Perfect Day

loud.
    ‘If I could just have a day with him...’ she says. ‘You’d promise what?’ Marie wants to know.
    ‘Do you think going to Mass would be enough?’
    ‘For a whole day with the man of your dreams? Doubt it,’ says Marie, giving the hypothetical negotiation serious consideration. ‘Anyway, a day wouldn’t be enough. You don’t want just a day, really. You’re only saying it because you think that in a day he would see how wonderful you were... and then it would be up to him, not God...’
    ‘Don’t be stupid!’
    But Marie’s analysis is uncannily close to what Kate was thinking.
    Marie starts to murmur the Lou Reed song, ‘Perfect
    Day’.
    ‘Stop it!’ Kate says.
    But Marie just gets louder.
    ‘...drink champagne in the park...’ she trills in a Lesley Garrett crescendo.
    ‘It’s not champagne anyway, it’s sangria,’ Kate interrupts.
    ‘What’s sangria when it’s at home?’ Marie wants to know.
    ‘Cocktail or something.’
    ‘It’s about heroin, that song,’ says Marie.
    ‘No...?’
    ‘Everyone knows that,’ Marie says, contemptuously. She takes one last drag of her cigarette, stubs it out, fidgets around a bit in the darkness, settling down for the night.
    ‘No relationship lasts a day,’ she says, authoritatively. ‘It’s five minutes to five hours after you’ve fucked, depending on how well he’s been brought up...’
    Then there’s a long silence.
    ‘... or it’s destined to be longer. A month... a lifetime...’
    ‘As if,’ says Kate.
    The fluorescent stars are fading. Marie’s breathing becomes slow and even.
    ‘You still thinking about that bloke?’ she suddenly demands.
    ‘No,’ Kate lies.
    ‘Do you think about Jimmy?’ Marie asks.
    ‘Course I do,’ Kate replies, turning onto her side, so that they’re back to back. ‘All the time.’
    ‘ D’you miss him?’
    ‘Course I do.’
    ‘But not enough to go back?’
    ‘Shut up, Marie.’
    ‘Night then,’ says Marie.
    ‘Night,’ says Kate, knowing that she won’t be able to sleep now.

Three

    ‘The village is awash with colour. Ever since Laura, the mobile librarian, had a colour therapy consultation in the back room of the organic shop that used to be Barclays Bank, and learned that she has been both an artist and a warrior, everybody’s wanting to find out about their previous lives. All you have to do is choose four colours from a rainbow of silken strips of fabric, write down your birthday, hand over £30, and the therapist will give you half an hour on where you’ve been and where you’re going (with a tape recording of the session included in the price). I’m a bit sceptical about reincarnation — why do previous lives always have an archetypal feeling about them? Why, for instance, wasn’t Laura a street cleaner or, for that matter, a horse, and would the therapist have told her if she were? Nevertheless, I too found myself the other day picking through a basket of dirty vegetables looking for the ones that would require least work to turn into something resembling a salad bag from Tesco, as I waited for my consultation. Clearly, I wasn’t a kitchen maid in a previous life, or perhaps I was, and my laziness now is a reward for all that drudgery

    Nell reads through what she has written and clicks the mouse on word count. Two hundred words. Five hundred to go. On a good day that would take her another hour, but she’s stalled. The kitchen clock says ten o’clock. Nell saves her work, then walks wearily upstairs to the bathroom.
    In the bath, she lies listening for the click and creak of the front door until the skin on her hands is pale and pruney . She would like him to find her here. Talking, like singing, comes more easily in the warm, steamy room.
    Eventually, she gets out and puts on the towelling dressing gown her mother gave her at Christmas. Peach is not the colour Nell would have chosen for herself, but the cotton pile is soft and comforting. It’s the sort of dressing gown to drink hot chocolate in, too warm for this evening. The weather forecast is for thunderstorms.
    Downstairs, Nell reads through her evening’s work again. She wonders how it is that the person on the page sounds so lighthearted when she feels so apprehensive. She stares around the living room searching for the next sentence. The predominant colours are yellow and blue. Butter yellow walls, cobalt blue sofa. Lucy’s toy kitchen is red, her pots and pans yellow. The room looks like a giant