Free The Paper Eater by Liz Jensen

embrace which they both shrank from.
    – I came under my own steam, said Tilda, taking a step back and smoothing her mauve shell-suit. She nodded inthe direction of an electric buggy parked on the kerbside, its disabled sticker prominently displayed.
    – How are you health-wise? asked Hannah dutifully.
    – Well, the laparoscopic investigations continue, sighed Tilda. We’re coming up to the tenth anniversary of the start of that. I’ve got more keyhole surgery booked for March, but in the meantime the doctor who deals with my connective-tissue question is taking long leave. And d’you remember that polyp I told you about?
    It was after Hannah was diagnosed with Crabbe’s Block that Tilda’s health problems came into their own. Internal organs, usually. Nothing visible. It was only when Hannah was head-hunted into Head Office’s Munchhausen’s Department that she realised her own mother counted as a classic seeker of attention. Munchhausen’s by Proxy, to begin with. Then the real thing. The Liberty Corporation, it dawned on Hannah, had known about her Munchie mother from the start. That’s why they’d recruited her.
    She wasn’t offended. She was pleased to have been spirited away from home like that. Pleased to have been given a role.
    As Tilda continued the story of her latest medical adventures – the scheduling of appointments seemed to be a key feature – Hannah looked round at the neat fuchsia’d borders of the tram station. The pressed rubber chips of the platform felt different under her feet, as though they were full of packed energy.
    – Anyway it’s my kneecaps now, finished Tilda. The plastic’s fatigued.
    – I don’t remember it like this, said Hannah. Something’s changed.
    – Well, what d’you expect? Tilda ducked into her buggy and gripped the little steering wheel.
    It made her even smaller, Hannah thought, like a toddler in a pretend car.
    – St Placid’s had more makeovers than any other city, Tilda said proudly, starting the ignition. Even we can’t keep track!
    But it wasn’t a makeover thing – it was something else, something less tangible than a revamp, Hannah thought, oddly aware of a springy feeling underfoot as she trailed her mother’s electric buggy on foot down the residential streets past rhododendron hedges, mail-boxes, and tidy lawns dotted with miniature wells, windmills, and bird-baths with plastic ivy. Water features were big this year, and lawn furniture with pop-up parasols. The lavender smell gusted out from the gas pumps. It seemed more potent than usual, as though it were fighting a competing perfume from a rival source.
    Tilda’s ground-floor apartment comprised a box shape within the larger box of the block itself, which was painted in variegated pastel shades. Inside, Tilda had chosen lilac as a theme, to complement the lavender. Here the smell seemed more voluptuous and luxuriant, like a bath-house.
    While Tilda fussed in the kitchen with her little percolator, Hannah glanced around the living-room. Her mother’s latest craze was for Japanese flower-arranging, and the occasional tables were cluttered with cut palm leaves, wires, secateurs, dried-out sticks and other Ikebana accoutrements. On the shelf by the CD rack was a hologram of Hannah as a child, clutching a Marilyn doll in one hand, and in the other, a plastic monster, a gorgon with multiple heads. The small face overwhelmed by glasses, the pale eyes not meeting the camera’s stare.
    – You probably can’t even remember what it was like before, said Tilda, returning to the living-room with the coffee and re-arranging her flowers, a big bouquet of blue irises and orange tulips. See? They’re in Liberty colours. That’s a nice touch, isn’t it?
    – What? asked Hannah. The heat in Tilda’s apartment was already making her sleepy and confused.
    – You can’t remember politics. D’you still drink it black?You were barely an adult. All that incompetence. I can’t believe we put up with