Free Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble Page A

of them. Do something you love. Whoever was the fool who decided that we should work for six days and rest for one? But if you’re doing something you love, you’ll be okay.
    Well sorry, Mum, but Amanda most certainly had not found the thing she loved to do. This was mental treading water. What she did for money. That was all. It was nearly time. Amanda knew this cycle of old.
    Every time she came back from a trip, she tried. Tried to put down some roots in an everyday ordinary life. It usually worked for a while. She would get a job. Pay rent. Spend as little as possible of whatever was left, and save the rest. She knew she was old enough now to be saving for a deposit on a flat. Or even a car. But she only ever saved for plane tickets.
    She was always getting ready to leave. Not that she didn’t have fun mean-while. Amanda always had fun.
    Bex was an old friend. They’d been at school together. She and Amanda had stayed in touch all these years via postcards, texts, and the occasional 56 e l i z a b e t h
    n o b l e
    drunken night in London together when Amanda was home. They weren’t especially close—after all, Amanda wasn’t especially close to anyone—
    but there was an empty room. Bex was a beautician at an upscale salon off Oxford Street, just up from the temping job. Probably the most indiscreet beautician in London with a hilarious line in disgusting stories about her wealthy clientele and their excess body hair. Their third flatmate, sourced from an ad in Loot, was Josh—a gay hairdresser who wore sunglasses in all weathers and worked in some cutting-edge place in Sloane Square. Apparently he even wore his sunglasses while cutting, and he pretended to be vaguely Italian, when, in fact, he was the son of a librarian and a dentist, from Saxmundham. When she was with them at home, Amanda always felt vaguely as though she were taking part in anarchic, hilarious dinner theater. There was always loud music, and cocktails. And usually a walk-on cast of extras, since they were both fairly promiscuous. Sunday breakfast (served around lunchtime) was often a crowded affair. What they had in common, and what made this living arrangement okay, for now, was a total, dedicated lack of concern for the future. No pension, no career ladder, no ticking biological clocks or great need to nest. The flat was sham-bolic, none too clean and full of laughter.
    Which was more than could be said for the office she had had the mis-fortune to be assigned to by the woman at the temping agency. Still, two weeks to go. Christmas, she’d stay. She’d promised Hannah. And then probably New Year’s—there was some all-night rave in a warehouse in Lewisham Josh had tickets to—but then . . . then she’d be on her way.
    She wanted to go to Australia. She’d saved enough for a ticket—if she waited until later in January, when all the long-lost relatives had finished toing and froing, then relative bargains could be had. Maybe via Bali, or back to Thailand. She’d been there about four years ago and loved it. She’d stayed in a beach hut in Kata Noi with a Kiwi she’d met on a train in Bangkok. Three weeks of swimming and lying in a hammock, eating amazing seafood from stalls near the beach for pennies, and talking late into the night with the backpackers passing through. They all felt T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 57
    like they were extras in The Beach —they’d discovered Shangri-la, and it was theirs. The beach hut with the narrow veranda, where she had hung her bikinis to dry and sat to watch electrifying sunsets, wouldn’t be there anymore. The Boxing Day tsunami would have swept it away. But still, she might go back. God knows they needed the tourists to go.
    Sometimes, when she was filing, Amanda thought about her addic-tion to being on the move. About whether she was running away or running toward. She loved the mystery of a plane landing somewhere new, of a train pulling into a station. She loved