Free Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood

away and tried several other groups, hovering on their peripheries until the embarrassment of her apparent insignificance became unbearable. She looked over to where Henri held court, his chest proud and puffed and covered by a waistcoat of the same claret colour as the fluid in his glass, but she did not want to go and simper at his side. She would show him that she could manage, that she could make herself useful. And so she went into the kitchen and took the plastic film from the top of a fresh platter of hors d’oeuvres.
    She moved, purposefully now, between conversations, platter in hand, but the guests either waved her away as if she were an insect, or seemed not to see her at all. She made two complete circuits of the rooms into which the party had spread before giving up. She leaned on the wall just to one side of the open fire and popped a shrimp into her mouth, bursting its curled body between her teeth. Henri was looking at her from across the room, and suddenly she understood exactly what it meant to be caught in someone’s gaze. She felt herself to be held there for a moment, trapped. Then she was released, Henri’s eyes travelling to the ebony-skinned mannequin, who was bald but dressed in scarlet, standing with a plate of cheeses in her arms. He smiled and flicked his eyes back again to where Justine stood, identically posed. His smile broadened and she felt, first in her neck, and then simultaneously in her elbows and her knees, a stiffness that was creeping, seizing, cramping, aching. Before it reached her feet, her hands, Justine dropped the platter and ran. For the door. For her life.
    Justine is living at home again now. Most evenings Jill brings home movies from the shop for Justine to watch, but she’s seen everything in stock. In the afternoons their mother tucks a crocheted blanket around Justine’s immobile legs and wheels her out onto the porch. Justine hates it, the horrible parody of it, her mother sitting with her as if she were a toddler, turning the pages of picture books prescribed by the woman from the rehab clinic.
    ‘Say “duck” darling,’ her mother says, pointing. ‘D-uck.’
    ‘Uck.’
    ‘Like this, love: d-uck.’
    ‘Uck.’
    ‘Not quite, sweetie. D-uck.’
    When Justine gets tired, her eyelids fall closed with a faint click.
    ‘Don’t get frustrated, lovey. I know you’re trying. You’re improving so much. Just have one more go and then we’ll give it a rest. Have a try. D-uck.’
    ‘Daaaaa-ck.’
    ‘Oh, clever girl! Well done. That’s right. Duck. Oh, you’re doing so well.’
    This is what her mother says, but Justine can see her wondering how it is that they have been so reduced, down to words of one syllable. And Justine has no means by which she might explain.
    She had been found early in the morning after the party, face down in a garden bed freshly planted out with pansies, less than two blocks from Henri’s house. In the days that followed, the owners of the pansies told her mother their side of things, a hundred times.
    ‘I said don’t touch her,’ the woman said. ‘I said that’s the way you get stuck with a needle. I thought she was a druggie, you see. But he doesn’t listen to me.’
    ‘I thought it was too late,’ the man said. ‘When I put my hand on her arm she was all hard and cold. I rolled her over and she was stiff as a board.’
    ‘Then I had a good look at the dress,’ the woman said. ‘And I knew she must have come from a good home.’
    Even now, two years later, Justine holds the same pose, both arms bent ninety degrees, the fingers of each hand locked together in neat salutes. And still the doctors stick to their story and call it a stroke. They just ignore the things that don’t make sense. Like the almost synthetic texture of Justine’s hair, which no longer seems to grow. And the fact that her feet, two sizes smaller than they were when she left home, are arched and angled downwards, toes crimped together and pointed, as