Free One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke

preferable to having him lying in bed all day, doing nothing, getting older; except why was he out all the time? How long was it since she’d actually spoken to Lonnie? Heard his voice?
    ‘Lily?’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘How long is it since Lonnie rang?’
    ‘Dunno.’ She added, disconcertingly, ‘Ages, isn’t it?’
    ‘How long is ages?’
    ‘Three weeks? Four? No, hang on – it was that time he wanted you to send his Army Disposals jacket over.’
    ‘But that was at the end of June . And it’s August now!’
    ‘So?’ Lily glared at the screen. ‘He’s okay, Mum. Or do you think his landlady’s bumped him off and buried him underneath the floorboards?’
    ‘Of course I don’t!’ Why couldn’t Lily be more sympathetic? It was awful never knowing how Lonnie was getting on, or what kind of place he was living in: this mysterious gentlemen’s boarding house at 5 Firth Street, Toongabbie. Marigold had occasionally been tempted to sneak over there and take a look, only, well – you had your pride, didn’t you? She wouldn’t spy, she wouldn’t stoop so low. Old Mr Parker at the daycare centre had once lived in Toongabbie, and last Tuesday Marigold had asked him if he knew Firth Street. ‘Never heard of it!’ he’d replied.
    Though of course the Toongabbie Mr Parker had known was sixty years in the past . . . Still, it had given Marigold the most uneasy feeling; as if the place where Lonnie had told them he lived wasn’t really there.
    And then there were the vanishing dreams. ‘I had another vanishing dream last night,’ she said to Lily when the next ad flashed up on the screen.
    ‘Right!’ said Lily, who’d dreamed Tracy Gilman was going out with Daniel Steadman. She’d woken feeling furious, almost on the verge of tears, and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep again. At school, Tracy Gilman had peered into her face and said, ‘Your eyes have gone all puffy, did you know? You look like you’ve been crying!’
    ‘Allergy,’ Lily had said shortly, because she certainly didn’t feel like telling Tracy Gilman that she’d been awake half the night. And how, groggily wiping the stove-top after the breakfast milk had boiled over, she’d squirted the can of Ezi-Kleen wrong way round.
    ‘I dreamed I got a parcel in the mail,’ her mum was waffling. ‘A big brown parcel like the ones your nan sends sweaters in, and I knew Lonnie was inside – it said so on the label. It said: ‘Fragile. Lonnie inside.’
    ‘Fragile!’ scoffed Lily.
    ‘Only he wasn’t inside. There were layers and layers of paper, and then – nothing.’
    ‘That sounds like Lon all right.’
    ‘Perhaps I should get him another mobile, do you think?’
    ‘No! He’ll lose it, like he lost all the others. Mum, you’ve got to stop worrying about him. He’s a big boy now, you know; he’s twenty-two! He can look after himself.’
    ‘I know,’ said Marigold. ‘It’s just that when you’re a mother –’
    ‘Your brain softens.’
    ‘Not at all,’ said Marigold coldly. ‘But you do always tend to think the worst. You lie awake, and you –’
    Lily didn’t want to hear about lying awake. She thought being a mother must be like having an eternal crush. ‘If it makes you feel better, I’m going to Lon’s place tomorrow,’ she said.
    ‘Where? To the boarding house?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘But you know Lonnie doesn’t want us to go there; he said he needed space.’
    ‘He’s had space,’ said Lily, who felt she had no space at all, because having a crush was also like a prison; it was like solitary confinement. ‘And I’m not going there to spy, Mum,’ – she saw her mother flinch – ‘I’m going because Nan asked me when she rang last week. She wants to be sure Lon knows about Pop’s party.’
    ‘Oh, that wretched party,’ sighed Marigold.
    Lily understood her mother’s attitude. Parties in their family always seemed to end in fights. Or even start with them, like this one would if Lonnie came along and