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

if in permanent acceptance of a high-heeled shoe.

Eden
    O n the first day, Eve began. Well, it wasn’t actually the first day. It had been four and a half weeks since they moved, but she had needed that time. She deserved a little holiday, and boxes didn’t just unpack themselves into a new house. But now that she felt rested, and everything had been put away, she was ready to begin.
    First, she would need breakfast. She couldn’t begin on an empty stomach. And since it was such a significant day, she felt, breakfast should be somewhat celebratory. One of the farewell presents from the girls in the office was an apron printed with a picture of Michelango’s David . She put it on, wishing they could see her now: ducking out to the shed in her gumboots to get an egg from underneath one of her own hens. She made pancakes, stacked them with maple syrup and banana slices, and took her plate out onto the veranda.
    It was on this veranda that Eve had fallen in love with the place. The real estate agent, a chestnut-haired woman whom Eve was fairly sure was on Valium, had brought them out onto it to show them the view. ‘Paradise,’ she had sighed, parking her tortoiseshell glasses on top of her head and gesturing to the thoroughly unexceptional rural scene before her. In one direction there were rugged-up horses in a field of apple-tree stumps, and in the other an orchard of gnarled trees that dropped economically unviable fruit onto the grass. But to Eve, it was Paradise, this old pickers’ hut flaking its green paint into a valley an hour’s drive from the city. She loved the ruffles of sweet william along the driveway and the letterbox that perched in the forked branches of an old peach tree. Inside, the hut was daggy and funny, with chequered linoleum lifting in all the corners and incongruous, ostentatious light fittings. But after the sale of the city apartment, they’d been able to buy it outright and still have enough left over to buy a nice car for Adam, to take the sting out of commuting.
    It was still dark in the mornings when he came into the bedroom to bring Eve a cup of tea just before he left for work.
    ‘Today’s the day, hey?’ he had said this morning, and kissed her cheek.
    ‘Yep. Today. Today, I begin.’
    Eve finished her pancakes and washed the dishes. In the shower, she shaved her legs and noticed that her toenails were quite long. When she got out, she trimmed them with clippers. Then filed them into a nice shape. And since they were such a nice shape, it seemed a shame not to paint them. And so she did, in a shade of polish called Rose Madder Lake, which was exactly the same name as that of pencil number twenty-one in her set of Derwent Watercolours. Rose Madder Lake . It really ought, Eve thought as she applied a second coat, to have been the name of a famous synchronised swimmer. She sat for a while with her feet in front of the fan heater. And smiled when she realised that she had just begun. No-one could say that she hadn’t painted anything today.
    On the second day, Eve decided, she would begin properly. But what to wear? Everyone knows that there is no sense beginning a new gym campaign without a series of new lycra outfits; or horse-riding without jodhpurs and a nice velvet hat; or ballet classes without pointe shoes and a tutu. And Eve knew that she could not begin, seriously and formally, as a painter until she was dressed as one.
    She had given away all her office clothes as a kind of insurance against going back and this had left her with a wardrobe full of smart casuals and party clothes. Back when she was only a hobbyist, dabbling with her paints in the sunroom of the city apartment on weekends, she used to wear Adam’s old T-shirts and track pants. And they wouldn’t do anymore.
    There was a small town about twenty winding kilometres away. It had suffered a fatal blow ten years back when the arse fell out of the apple industry, but was being kept on life support by the hippies