks at me encouragingly. ‘So you see, it might be worth your while joining us. There is quite a bit of this kind of work over the course of a year.’

‘She’ll think about it,’ Shelley puts in for me again. ‘Thanks for the offer, Aunt Annie-Jo.’

‘Thanks for the tea, Rachel. It’s been so nice to talk to you again. We’ll have to organise to get together just you and me sometime. We’ll do it next week, when you come to lunch.’

‘Sure.’ I keep washing up the cups and I don’t see her to the door. I feel stung to the core about Shelley not getting a birthday invite, even if it is stupid of me.

The door shuts behind her at last. The atmosphere in the kitchen is thick with my unspoken resentment. It isn’t me that she’s hurt, I could cope with that. I just can’t bear that she did that to Shelley, my Shelley, who has such little time, so few parties left to go to. Why had they done that?

‘It’s all right, Mum.’ My daughter has seen my guest out and chivvied Daniel up the stairs to get out of his scout uniform. ‘I don’t mind. I really don’t. You don’t have to be so hurt on my behalf. Michelle and I haven’t been close for months.’

‘That’s not the point, though, is it?’ My throat is tight. I’m not really sure what the point is, but this feeling of rejection has cut me to the quick so I go back to the sink to wash up all the bits and bobs of cups and teaspoons and plates that gather during the course of the day. Outside it has grown dark all of a sudden. There is a wind stirring up the leaves in the garden and I have a feeling that tomorrow it will be quite cold.

‘If she can get you some calligraphy work then you should go to the lunch. She might prove a useful contact for you.’

If Shelley feels rejected at all then she really isn’t showing it. And maybe she is right. Maybe I should think of Annie-Jo as a contact if I can’t think of her as a friend any more.

‘She’s still your friend,’ my daughter reads my thoughts in that uncanny way that she has, ‘she’s just a different kind of friend than you are.’

‘A disloyal one, you mean?’

‘Mum,’ Shelley laughs, ‘compared to you the whole world is traitorous and harsh!’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ I look at Shelley in astonishment. Daniel has just bounded into the kitchen and he’s ravenous as usual. His look of disappointment that there is nothing cooking on the hob is a picture.

‘I mean that there is no one on this planet who is as good and true a person as you. You are the best mum in the world.’

Disloyalty, I think. That’s what this is all about, really. I feel let down. I feel trampled over. Disregarded.

‘I always thought of her as a friend.’ I give Shelley a lopsided attempt at a grin. ‘There we go. No sooner do I open Pandora’s box than all the Miseries start flying out at me.’

If there is one person I would have laid money on remaining loyal to us, it would have been Annie-Jo.

‘Not, of course, that there is any connection whatsoever between Annie-Jo becoming a turncoat and Pandora’s box of old junk arriving at our door…’ Shelley reminds me.

‘No. None at all,’ I concede.

‘What’s a turncoat?’ Danny looks from one of us to the other and his face seems worried. ‘And what do you mean, Pandora’s box makes miseries shoot out at you, Mum? Is there something inside Granny’s box? Like—like germs, you mean?’

‘Mum was making a joke, dunderhead. No germs in there. No miseries. Nothing. It’s just that Mum’s a bit sad because A-J, well, she doesn’t appreciate that our mum’s the best.’

‘Mum’s the best,’ Daniel echoes his sister, and I pull a face and go to rummage in the fridge. If I am quick enough maybe I can pretend that these tears welling in my eyes are just the onions?

‘Did you get to speak to Dad yet?’ Shelley speaks softly to me, peeling the garlic in the corner. ‘About the trip?’

‘I’ve left a couple of messages. I’ll get on to him tomorrow, definitely.’ I don’t add that he’s already got back to me this morning with a resounding ‘No!’

‘What if he says no?’

‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ I tell her. ‘How did you find out about Michelle’s party?’

She shrugs. ‘The girls were all talking about it on the Internet last night. Bryan hired out the whole of the top floor at Maxime’s for her, apparently. It was formal attire. Not really my scene, though, you’ll agree?’ I look at her closely, searching for any hint of regret at having been left out, but I can find none. Shelley accepts it; it is me who can’t accept it.

‘You’ll go to Summer Bay,’ I tell her. ‘No matter what happens, you’ll have your wish, I promise you that.’

‘Okay, Fairy Godmother,’ Shelley grins, dropping the peeled garlic cloves onto the chopping board. ‘I’ll leave it in your capable hands.’

If I know Bill, though, it is going to take more than a wave of a magic wand before he will let her go.

It is going to take something more akin to a miracle.

6 Rachel

I feel so…so pathetic and stupid and helpless now that Annie-Jo has gone. I’ve got all those I-should-have-saids twirling round in my brain like a snowstorm in a bottle and to what end? For what?

I’ve just pulled the tray out of the bottom of the toaster to get to all the crumbs. This is a job I never do, not ever. It is one of the least necessary things in my life and yet I am doing it now because…if I don’t do something constructive with all this energy I fear I may pick a chair up and hurl it through the window.

I am never going to mention to Annie-Jo how hurt I was that Shelley didn’t get an invite; I won’t, because there is simply no point. It’s gone. You can’t bring the past back. I can’t change anything, can I?

It’s the same reason why I don’t see any point hanging on to all the trash that people accumulate about the past. Like all the things Pandora sent me that I’ve shoved behind the pedal bin. What could possibly be in there that anyone could have judged worth keeping for all these years?

In fact, now that I’m down here throwing the crumbs away I can see I really need to clean out this cupboard under the sink, too. There are no less than three dried-up used teabags under here that never quite made the bin. And Pandora’s blooming box is taking up too much space. It makes the pedal bin stick out at the front so the door won’t close properly. It’s a darn nuisance having to hang on to all this for Lily, it really is. Pandora should have sent it all to her in the first place. Still, there is nothing stopping me from sticking it all in a slightly smaller (and fresher-smelling!) box that will fit more neatly behind the door. I don’t know where else I would put it; we’re bursting at the seams as it is.

Oh my god, there’s my old diary. I can’t believe she kept that! I just hope Pandora never read any of it. How embarrassing. I must have written pages and pages, what on earth did I go on about? Better take that out before Lily gets her mitts on it!

8 February 1978

Today my feet hurt and my legs hurt so much. We have to strengthen all our muscles, Mrs Legrange says. We have to keep on practising daily, practising and smiling, all the way through the pain because that’s what the pros do. Ha, if only she knew there is no way I am ever going to do this as my grown-up job, no way, ever! The competition season is coming up again and that means extra lessons which we’ve got no option but to go to because once it’s paid for, Dad says, it’s paid for and we go. But—here is my big secret—at the moment I don’t mind.

There’s this boy called Gordon. He’s sixteen. His partner is called Amelie and she’s two years younger than him. They aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, though. You can tell it by the way they automatically separate once the dance is over. Their gaze goes to different things. She looks up to the balcony where someone else is watching her. He looks around at the edges of the dance floor, scanning the other couples, sussing out the opposition. He’s very focused. You can just see, he so much wants to win. He’s got what Dad calls ‘the hunger’; he says he’s one to watch. So I do; oh, I do.

I watch him when he’s dancing with Amelie; I watch the way that he looks at her, his eyes melting right into the very heart of her, and I find myself wondering, what might it be like if only he looked at me like that? Just the thought of it is enough to make me shiver. Just thinking about what it might be like if—just for one day—I could be his partner instead of Amelie, it’s been enough to get me into trouble with Legrange for not ‘paying proper attention’ already.

Oh, wow, I remember him now. I do. I remember how I used to hang about after class, looking out for him. He used to turn my insides to jelly! Just thinking about it is bringing a smile to my face because I can remember how it used to be, god, what it is, to be in love. I suppose it must be just a teenage thing, because I never remember feeling anything like it with Bill. Not that I didn’t love Bill, I did, but it wasn’t this kind of head-over-heels, all-consuming thing that I felt for this boy Gordon. And here’s the strange thing. When I think about it, I can hardly remember Gordon at all. I cannot bring to mind his face, or hear the sound of his voice any longer, it’s all faded. What I do remember, reading this, is how I felt about that boy!

4 March 1978

He asked me my name today. He’s been looking out for me. Well, that’s what I think anyway. My class finishes ten minutes earlier than his but three weeks in a row he’s come through the door into the hall at exactly the same time as me—can that be a coincidence? I told him, ‘Rachel’. He said that’s real nice. He’s got a soft voice but it’s got a strength about it, you can tell. He might be a dancer but he’s not the kind of boy any of the other lads would want to mess with. He told me his name was Gordon, and I already knew that but I pretended I didn’t.

I got some other info from his partner, Amelie, too. He’s got a younger sister who’s only six, and he’s got a dog called Blanche and he’s into Guns N’ Roses. She told me all that without me having to probe too much and I don’t think she even suspects I’m interested in him yet cos I was pretty casual about it.

Gordon didn’t say anything else to me apart from ‘That’s real nice’ and then he kind of shrugged and said, ‘Well, see ya’. And then Lily came out at that moment so I was pretty glad he was gone because I don’t want her getting involved. Next week I’ll get to talk to him for longer because she’ll be at the dentist and I’ll have the field clear, all to myself. I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next seven days without seeing him. It’s torture. But a kind of wonderful torture at the same time because him being there has made going to practice so much more exciting. I’ve been trying to find out what other times he and Amelie are there but I’ve got to be careful. If anyone finds out they will make so much fun of me that my life will be one Holy hell, as if it isn’t bad enough already.

