On Summer Street, the sun had shifted in the afternoon sky. Christie Devlin’s back garden was bathed in a golden glow that lit up the velvety roses and turned the cream-coloured trellises a glittering white. It was the sort of afternoon Christie loved.
James had phoned to say he’d caught an earlier train and should be home by seven instead of nine. The postman had arrived with a late-afternoon bounty of the gadget catalogues Christie loved to devour at night, picking out useful things she’d buy if she could afford them. The dogs, too tired of the heat to clamour for another walk, were content to lie in the shade of the kitchen door, dreaming happily, two sets of paws twitching.
Sitting on her tiny terrace with a cup of iced tea, Christie was supposed to be marking art history essays for tomorrow morning, but she couldn’t concentrate.
The heat, the glory of her garden, James coming home early, none of it mattered. Nothing except the fear that sat hard and stone-like in the pit of her stomach, telling her there was something very wrong.
In her kitchen seven houses away, Una Maguire was standing on a chair looking for a spare tin of baking powder in the larder cupboard beside the fridge. She’d decided to bake a Victoria sponge for the church fair and there had been only a scraping of powder in the old tin.
‘Dennis, have you been at my cupboards again?’ she yelled good-humouredly at her husband. It was a joke. As their daughter, Maggie, was well aware, Dennis Maguire barely knew how to open the cupboards in the kitchen and his only domestic duty was washing and drying. He never put away the dishes he’d dried. Una did that.
For years, it had been Maggie’s job in the production line of washing and drying, but she was long gone with her own life, and the duty fell to Una again.
‘Never touched them,’ Dennis yelled back from the living room where he was putting the final touches to the model of a Spitfire that had taken two weeks to complete. The construction was entirely accurate: Dennis had checked in his Jane’s Aircraft Guide.
‘Don’t believe you,’ teased back Una, over-reaching past a pack of semolina because she was sure she’d seen the red metallic glint of the baking powder tin. With a swiftness that surprised her, the chair tilted, she lost her footing and fell to the floor, her left leg crumpling underneath her.
The pain was as shocking as it was instantaneous. Cruelly sharp, like a blade neatly inserted.
‘Dennis,’ whimpered Una, knowing that she’d done something serious. ‘Dennis, come quickly.’
In the comfort of her bedroom at number 18 Summer Street, Amber Reid lay in her boyfriend’s arms and heard the sound of the ambulance droning up the street to the Maguires’ house. Amber had no interest in looking out the window to see what had happened. The world didn’t exist outside the tangled sheets of her bed, still warm from their lovemaking.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked Karl.
She couldn’t help herself, even though every magazine she’d ever read said that this sort of question was a Bad Idea. She didn’t think she was a needy person, but there was something about this intimate moment after lovemaking, that made her want to know. She’d been a physical part of Karl. She wanted to be inside his head too, inside for ever, always a part of him.
‘Nothing. Except how beautiful you are.’
Karl shifted, laying his leg over hers, trapping her.
As fresh heat swelled in her belly, Amber realised that there was nothing more erotic than the feeling of naked skin against naked skin. Just lying there after the most incredible lovemaking was almost beyond description.
She ran questing fingers along his powerful chest, feeling the curve of his muscles, the sensitive nubs of his nipples, so different from hers.
She’d seen men’s bodies before, but never fully naked except on a canvas or on a plinth carved from finest Carrara marble. And marble felt different from the warm, living beauty of a man’s body beside hers, inside hers. Desire rushed through her veins again. Why had nobody told her lovemaking could be like this? All those talks about pregnancy, AIDS and being emotionally ready, nobody had said how utterly addictive it all was.
‘We should get up,’ Karl said. ‘It’s after six. Your mother will be home soon.’
Half six, Amber had said. Her mother ran her life on a strict schedule. Half six home, change out of her office suit by 6.35, dinner on the table – pre-prepared from the night before, obviously – by seven.
Amber used to love the comfort of their evening routine. It made home seem like a refuge. No matter how much life changed in the outside world, her mother put dinner on the table at seven. But lately, Amber found herself telling Ella that when she moved out of home, she’d never have a schedule as rigid as her mother’s as long as she lived. Life was about being a free spirit, not a slave to the clock or the powers of good kitchen cleaning products, or having to hear the oft-repeated phrase ‘a good education and you can go anywhere, Amber’.
Right now, education suddenly seemed so boring. Her mother’s view of life was stifling and there was no escape from it. And Mum would hate Karl, who was a free spirit, would hate his intrusion into their tightly run lives. It wouldn’t be the two of them any more. It would be a different twosome, Amber decided firmly: her and Karl.
She slithered over until she was astride Karl, her long tawny mane a tangle over his lightly tanned shoulders. ‘We don’t have to get up,’ she said, smiling. ‘We’ve ages yet.’
There was so much they could do in that precious twenty minutes.
‘And if my mother arrives home early, you can always hop out the back window and climb down the flat roof of the kitchen.’
Her mother was still paying off the credit union loan for the kitchen extension, a fact that often brought a worried look to her face.
Money: that was another subject Amber never wanted to worry about again, along with timetables and exams. Karl was going to be a famous musician and they’d have loads of money. Enough to pay off her mother’s debts, enough to buy anything Amber wanted.
Just once, she’d love the thrill of shopping and never looking at the price tag. Wouldn’t it be glorious to spend without worrying or feeling guilty over it?
‘The neighbours will call the cops if they see a strange bloke hop out of your bedroom on to the kitchen roof and down the lane.’ Karl put both hands around her waist and splayed his fingers.
Amber was proud of her tiny waist. She’d inherited her mother’s hourglass figure, although, thank God, she hadn’t inherited her total lack of interest in looking good. Her mother wouldn’t have been seen dead in the clothes Amber wore: slivers of vintage fabric that barely covered her breasts, low-rise jeans that revealed more than a hint of bare skin. Mum just never bothered making herself look good or showing off her waist.
Amber arched her back as Karl’s fingers moved up to cradle her ribcage. She didn’t want him to go. They had plenty of time.
‘Everyone’s at work or cooking kids’ dinners,’ she said, feeling sympathy for anyone engaged in such boring duties. ‘Nobody will see you.’
There was only one person on the street who might possibly know she had phoned in sick to school and might wonder at her having a strange guy in the house, and that was Mrs Devlin.
Amber approved of Christie Devlin, even if she was old and, therefore, should be totally wrinkly, boring and incapable of remembering what it was like to feel alive. For all Christie’s silver hair, she had a way of looking at Amber