Halfway down the stairs, Lauren heard the sizzle of bacon.
Don’t be argumentative, she told herself as she entered the kitchen and took a seat (the nearest to the door) at the gigantic wooden table – a new addition to the room. Just say nice things. Do whatever your mum wants. Tell her about yourself. Don’t act like a stroppy teenager for once. Finally become a grown-up.
‘You are eating meat at the moment, aren’t you?’ Lauren’s mum said.
‘I’ve stopped again,’ Lauren lied.
Why did you say that?
Lauren’s mum turned off the hob and ran her fingers through her newly cut hair (a shiny, dyed-gold bob, the kind of thing you might see on daytime TV), then scratched at a fleck of burnt lasagne on the counter top. ‘What’s your plan, then?’ she said in a different, colder voice.
‘Dunno,’ Lauren said.
‘Planning on getting dressed at all?’
Lauren pulled her dressing gown a little tighter around her waist, brought her feet up off the cold tiles and onto the chair.
‘I am dressed,’ she said.
Her mum scraped the half-fried rashers of bacon into the pedal bin, then stuck the pan into the sink. It hissed like a cat.
Start again.
Try to be nice this time.
‘I guess I could have some bacon, actually?’ Lauren said.
Her mum just sighed.
‘Look, I don’t know what I’m doing yet, alright?’ Lauren said. ‘With my life. Okay? And anyway, it’s not as if . . .’
Oh dear.
What are you about to say now?
There’s still time not to say it, you know, to say something else.
‘As if what?’ her mum asked, plunging her hand into the sink, angrily rummaging around beneath the frying pan in the suds.
Say something else!
Anything!
Tell her how nice her new haircut is!
Ask her where she got the kitchen table from!
‘Well, it’s not exactly as if you work either,’ Lauren said, watching her mum’s face twitch and flicker.
‘Fuck!’ her mum cried – a strange thing to cry, Lauren thought, until her hand emerged from beneath the suds, and Lauren saw the dark flower of blood pumping out from her clenched fist, curling quickly around her wrist, then beginning to drip from her elbow and spatter on the floor.
‘Shit, keep still, put your hand up,’ Lauren instructed, trying to lift herself up out of her seat but feeling pinned by a woozy gravity, her own head spinning as the blood landed, too loudly, on the kitchen tiles. ‘I’ll get a towel,’ Lauren said, but she didn’t. She couldn’t get up.
Lauren hated anything at all to do with blood.
When she was little she threw a tantrum in the doctor’s, during her one and only blood test.
She’d screwed her eyes shut and gripped her mum’s hand, squealing just from the feel of the cold, wet swab of cotton wool, before the needle even went in, and then, when it did, she couldn’t help herself: she opened her eyes and looked, even though it was the thing she was scared of most of all, and she saw the cylinder filling with bright red liquid and almost fainted.
‘We’d better call a taxi,’ Lauren’s mum said, holding her dripping elbow over the sink. ‘This is going to need stitches.’
‘Right,’ Lauren murmured, still unable to stand.
She pushed out her chair and sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, closing her eyes, taking deep breaths, fighting back the nausea, as her mum took the large cordless phone from the table with her good hand and calmly thumbed through for the taxi number.
* * *
While Lauren was out walking around the village a few nights later, just as she used to do when she was a stroppy fifteen-year-old – just to the post box on the green and back – her phone began buzzing in her pocket.
Paul, she thought, but the display read EMILY T. Emily was a large, hippyish girl from her third-year post-colonial literature and theory module, who was always up for going for a drink afterwards, and who always wore bags and headbands with little circles of mirror sewn into them, and who Lauren could never quite work out if she was actually friends with.
‘Hello?’ Lauren answered cautiously, one quarter of her suspecting that this was an accidental call, that all she’d hear on the other end of the line were the muffled swishes of the inside of Emily’s mirrored handbag, full of joss sticks and tobacco-free cigarettes and dream catchers.
‘Hey,’ Emily said, happily, friendlily, as if she was carrying on a conversation from last week. This, Lauren remembered, was one of the things that had annoyed her about Emily: a general lack of self-awareness. ‘I was just calling to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye?’
When Lauren reached the post box, she stopped walking and touched the cold, dimpled top of it with her palm.
‘Yeah, I’m leaving Nottingham,’ Emily said. ‘I’m going to Canada.’
‘Oh, wow, um, great,’ Lauren replied.
‘Yeah, I got a year’s working visa sorted out,’ Emily continued. ‘It just came through. Only applied last month.’
Why is she telling me? Lauren wondered. Is she just doing it to show off?
‘Great,’ Lauren said again, as she looked at the sooty little houses hunched around the edge of the green, then back down the lane towards her mum’s. The sun was dipping behind the trees and this view should be pretty and tranquil, but instead it just looked so miserably small, so depressingly English, so un-Canadian, where things would be large and spacious and new-built, probably.
‘How about you?’ Emily asked. ‘What are you up to? How’s Paul?’
‘I thought you might’ve heard,’ Lauren said. ‘We broke up.’
‘Oh, so what are you doing now?’ Emily asked.
Emily was like Lauren; her parents were rich, she didn’t need a job. At uni, between semesters, she’d disappear off to places like Goa and Bali and Fiji and always come back with a dusty-looking tan and braids in her hair and anecdotes about bonking – who the fuck called it ‘bonking’ in 2004? – boys in teepees.
‘I’m living at my mum’s for a bit. Just until I know what I’m doing next.’
‘Oh shit,’ Emily said. ‘Sorry, Lozza.’ (She was the only person who ever called Lauren that.) ‘That’s rubbish.’
‘Yep.’
‘So what are you doing next?’
‘All I’ve got pencilled