Sublime

xenia?’

eked

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.

Melissa did not want Ria and Blake to grow up with this sound, to develop the hardness that enabled you to become insensitive to it. She wanted them to live somewhere calmer, somewhere greener, somewhere the emergency services were less busy, so that they in turn could be calm, and keep the purity of themselves.

doggedness

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

Founded before Christ and noted for its pretty women, Aries was until 1997 the home of Madame Jeanne Calment. Her story is a testament to the bracing air of Provence and a warning to all property speculators. She was born in 1875, and had met Van Gogh when she was a girl. At the age of 90, she decided to sell her apartment en viager to a local