Free Life by Gwyneth Jones Page A

matter?”
    “It’s Rob.”
    “You’ve had a fight?”
    “I have to get away from him. Anna, you have to help me, please.”
    She wept on Anna’s shoulder. She had to get away from Rob because she couldn’t marry him. She’d seen this happen to Muslim girls from home, stumbling blindly into relationships that couldn’t survive. Daz was a Hindu, and her family so detached from all that religious-ethnic power stuff she’d thought she was safe. She’d been wrong.
    “I can’t marry him, it would be impossible. I must get away, right away, right now.”
    Anna did her best to comfort the World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian. She asked no questions; she didn’t need to. She suspected she’d soon know more than she wanted to be told, anyway. She agreed that they would put their savings together, and instead of staying in Bournemouth making money all summer, she would go away with Daz.
    Needs must.
    Daz calmed down and revealed, ingenuously, plans already devised. They would go to Greece, there were some very cheap flights. They would bum around the islands. There remained something so tragic in her hollow cheeks and compressed lips that Anna knew she had no choice. It was probably better this way. Quit while you’re ahead.
    “But what about you and Spence?” asked Daz, when she knew she was safe.
    “It’s okay,” said Anna. “It was a temporary thing.”
    They left on the last day in July, driven to Gatwick by Daz’s mother. Anna and Spence had said goodbye the night before, in the pub on the corner of the Passage. It served them right, that they had to part in public, after the stuff they’d got up to.
    In the kitchen at Regis Passage late that night, under a pokerwork wall plaque that read DON’T GET MAD GET SORTED, Frank N Furter shook his head over the folly of the young. “Should’er told her how you feel, Spence. Should’er taken a chance. The key is always frank. Remember that. As you go through life, you will find I’m right.”
    “Yeah, well. It’s too late now.”
    He would go back to school, bury himself in his studies, use his new expertise to find another girl who would never lead him such a dance. He would try to forget.
    “Fancy a line?”
    “Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”

Anna Anaconda
    i
    When Anna was a little girl, she and her sister possessed a picture book about a snake called Anna Anaconda, who swallowed things: notably other animals. It was a reign of terror. The anaconda lured and flattered every animal in the forest to its doom, except for the peacock, whose beauty was impervious to flattery and immune to greed. (The book was indifferent to conventional zoology: this was a female, Amazonian peacock.) Finally the peacock tricked the monster into trying to swallow her reflection in the river. She went on swallowing until she burst, and all her victims escaped. Anna had gained immense, sensual satisfaction from the picture of the snake trying to engulf the whole of the great Amazon: flanks swollen and transparent, so you could see the huge variety of things and creatures she’d already consumed. But she had equally admired the cool-headed bird. There’s a growing grace and glory in remaining by myself, sang the peacock, to the annoyance of her neighbors. But solitary content turned out to be the right choice—a rare conclusion for a children’s story. The book had frayed, disintegrated, and vanished. In Anna’s memory the two characters had survived, the distinction between them fading. The snake who swallowed everything was not a monster. She desired, like the peacock, to be self-contained. She tried to gulp her own reflection not because she was tricked, or greedy, but because she longed for closure.
    Anna remembered Anna Anaconda in her second year at university, as she drifted into social isolation. She shared a house with Daz and Rob Fowler (their relationship had recovered after the abortion and the summer break, though the old suburban certainty never returned); Simon