It’s all because I have to be the one to dress up and be the ‘boy’, of course. When we were younger it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. But now that the other kids are older it’s the kind of thing they notice and they laugh at me for it and I hate, hate it! I don’t want to be a bloody boy, I never did. But now Mum and Dad say me and Lily have got to stay together for at least one more season because we’ve been dancing together for so long nobody else is going to be able to partner her as well as I can.

I don’t want to have my hair cut short any more. I don’t want that nasty top hat or to have that moustache painted onto my face.

Gordon doesn’t know because he only sees me on a Tuesday evening after we finish general dance fitness classes. Then I’m allowed to wear my pink leotard and look like any other girl so he doesn’t know. If he did he’d probably hate me and call me nasty things like all the other boys do. God, it doesn’t bear thinking about, it really doesn’t.

Ugh! It brings it all back, it really does. I would never have thought that just a few simple words written in a diary could have such a strong emotional impact, but it’s almost as good as a time-machine, this. I’m transported. I’m actually there.

‘Mu-um, are you coming? Mu-um?’

‘Just one second, Dan. Do the bits of your maths that you can and I’ll be along in a moment.’

He’s waiting upstairs. I said I would just finish in the kitchen but I’m taking an age over it because I was feeling so upset about Annie-Jo.

‘I’ve already done the bits that I can do.’ His voice is languid. He’s probably hoping that I’ll get sidetracked and forget all about it but I can’t, I mustn’t.

‘Okay I’ll be up at exactly quarter to. Five minutes.’

Five minutes—just one more and then I’ll have to leave reading the rest of these diary entries till later.

11 March 1978

I had to make the most of it tonight, I knew that and I went for it. I kept thinking there’s never going to be another good time like this when Liliana is out of the picture. It couldn’t have been better really. First, she and Dad got stuck behind a long appointment at the dentist. I got a message through the office that they were going to be delayed. Then that was nearly ruined when my class overran by fifteen minutes. My heart felt so tense in my chest it was just unreal. I kept thinking he’s going to be gone by the time I get out of this bloody lesson, my whole week of waiting will have all been for nothing and I can’t stand this, I really can’t.

But when I finally got out, blasting through the double-doors like a bat out of hell, he was still there, leaning all casually up against the doorway opposite, waiting for me. I could feel it. He smiled at me and then he…just sort of put his head a little to one side, indicating the courtyard, and I followed him out without speaking. And outside there was a chill spring wind blowing, I could feel it goose-pimpling up my arms but I was too excited to feel any cold at all. It was getting dark, quarter to five already, and there was only the lamplight from the street opposite for us to see each other by. It didn’t matter.

I was worried I wouldn’t know what to say. Gordon was so quiet at first I thought maybe he’s shy too, but he wasn’t. Not at all.

They say you always remember your first kiss, but what do you remember? Is it the surprise of first having someone else’s ardent lips on your own, that feeling of having them so near, dangerous and exciting as it is, the heat of their body up close against yours? If we’d had more time to get to know each other, more opportunities during the week to meet, I would have hung back forever shy, I would have taken forever to let him get near to me.

But tonight…all I could think of was, I won’t get to see him again for another seven whole days. And when I do, next time, stupid Lily will be there. And by then maybe someone will have told him about my nasty tuxedos and painted-on moustaches and he will have gone right off me. Hell, if I were him I would have!

So we kissed. And I didn’t feel shy and awkward about it, not at all. I felt powerful and feminine and beautiful even though we didn’t say a word, no, I swear, we didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. Only when, after an entire age had passed at last I heard my father’s voice calling through the corridors inside; I heard his footsteps coming quickly and the janitor following behind him saying grumpily ‘I’m already locking up here’. And only then did Gordon let me go. He had this peaceful smile on his face. He said, ‘See ya’. That was all he said but it echoed in my heart all the way home and for a long time afterwards. I think it will echo in my heart forever.

Reading that has just lightened up my day, it really has. I didn’t always feel like such a dried-up old husk of a fruit bat like I do now. I did once know what it felt like to fall in love with someone. Puppy love, maybe, but who cares what it was? It’s all come rushing back and it’s made me feel all funny inside.

‘Mum, it’s quarter to already!’

Hell, so it is, and I did promise Dan.

I don’t want to read on, though. I’m not really sure why. It reminds me of who I used to be, I suppose. It reminds me of the person I might still be, inside, underneath the crusty layers of all the years and all the vicissitudes. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

‘Coming, Danny. I’m coming.’ I jump up, pushing the journal back in Pandora’s box. I’m going to have to find some other hiding place, well and truly hidden out of sight. I don’t want any of the kids cottoning on to this before I have a chance to destroy it.

‘Okay, Mum?’ Shelley’s caught a glimpse of the smile in my heart, I know she has, because she’s just looked at me curiously, passing me on the way to the stairs.

‘I’m fine,’ I tell her automatically. Maybe I am, too, I think. I’ve just had a reminder of the fact that, after all, I am still human. I am still capable of remembering what it feels like to love and be loved.

Maybe at the end of the day that’s the only thing that counts?

7 Shelley

Miriam’s mum came round this morning. When she came through the door I thought she was someone else. She didn’t look the same. Her hair has gotten much thinner than it used to be, much lighter, almost white. Her face has been leached of all its colour, of all its life. I think she was wearing a thin beige jacket; the kind that the old ladies wear who queue up at the post office on a Thursday morning. She’s gotten old.

She’s not that old, though. She’s only the same age as my mum is. She shouldn’t look like that.

‘I’m getting there,’ she said, when Mum asked her how she was coping. ‘Slowly.’ She wanted to see me, to say hello, and I wanted to see her too, but when I came into the hallway she looked at me so long and hard I felt she might be X-raying me with her eyes. It was as if she was trying to look right through to my bones, to see how they were holding up, assessing just how much longer I might have left.

She told me I was looking well, but she didn’t say it with any happiness in her voice. She made me feel guilty. When they went to drink their tea I left them and went into my bedroom, which is downstairs nowadays. My heart was pounding. My arms felt all weak. I needed to stay there for a minute and just rest. I didn’t want to be with them, but I still peered at them from where I was behind my door. I felt hypnotised.

Miriam’s mum and her husband David have split up now, apparently. She said they didn’t know how to be together any more; they couldn’t remember who they each were.

I wondered if my mum would remember who she was, once I’d gone. It seemed a strange kind of thing for Miriam’s mum to say, and it stayed with me for a long time afterwards.

‘Well at least that’s one bridge I won’t have to cross.’ Mum had smiled tightly at her. She had no one to split up with. I guess that’s what she meant.

‘Splitting with David was the least of my worries,’ Miriam’s mum had shrugged. ‘I’m leaving for Spain in three months. I’m leaving this country for good. I’m taking her ashes with me. I plan to plant them beneath an olive tree under the glorious Mediterranean sun.’

‘I’m sorry about David,’ Mum said.

‘Look, I just don’t care any more. When you see someone you love—your child—go through that suffering, everything else in the world…it just turns a shade of black or white or grey. Nothing matters. In the end,’ she looked at my mum sharply, ‘I just wanted her gone.’

‘Was it that bad?’

They had lowered their voices. They were talking in loud whispers but this house is full of echoes. I could still hear every word.

‘It is far worse than they told us to expect, I’m afraid.’ She shot Mum a pitying look. ‘I won’t go into the details but you will have to brace yourself for it. We were desperate, in the end. To say that her passing away was a blessed relief would be an understatement.’ She stopped, then, as Mum put her hands over her face and began, noiselessly, to cry. I wanted to go and smack that woman in the face just then. I would have liked to storm in there and tell her to get the hell out. What business did she have, coming in here doing that to my mum, just because she’d been through a terrible time?

All that she’d been through—it must have changed her. She never used to be like that, and now she was regretting it because I could hear her saying, ‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. I shouldn’t have said that. I wanted to warn you, that’s all, so that you would be prepared for what is to come. Maybe there is something you can take some strength from?’ She hesitated. ‘Do you ever go to church?’

Mum shook her head at that. She blew her nose into a tissue. ‘It might not be the same for Shelley,’ she said when she put her face up. ‘Research is giving us new medicines all the time, things are getting better. And maybe the new doctor, Ari Lavelle, maybe he’ll be able to come up with some things that Doctor Ganz never thought of?’

‘I won’t hear a word spoken against Doctor Ganz,’ Miriam’s mum flared up and you could see Mum had hit on a real nerve there. ‘Doctor Ganz was the only one out of the lot of them who really cared. If you had your eyes open you’d know they’ve only taken away his consultancy and his research post to allow that Lavelle man to come in and…’ Our visitor sniffed loudly. I could see her fingers clutching tightly on to the handles of her bag. ‘I blame Doctor Lavelle, personally, for what happened to Miriam. She only started getting much worse when he came in and began messing around with her dosages and asking questions that Doctor Ganz never asked us. Messing things up, basically.’

‘I really think that might be a little…’ Mum didn’t know what to say, I could tell.

‘You got Doctor Ganz back for a little while, though, didn’t you?’ There was a hint of resentment in Miriam’s mother’s voice now. ‘I heard Doctor Ganz came back because Lavelle had some more important work to do at his other base in the US. But I hear the old man’s back at the department now, causing mischief again?’

‘I…I really don’t know about that. I believe that Ari Lavelle has very good credentials. And I still think…I think maybe there’s hope for Shelley yet. She may react differently to the drugs they give her. Everybody’s different you know.’

