Free Stop the Clock by Alison Mercer

it’s permanent.’
    ‘Do you really need me there to tell them that?’ he said.
    ‘Yes, I do. We need to do it together.’
    ‘If you say so. Sounds like something out of one of your parenting books,’ he said.
    ‘It has to be done. We can’t put it off any longer,’ she told him, but he had already hung up.
    After she’d taken the girls to school the next day she finally finished packing up Hannah’s stuff.
    There wasn’t all that much to get rid of, when it came down to it. CDs and skinny jeans showing varying degrees of wear and tear; bedding; a poster of some unhealthy-looking pop star. Hannah wasn’t one to set much store by owning things – she’d always spent all her money on going out.
    She couldn’t help but pick up traces of Hannah’s smell: damp denim and smoke and beer, suggestive of all the nights Hannah had walked back in the rain from the station after a night out.
    Adam still had a number of shirts hanging up next to her dresses, a squash racket in the under-the-stairs cupboard, a Brand Director of the Year award on the bookcase in the sitting room. But Hannah had been completely purged.
    She had told the girls that Hannah had moved in with Ellen, to keep her company. Something about the way she’d said it must have put them off asking any questions. Perhaps she should have arranged some kind of farewell . . . but no. Children needed their fathers, but plenty of people never saw their aunts.
    She loaded Hannah’s things into the car and drove across London to her mother’s.
    ‘She’s not here, you know,’ Ellen said as Lucy dumped the first box in the grimy hallway. ‘She’s at work.’
    ‘I know,’ Lucy said.
    She went back out to the car. Ellen didn’t move to help. When Lucy came back in Ellen had folded her arms and looked displeased. She was wearing a man’s denim shirt, slightly stained, over grey sweatpants, and her long raggedy hair, which had once been golden blonde but was now rough and grey, hung in loose drifts over her shoulders.
    ‘What if she doesn’t want all this stuff?’ Ellen asked.
    ‘Then she can throw it away,’ Lucy said, dumping a bin bag on the box and turning to go back outside.
    ‘Are you going to come in properly and sit down?’ Ellen asked as she came back in with another bin bag.
    ‘Can’t, I’m sorry,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve got to be at the school gate at three.’
    Which was true. She also couldn’t face the old photos of herself and Hannah beaming for the camera.
    ‘It’s been a while,’ Ellen said. ‘How are the girls?’
    Ellen had never been the sort of grandmother who babysits on a regular basis, nor yet a spoiler, armed with sweets. Her interaction with the girls was always muted when she was on Lucy’s territory, but on the rare occasions when Lucy brought the girls to the flat Ellen became bolder, barking out questions about school and friends and favourite games.
    The girls seemed to accept Ellen’s foibles – her domestic sluttishness, her strange mix of aggression and defensiveness, the smell of gin that sometimes clung toher; they always seemed more pleased than not to see her. And why not? She was the only grandmother they had.
    ‘Why don’t you come round on Sunday?’ Lucy said. ‘I can pick you up and drop you back if you like. We’re free all day.’
    She would tell her then. With the girls out of earshot, but still around. That way, Ellen wouldn’t be able to probe too deeply.
    ‘That’s a possibility, I suppose,’ Ellen said. ‘Will Adam be there?’
    ‘Er, no. He’ll be away. He’s been away a lot lately.’
    ‘I know he doesn’t want to see me,’ Ellen said. ‘You don’t need to try and hide it.’
    Lucy decided not to respond to this either. She came back from the car with the last of Hannah’s things: her guitar.
    ‘I do hope she’s not going to try and play that thing while she’s here,’ Ellen said. ‘She’s a rather selfish girl, isn’t she? To be honest, Lucy, I don’t know how