Waiting for Wednesday

guess you could call it
that.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    Frieda held out her hand and Yvette took it,
and for a moment the two women sat across the table from each other, holding hands and
gazing into the other’s face.



FIFTY-SIX
    Frieda was dreaming about Sandy. He was
smiling at her and holding out his hand to her, and then Frieda, in her dream, realized
it wasn’t Sandy at all – that it was actually Dean’s face, Dean’s soft
smile. She woke with a lurch and lay for several minutes, taking deep breaths and
waiting for the dread to subside.
    At last, she rose, showered, and went into
the kitchen. Chloë was already sitting at the table. There was a mug of untouched tea
and what looked like a large album in front of her. She was bedraggled, her hair
unbrushed and her face grimy with yesterday’s mascara. She looked as though she
had hardly slept for nights. She was like an abandoned waif – her mother was going
through a messy crisis and barely thought about her, her friends had been taken away
from her, and her aunt had absented herself at her time of need. She lifted her smudged,
tear-stained face and stared blindly at her.
    Frieda took a seat opposite her. ‘Are
you OK?’
    ‘I guess.’
    ‘Can I get you some
breakfast?’
    ‘No. I’m not hungry. Oh, God,
Frieda, I can’t stop thinking about it all.’
    ‘Of course not.’
    ‘I didn’t want to wake
you.’
    ‘How are you feeling?’
    ‘I was lying in bed and I kept
imagining what they were feeling at that very moment. They’ve lost everything.
Theirmother, their father, their belief in their past happiness. How
do they ever get back to an ordinary kind of life after this?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘What about you?’
    ‘I didn’t sleep so well either.
I was thinking about things.’ Frieda walked across the kitchen and filled the
kettle. She looked at her niece, who had her head propped on her hand and was dreamily
staring at the pages of the album in front of her.
    ‘What is that?’ she asked.
    ‘Ted left his portfolio. I’ll
give it back to him but first I’ve been looking through it. He’s an amazing
artist. I wish I was just a tenth, a hundredth as good as he is. I wish –’ She
stopped and bit her lip.
    ‘Chloë. This has been hard for
you.’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ she said
harshly. ‘I know he just thinks of me as a friend. A shoulder to cry on. Not that
he does cry on it.’
    ‘And probably,’ said Frieda,
‘your own feelings are rather complicated because of everything he’s been
through.’
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘I mean there’s something
extremely attractive about a young man who’s so surrounded by tragedy.’
    ‘Like I’m a grief
tourist?’
    ‘Not exactly.’
    ‘It’s all over now,’ said
Chloë. Her eyes filled with tears and she went on staring at the book in front of
her.
    Frieda leaned over her shoulder as she
turned the large pages. She saw a beautifully exact drawing of an apple, a bulbous
self-portrait as reflected in a convex mirror, a painstakingly precise tree.
‘He’s good,’ she said.
    ‘Wait,’ said Chloë.
‘There’s one I want to show you.’ She leafed over page after page
until she was almost at the end. ‘Look.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Look at the date. Wednesday, the sixth
of April, nine thirty a.m. That’s the still-life drawing he had to do for his mock
A level. It’s also the drawing he did on the day his mother was killed. It almost
makes me cry just to look at it, to think of what was about to happen.’
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ said
Frieda, and then she frowned, turning her head slightly. She heard the kettle click
behind her. The water had boiled. But she couldn’t attend to it. Not now.
    ‘It bloody is,’ said Chloë,
‘it –’
    ‘Wait a moment,’ said Frieda.
‘Describe it to me. Tell me what’s in it.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Just do it.’
    ‘All right. There’s a watch and
a bunch of keys and a book and an electric plug thing and then …’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘There’s something leaning on
the book.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I can’t tell.’
    ‘Describe it.’
    ‘It’s sort of straight, and
notched, like a sort of metal ruler.’
    Frieda concentrated for a moment in silence,
so hard that her head hurt.
    ‘Is that what it is?’ she said
finally. ‘Or what it looks like?’
    ‘What do you mean?’ said Chloe.
‘What’s the difference? It’s just a drawing.’ She slammed the
portfolio shut. ‘I need to take it into school,’ she said. ‘To