Chapter Eight
Tuesday’s eyes were watering. She rubbed away her ash-filled tears and blinked into the toxic smoke.
Somehow she had gotten lost. It was just a dash up Ocean Street and a sprint across Oxford to home but a quick glance over her shoulder had disorientated her. She turned around. Then around again. In all directions the same sick orange glow hung down to the asphalt. She couldn’t even see the hem of her dress beneath her knees.
Tuesday groaned, exasperated. She didn’t want to be the character in the book that made an absurd mistake and put everyone’s lives in danger. There were already too many books where a woman stepped into her backyard on a moonless night to call her cat even though she knew there was a serial killer on the loose in her neighbourhood.
Where were the strong female role models? Tuesday thought, feeling tiny and scared in the choking smash. Where were the take-charge heroines? She wondered, taking a tentative step forward, her heart beating faster than Bill’s hand at the climax of masturbation. Why was it the heroine who always made fatal mistakes?
Above the roar of the fire storm the sirens mingled - Paddington’s ‘I’m on my way’ by The Proclaimers and Woollahra’s ‘Sleeping Pills’ by Suede.
“I’m on my way to Valium,” warbled the mixed voices.
Amongst the racket, Tuesday thought she could hear the faint clip-clop of hooves. The noise danced around her, billowed back and forth by the fire wind. The sound could have come from anywhere.
I hope it’s not Tom, thought Tuesday. I don’t need anyone. Especially someone who didn’t need her. Particularly someone she couldn’t have. After all, she was sure Oxford Street was that way. She swivelled left. The air boiled with soot. Or that way. She swivelled right. Curls of dense smoke rose up from the ground as if the earth itself was on fire. Damn it all. She couldn’t see anything!
Tom’s voice called out of the murk, his words rising up and down with the donkey’s canter.
Tuesday sulked and folded her arms. “I’m here!” She yelled, not knowing exactly where that was.
The red clouds parted briefly and a broom handle with a dangling hibiscus shot over her shoulder, missing her ear by millimetres.
“Whooooa!” Shouted Tom.
The handle came to an abrupt halt at the side of Tuesday’s head and a soot-smeared, heavy-lidded donkey, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, leant his head over Tuesday’s shoulder in exhaustion. His sweaty chest heaved against her and he sighed dramatically, his snot flicking down her back.
“Hop on.” Said Tom.
Tuesday considered her options. She didn’t have any. She climbed behind Tom both reluctant and relieved. If she hadn’t been so worried about her family and her house and Bill and Ginny and the terrible plan Anthea Yialousis had to destroy Sydney, she might have been secretly pleased that Tom had rescued her commandingly on his trusty stead.
“Giddy-up.” Tom tapped the reins lightly, guiding the donkey slightly left without any hesitation. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Thought Tuesday grudgingly. She couldn’t imagine Tom ever made a wrong decision about anything. Except for dating Swan. Except that maybe Swan wasn’t a mistake after all. Tuesday leant her cheek against Tom’s back. You’re just jealous, Tuesday, she told herself - and the sooner she admitted it, the better.
The donkey was tiring and snorting wetly in the smoke. He trotted listlessly through the heavy smash, his hooded eyes blinking dumbly at his hibiscus prize.
Up ahead, the Oxford Street turn off was blocked by a domino of toppled carriages engulfed with dancing flames. Torn harnesses lay abandoned on the ground. The horses had been cut free. Tuesday jumped down and quickly inspected the upturned carriages. There wasn’t anyone trapped inside and she jumped back on the donkey. They detoured down Queen Street towards the Syd Einfeld overpass.
The streets were deserted. The donkey’s hooves stepped around burning garbage and dead bird carcasses. He trotted past smoking cars and fleeing kangaroos. The heat was incredible.
“We’ve got to walk,” Tuesday said, hopping off as they reached the top of the curving upsweep of the overpass. “Or this donkey’s not going to make it.”
Tom leapt off and stroked the donkey’s muzzle. He stared back at Tom with half-slit eyes. Tom pulled the hibiscus off the pole and offered it to him in the palm of his hand. “Well done, old mule.” The donkey stretched out his lips and sucked it up. His eyes looked weary. Tom slapped him lightly on his rump. “Now garn. Get out of here. Go on. Shoo!” The donkey stood still and watched them.