‘They are. You watch out for him, that’s all I’m saying. At least you can’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.’ Miriam’s mum stood up then and pushed a small white card into her hand. ‘Anyway, I’ve taken up enough of your time. We’re having a memorial service for Miriam. The details are on the card. Let us know if you can come. Shelley, too, of course, if she’s able.’

‘Why would I be coming if she weren’t able?’ Mum’s voice had a new energy to it. I watched her as she shoved the front door closed with her foot. It slammed more loudly than seemed polite. I hoped Miriam’s mum hadn’t got offended. I don’t know why I cared, but I did. I thought maybe we should still try and be kind to her.

I remembered how many times she had brought Miriam to our house and what good friends we had all been then, Miriam’s mum and my mum, Miriam and me. The last time they had been here Miriam had been laughing and joking because she’d just made her mum buy her a bright green coat which made the ginger of her hair stand out even louder. She might have been sick, but she was still so full of life.

Now Miriam was ashes. I tried to think about that but it was more than my head could take. Where did the person go if they were ashes? Where was I going to go? What if I didn’t want to go there?

I’d talked about this sort of thing before, with Solly. Solly is very spiritual. He told me that Miriam would probably reincarnate sometime; that I shouldn’t worry. I told him that if I’d had the shit life she’d had then I wouldn’t bother reincarnating. Besides, it might sound selfish but I was more worried about myself just at that moment. It was going to be my turn next. I didn’t want to disappear into a pot of ashes under an ornamental tree.

‘I suppose you heard most of that?’ Mum reappeared from the front door looking tired and worn; and angry. I nodded.

‘Just who the hell does she think she is?’ she stormed.

‘She hasn’t come to terms with it,’ I muttered. ‘She’s angry that she had to go through seeing Miriam suffer so much. It’s that which has made her bitter.’ And the change of doctors, I thought. She hadn’t got over that yet, clearly. What if she’d got a point, though? I pushed that thought out of my mind quickly.

‘I know, I know. I feel sorry for her too. Even though I’m angry with her.’

‘Don’t be.’ I looked Mum straight in the eye for a minute. ‘She’s just jealous, you know, because you’ve still got me.’

‘You’re right.’ I could see Mum had tears in her eyes, though she was trying to hold them back. ‘It’s just…why do people have to change so much?’ she muttered under her breath. ‘First Annie-Jo, now her.’ She picked up the cushion where Miriam’s mum had been sitting and gave it a good punch then set it back down again. ‘Why can’t things ever just stay the same?’

They don’t, though. The unspoken thought hung in the air between us. I wasn’t going to stay the same, either, even though we were both in the habit of pretending otherwise.

Sickness.

That’s what was coming.

I looked at Mum’s face and I could tell exactly what she was thinking.

‘It’s not going to be the same for me, Mum, I promise you that.’ I don’t know if that made her feel any better, me telling her that I wasn’t going to suffer. It made me feel better, though, knowing that I wouldn’t be putting her through that final hell. It strengthened my resolve, as she would say.

Maybe Miriam’s mum had done us a favour after all.

8 Shelley

SugarShuli says: Hi Shelley. Am I the luckiest girl in the world or what? Sending you a jpg of Jallal so you can see why. (Isn’t he fit?) Got it through last night. Please don’t be jealous, just be pleased for me. Mum and Dad want to hold the wedding in the summer, so you should be okay to come, yes?

ShelleyPixie says: Jallal looks nice.

SugarShuli says: Nice? Is that all you can say?

ShelleyPixie says: He looks nice, Surinda. I hope he’s good to you when you get married. What is he like?

SugarShuli says: Haven’t met him yet. He comes over next month. My parents sorting him out with a job, that sort of thing.

ShelleyPixie says: Sounds real strange to me, to think of marrying someone you haven’t even met.

SugarShuli says: To you it does. We spoke over the phone for the first time yesterday too. I couldn’t sleep all night after hearing his voice. He sounds seriously sexy, my friend.

ShelleyPixie says: Sure.

I’m thinking maybe what Surinda is doing isn’t so very off after all. Krok jokes all the time that he’ll come for me one day to marry me and sometimes I pretend that it’s true. Only because I have nothing better to do. I know it’s just his online chat. But sometimes I pretend; and if it ever really did come true—let’s just say ‘if’—I wonder if I really would elope with him. Maybe I would.

SugarShuli says: I’ve never felt like this before. Have you ever been in love, Shelley? I mean, really, head-over-heels type in love?

ShelleyPixie says: No, what’s it like?

SugarShuli says: You can’t stop thinking about the person. It’s like an addiction. Some people need a drink or a chocolate to make them happy. I know what I need is Jallal.

Phew, she’s derived all this from a photo and one long-distance telephone conversation. Love must indeed be a powerful thing.

ShelleyPixie says: I’m just wondering—how do you know it’s love and not just a crush or something?

SugarShuli says: Well—you’ve read about it, haven’t you? It just takes over your whole world, just like Mystical Crystal said in ‘Superstars Secrets’ last month. All I can think about is the wedding. It’s, like, taken over my brain.

Surinda doesn’t have an enormous brain, so that shouldn’t be too hard, the uncharitable thought pops up.

SugarShuli says: All I can think about is…you know, the actual night. I’m working on my mum to buy me some nice stuff, lingerie, you know the type of thing. She says I won’t need it. It won’t matter. But I’m working on her; it’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

ShelleyPixie says: I guess.

How would I know? She’s talking about sex. I’ve never even been kissed. I’m never going to be. I’m not much of a friend, I know, but her joy is making me miserable. The more wonderful Surinda assures me that her life is, the crappier I feel about my own. Not that any of that is her fault. Krok hasn’t answered my emails for ages and he’s never online these days. I don’t know how he spends his time. Having fun making music and going out with girls who can go out with him, I suppose. I want to ask him about the Beat the Bank tickets. Not that I’m planning on going, it’s just a thing we talk about online.

ShelleyPixie says: I don’t know how you can get so enthusiastic about someone you’ve never met.

There I go. I don’t want to rain on her parade, not really.

SugarShuli says: You’re enthusiastic over your Krok, aren’t you?

ShelleyPixie says: I’m not marrying him, though.

I wish I were. I can’t believe I just thought that. I’m jealous. I admit it. Surinda sees this Jallal as the easy way out of her life as she’s living it at the moment, stuck in that tiny house with her five brothers and sisters and her strict ‘do-as-I-say’ father and her timid-mouse mum. She was always a dunce at school so marriage is her only way out of it.

I wish I had an easy way out of my life too.

I guess I do.

I’ve already gone through all my options on that score and I’ve made my decision but it isn’t a very thrilling one. I’m going to have to tell someone soon because keeping it all to myself is killing me. Ha ha.

It has to be someone who won’t say anything, though, or my plans will be ruined. I have to tell Mum, of course, but I want to tell someone else as well. I don’t know if I can trust Surinda. I want Krok.

SugarShuli says: I wish you could be happy for me.

ShelleyPixie says: Don’t think I’m not. Once you’re married you’re stuck with him, though, aren’t you, Surinda? I mean, with your family being the way it is, you won’t have the option of a quickie divorce if things don’t work out.

SugarShuli says: I’m content, girl. I couldn’t be happier. I see your Kieran boy was in the papers this morning?

She means Krok. Kieran is his real name.

ShelleyPixie says: Was he? What for?

SugarShuli says: He must have got them places he was after. They were doing a piece about how today’s youth have such high expectations and it’s all because of the hype surrounding game shows. They all had to say what they hoped to gain if they won. Kieran’s bit got the biggest coverage—they said because he’d tragically lost his parents and here was a lad who wanted to do something positive in their memory, but I think really they’re targeting him because he’s so photo…photoginetic.

ShelleyPixie says: Photogenic?

SugarShuli says: ’God damn gorgeous, girl! Anyway, he’s on tonight’s show.

Christ, is that what he’s been up to? I didn’t know. He hasn’t even bothered to let me know…I feel like not even watching it now. Plus, now there’s the added worry that everybody else is noticing him. I don’t want everyone else making a fuss of him. He’s mine.

ShelleyPixie says: Not been talking to Krok lately.

SugarShuli says: He pissed with you?

ShelleyPixie says: Why would he be?

SugarShuli says: Dunno. Maybe because you wont send him a photo? And he hasn’t sent you them tickets.

ShelleyPixie says: NOYB, is it? Anyway, even if we did get tickets—assuming he’s not eliminated in the next few weeks—how would we get there? Mum won’t take us so how would we…

SugarShuli says: Yes she would. Your mum is the best mum in the world. She gives you everything. You’re so lucky. She’d give you the lingerie I’m after if it was you in my place.

ShelleyPixie says: If it were me.

SugarShuli says: That’s what I said, if it was you.

ShelleyPixie says: If it were me, not was me. Anyway, why don’t you ask Jallal if he’s so loaded? It’ll be mainly for his benefit, won’t it?

SugarShuli says: lol. Big brother wants the computer off me—he’s looking for jobs now. Speak to U tomorrow.

ShelleyPixie says: Okay, CU then.

God, she’s so excited. She’s like a jumpy bunny. I’m a cow, I know, but I don’t want to hear all about it really. I wish I had some proper friends I could speak to, like Miriam, not just Surinda. I wish Krok would come back online. Maybe I could phone him and speak to him at the DVD shop? Just the thought of doing that gives me butterflies in my stomach. What if he doesn’t want to take my call? I’d be so embarrassed.

I was thinking about that last night. I looked up his shop but they aren’t listed on the Internet and Mum keeps the telephone directories upstairs so I can’t get to them without her wanting to know why, and I don’t want to tell her so I’m stuck. Unless Surinda does it for me?

