Clara shook her head.
‘Do we try to join the words together?’ Madeleine asked.
‘If you like,’ Clara said.
Madeleine smiled, then slotted ‘penguin’ through Tania’s word. ‘What do we do with the extra tiles?’ she asked. She held up the letter ‘p’ she’d saved.
‘Nothing,’ Clara said. ‘Just put it with your others for now.’
Gull went next, slotting ‘jaguar’ through Madeleine’s penguin and leaving his ‘g’ with his other discarded tiles.
Lysander frowned, shifting his tiles around. Rose looked across the table, then grinned.
‘Maddy,’ she said. ‘Can I have your spare letter “p”?’
Madeleine passed it across, and Rose arranged that and some of her own letters to spell ‘pangolin’, meeting up with the ‘n’ of Madeleine’s ‘penguin’.
‘What the fuck is a pangolin?’ Lysander said. Uninterested in the answer, he pushed some of his tiles into place, adding ‘ostrich’ to the board, using the ‘t’ from Tania’s ‘elephant’.
‘You can’t do that,’ Tania said. ‘Your ostrich is right up against Gull’s jaguar.’
Madeleine began to giggle, and Rose joined in. Clara took the tiles from the board and concentrated on the next distribution. There was a serious point to this, but she wanted them to relax into the silliness of the game, first. To break down some of the barriers.
Clara had wondered how best to tell them all what she wanted to say. The message to each one of them was different. As she’d already witnessed, a conversation was too easily steered off-course or interrupted. She hoped that the use of single words would achieve her aims, maybe even without them realising what she had done.
This time the words were food based, Gull first to assemble his word and place it onto the board. Tania threaded her word through his, then did the same with their fingers, relaxing against him. Clara glanced at Lysander, willing him to keep any acerbic comment to himself. He was preoccupied, too busy shuffling his tiles around, perhaps determined not to be last to work out his anagram this time, his perfect features sharp with concentration.
Clara felt a pang of concern for him. He suddenly looked like a teenager, faced with something that genuinely piqued his interest. Lysander was all sorts of manipulative; there was no getting away from that. He’d made Tania’s life more difficult than he had any right to. But it struck Clara that while the sibling rivalry was undoubtedly the product of a number of factors, his antagonism towards Tania was the only aspect of Lysander that appeared to have any real depth of emotion attached to it.
Clara hoped the final word she’d chosen for him would be helpful. While they finished sorting out their words– with Madeleine berating herself for her own stupidity when she finally placed ‘chocolate’ on the board– Clara found the bottle of génépi Gull had delivered for Tania, pushing it and a tower of shot glasses onto the table.
‘I recognise that bottle,’ Gull said, passing his arm around Tania and pulling her closer. ‘Do we get to open it tonight?’
‘So long as you don’t mind missing out on the hot tub,’ Tania said.
‘I think we’re past that, now, aren’t we?’ he said.
Tania twisted around to face him. ‘God, I hope not.’ She glanced at the window. ‘Might be a challenge tonight, granted.’
‘Here we go again,’ Lysander said, his eyes narrowing as he looked at his sister. ‘Do you ever think about anything but sex, Tits?’
‘Why do you insist on calling her that?’ Rose said. ‘You realise it makes you sound about fifteen, Lysander. I think it’s time you stopped it.’
‘Do you?’ He seemed amused by Rose’s comment.
‘Yes. In fact, there are a lot of things I think you should stop.’
‘Like what?’ He smiled at her and winked. ‘You know I like it when you boss me around too.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake stop being a total dick, Donkey,’ Tania said. ‘Shut up so that we can get on with Clara’s game.’
‘Shall we have one last round?’ Clara said. ‘Then we can open the génépi and relax.’
‘Sounds great,’ Madeleine said, pushing the tiles together and shoving them into a pile in front of her.
Clara worked quickly to sort the tiles. This was the important round, the words that mattered. Her heart beat harder as she concentrated on getting the distribution correct. She wondered if it would work. Or whether this whole exercise would be viewed as a bit of nonsense. It had to work. She wouldn’t get another chance to say what she wanted to say. She pulled in a large breath as she passed the piles out.
‘We don’t get to choose this time?’ Rose said.