Tom and Tuesday walked away. “Go on, get out of here!” Tom called back. The donkey’s nose disappeared behind them in the smash, his hooves rooted to the spot. He made no move to follow them, nor did Tuesday hear the donkey trot away.
The air as they approached Mill Hill was not so much filled with the roar of the fire storm hurtling across St James Road but with the sound of hundreds of people shouting. As they crossed the fire front and ran down the street, the smash lifted and Tom and Tuesday gasped.
The neighbourhood was filled with people, hundreds of them, their neon masks bobbing and their t-shirts wrapped around their faces and flapping in the wind. A chain gang passed buckets of water down Oxford Street. The line of people forked into fingers down Mill Hill and through the imposing iron gates of the city park. A fire warden directed someone at every turn. Rangers herded animals towards Randwick. Donkey ambulances, wearing white hats embroidered with a red cross, were taking the smoke affected across town to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
No wonder Woollahra had been deserted. Everyone was here. Even the politicians. Tuesday saw several bigwigs attempt to shake hands with harried neighbours in the chain gang and even when the politicians were spat at and ignored and shouted at, even when a woman pummelled the Lord Mayor in the gut for his opposition to dedicated bicycle paths, the Mayor still picked himself up and continued down the line, looking for a baby to hold and a news camera.
Tom and Tuesday ducked past the weatherman, Tim Bailey, who was standing on a milk crate and speaking into a microphone. He wore a yellow fire helmet that covered his eyes. He cocked his head and smiled white teeth through a perfect tan. “As you can see, Jess,” he motioned with his arm, “it’s a beautiful sunset this evening in Bondi. A little smoky from the bushfires a hundred metres away and the air quality poor but a brilliant day to be at the beach.” The NSW premier staggered in front of the camera, a bucket on his head, surrounded by a circle of teachers hitting him with singed fence palings for his lack of funding for State Education.
Tuesday ran up to her brick fence. The roof was smoking. She shadowed the light from her eyes and peered upwards. Nope, it was just her mother leaning against the chimney, smoking.
“Have you lost your mind?” Tuesday called up, her hands on her hips. “There’s a fire on!”
Her mother blinked down at her. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Tuesday,” her mother said, flicking her butt onto the lawn. The grass went up in a whoosh and Tuesday jumped from flame to flame to put it out. “Nothing matters. Your father’s…your father’s gone.”
“Gone?” Asked Tuesday, stamping out her smoking toe.
Her mother nodded slowly. “Gone. Dead. Deceased. Departed. Gone.” Her lips trembled. “He fell… he fell…”
Tuesday’s face paled. “He fell off the roof!”
“No. He fell for another woman and when I get hold of him I’m going to bloody kill him.”
“Whoooo-hooooo!” Her father called down from Tuesday’s upstairs bedroom window. “Hellllooo, Tuesday. Come to save the house?” His black muscular chest shone with sweat and his hair was singed. Soot was smeared across his face. Beside him stood a somewhat blond-haired, somewhat dishevelled, somewhat nude news reporter.
“This is Maria.”
“Er, Inge,” corrected Bill, popping his head up beside him.
“Inge, then.” Said her father. “We’re going to get married!”
There was an indignant shout from the roof and her mother clambered over the tiles. “You worthless piece of bat guano!” Her mother yelled at him, kneeling over the gutter upside down. “You adulterous old fox! You five-timing sleazy lust-riddled loser!”
“Steady on, Mum!” Her father said. “There’s room for all of us.” He quickly conferred with Bill. “My love is just spread around a bit, that’s all. What you have to decide is…” Another quick word from Bill in her father’s ear, “do you love yourself enough to love me enough to let me love you?”
Tuesday narrowed her eyes and so did her mother. Buckets of water halted all the way up the road, a fist stopped mid-air towards the Prime Minister’s face, even the flames licking Bill’s roof quietened down. Everyone was trying to decipher the sentence. Heads huddled together, whispering.
“It doesn’t make sense!” Shouted the Lord Mayor with effort because he was hanging upside down from a lamppost and a garbage man upset with the Mayor’s enthusiasm for planning approvals for American fast food stores had his one giant hand wrapped tightly around his larynx.
“It doesn’t make sense,” repeated Tim Bailey into the television camera.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” everyone shouted.
Bill chewed on his thumbnail. “Bugger.”