ShelleyPixie says: B4U go—could you look up the telephone number for David’s DVDs for me? It’s in Kensington somewhere.

SugarShuli says: Did you think of trying directory enquiries?

ShelleyPixie says: I haven’t got the full address—you might have to hunt for it.

Surinda’s brother works in telesales. He’s got a huge pile of directories beside his bed at home. Surinda told me he keeps his collection of top-shelf magazines hidden underneath them too, but that’s more than anybody wants to know.

SugarShuli says: Give me a little while. If Yusef goes out later I can search for you, otherwise not.

ShelleyPixie says: Thanks for that, Surinda.

She’s not so bad after all. It’s not her fault her life is on the up and mine isn’t. I think I’ll make out a ‘May resolutions list’. I’ve got such little time left. I need to focus on what I want to get done before I go. It’s a pity I won’t make Surinda’s wedding like she thinks. I would have liked to have seen her all decked out in her orange sari.

But I promised myself I wouldn’t do the ‘if-onlys’.

I said I’d never do that.

My ‘May resolutions list’ would look like this:

1 Meet Krok. Okay, I do want to meet him. I want to say hello and goodbye. I want to know if I really would have fallen in love with him. I want to know what that must feel like. I can’t leave earth without doing that.

2 Sort out my stuff. I’ll make a list. Danny gets my computer. Surinda can have the emerald ring that belonged to my dad’s mum. That can be my wedding present to her.

3 Be independent. Find out who I am. Do something brave.

I reckon I can do those things before my birthday at the end of May. I can if I put my mind to it.

9 Rachel

Stella is having a difficult time with little Nikolai. I can hear him kicking and struggling in the background.

‘He’s always like this whenever one of us gets on the phone!’ Stella tells me. She sounds strained, distantly polite as always. I wish she would just accept that the last thing on my mind is any desire to steal my ex-husband back from his new wife. I don’t want Bill back. If they are happy together then I am truly glad of it.

‘Nikki and I were just about to go and play in the garden.’ The tone of her voice suggests that I have phoned at a most inconvenient time. The sun has been beating down all day in Surrey, apparently. Lucky Surrey. We, on the other hand, have been blessed with unremitting rain since the beginning of April. My garden is a veritable sea of mud.

‘I’ll see if I can locate Bill for you.’

Stella could be a secretary screening calls for a high-profile executive. I bite my lip irritably. I’ve already phoned Bill twice this week about our daughter’s birthday; the least he could do is get back to me.

I must be frowning more deeply than I realise because Sol—out there in the treehouse fixing a leak for Daniel—catches sight of me through the window and pulls a face. I pull a face back at him but then force myself to smile. I am going to be pleasant to Bill, no matter what it takes.

‘Hi, Rachel,’ Bill’s breathy voice comes down the phone suddenly. I get a momentary vision of him, a half-eaten piece of toast in one hand, his jacket half-on and scooping up the car keys from the sideboard as if he needs to be off, quickly, somewhere else.

‘Bill, I’m phoning about Shelley’s birthday. Have you got a minute?’

‘A minute, yes.’

Hi Bill, yes, I’m doing just fine. The kids are well too. So kind of you to enquire. Bill was never one for small talk—cut to the chase, he always said. Okay, here I go with the chase:

‘This is about Shelley wanting to go to Cornwall for her birthday, Bill.’

‘Yeah, you said. We emailed. I thought we’d agreed. No.’ There’s the sound of a door shutting far away in the place where he is, as Nikolai’s high-pitched screaming blocks out all else for an instant. ‘Sorry, he’s teething. It’s a bit noisy here.’

Teething, yeah, right.

‘Bill, Shelley really wants to go to Summer Bay for her birthday.’

‘Look, things are kind of difficult here at the moment.’ I can just feel his eyebrows lifting. ‘Anyway, what on earth does she want to go for?’ He sounds preoccupied. He sounds as if he hasn’t slept in weeks. Nikolai probably makes sure of that. ‘It’s a bit far away, isn’t it?’ He is thinking about the long drive down there; what it will mean to squeeze it in between a late finish on a Friday and an early start on a Monday morning.

‘You don’t have to come, Bill. In fact, she doesn’t really want a crowd. She’s been quite clear about that. She just wants some girl-time.’

He doesn’t seem to be listening. He’s got the desk diary in front of him, I can hear him turning over the pages, flick, flick, till he arrives at the week at the end of May.

‘Not possible, I’m afraid. I’ve got a meeting first thing on that Saturday morning which won’t finish till about one. Nope. No can do, Rachel.’

‘That’s all right, Bill,’ I explain patiently. ‘She just wants me and her to go. You don’t have to be there.’

There is a silence at the other end while he takes that in.

‘We can do all the tea and cakes and presents bit when we get back,’ I offer.

‘No, we can’t.’ He sounds petulant. ‘It’s Stella and my anniversary. When my meeting finishes on Saturday I was planning to take her away for a few days. In fact, there was something I was hoping to run past you regarding that. We were sort of hoping you might have Nikolai for us; just for a few days?’

I am stunned into silence for a minute; astounded really that he can even think of asking me. Okay, so we keep up a good front for the kids’ sake but Bill and I hadn’t exactly parted best of friends. I glance up as Sol taps gently on the kitchen door and lets himself in. I can see the darker patches on the bottoms of his socks where they are soaking wet. I watch him sit down at my kitchen table and peel them off.

‘The conversation we need to have at the moment is about Shelley’s birthday,’ I remind Bill, ‘not your anniversary. Perhaps we can discuss that another time?’ I don’t know why I say that. There is no question of me ever taking Nikolai off their hands—not even for a couple of hours, let alone a couple of days. I have my own hands full enough as it is. Why the hell do I find it so difficult to just say NO?

‘Can’t do it, Rachel. Anyway, weren’t the kids due to come to me for that Saturday? I was going to take them all out to the park and then on for a burger. That way Nikolai can come too.’

Hmm, and maybe you can then palm Nikolai off onto me later?

‘The park?’ I say. Sol chuckles into his hands at that. He knows who I’m talking to and what we are talking about. ‘I think you’ll find it’s the week after that they’re due to come to yours, Bill. I’ve just checked. The Summer Bay thing is just for Shelley and me, as I’ve said. It’s what she’s asked me for…’

And she so seldom ever asks me for anything. If only he could see that and break away from his enclosed little Bill-Stella-Nikolai world for a minute.

Had we ever been like that? I wondered now. A little self-contained, totally enclosed unit; a bubble of a family, where inside the fold everyone is totally ‘right’ and outside it you are likely to be considered completely in the wrong?

‘I’ll just check on that with Stella. I’m sure you’re wrong there.’ Bill’s tone is defensive now. I hear him put the receiver down and go out and close the door to talk to Stella.

Were we? Were we ever like that together, Bill and I?

I close my eyes for a minute. I count to ten. Once, a lifetime ago, lying under the canopy of an oak tree on Hampstead Heath:

‘I want to know why it is you love me.’ Bill had been lying flat on his back, hogging the lion’s share of the shade.

‘Because you’re…you’re wonderful!’ I’d told him enthusiastically.

‘No, I mean precisely why. Tell me the reasons.’ His eyes had opened, caught me laughing, then, while he’d been dead serious.

‘I just do,’ I’d said helplessly. ‘Because you love me. Because you accept me as I am. Because you believe in my dreams. Because when I’m in your arms I feel, oh, I feel I could conquer the whole world, but even better than that, I feel I don’t need to…’

‘The real reason,’ he’d rolled over, businesslike, ‘is that you know that with me, you’re going to be going places, right?’

I didn’t know what he meant at the time. Some little village on the outskirts of Mumbai? To Turkey; to Greece, where we could look up the lost city of Troy?

‘Women need to know they’ve got someone to look after them, that’s all. You’re right, Rachel. Stick with me and you won’t need to conquer the world. That’s because I’ll do it for you.’ He’d been so sure of himself. I’d been so besotted with him. He’d meant he’d look after me materially. I thought he’d meant in all the other ways that count.

‘Any luck?’ Sol glances up at me from the papers he’s been scanning.

‘You know Bill,’ I mouth. ‘He’s never going to make this easy.’

Sol does know Bill. He and Adam were our neighbours for four years before their business took off and they were able to afford pastures greener. I sit down beside my one-time neighbour and sometime employer and prop my face in my hands.

‘Never mind him, though. What interesting work have you got lined up for me today?’

Sol pulls a face, then straightens it immediately. ‘Wrinkles,’ he tells me, ‘I must remember not to do that. Anyway, I’ve got a pile of typing for you, darling. I think most of it is legible. Let me know what you think of the hero.’ He sits back, his white linen shirt half-open, showing off his all-year tan to good effect. He is gorgeous, actually—the thought pops irrelevantly into my head. No wonder Adam was heartbroken when they split up. Annie-Jo has a point. Why do I never notice men at all these days—even the gay ones?

‘The hero? Oh, it’s your novel then? Not the new brochure for the shop?’

‘Justin’s doing the brochure.’ Sol waves a hand airily. ‘He understands the new publishing program better than anyone. He’s a whiz-kid. He’s young. They’re all whiz-kids.’ He looks a bit tragic as he says this.

‘Adam had a pretty good handle on that side of things…’

‘Adam was a dinosaur, Rachel. Old-fashioned in the extreme. In all his ways.’ He gives me a significant look. ‘Life’s an adventure to be tasted, isn’t it, sweetie?’

‘So, the whiz-kid is helping you with the brochure?’

