Free Scissors, Paper, Stone by Elizabeth Day

imaginings, and, in a strange sort of way, this gave her a sense of power. If she kept it concealed, Charlotte realised that no one else could ever truly know her. And this meant that she was in control. She felt intensely vulnerable under Gabriel’s scrutiny but she still had secrets from him. There was a blackness nestling within her, a poisonous seepage of self-inflicted pain that she would never expose to the light.
     
    The art gallery was a single white room, dotted with rectangular plinths that rose up from the white floor like sawn-off tree trunks. To access it, you had to walk down a rickety metal fire-escape staircase and it was difficult to negotiate in heels. Just as she reached the last step, Charlotte tripped up and had to grasp hold of Gabriel’s arm to steady herself, so that they ended up spilling drunkenly into the room, almost teetering off balance, and everyone appeared to stop talking at precisely the same moment. Charlotte instantly felt out of her depth. They were late – Charlotte’s fault, naturally – and now she could imagine all his glamorous female friends looking at her high heels with the disapprobation mature women reserved for trivial young things like her who wore unsuitable, cheap shoes.
    ‘Gabe!’ came a screeching voice from across the room. ‘Over here.’
    They looked over. It was Florence, a pained-looking woman in her late thirties with a powdered face and a deep wrinkle between her plucked eyebrows. She was, as she never seemed to tire of reminding Charlotte, one of Gabriel’s oldest and closest female friends. They had met when both were starting out as trainees at one of London’s biggest PR firms in the early nineties and, for a brief while, had shared a flat together. It was a period of time that both of them repeatedly referred to with winks and wistful shakes of the head that signified some boring private joke.
    Charlotte had once spent an entire evening with both of them during which the sight of an ashtray on a hotel mantelpiece had triggered a long-ago memory of Gabriel accidentally setting alight a curtain. The two of them were in hysterical fits of giggles even though nothing about the story was particularly funny. Charlotte had found herself laughing uneasily along with the joke, aware that Florence was deliberately pressing home her advantage: this is something I know about Gabriel that you don’t, she seemed to be saying, because you will never rival me in this man’s affections.
    It was Charlotte’s contention that Florence was secretly in love with Gabriel – a belief that he dismissed as ‘absurd’ any time she raised it. ‘Besides,’ he would say. ‘Who would want to sleep with Florence? It would be like shagging a man.’
    Charlotte looked at her now. She was a woman who had spent her whole life maintaining a fiction of her own appearance; a woman who cultivated extreme skinniness because it would make other women jealous rather than because it suited her. Her body was straight up and down, usually clothed in black dresses accessorised with a mad bohemian twist – belts made from Caribbean calabash gourds or necklaces woven together with bright Peruvian threads – and neat flat-soled ballet pumps tipped with velvet. Tonight, she had done something odd with her hair so that it was swept back off her high forehead and tucked behind her ears, kept in place with copious hairspray so that the blonde strands looked brittle to the touch. Two veins stood out thickly from the fleshy scrag of her neck.
    ‘Hi, darling,’ she said, kissing Gabriel on the lips. ‘So what do you think of the photographs? Pretty grim, no?’
    ‘We’ve only just arrived,’ he replied, scanning the walls quickly, ‘but they don’t look too bad. I like that one.’ Gabriel pointed at an overblown black-and-white study of a series of corrugated-iron shacks.
    ‘Hmmm. Very misery chic.’ Florence, who had intertwined her arm with Gabriel’s during this brief exchange,