The chain gang sighed and went back to sloshing buckets of water down the line, the Prime Minister went back to gagging for breath between making empty promises, the flames leapt back within reach of the house, and Tim Bailey went back to the studio to take his hormone growth injections.
“Who’s your friend?” Her father asked her, nodding at Tom.
Bill blinked and seemed to notice Tom for the first time. “Yeah,” he leant out of the window with her father. His voice was indignant. “Who’s your friend?”
“God,” murmured Tom, “who is that jerk?”
Tuesday quite wished she wasn’t here right now. “He’s just a friend.” It wasn’t clear who Tuesday was talking about or to whom, Tom or Bill, but the answer seemed to satisfy the both of them.
The two of them nodded, eyeing each other suspiciously.
“I think he likes you.” Tom said to Tuesday, looking at her questioningly.
Up at the window, Bill nudged her father. “I think he likes her.” He growled, glaring at Tom and thinking that he’d quite like to send a projectile spit onto the footpath at Tom’s feet.
The wind suddenly picked up and flames leapt onto the tree top next to her mother. Her mother screamed but that was because Inge was waving up at her from the bedroom window. “Hullo, Mrs Cockatoo!” Inge called, her head twisted up, her nipples as erect as two rubber eye droppers despite the heat. “I hope we can be friends some day and leave this all behind us!”
“Come and help us, Tuesday!” Her father yelled down, passing Bill a bucket of water.
Tom and Tuesday ran inside and Tuesday picked up a rug on the way through the living room to help smother the flames. Tom nodded at Uncle Bob’s paintings as he ran past. “Vaginas. Nice work.”
They burst into the backyard. Through the smoke Tuesday could see Audrey’s crumpled, dirty face. She was on her knees on the red hot concrete wailing.
“Whatever is the matter, Audrey?” Tuesday asked.
Audrey hiccupped. “My designer furniture!” She pointed at Tuesday’s house. “I’ve just spent $17,000 on a Space bed and now it’s going to go up in flames!” She howled into the air, her hands clutching a Bang and Olufsen wall-mounted stereo, her nose encrusted with so much mucus, it had stopped the bleeding. “Do something!”
Tuesday threw down the rug. “Bugger this. It’s only a house.” She stood with her hands on her hips. “I don’t know if any of it’s worth saving.” But she wasn’t sure if she was talking about her relationships, her life, or the brick and mortar dwelling behind them.
Tom beat the living room rug down on the smouldering backyard dunny and admonished her. “Your house is not just a badly designed series of rooms, Tuesday, some of which the Department of Health would like to investigate. It’s a home. It’s where memories take place. It’s a safe haven that provides you with shelter and love and security. It’s worth saving. And the hundreds of people in that chain gang think so too.”
“I don’t care!” Yelled Tuesday with intensity. Tom and Audrey looked at her in surprise. “I don’t care anymore. Nothing matters! I don’t care if the whole city burns down!” Tuesday turned around and ran from the garden and back through her house. Her father’s three wives had returned from their Christian Women’s Book Club and were kneeling on the living room floor, holding hands and chanting.
“Lord, please save the soul of Jonathon Franzen who refused the stamp of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, ohhhhhhhhh ummmmmmmmmm.”
Tuesday darted past them and into the darkening street. Bill’s front door was wide open and Tuesday headed for it. Tom was hot on her heels, literally, because the concrete beneath his bare feet was very hot.
Tuesday streaked down Bill’s hallway and fell into Bill’s couch in front of the tall plate glass windows. White ash flew out of the black sky towards her and clung to the glass. She sighed. She felt safe here. This was her fantasy world – okay, so lately it had been a nightmare but it was the place where she could at least dream and hope and live a different life. The life of the rich and famous. Let her family try and save the dirt box next door. Why were they even trying? Ginny was right. How could Tuesday be happy with so little?
“You okay?” Asked Tom, hopping down the hallway towards her and peeling strips of pink skin from his heels.
Tuesday poked her nose over the armrest. She shrugged. “I’m okay. I’m just evaluating things.”
“Now? We’re in the middle of a fire storm.”
Men! Huh. Tuesday folded her arms. She was a woman. There was always time for reminiscing, musing, self-berating, pondering, reflecting, deliberating, concluding, and philosophising.
“Go away then.”
“You don’t want me to go away.”
“I do so.”