‘Actually, he’s being such a bitch about it I told him he could bloody well do it himself.’ His voice is blasé, but the pain in his eyes when he mentions Justin is etched deep.

‘Justin playing up again?’ Uh-oh, trouble at the ranch. I’m still holding the phone to my ear, but there’s no sign of Bill coming back just yet. Bill works for a law firm and no doubt he’s used to keeping people on hold for great lengths of time, I think. I will hold for exactly two minutes more.

‘If I didn’t love him so much I would dump him, truly I would. But we’re soul mates,’ Sol tells me, ‘we were destined to be. He’s making me suffer to show me what I put him through in our previous existence together.’

‘Won’t that mean he’ll have to come back and suffer the same thing again himself?’ I swap the phone over to my other ear, and hand Sol the corkscrew and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

‘I don’t know. Good point. I shall put that to him. He won’t care, though, that’s the thing. He’s a Gemini, isn’t he? I was warned. Aquarius rising, too; he won’t be tied down.’ He pours out a small amount of wine and swivels it around in the glass, savouring its bouquet.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. He never used to look this sad. Or even so careworn as he does at the moment. Well, stands to reason really. I know Adam was the one who used to take care of the troublesome things in life, like shop brochures and acquisitions and keeping the website updated. Making sure there was milk in the fridge. In short, all the boring little necessities of life, which allowed everyone else—aka Solly—to go out and be ‘carefree’.

‘Will he let Shelley go with you?’ Sol indicates the phone with his head. ‘He should let her do what she wants to, poor darling.’ He pours out a large glass and hands it to me.

‘I’ve made up my mind I’m going to take her anyway,’ I tell him slowly. ‘I might need to ask for your help with some things, though. Hattie, for example, will you look after her for us?’

‘The tortoise?’ Sol grins amicably. ‘Sure.’

‘Will you be around the last week in May, though? This is really important, Solly. Are you sure you can do it?’

‘Sure thing, honey bunch.’ He is still thinking about Justin, I can tell.

‘Hello, Rachel?’ Bill is back on the phone.

‘Hello. All sorted then?’

There is a pause.

‘No.’ Bill is sounding surprisingly determined. You’d think he’d got enough on his plate with the demon child he and Stella have produced, but no. ‘This might be what Shelley’s asked you for, Rachel, but there are other people’s feelings to be considered here too. She’s used to getting too much of her own way, I think. That’s the trouble with it. When she comes over to us we stick to a much stricter regime and she has to deal with it. She has to eat whatever Stella puts on her plate for one thing.’

‘Meaning?’ What the hell has that got to do with anything? The two of them have obviously had a very long conversation while I’ve been hanging on that damned phone. I can feel my ire rising. Why do I always let him do this to me? I swore that I wouldn’t, not today.

‘She’s as thin as a stick, Rach. She can’t eat more than a morsel of food on an ordinary day, be honest now. We weighed her when she came to us for that week over Christmas, at the beginning, and then again at the end.’ I can hear him sounding a little bit sheepish as he realises what he is admitting to but he ploughs on with it anyway. ‘And she’d put on five pounds at the end.’ Sheepish, but triumphant nonetheless.

‘Now you’re telling me that I don’t feed her?’

‘Stella said when she handed her the bath towel she could see her ribs sticking out. You’ve got to be aware of this, surely? I have to say it, even if it hurts you to hear it.’

‘If you think you could do a better job then we could talk about options here. I’m worn out myself, with being her carer. I love her, but I’m worn out. Maybe you’re right. You two might be able to do a much better job than I can manage these days.’ My voice is surprisingly calm. A year before I might have made that as a throw-away comment in temper, knowing full well he would never agree to take me up on it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to, anyway. But this time I really mean it.

Sol’s face is a picture. I cover the phone with my hands while Bill relays what I’ve just said to his wife. ‘He won’t take me up on it, of course. There is no way they could hack it. They are both stressed up to the eyeballs with their own child as it is. And,’ I turn my face away from the phone to make doubly sure they won’t overhear, ‘to tell you the truth I think there is nothing wrong with little Nikolai, not at all. It’s just that some two-year-olds don’t want to learn the violin and take French language lessons and gymnastics classes every week. They get tantrummy about it. It is all very well to keep up a military regime for one or two days every couple of weeks but it’s not so easy when the child is resisting you all the way, on a day in, day out basis. Shelley won’t eat much because the tablets she has to take with her food sit like a pile of gravel in her belly and they ruin her appetite. She copes at her dad’s because she just doesn’t take the tablets for those days, just so as not to make a fuss.’

Sol nods sympathetically.

I know she’s too thin. I’d like her to be a lot heavier. I’d like a lot of things that just aren’t going to happen.

‘Let’s not argue over this.’ Bill is back and has gone into reasonable mode. ‘You know that suggestion isn’t practicable.’

‘I thought not.’

‘But to get back to my previous point, there are certain procedures you could put in place…’

‘Save it.’ I am the one feeling tetchy now. ‘Save your parenting theories for the one you have to deal with, will you? And let’s keep our conversation to the birthday plans. That’s what I rang about, and I too have a schedule to keep to this afternoon.’

I have to ring the surgery after speaking to Bill and ask why they’d only given me one month’s supply of Shelley’s tablets again. They used to give me six months, then it went down to three months, and then it became a ridiculous one month’s supply! I can’t spend my life going up and down putting in repeat prescriptions every four weeks. Everything takes up so much time. Bill doesn’t have to deal with any of that, and so he can’t possibly know what it is like.

‘I want to spend time with her on her birthday too.’ He is sad. I can hear it in his voice, and I wish now I had been kinder to him. Why do we always do this? Why can’t we just be civil to each other? I can’t bear to hear him feeling sad. It reminds me of that small battered place in my heart where I keep all the cherished memories of what we used to mean to each other.

‘We don’t know if she’ll have any more birthdays.’ His voice breaks here and I just cave in. It is true. He is right. I don’t want to be unfair about this.

‘Look, we can work something out. Perhaps you can come down and spend the Saturday with us down there then? She specifically asked to be in Summer Bay for her birthday. And she wanted some time alone with me. But if you could make it down for the Saturday, that would be a lovely surprise. We could throw her a party—organise something that she’d never even suspect. You can bring Daniel and Nikolai too. And Stella, of course.’

‘It’ll be a long drive,’ Bill grumbles, but he is caving, I can tell. ‘Just for the one day.’

‘Stay for the long weekend then. Make it worth your while.’

‘Maybe,’ Bill concedes. ‘I’d have to discuss this more with Stella.’

‘Do it then. I know Shelley would love to see you on her birthday.’

‘Don’t make any plans,’ he warns me, ‘not just yet. There’s a lot we’ve got to think about here. I’ll get back to you about it within the next couple of weeks.’

The next couple of weeks, I know, will be too late. I have a letter, still on the kitchen table, that I received this morning from Maggie at the bed and breakfast; we have to confirm straight away or the last two spaces will be taken.

‘We’ll talk about this again,’ he tells me.

‘Sure,’ I say, and I remember all over again just what he is like. I know I am never going to get anywhere with him. Bill isn’t the reasonable sort. ‘We’ll talk about it soon.’

Deceit, I think now. This isn’t like me at all. This is another one of Pandora’s vices. Oh well. Looks as though they’re thrumming through the air at a rate of knots at the moment, just waiting to home in on us at any opportunity.

‘Who are you ringing now?’ Solly watches me curiously as I punch the next number into the phone. ‘All sorted, is it?’

‘All sorted,’ I tell him. ‘I’m booking Maggie’s place for Shelley and me for the last week in May, just like she wanted.’

10 Shelley

Mum’s gone out, thank god. I thought she never would. I’ve had this paper with Kieran’s telephone number on it in my hand since breakfast time when Surinda phoned me. It’s gone all crumpled and hot because I’ve had to wait so long. I probably won’t even be able to read my own handwriting now.

To be honest, I’ve waited so long I’ve gone off the boil with the whole idea. He would probably be horrified if I tried to ring him anyway. In fact, I’m sure he would.

I’m not going to do it.

I’m going to read a bit more of Mum’s diary instead. That’s another thing that I can’t do when she’s around. I shouldn’t be peeking in Mum’s old diary, I know. It might all be ancient history now but it’s still private and she has a right to privacy, but I…I just want to know what it used to be like for her.

Her writing was a bit smaller in those days. It was a lot neater too. Her diary has a pale pink plastic cover and she’s drawn lots of hearts and loopy-petalled flowers in biro all the way around some of the entries. I can’t believe she did that. Ohmigod, it’s just what I do when I’m daydreaming. I wonder if that kind of stuff can be inherited? That’s just weird, man.

It’s real funny, thinking about her being a girl my age, having so much stuff to say and the only one she has to say it to is her diary. Just like Anne Frank, when you think about it. God, how sad is that? We all just email each other these days but they had to make do with diaries, I guess. I wonder if people read each other’s diaries after they’d written them? What would be the point of it otherwise?

20 October 1978

We have to be careful. I’ve told Gordon that my dad won’t let us have boyfriends and he accepts that. So we take whatever snatched time we can get. It helps that Legrange Studios are having a big refit at the moment. It means everything’s a bit chaotic so a lot of the time people are coming and going from all sorts of places where they wouldn’t normally be.

