Sublime

mien,

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

Strange to think of his voice still flying through the air, already a country away, growing weaker every mile.

And if it was for any sort of a fine handsome woman, but for a little fistful of a woman like Kitty Keary, that’s not four feet high hardly, and not three teeth in her head unless she got new ones!

reverenced.

‘He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,’ she said to the other women in the closet.

She was Melissa’s oldest, boldest friend. They had gone to the same primary school. Hazel worked in advertising. She had a wide and glamorous smile behind which was an oft-foul tongue, and long, bouncing, half-French, half-Ghanaian curls falling down her back, the most beautiful, the most envied of their schoolgirl pack, the one the boys always wen

xenia?’