Free Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley Page A

was picking up on some discussion they had only broken off a few moments before, although in fact they hadn’t talked once, since it was over, about what had happened to her.—I mean, apart from physically. Just like a tummy upset. That’s all it was: a nuisance.
    —All right, if you say so.
    For the first time Sheila talked about her studies. She had to write an essay on the
Oresteia
which she said was all about the sex war, female avenging Furies and male reason.
    —
The gods are disgusted at you
, she said gleefully.—Apollo to the Furies.
Apoptustoi theosis. Never let your filth touch anything in my sacred shrine.
    When Hilary was in her seat in the coach, Sheila stayed hanging around outside the window although Hilary signed to her to go, there was no need to wait. They laughed at one another through the glass, helpless to communicate: for the first time they were in tune together as they used to be. Sheila mouthed something and Hilary mimed elaborately: frowned, shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t understand. Sheila put her face close to the glass and cupped her hands round her mouth, shouting. She was wearing a woollen knitted hat with knitted flowers pulled down over her ears.
    —Give my love to everybody!
    Hilary saw that all of a sudden her sister didn’t want her to go. She was seized then by an impulse to struggle off the coach, to stay and fight, as if Sheila had after all been abducted by a Bluebeard: she felt focused as a crusader in her opposition to Neil. She even half turned round in her seat, as if to get out. But there was a man in the seat beside her, she would have had to ask him to move, he was settled behind his newspaper. The moment and the possibility passed. The coach reversed, the sisters waved frantically, and then Sheila was gone and Hilary subsided into her solitude, keeping her face averted from the man who had seen too much of her excitement, and whose newspaper anyway would make her sick if she accidentally read any of the headlines.
    Above the city buildings the sky was blue and pale with light, drawn across by thin skeins of transparent cloud. Beyond the outskirts of the city everything was bursting with the spring growth which was further on over here than in the east. The tips of the hedgerows and the trees, if they hadn’t yet come into leaf, gave off a red haze where the twigs swelled and shone. It seemed extraordinary to Hilary that her life must at some point soon change as completely and abruptly as Sheila’s had, so that everythingfamiliar would be left behind. She sat with bubbles of excitement rising in her chest. The scruffy undistinguished countryside outside the coach window seemed to her beautiful. It desolated her to think that when she was dead she wouldn’t be able to see it: cows, green hummocky fields, suburban cottages of weathered brick, a country factory with smashed windows, an excited spatter of birds thrown up from a tree. Then she started to see these things as if she was dead already, and they were persisting after her, and she had been allowed back, and must take in everything hungrily while she had the chance, every least tiny detail.

PHOSPHORESCENCE
    THE COOLEY BOYS used to spend all their summers at the cottage in West Wales. They had a boat, so most of the time they were on the water, or playing cricket on the beach, or helping their mother who was restoring the cottage. For whole days that summer when Graham was thirteen she was up on the roof in shorts and T-shirt and old daps, reslating. Their father went off every day alone, to paint landscapes.
    That summer, as usual, various friends and family came and went, either staying at the cottage or in the tiny primitive chalet at the other end of the meadow which Graham’s mother had done up for overspill visitors. It was to the chalet that Claudia and her family came: the Cooleys didn’t know them well, her husband was some sort of technician in Graham’s father’s lab at the