Mr Legrange nearly caught me out today. I took a short-cut coming in from the courtyard after seeing Gordon. I ran across the new stage area where none of us are allowed to go, yet. It was the quickest route but Mr Legrange caught me and it was the nearest I’ve come to being rumbled so far. It reminds me that I mustn’t get careless. He gave me that look adults give kids when they catch them doing what they’re not supposed to. Luckily, I’ve got a good reputation. I could see him waiting for an explanation so I told him one of the planks on stage was loose and I’d come back in especially to tell him that. He said which plank, and I pointed to one, and he went and jumped up and down on it a few times. He said he’d have it checked out and he let me go, thank god.

Lily is getting suspicious, too. She’s wondering why I keep finding excuses to go back inside the studio once we’ve already come out. By the time I got through Mr Legrange, I found her waiting, arms folded and looking fed up, by the toilets. I told her I had to use the ones usually reserved for the adults but I don’t think she believed me. God, why can’t she just leave me in peace for once?

God, they were all at it in those days, weren’t they? Sneaking round behind each other’s backs like there was no tomorrow.

Why shouldn’t I ring Kieran, come to think of it? So what if Mum won’t like it? She’s had her moments, ‘snatching whatever time she can get’, hasn’t she? Hell, I’m just doing it. I’m ringing him now before she gets back and that’s an end of it.

I mean, Krok might not even be there. Kieran. I must remember to ask for Kieran. He doesn’t work there every day. I hope he’s there. I’m not actually sure if I’ve rung the right number. It’s been ringing a while. Maybe they’re busy. Maybe I’ll ring back later. Maybe I just won’t bother…

‘Hello?’ It’s a woman. She sounds middle-aged. ‘David’s DVDs. Can I help you?’

‘Yeah. Er…is…er, is Krok, I mean Kieran, there?’

‘Who’s speaking please?’

‘Tell him it’s Shelley.’

She half-covers the mouthpiece with her hand but I can hear her calling out, ‘Kie-ran. Someone on the pho-one for you.’ She sounds vaguely amused.

‘Hey, man.’ Kieran’s voice is curt, abrupt; it gives me a shock and I want to put the phone down and just run away. He’ll think I’m a complete nerd.

‘It’s Shelley,’ I say stupidly. ‘You know—ShelleyPixie.’

‘Oh my god.’ He seems to gasp a bit; I can’t quite make out why. There’s this silence. It stretches on forever. ‘Hey, Shelley,’ he says at last. His voice is soft now, I can make out the echo of an Irish lilt. ‘How come you’re ringing me? Nothing’s wrong, is it?’

‘No.’ I’m staring at the symbols I etched into my desk with the sharp end of my school compass: ‘K4S’. I did that the other night when I was on the phone to Surinda and she was waxing lyrical about Jallal. Now I’m feeling embarrassed about it, to be honest, so I’ve covered it up with my mouse mat. ‘I just wanted to say hi.’ I feel like a complete fool. A complete and utter fool. Just thank god that he can’t see me because my face must look like a beetroot. I clear my throat. ‘You haven’t been online lately. I wondered if everything was okay? I…I…’ I was going to say ‘I missed you’. But that’s so much easier to type on a screen than it is to say over the phone. He’s a stranger, after all, I’m thinking. What do I really know about this guy, other than what he wants me to believe?

And we aren’t supposed to contact strangers we meet over the Internet. Everybody drums that into you. All the time. Especially if you’re kind of fragile, like me. At least he sounds…he sounds like he looks: young and kind and gentle.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he says it for me. His voice has gone real low. ‘There’s been so much going on. Granddad’s been ill. And then there’s been this game-show thing…’

‘I heard. Sorry about your granddad,’ I remember to say.

‘I got you those tickets,’ he tells me, ‘I didn’t forget you were after them. The next filming date is in a week or so. Or you could use them for the final.’

‘Did you?’ I can’t believe he did that. He really did it.

‘They’re screening the first episode tonight.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ My voice has gone kind of funny It’s because my mouth has gone all dry, speaking to him. ‘I’m going to watch it, for sure.’

‘I’m counting on it. You can tell me if I look like an ee-jut’. He says ee-jut for idiot. I can feel him grinning. He sounds pleased. If they’ve filmed several at once and he’s still going back then he must have done well and got through to the next round.

‘I hope this isn’t a bad time?’ I say after a bit. He’s gone quiet on the other end. I think maybe he’s just as shy as me? I can’t think of anything else to say. Why is this happening? When we talk online my fingers fly over the keys. He makes jokes and I laugh and laugh; he’s so witty and funny and fast. I can hear the front door opening now and I hope it’s just Daniel back from his bike ride, I don’t want it to be Mum back already. I hope if it’s Daniel he doesn’t come in here looking for me.

‘Not in the least. We’re never that busy in the morning,’ Kieran is saying. ‘But, Shelley, now that you’re here. I’ve got those tickets for you, like I said. Would you like me to bring them over to you sometime?’

‘No!’ My dad would kill me, and Mum, she would really kill me if she even knew I was talking to this man. ‘I mean, my parents…’ I trail off.

‘Of course. I understand completely. Never give out your address to someone from the Internet, right?’

Kieran doesn’t feel like a stranger, though. He’s got a nice voice; it’s everything I thought it would be. I think of Surinda, talking to Jallal for the first time, and I can’t help smiling. She’s right. You can fall in love over the phone. Just a little bit.

‘Perhaps we could meet somewhere public, though?’ I don’t want to put him off. This might be the one and only chance I get, and a great wave of bravery lifts me up.

‘There’s a fair up on Blackberry Common at the weekend. My mates are doing a mini-gig up there. Do you think you could make it?’

‘If I can get someone to help me with the wheelchair,’ I remind him. He hasn’t forgotten, has he? He does still remember that I’m in a wheelchair?

‘I’d help you myself but I know you don’t want to meet me alone. And you shouldn’t. You’re sensible to insist on that.’

‘How will you find me?’ I ask him. ‘Even if we agree a specific place…how will you know it’s me?’ My heart is hammering in my mouth. I’m actually arranging to meet Kieran! I still can’t believe I’m doing this.

‘Shell-ey!’ Daniel has just discovered that Mum is out. And he’s probably found that there aren’t any biscuits left. It’ll be something like that.

‘I’m here. Where would I be?’ I yell back.

My brother’s face is red and flushed as he pokes his head round my bedroom door.

‘We’re out of squash,’ he informs me.

‘I know.’ I wave the phone at him. ‘Drink water instead. I’m busy right now.’

‘Is that Mum?’ He eyes the phone suspiciously. I don’t talk to my friends all that often. I shake my head at him.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Kieran. A friend. Now scoot.’ My brother darts out the door again.

‘I’ll know it’s you because you are going to send me that photo of yourself that you keep promising me, right?’ Kieran’s voice is soft and coaxing. I get a crazy thought: maybe he thinks he’s falling for me too?

‘Right,’ my mouth says before my brain screams No! Too late.

‘Email me your mobile number, Pixie. We’ll firm up the times a little later. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Thank you for your call,’ he says before he hangs up. Thank you for your call. As if I were a business associate. But he sounded as if he really meant it, though.

I’ve got a date. Ohmigod. Who shall I tell? Surinda, of course, because I’ve only got a date if she’ll take me to it.

And she will if she wants those Beat the Bank tickets.

When I phone her, my fingers still trembling and sweaty on the keypad, her mum tells me that she isn’t there. Surinda is at school, she says. I don’t know about that, but I’ll have to call back later. Her voice sounds a little arch, as if she’s wondering why I’m not in school, too.

Stuck on the back of my bedroom door there is an old, gilt-edged mirror. It used to be Mum’s. It came from the old house and she didn’t have anywhere else to put it. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded, either, of the days when our whole world felt so much bigger—and so much more capable of expanding—than it is now. They were talking of moving to a bigger house in the countryside one time. That’s what Dad ended up with. We got Fetherby Road.

This used to be my ‘dressing-up’ mirror. I used to put on Mum’s scarves and her high heels and her lipstick. Oh yes I did! I can’t believe it now but I used to twirl around like a princess. What a twit.

I don’t think Mum even owns a pair of shoes any more that aren’t flats. She used to have some velvet-black stilettos that I loved, and a silver pashmina that she’d throw over her evening dresses (I loved that shawl, I think I’ve still got it stowed away in the back of a drawer somewhere, I saved it from the Oxfam bag). She used to wear a lot of emerald greens to show up the auburn in her hair, and dark russet-reds that showed up her real beauty. That’s a pity because she used to look so glam going out to Dad’s ‘corporate dinners’, as they called them. She told me they were very boring, really; it was only the chance to dress up that she liked!

Well, this mirror. I never look at myself in it. Why would I want to see what I’ve come to look like now? But once I put the phone down I suddenly get the urge to look at myself. I close the door and take a deep breath. Then I peer at what I can see in the half-light.

My arms are skinnier than I remember them. I look like a thin weed, struggling through a shady copse of bushes, all gangly and spindly and droopy in my chair. My face looks too pale. I could look a lot better than this if I took some trouble over it. I know this because everyone says I look so much like my Aunt Lily, and she was a beauty when she was my age. Naff fashion sense, admittedly, but you could see she had something when you look at her pictures. Perhaps I should send him a picture of her? Lol. Nah, not really; I just need to do myself up a bit.

I wonder what I would look like standing up? I’m so sick of sitting in this hunk of metal. I haven’t stood up by myself for such a very long time. They tell me I mustn’t put any pressure on the bones of my legs. That’s why they gave me Bessie so long ago, even when I was well capable of walking by myself. I could walk, but they didn’t want me fracturing the bones in my legs.

Now I’ve got this overwhelming urge to try standing up on my own two feet. I want to know what I would look like standing up, by myself, without anyone else there to hold me.