“Alright then – I don’t want to go away.” He plopped down onto the couch next to her.
Tuesday folded her arms. “Go away. I don’t want to be responsible for you dying too.”
Tom snorted. “Dying? You’re not that kind of character, Tuesday.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a survivor. Tough. Free-willed. Determined. There’s no way the author is going to let you die.”
“She might.”
“She won’t. She can’t.”
“She might too!”
They looked up from the page but all they could see was Bill’s ceiling above their heads. But they knew that beyond that was the nib of a fountain pen.
“You’re too strong-willed. I mean, look at you and look at Swan. You live life with much less than she has and you’re happier.”
“I am?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Tuesday didn’t have the bottom she wanted. She didn’t have the boyfriend she wanted. She didn’t have the career she wanted. She didn’t have a stable family. Or a respectable house. Or a satisfying sex life. And yet, was it possible? That she was happy anyway?
“Having a revolution?”
“You mean a revelation. Maybe.” Tuesday looked across at him. “Are you happy?”
Tom looked uncomfortable. “We’re not talking about me.”
“But are you – with Swan I mean?”
Tom looked down at his hands. “You know what? N…”
“Tuesday!” Bill leapt down the hallway and into the living room, all uncoordinated arms and legs, dressed only in his tie-dyed trousers with Bilby fur cuffs that he’d had since a teenager in Tasmania.
“Hey! We’re having a private conversation here,” said Tom, annoyed that the deep feelings that he was about to confess to Tuesday had been interrupted.
“Hey! This is my living room,” answered Bill.
Tom got off the couch and stood and the two men faced each other with their hands on their hips and glared at each other.
“Tom, this is Bill, and Bill, this is Tom.”
“Sure, but who the hell is he?” Asked Tom. “I don’t like the way he’s salivating over your breasts with that little bit of dribble running down his chin. Like he’s remembering them. I can see the cogs almost turning. And I especially don’t like the way you’re looking back at him. Like you’re under his spell. Like you’ve been madly in lust with him for the last two years and have had extremely unfulfilling sex with him and totally unsatisfying conversations and too many rugby league video nights and are now torn between your desire for me and your old crush on him.”
Uh oh. Tom could be very perceptive for a guy. “He’s just my neighbour,” said Tuesday quickly.
Bill smiled. He could see a space for some one-up man ship through his cocaine-addled brain and Tuesday was the pawn. This mattered not one iota to him of course. Tuesday had never mattered to him. The only thing that mattered to Bill, was Bill himself.
“I’m her lover,” Bill gloated. “Me and Tuesday.” (Audrey wasn’t around to correct his grammar anymore).
“Yeah, right.” Tom snorted. “You wish. Look how beautiful she is. As if she’d be interested in you.”
Bill turned back to Tuesday. “Beautiful?” He’d never thought of Tuesday in that light. Cute sure. Attractive of course, even in her stained Goodies t-shirt with her breasts doubling the size of the ‘o’ and the ‘d’. But beautiful? Did Tom know something he didn’t? “Whatever. The point is…” Bill screwed up his forehead. He hated that, when you’d just got your finger on the point and then it slipped away from you and you were left holding your hand in the air, pointing.
“The point is…we’re lovers…of sorts.”
Tom laughed and looked back at Tuesday. “Tuesday! Aren’t you going to defend yourself!”
Tuesday nodded vigorously at him. “No.” She stood and inched her way along the couch towards the door. “I mean - this is not the time for reminiscing, musing, self-berating, pondering, reflecting, deliberating, concluding, and philosophising, Tom. I have a fire to fight.” She tried to sneak past them both.
“Wait a minute,” Tom pulled her back by her collar. “You’re just neighbours, right? This old man and you?”
“I’m not old!” Bellowed Bill. “I’m charismatic! I’m mature! I’m sophisticated. I’m…” Bill tried to find the right word. “Thirty-nine!”
Tuesday and Tom didn’t even bother to challenge such an obvious lie. Bill was as much thirty-nine as Tuesday was a white male accountant from Turramurra.
“Anyway, I can prove it,” Bill gloated, giving Tuesday a triumphant look.
“That you’re thirty-nine?” Tom and Tuesday gasped.
“No!” Bill pulled up the elastic band of his slipping pants so that they once again covered the crack of his backside. “I can prove that Tuesday and I enjoy a certain intimacy. That our love-making has been passionate and sex-u-al.”
