‘Whozat?’ Ivy asks in her usual candour.
‘Junk email, I expect.’ I pop a teabag into her mug. ‘I got a message from Soraya late last night. She’s calling later on.’
Ivy makes an indistinct noise; a sort of enquiring sound.Something’s definitely a little off.
‘What?’
‘What?’ she repeats, only in a higher tone, doing a fair impersonation of a deer caught in a pair of high beams.
‘What’s with the strangled noise?’
‘I was just thinking that’s probably a good idea.’ She nods her head vigorously. ‘A really good idea.’
‘It’s just a phone call, Ivy.’ Just a phone call I hate making more and more these days. I’ll forever appreciate everything Soraya’s done for me, but it’s like she and I might as well live on separate planets now. I’m indebted to them both—Ivy and her—but for them, I would be living with my mother and her new guy, or maybe worse.Languishing in a foreign jail, maybe. But keeping in contact with Raya makes me sad. It’s almost as if, in the days between our calls, I can ignore my past and just focus on what I have in front of me. And by in front, I mean just that; neither the past nor the future, just what’s right in front of me.
Pathetic, I know.
‘You know what else would be a good idea? If you shaved your legs.’
I glance down at the prickly appendages. ‘What for? No one sees them.’
‘And if a bear poos in the woods, does that mean no one sees?’
I snort. Ivy is forever getting things back to front, sideways and ass over tit.
‘For the sake of Pooh Bear’s modesty, I hope so.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Coming closer, Ivy leans over me. ‘Helps if you flick the switch, see?’ she says, doing just that to the kettle. ‘And you’re supposed to be the clever one.’
Still smiling smugly, she turns and leaves.
I dunk a spoon of instant into my mug, resting my hip against the cupboard. As I wait for the kettle to boil, I absently run my hand against one of the chairs, spotting a corner where the whitewash paint has run leaving an unattractive drip effect. Scratching the lump with my nail sets off a domino effect: the chair wobbles against the uneven floor, nudging the table, and bringing Ivy’s laptop whirring from sleep mode. Unconcerned, I continue my tidying repair when my vison snags on the backlit screen. Ordinarily, I’m not the prying kind. People who listen at keyholes deserve a poke in the eye as far as I’m concerned, but a particular word catches my attention, creating a wave of nausea that almost pushes me to my knees.
The word is my dead husband’s name.
Why would Ivy be writing about him?
The chair grates a little against the floor as I pull it out, sliding my bottom onto the hard wooden seat.
I really don’t know,the email reads.She’s still pretty fragile and not willing to talk about any of it.The email goes on, stopping mid-sentence after a brief mention of the recent waxing course I’d completed. It’s kind of a jokey judgement, something about getting me to practise on myself, though the underlying message is that I’m hiding from myself.
I scroll up the page, reading the previous email, the one to which Ivy’s note responds. It’s from Soraya. I had no idea the pair had any kind of discourse since my return, and for a moment, I’m a little hurt. But as my eyes track the email contents, the wave of nausea returns and bile rises to my throat.
Needs to be told.
We’re not helping her by hiding this.
She’s punishing herself and for what?
‘Fin, you’re not making Turkish coffee, are you?’ Ivy’s voice catches me off guard, guilt quick to rush to my cheeks.’
‘N-no,’ I call back. ‘Unless you want me to.’
‘God, no. That stuff’s like drinking tar. What’s taking you so long? Have you gone to milk a cow or something?’
‘Just a minute,’ I call back, my eyes tracking the words even as they begin to blur across the screen. I hear the kettle boil and click off somewhere in the distance, but I can’t move.
‘A person could die of thirst waiting for—’ Ivy comes to an abrupt halt in the kitchen doorway, her expression morphing in that split second from shock to sympathy.
