A bird was singing a morning melody like the shallows of the river Nithy running in rivulets over rocks. Peaches smiled at the sound, but kept her eyes tightly closed. Her body ached but with a delicious tiredness like she’d been running the day before. Her face was warm. The sun from her studio window rested on her skin, shining golden through her heavy eyelids. She’d fallen asleep sewing on the floor again, leaning against the end of her bed. She’d be glad when the showcase was over and she could sleep properly.
The birdsong grew in her consciousness, mingling with the sounds of traffic, and something metallic and clanking.
She was snoring softly. Strange how she’d never heard herself snore before. She lifted an eyelid, thinking she’d drag her studio curtains shut and climb into bed for another half hour’s sleep. That’s when she realised.
‘Oh my God!’
‘What!’ Euan screamed himself awake, jolting upright, then rushed a hand to his shoulder. ‘Cramp, cramp, cramp.’ He was on his feet, setting the whole ski chair swinging.
‘We fell asleep!’ yelled Peaches, like he just wasn’t getting it at all.
Euan smiled lazily as he circled his stiff shoulder. ‘We sure did. It’s a beautiful morning though, look at that view!’
‘Look at the view? Look at this!’ she yelled, showing him her phone with its red battery indicator and precisely… zero missed calls and messages from her mum. ‘Hold on.’
She shook her phone, checked for a signal, seeing three bars change to four and expecting a barrage of increasingly concerned messages. None came.
‘Oh no!’ She threw the blanket off her lap. ‘This isn’t good.’
‘Hey, wait, it’s fine. We’re good, remember?’
‘You don’t get it.’ She showed him the phone again, not understanding why he wasn’t feeling the same way. ‘I need to run.’
‘I’ll come with you. I have to pick up the bike anyway?—’
‘Don’t!’ Stopping him with a raised finger, she turned. ‘Don’t come near the house, please.’
‘But, the bike?’
‘Forget it!’ she shouted over her shoulder as she slid down the little grassy knoll on her bottom, knowing she must seem ridiculous to Euan, the grown man who could probably stroll in and out of his grandad’s house at whenever hour he liked and never once feel guilty. Hitting tarmac, she got to her feet and ran, leaving the ski centre and Euan in the dust.
‘You can’t be serious!’ Euan called after her.
As she ran down the waking high street, she tried to get a look at herself in her phone camera. It was worse than she thought. She swiped at the dried-on glitter make-up. It wasn’t coming off. Her lips were bee stung from kissing. Her eyes were swollen from lack of sleep.
It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning when she hadn’t been able to fight sleep any longer, exhausted from the showcase and all that adrenalin burned through, and kissing Euan had turned into being held very close and warm by him, and it had all been so heady and delicious, and when she’d got sleepy, he’d told her he’d wake her in thirty minutes if she wanted to take a nap, and then he’d walk her home before the sun was up.
‘Well, that was a lie!’ she told herself, sounding very much like her mother sayingBoys lie all the time! They can’t be relied on. And yet, Euan had saved her showcase yesterday, and he’d been so nice to her up behind the ski centre, not pushing her for anything more than kissing, not asking, not expecting… ‘Gah!’ she yelled to clear her head as she rushed out of the back streets and straight out into the slow-moving traffic, dodging the postie on his bicycle-mailcart and Pigeon Fergus bouncing along the road on his old red tractor.
People were waving good morning to her, surprised to see her out at this hour. Post Office Pauline stopped raising the shop’s shutters to shout after her. ‘Someone’s up early, or out late, eh?’
‘Oh no!’ Peaches cringed.
Roz was all the way along the other end of the high street with Wayward on her lead. She’d want to hear about the showcase if she spotted Peaches, and she’d know from taking one look at her that she’d been out all night like a… She didn’t want to hear it, even in her head. Her mum would say it, though, when she got home. She’d call her astop-out, which maybe isn’t the worst thing you can be called at twenty-three, but coming from her mum, it would be unbearable.
She’d made it into the gated homes in the ‘new’ end of the old town, her feet pounding the paving stones. Her mum’s townhouse lay up ahead, all the curtains and blinds drawn for the morning, the milk bottle already taken in off the step, and the porch lights switched off.
She tried the door. Locked. Searching for her key, she knew her mum would be waiting behind the door. Carenza would pull it open any second and startle her.
Except she didn’t, and when Peaches turned the key in the latch and peeped into the entry hall, there was no sign that anyone had sat on the bottom step all night waiting for her. There were no notes in the key dish saying,You, my girl, are in big trouble!
Heels clicked across the kitchen tiles up above, and so, with dread in her heart, she climbed the stairs, stopping on the halfway landing to fix her hair in the mirror. Her cheeks were a deep pink.
‘Mum?’ she called, before taking the next flight. ‘It’s me.’ Who else was it going to be? she asked herself. Why did she feel the need to announce herself in her own home?
She caught a glimpse of a sleek and chic Carenza in her best cream skirt suit, her phone to her ear, a coffee cup in her hand.
She entered the kitchen, and nothing had changed, even though within herself she felt some kind of seismic shift must have taken place and her whole world would now be off-kilter forever. She had defied her mother.
