LITMIR.BIZ

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Stupid old bag. Nora had to be at least sixty-five, and didn’t look a day over fifty. And she was still going strong. Had to be drugs, had to be. Those alternative health people were all growing marijuana plants in their sheds and insisting it was for their health.

      It was easier to have Prudence come out and say it, Nora knew. The news would be all round the square at high speed, and this way everyone would be over the embarrassment should they bump into Megan. Even Kevin, who wasn’t much of a reader, had seen it in the paper.

      ‘Poor Megan. It’s a bummer, isn’t it?’ he’d said.

      ‘Yes, a bummer,’ Nora agreed.

      Another reason why she loved Kevin. There would be no sly glances from him, betraying the unspoken judgement that her actress niece had really screwed up this time. No, Kevin knew that things happened to people and you got on with life. Shit happens, he liked to say. It was a comforting philosophy, although not necessarily one you’d want embroidered on a cushion.

      When she opened the door to her apartment, Leonardo and Cici, her two dogs, were waiting inside, tails wagging furiously. Leonardo, who was part-greyhound and very shivery, danced his quivering dance, while Cici, who was mainly shih tzu, all dictator, bounced up and down like a dog who hadn’t been petted for at least three hours and was on the verge of phoning the animal rescue people in outrage.

      ‘You had a walk at lunchtime,’ Nora said, hugging them both. ‘And this morning. You are shameless.’

      She pulled on a cardigan and her duffel coat.

      Nora didn’t bother much with fashion. Flat shoes, comfortable trousers and shirts worn untucked was her style. She varied the colours and the fabric, but generally, she looked the same no matter what. The hair that had gone grey in her twenties, like her mother’s, was tied back or sometimes plaited. She wore suncream in summer, moisturiser in winter, and clear salve instead of lip gloss. When Megan and Pippa had stayed with her as teenagers, they’d moaned that she had no cosmetics for them to practise on.

      Bien dans sa peau, as Pippa would say now. Comfortable in her skin.

      Pippa understood it, but poor Megan still didn’t. Megan worked in a world where the emphasis on the outside was so total and all-consuming that there wasn’t any time for the inside. When Megan had first said she wanted to go to acting school, Nora had got an anxious feeling in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t approve of acting or actresses. Of course, they were all ‘actors’ now, men and women. Another bit of tomfoolery. It wasn’t a steady trade. Only a few lucky ones made a living out of it, and the rest struggled endlessly, hoping for a break. Nora had known that Megan’s head would be turned by that glittery surface world, and she’d been right.

      The dogs’ excited barking made her hurry to open the door and as they walked out into the dark she admired, as she often did, the beauty of the lights all around the square. Golden Square’s residents could be split into two groups: the people who owned whole houses, had two cars, and employed someone else to cut their grass, and those whose families had lived there for donkeys’ years and who couldn’t have afforded to buy one now even with the state of the market, but who were holding on for the next property boom. They cut their own grass, occasionally rented out bits of the houses to tenants, and looked enviously at their neighbours’ double glazing.

      Nora was one of the latter type. Her parents had inherited the house and had moved in anxiously in the 1940s, fresh from a tiny flat above a gentlemen’s draper’s shop in Camden Street, terrified they’d never be able to heat or redecorate this comparatively enormous residence.

      They’d been so proud of their new home, but always anxious about living somewhere so grand. As if they didn’t really belong.

      Nobody’s windows were so clean or their garden so weedfree as the Flynns’. It was as if they felt keeping the place spotless made up for the fact that they had to repaint it all themselves. It was years before they could afford to have a roofer fix the tiles. When it rained heavily, Nora’s mother used to trail round the house nervously, waiting for the arrival of the next spot of damp. Unaccustomed to the whole notion of a garden, they’d kept the lawn shorn and attempted little else.

      One of the biggest worries had been the behaviour of the various basement tenants over the years. Nora could remember her mother’s prayers that the next lot of new people would be quiet.

      ‘I’ll say a novena to St Jude,’ she’d say. Sometimes the novenas worked and sometimes they didn’t. Nora’s parents never wondered why, they just accepted it. God’s choice was not theirs to question.

      If they could see her now, Nora thought sadly. They’d have told her to keep the dogs on the lead and her father would have been following at a crouch, plastic bag in hand, waiting for the inevitable poop.

      Dogs were supposed to be kept on the lead in the square, but it was easy enough to work out which animals were there and whether it was safe to let her pair off. It was safe this evening. Nora unclipped the leads and let the dogs race off under the gentle lamplight. She sat down on her favourite bench, stretched out her legs and let the strains of the day slough off her. There were only a couple of other people about. Nora liked all the doggie people in the square. Having dogs did something to people. Made them softer, gentler.

      Prudence Maguire didn’t have a dog; no surprise there. Rumour had it that her daughter had once had a hamster, but it had escaped, and Prudence had refused permission to have the couch ripped apart to find it. Nora imagined a ghostly hamster still rattling round inside the Maguire family couch, making little eldritch squeaks of distress that Prudence would totally ignore.

      She glanced at her watch. Ten to seven. Megan would have landed. She’d be in the taxi soon, on her way. Nora closed her eyes and wished for the first time ever that her niece wasn’t coming. Nora had tried hard to be a steadying influence in her nieces’ lives. Her brother Fionn would have wanted his big sister to take care of his daughters when he died. But it hadn’t been easy. Marguerite, their mother, was the exact opposite of Nora: a woman who lived in a state of constant, almost child-like happiness, she was prone to both wild adventures and falling passionately in love.

      She was the type who clearly needed a man around and, although she’d adored Fionn, he wasn’t long dead before she was anxiously looking for another strong male to take care of her.

      She also had strange views on how to bring up her daughters.

      When the carrots the children had planted hadn’t grown in Nora’s bit of garden, Marguerite stuck shop-bought ones into the earth instead and pretended to dig them up.

      ‘That’s appalling,’ Nora had said, unable to stop herself. ‘How can they learn about real life when you fake it for them like that?’

      ‘They’re only a few carrots,’ Marguerite had laughed. ‘Don’t be so serious, Nora.’

      And now Marguerite was sunning herself in Ibiza with her latest hunk and didn’t appear to be treating Megan’s situation as worrying.

      ‘Darling, it’ll all blow over,’ Marguerite had reportedly said to Pippa when her elder daughter had phoned with the news.

      Nora hadn’t spoken to Marguerite in years. It wasn’t possible to kill someone over the phone but Nora didn’t want to take any chances.

      So Nora was left to pick up the pieces. But how could she? Megan still didn’t know that huge, clean carrots didn’t magically appear a couple of weeks after you planted seeds.

      

      The cassette player in the taxi had been blasting out Moroccan music all the way from the airport and the driver, a very slender, dark-skinned man with long, artistic fingers that tapped the steering wheel in time to the beat, hadn’t spoken at all since Megan had got into the cab.

      ‘Very good,’ was all he’d said when she gave him the address.

      ‘This is it,’ she said, sitting forward in the seat at the taxi slowed down in Golden Square.

      ‘Very good,’

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