“Bill,” Tuesday hastened. “I know you’re upset that your wife has left you and become a friend of mine and I know the cocaine you take has addled your brain until it’s just pea soup with real peas because you snorted fifteen peas up your nose to show me how the body’s digestion and respiratory systems are inter-related except that they’re not and now you have fifteen peas lodged in your left temporal lobe, I know these things have altered your sense of reality, so why don’t we just forget about this?”
“How can you prove it?” Tom asked Bill, folding his arms.
“I’ve got a CT scan somewhere,” Bill said.
“No, I mean, how can you prove you’ve slept with her?”
“Tom!” Tuesday put on her most indignant face. “I refuse to let you talk about me like this when I’m still in the room!” She crept towards the door. “Do it after I leave.”
“She has a tiny white scar in the shape of a gun on her ass.”
Tuesday hesitated and paled. If only she hadn’t been playing Cluedo that day with her four year old brother. If only her mother hadn’t boiled the game pieces after her brother baked them in his ‘mud’ cakes. If only her mother hadn’t left the tiny white hot murder weapons to cool on the kitchen counter next to the footstool.
Still, Tuesday had set a trend. All of her brothers had little white scars on their black bottoms and Tuesday couldn’t count the number of family photos taken of them mooning the camera and grinning over their shoulders.
“First of all,” Tuesday growled, “I have a bottom. I do not have an ass.”
“Secondly, I may or may not have a scar in the shape of a gun in the bottom quadrant of my left buttock. I don’t often look at my bottom so frankly I am unable to confirm or deny Bill’s allegation.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind looking at your bottom,” said Tom. “You know, just to sort this out once and for all.”
“Neither would I,” added Bill. “I’d quite like to look at your bottom too.”
“NO ONE IS GOING TO LOOK AT MY BOTTOM!” Tuesday gritted through her teeth. She pointed at Bill and spoke to Tom. “He is none of your business.” She pointed to Tom and spoke to Bill. “And he is none of your business.”
“I don’t agree,” said Tom, his voice raised because the wind had picked up and was throwing sparrows against the glass like rain. “You’re my friend, Tuesday. In fact, I think we’ve quickly become good friends. Whereas this withering look-alike of Mick Jagger’s older brother is only your neighbour.”
“Lover.” Corrected Bill. “In fact, Tuesday has agreed to sleep with me for $155,000 a year.”
Tuesday covered her face with both her hands.
Tom sucked in his breath and looked at Tuesday incredulously. “Is that true?”
“No.” Tuesday nodded her head vigorously. “That is absolutely and completely untrue.”
“You mean, you’re not going to?” Asked Bill, his face falling, and not because he was highly disappointed but because his fifty-four year old facial muscles had finally, at this exact hour and minute, fallen.
Tom stepped back. “He’s asked you to though, hasn’t he? And what – you’ve been thinking about it?”
“I…he’s…” Tuesday stuttered, knowing she was between a hard place and another hard place, and neither places were erect penises as they were in Wally’s Willy Wonderland where Linda Love-A-Lot had murmured ecstatically (when her mouth was finally free) that she was between a hard place and another hard place.
“How could you even consider it?” Asked Tom, his voice low. “I mean, I thought Swan was opportunistic, I thought she would do anything for money. But even she would draw the line at this! I thought you were different from all these Eastern Suburb princesses. I thought you were…” Tom sighed, his shoulders sagging, “…special.”
“Oh, don’t be such a girl!” Said Bill. “It’s a business proposition. Don’t you want the best for Tuesday? Besides, it’s an open relationship, if she wants to shag a sensitive new age guy like yourself on the side then far be it for me to intervene.” Bill massaged the top of his head. That was quite possibly the longest sentence he had ever spoken and his head hurt. The peas did that sometimes, they were buried in the speech centre of his brain next to the peanut he’d stuck in through his ear.
Tom shook his head. He shook his head all the way to the front door. He didn’t even look back. It was as Tuesday had feared. Tom had found out the real her and hadn’t liked what he’d found.
“Wait!” Tuesday called. “I might not be good enough for you but we’re still mates aren’t we?”
Tom glanced back at her tightly, his hand clenching the doorknob. “What for? You’re just like Swan and her shallow friends and believe me, I have enough of them.”