Grabbing hold of the knobs on the chest of drawers near the door I pull myself up. It’s damn hard. My arms are so much weaker than I thought. Inch by inch I do it, gritting my teeth, gingerly feeling the weight resting on my legs. The effort is huge. The effort is Mount Everest to a crawling baby. For a second, just a brief second, I see what I might look like if I were normal. I’m not as tall as I thought I was. It’s just the stick-thinness of me that gives the impression of height. Yuk. I have dark circles around my eyes that most girls of my age would not have. My mouth droops down a bit at the edges. My complexion is a bit grey. My hair is okay-ish. I’m going to get Surinda to cut out the black bit that I dyed into my blonde fringe. Or else she can dye it back to blonde. What will he think if he sees me, looking as I do?

Maybe he won’t notice anything but my eyes. My eyes are looking different today; talking to him has put a new light into them. He’s made me remember what it feels like to be alive.

My legs give way just then and I collapse back into Bessie again, feeling every limb trembling with a strange fear and excitement and pleasure at the same time. I shouldn’t have done that, but it feels good that I did. It makes me think that there are other, unthinkable things that I still might be able to do.

Just like Mum, really. She had to move beyond what was permissible or possible in order to get what she dreamed of.

27 October 1978

In the car on the way home tonight Dad said something that made me sit up. He’s heard that Gordon—that Ilkeley chap, he called him—is going to be needing a new partner soon. Amelie’s leaving, apparently. Dad said, perhaps we should ask his parents to take a look at what you two are capable of, eh? And he glanced at me in his rear-view mirror when he said it.

Could it be true that they would consider it? I knew about Amelie leaving, of course, from Gordon, but even though we’ve talked about it secretly, what it would be like if we could dance together, I never in a million years dreamed that it might possibly come true. Mum and Dad have always been so strict about me and Lily sticking together; they never would have even considered anything like this before.

Oh god, if it could happen, though, I would surely be the happiest girl in the whole wide world!

I like the thought of that: my mum being young and having dreams and being happy. Once upon a time, when I was still a princess, twirling in my mum’s high heels in front of this mirror, my dad caught me in his arms and told me: ‘One of these days I’m going to make all your dreams come true, princess, you just see if I don’t.’ That’s the kind of sugar-coated person my dad is, really. He might be a corporate hot-shot and all that, doing law for the stock exchange, dealing in ‘futures’ as Mum once told me, but one thing I do know is he can’t deal with ‘futures’ that look less rosy than he wants them to be.

Still, I remember him saying that now. Not because he stuck with us for long enough to ever find out what my dreams might be. Not because of that. But because, in some way I really can’t explain, him saying that made me believe that there were certain doors that one day might be opened. Even if it’s me who has to open them for myself, and not him that does it. And I’ve just got myself a date with Kieran O’Keefe, haven’t I? So something’s going right…

11 Shelley

Surinda is coming round after school, she said. She’s suddenly become interested in schoolwork whereas she never was before. ‘I’ve got to get my exams, haven’t I? I’ve got to do something with my life. Jallal will expect me to work.’ This coming on top of a year in which she’s spent the best part of each term off playing hooky.

I’m not even sure I want her around today. Not if she’s going to be as narky as she was to me on the phone last night. I told her I’d got the Beat the Bank tickets and that’s why she’s coming, but you’d think she’s the one doing me a favour and not the other way round. Ever since this Jallal business she’s become a very different person, I think.

It’s only 3.30 p.m. so it’ll be a little while before she shows; this afternoon is dragging on forever. I’ve tidied the place up a bit. This room is not huge so I had to. By the time you take into account the bed, the ward robe, the desk with the keyboard and Bessie, there isn’t enough room left to swing a cat. She’ll have to sit on the end of the mattress, that’s all.

I don’t suppose she’ll be staying that long. Just as long as she agrees to take me to Blackberry Common I don’t care how long she stays. My stomach’s all in a knot over it.

If she says no I don’t think I’ll ever speak to her again.

She’ll have to be prepared to help me get onto the bus. She won’t like that. Surinda isn’t known for her patience. She’s meeting Jallal the week after next, and she’s angry because they’ve had to put it off a few days. It seems he couldn’t get an earlier flight out from Jakarta. I pointed out that gives her a few extra days to drop those ten pounds she’s on about losing before she meets the bridegroom but that didn’t cheer her up any.

Anyway, the bus. I haven’t been on one for a very long time. Daniel gets on one sometimes and he says they’re often empty. I wanted to ask him this morning if he’s ever seen anyone get on it in a wheelchair but I don’t want to arouse his suspicions.

He’s back from school now, I heard him rooting around in the kitchen a minute ago, getting himself a drink.

‘Shell?’ Talk of the devil.

‘Yeah?’

‘Your room looks different.’ He’s standing at the door, looking puzzled. He’s probably wondering why there aren’t any papers or clothes on the floor.

‘I’ve tidied it, dunderhead. You should do yours more often too.’

‘Oh.’ My brother stands there for a moment, flummoxed. His face is red, his hair all sticky-up and sweaty because it’s hot outside and he’s just got back from school. ‘I’m going out on my bike,’ he says shortly. ‘Tell Mum.’

‘You’ve just come in’, I say. I return my attention to the nail varnish I was applying just a moment before. He’s just come in and now he’s going out again. And why? Because he can. My heart sinks a little. I remember the times when we used to go out on our bikes together. I was the one who used to encourage him to ride. He was so scared. He would never have done anything at all if it weren’t for me. I wonder if he’s still got those stabilisers on. In a minute I will hear him practising, round and round the drive up front.

Sometimes lately the sounds outside go quiet and I know he’s gone a little way up the road to his friend’s house. His world is expanding. That’s good; that’s the way it should be. I envy my brother that.

When I look at the light brown side-panel of my wardrobe and the jutting-out edge of my computer desk, my world feels as if it’s shrinking, even though I’ve just picked up all the crap off the floor.

I want to see something different. A different view; different faces. I want to be somewhere else.

I wheel myself over to the window and take a look at the view from there. We have a little garden. Just in front of my window there’s a tiny azalea bush just coming into pink bloom. It’s the same colour as my nail varnish, I realise now. The bird feeder that Daniel hung from the washing line is empty again. The garden is very green. It wasn’t a couple of weeks ago, but now we’ve entered May the whole earth seems to have woken up with a flourish.

I wish my room were a tiny bit bigger. I wish I could get in and out of it a bit more easily. I feel so stuck. Deep in the pit of my stomach there’s this feeling of stuckness. I’m like a rat in a cage. I’ve got to get out of this place, I’ve got to. I’m withering away.

And with a sinking feeling I realise that it’s already begun, the shrivelling that happened to Miriam; it’s happening to me! Not in my body, not yet, but it’s happening in my heart.

The knock on my bedroom door, when it comes, is so loud that it really startles me.

‘You in there?’ Surinda is standing in the doorway, her schoolbag placed primly in front of her. It doesn’t look very full.

‘Your front door was just…wide open, man.’ Her kohl-lined eyes take in my little bedroom in one quick sweep. She looks at me, smiling. I get the feeling my place is smaller than she imagined. ‘So, you got those tickets, Shell?’ Surinda doesn’t sit down. Does she think I’m going to hand over the precious tickets just like that so she can make her excuses and be gone? ‘Because I’ve got to get back,’ she’s saying, ‘me mam’s taking me shopping for Jallal-clothes.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘Jallal-clothes. Look, Surinda, you’d better sit down because there’s something I’ve got to explain about the tickets.’

She perches obediently on the edge of my bed and I try to figure out what it is that is different about her. Something is. Her hair is slicked back and held in a pink rosette in the middle so you can see her dangly golden earrings. Her skin is dark, a little more greasy, with dark spots over her forehead. She has dark circles under her eyes. She used to look better than this, I think. But that isn’t what’s changed; it’s something else. She’s got a bit more confidence about her, that’s what it is. Like she’s been places and done some things. She’s had a little experience of the world. And me, stuck here, I’m feeling at a distinct disadvantage: I’ve had none.

‘Go on,’ she says. She’s picked up my nail-varnish bottle and is looking at the label.

‘Those tickets that we’re after, we’ve got to go down to Blackberry Common this Saturday and collect them.’

‘What?’ She’s frowning in annoyance now. ‘I’ve got things planned for this weekend, girl. My hair, for one.’

‘If you want the tickets…’ I say.

‘Why can’t they just be posted?’ She puts the nail-polish bottle down on my bed. ‘You ring them and tell them that you want those tickets posted.’

‘Ring who?’ Surinda is looking cross now. I thought she was desperate for those tickets. This whole Jallal business is ruining everything. ‘We can’t ring anyone. We’ve got to go in person.’

‘I don’t think I can help you.’ She’s shaking her head in a vague kind of way. ‘My time’s all taken up now. Things aren’t turning out exactly how we’d like them, either.’

‘What things?’ My heart is thumping again. If Surinda won’t take me to meet Kieran, then who will? Daniel is too young to be of any use. Solly would never approve of me meeting an Internet bloke—and he’d be sure to tell my mum. And she can’t know. She’d tell Dad and he’d never have any of it. They’ll ruin everything for me if they know. Surinda is the only one who I can trust with this; she has to do it.

‘Jallal’s dad, it turns out, doesn’t actually own the factory in Jakarta that we were told he did.’

‘What factory?’

‘The condom factory!’ She gives me a look that suggests I must be a total imbecile. ‘The one my family were told he owns. It turns out he’s just the manager.’

