found that she was shaking.
The Collingwood stood at the top of a rise; its portholes stared out over the neighbours like blind eyes. Is this my life now? she thought. How will I ever meet a man? At Wexham there were one or two young bachelors she used to glimpse down by the bins. One had never met her eye and only grunted when she greeted him. The other was Gavin to the life and went about swinging his car keys around his forefinger; the sight of him had almost made her nostalgic. But the men who had moved into Admiral Drive were married with two kids. They were computer programmers, systems analysts. They drove minivans like square little houses on wheels. They wore jackets with flaps and zips that their wives chose for them from mail order catalogues. Already the postman could be seen, ploughing across the furrows carrying flat boxes containing these jackets, and splattered white vans bounced over the ruts, delivering gob-ons for their home computers. At weekend they were outside, wearing their jackets, constructing playhouses and climbing frames of primary-coloured plastic. They were hardly men at all, not men as Colette knew them; they were dutiful emasculates, squat and waddling under their burden of mortgage debt, and she despised them with an impartial, all-embracing spite. Sometimes she stood at her bedroom window, as the men drove away in the mornings, each edging his square-nosed vehicle cautiously into the muddy track; she watched them and hoped they got into a pileup on the M3, each folding neatly, fatally, into the back of the vehicle in front. She wanted to see their widows sitting in the road, daubing themselves with mud, wailing.
The Collingwood still smelled of paint. As she let herself in at the front door, kicking off her shoes, it caught in her throat and mingled with the taste of salt and phlegm. She went upstairs to her own room—Bed Two, 15 by 14 feet with en-suite shower—and slammed the door, and sat down on the bed. Her little shoulders shook, she pressed her knees together; she clenched her fists and pressed them into her skull. She cried quite loudly, thinking Al might hear. If Al opened the bedroom door she would throw something at her, she decided—not anything like a bottle, something like a cushion—but there wasn’t a cushion. I could throw a pillow, she thought, but you can’t throw a pillow hard. I could throw a book, but there isn’t a book. She looked around her, dazed, frustrated, eyes filmed and brimming, looking for something to throw.
But it was a useless effort. Al wasn’t coming, not to comfort her: nor for any other purpose. She was, Colette knew, selectively deaf. She listened into spirits and to the voice of her own self-pity, carrying messages to her from her childhood. She listened to her clients, as much as was needful to get money out of them. But she didn’t listen to her closest associate and personal assistant, the one who got up with her when she had nightmares, the friend who boiled the kettle in the wan dawn: oh no. She had no time for the person who had taken her at her word and given up her career in event management, no time for the one who drove her up and down the country without a word of complaint and carried her heavy suitcase when the bloody wheels fell off. Oh no. Who carried her case full of her huge fat clothes—even though she had a bad back.
Colette cried until two red tracks were scored into her cheeks, and she got hiccoughs. She began to feel ashamed. Every lurch of her diaphragm added to her indignity. She was afraid that Alison, after her deafness, might now choose to hear.
Downstairs, Al had her tarot pack fanned out before her. The cards were face down, and when Colette appeared in the doorway she was idly sliding them in a rightward direction, over the pristine surface of their new dining table.
“What are you doing? You’re cheating.”
“Mm? It’s not a game.”
“But you’re fixing it, you’re shoving them back into the pack! With your finger! You are!”
“It’s called Washing the Cards,” Al said. “Have you been crying?”
Colette sat down in front of her. “Do me a reading.”
“Oh, you have been crying. You have
Colette said nothing.
“What can I do to help?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“So I should make general conversation?”
“If you like.”
“I can’t. You start.”
“Did you have any more thoughts about the garden?”
“Yes. I like it as it is.”
“What, just turf?”
“For the moment.”
“I thought we could have a pond.”
“No, the children. The neighbours’ children.”
“What about them?”
“Cut the pack.”
Colette did it.
“Children can drown in two inches of water.”
“Aren’t they ingenious?”
“Cut again. Left hand.”
“I could get some quotes for landscaping.”
“Don’t you like grass?”
“It needs cutting.”
“Can’t you do it?”