Tuesday saw red. She might have made a brief error of judgement but no way was she going to stand him comparing her to Swan. “Now, you listen to me!” Tuesday strode up to Tom and stabbed him in the chest with her index finger. “I make mistakes like everybody else. I dream like everybody else. I fall in lust with inappropriate people just like everybody else. I wonder what it would be like to be rich, just like everybody else. Are you saying that you’ve never made mistakes? Oh the great Tom, in love with Swan, who has the central nervous system of a pillow?”
“I’m not in love with her,” muttered Tom, “and anyway, you’re turning this back on me.”
“Because that’s where it starts Tom. With you. If you don’t like me – that’s your problem. I’m a pretty neat person! Aren’t I, Bill?” Tuesday strode back to Bill with her hands on her hips.
Bill hesitated and scratched his neck.
“Aren’t I!”
“Yes,” Bill squeaked rapidly, but only because Tuesday had a hold of his scrotum and was twisting it clockwise between her black fingers.
“And I’m smart and kind and funny and best of all, I’m happy.” Tuesday took a deep breath and let go of Bill’s balls. “Just as I am.”
Bill started to clap. “Right on! This is better than Oprah Winfrey! Though not quite as good as Jerry Springer.”
“Shut up, Bill.” Tuesday said.
Tom’s hand fondled the doorknob. “Are you going to take it,” he asked quietly, “Bill’s offer?”
Tuesday swallowed. Was Tom’s friendship worth $155,000 tax-free dollars? Was it worth trips to Paris and expensive restaurants and most of all, total release from all the worry of money? She hesitated. Come on, did she even have to think about it?
Tom looked back at her, disappointed. “You even have to think about it.” He turned his back and opened the door.
What happened next, happened so quickly that Tuesday had barely time to register it.
Heat exploded into the room with a suction pop like a cork being pulled out of a bottle. Tangerine flames flashed over Tom with a lion’s roar and were dragged back in the opposite direction by the wind just as fast. Tom had time to take one step back before the fire advanced again, whipped up by the ferocious fire storm. The inferno hurtled across the threshold towards them.
The afternoon sunlight was not. It was as dark as a winter’s evening sky and a cloud of black smoke charged into the hallway like a giant hand reaching out for them.
They had been so busy arguing that they hadn’t even noticed the escalating roar, the darkening of the sky across Bill’s windows. The smell.
The smell was appalling, Tuesday thought. As though her face was being pressed into a dead carcass. And indeed, it was. A charred Tasmanian Tiger had flown down the hallway wind tunnel and slammed into her nose, coming to a rest over her shoulder. It hadn’t been alive for quite some time however. Some ninety years in fact. She recognised it as the puppy specimen from the preserved jar that Professor King, Curator of Extinct Animals, kept on his window sill in his study across the road.
That meant that the houses were burning down! Tuesday pushed the little humped body from her shoulder onto the floor.
The front door caught alight and Tom strained to close the hot wood against the firestorm. Bill leapt beside him manfully and helped push it with his back.
“Ooh! Ow! It’s hot!” Complained Bill. He pushed Tom towards the hot air of the open gap and huddled himself near the hinges, straining heroically for Tuesday’s sake, but having not much of an effect at all.
In the gap in the door there was no one in the street. There were no more chain gang chants or whiny politicians’ voices or adulterous family members. There was just the insatiable beast of fire, demanding to be fed.
Tom hurled his shoulder against the cracking timber as the wind sucked backwards and the door locked into place with an audible click. In an instant none of them could see. The black smoke simply poured above the door frame, swooshed into their faces, and raced into the living room. Bill was especially upset at the shoddy workmanship that this revealed.
“I paid them $15,000 for that stained glass and brushed ironbark woodwork! Now I know where that winter draft was coming from!”
The stained glass cracked in a jagged slash and Bill gasped. “Not the lesbian orgy mural!”
Tuesday looked up. She had never noticed the small stained glass window before. A tangle of lips and arms and limbs mingled together. The faces were very distinct. Tuesday had a feeling they were Karen, Sharon, Marion, Brenda, Linda, Sandra, Sarah, Clara, Maria, Helen, Inge, and Leonie. Oh and Debbie.
And Nicola.
The picture exploded and the women mingled again, but this time on the floor in little pieces.
Bill wailed.
“Pull yourself, together Bill!” Tom said