‘And this matters because…?’

‘Because it means they aren’t so rich, of course. Why else would it matter?’

‘Why indeed?’ I’m getting this incredibly strong urge to giggle but I have a feeling it might not do my case any good so I try my best to stifle it by coughing into my hand.

‘I’m still marrying him, though,’ she says decisively. ‘Mum and Dad still reckon he’s a good catch. He has a third cousin who’s very high up in the government, they say.’

Well, if he doesn’t make the condom-factory-owner grade there’s always the third cousin to fall back on, I think.

‘Always useful to have,’ I agree.

‘I don’t think you’re quite getting this, are you?’ She takes her chewing-gum in between her fingers and looks around for somewhere to deposit it. ‘This is serious,’ she tells me heatedly. ‘This is my life we’re talking about here. It matters very much.’

‘I’m sorry. I am taking it seriously. Look, can’t you think of something to put off the hair appointment? Have it done the day before you see him. It’ll keep better. Krok will be so disappointed if we don’t go to Blackberry Common.’ I don’t know if that last bit is true, but it sounds good. ‘And what if Jallal is the possessive type and he never lets you out of the house once you’re his wife? Won’t you regret it then?’

There is a stunned silence for a minute. Then, failing to find any bin in my room, she pops the stale chewing-gum back into her mouth.

‘Kieran…will be there? You mean we’re picking up the tickets from him, himself?’ Surinda sounds a little too enthusiastic for my liking, all of a sudden, and why does she call him Kieran? ‘Well why didn’t you say so before?’ She stands up and looks at herself in the mirror behind my bedroom door. ‘Oh god, Shell, you should have said. Of course I’ll come.’

‘We’ll have to take the bus,’ I warn her.

‘The bus. Right.’ Her eyes have gone a moist, glowing shade of black. She fancies him. I can’t believe it. She fancies my Kieran. ‘There was a lovely picture of him in this week’s Telly Stars magazine.’

Was there?

‘He’s only a contestant on a game show,’ I tell her shortly. ‘Are you sure it was Kieran? He isn’t actually a telly star, is he?’ Surinda’s uncle owns a corner shop so she gets to look at all the trashy magazines as soon as they come out.

‘He’s on the telly. He’s drop-dead gorgeous and people have noticed him,’ she asserts. ‘Someone from Corrie has offered to introduce him to her agent, apparently. I think it’s them blue eyes, myself.’

Blimey. At this rate the world and his wife will all know about my Kieran. Maybe this Beat the Bank show wasn’t such a good idea after all? All those beautiful girls out there will see him and then what chance have I got?

‘Well anyway, about the tickets, you can’t tell anyone,’ I warn her. ‘My mum must never find out. She’ll kill me.’

‘Not a soul,’ she breathes. ‘Not a soul.’

‘You can make it then?’ I watch anxiously as she smooths down her school skirt over ample hips.

‘I’ve lost weight, haven’t I?’ She turns to look at me and I nod rapidly in agreement. Who knows if she has or not? Who cares?

‘I’ve not been eating a thing,’ she glowers. ‘Apart from my food, of course. Ohmigod. Kieran O’Keefe! I’m going to meet Kieran O’Keefe.’

‘Well, I am, actually. You’re just coming along for the ride,’ I remind her sharply. ‘You’ve got Jallal to look forward to.’

‘Course I do,’ she laughs. ‘We’ll both be sorted then, won’t we?’

I wish I could trust her more, really I do. I don’t trust her. But then, what option have I got? There is no one else who I could ask to take me there so it’ll have to be her.

‘It’s going to be so hard not to mention it to all them other girls at school, innit?’ Her eyes are dark as blackcurrants. I wish I could see into them. If she tells anyone and word gets back to my mum—which it will, if Michelle gets wind of it—then I’m done for.

‘If anyone finds out and my mum stops me going then you won’t be going either.’

‘If anyone finds out what?’ Daniel is standing at the doorway, his skateboard under his arm, looking from Surinda to me and back again.

‘Don’t you knock on your big sister’s door?’ Surinda gives him a withering look.

‘Mum’s gone out,’ he says to me.

‘I know.’

‘Why has she gone? How long will she be?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ I’m going to leave it at that—I don’t want him in here interfering when I’m planning something as important as this. But on the other hand I don’t want to be mean to him either. Especially since I don’t know how much he’s heard.

‘She won’t be too long, I don’t think. She’s gone to Solly’s.’

‘I’m going to go to Mote Park,’ he says. ‘With Lloyd. His mum’s taking us. Is that all right?’ If he’s going with an adult that should be okay, I think. ‘They’ve got a skate-ramp now,’ he adds, his eyes gleaming. They didn’t when Danny and I used to go there, I think. ‘They’ve got a whole new host of things down there that they never had before. You’d love it, Shell.’

My eyes skim over the skateboard. He hasn’t got the best sense of balance, my brother. I hope he’s telling the truth about Lloyd’s mother. He’ll need to have someone there for him if he falls. It should be someone like me, really.

‘I guess I would have,’ I shrug. ‘If I were your age. Take my mobile so I can get hold of you, okay?’

That seems to satisfy him. When he turns on his heel and walks out again, his hair looking like a complete scruff at the back, I notice he seems to have got even taller, taller than he was yesterday. My kid brother, how does he do it? He’s a pain and it’s unbelievable that he’s got to come and poke his nose in just when for once in my life I’ve got something confidential going on, but I still feel an ache in my heart every time I look at him because I know I’m going to miss him. Wherever it is that I go to, when I go, I’m going to miss my Danny like crazy.

‘Solly’s having man troubles.’ I roll my eyes at Surinda once Daniel’s left.

She giggles. ‘Not like us, eh?’ She pushes her hair back from her face and I see she’s been experimenting with her eye-liner. I might just ask her how she gets that kohl-eyed effect, it makes her eyes look less piggy I don’t like to admit it but I feel this little conspiratorial thrill as she leans closer to me, all confidential-like, and says,

‘So, what are we both wearing on Saturday? We’ve got to look the business, sister.’

12 Rachel

‘So, Darryl turned to me and said—you wouldn’t believe what he said to me, Rachel—he said, “If I had a face that was as wrinkled as yours I wouldn’t bother with cosmetic surgery, darling, I’d just have my whole head chopped off.”’

Cripes.

‘You don’t need any cosmetic surgery, honestly, Solly!’ He doesn’t. He’s obsessed with the idea that he’s getting older and he can’t bear it, that’s all.

‘Now, why don’t flowers like this grow in my garden?’ I’m trying to throw him off the scent of last night’s disastrous dinner party. Commenting about his pride and joy of a garden usually does the trick.

‘Careful with that. That’s Molly the Witch.’ He snaps off the delicate stem of a sunshine-petalled flower and holds it up to my nose. ‘This one’s for you. Direct from the Caucasus mountain range in the wilds of Azerbaijan.’

‘What, for real? I thought you got it from Nelson’s Nurseries.’

‘Nelson had to get it from somewhere, didn’t he? Anyway, I was saying—Justin—do you know what he did when Darryl said that to me? He tittered.’

I can imagine Justin tittering. I twirl the flower around near my face. Butterscotch, I think, I can catch the faintest whiff.

‘Young people can be so thoughtless, can’t they?’ I’m thinking about Michelle and her blasted party. But I scotch that thought. I’ve got to let it go, I really have. Shelley was waiting for her friend Surinda today. I wonder if she turned up in the end? I wonder if I should check in with her, just to make sure?

For some reason Solly looks mortified.

‘Am I thoughtless, do you think? Be honest with me, darling.’

I join him by the Calendula Officinalis. We’re in the ‘orange’ section at the moment. Solly orders his garden like his wardrobe: by colours. I have to think about this one. If I say ‘yes’—and it’s true, sometimes Solly can be thoughtless—then he might get offended. If I say ‘no’—does that put him in the bracket of ‘old people’ (who aren’t supposed to be thoughtless) as opposed to the ‘young’ ones who are?

‘Why in heaven’s name would you ask me that?’ I evade. I rub my hands together and the powdery earth falls like a tiny black dust storm all over his lawn. He’d normally tell me off for that but today he doesn’t notice.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says disconsolately. ‘Sometimes I just think that I must be. Thoughtless and just too…fancy free. You know.’

‘Are you regretting your misspent youth now?’ I grin.

‘Oh no,’ he interjects. ‘I regret nothing of my misspent youth. I intend to keep on misspending it till it’s all used up in fact. What’s this?’ He picks up a folder that I’ve brought with me. I found it in the bottom kitchen drawer last night.

‘I thought maybe some of that would come in handy. It’s bits and pieces, articles I’ve cut out over the years about garden design. I’ve never actually got round to implementing any of it in our patch, as you know. But you might do…’

‘No, this.’ He pulls out a curling yellow folder that had obviously been stuck in there along with all the other papers aeons ago…‘Jewellery design; advanced course. Adult ed?’ He shoots me an impressed look. ‘I never knew you did all this.’ His voice is filled with admiration as he flicks through my folder, not bothering to ask me if that’s okay. Hmmm, the answer to the previous question…

‘My, you’re a dark horsey, though, aren’t you, Rachel? You did all this and I never knew anything about it. Did you finish it?’

‘The jewellery design thing?’ I shake my head. ‘I was bang in the middle of it when Shelley first got diagnosed. Nobody knew what was wrong with her initially. I thought it would just be a matter of putting it off for a few weeks. Or a term or so—or maybe a year—but well,’ I hold my hands open. The rest is history.

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