Free Love and Fallout by Kathryn Simmonds

and unplugging the mud; the green-streaked inside of the roll-top bath; Di sitting with a placard beside the road; Rori turning away into a winter night as I call after her. I say something inconsequential about being young, only staying for a few weeks. He gives up.
    â€˜Well I’ll never know what it was like, will I? Not that I could have been there.’
    â€˜The men got too aggressive, they wanted to take over.’
    He looks at me, ‘So you’re telling me that none of those women acted like banshees. I remember the footage too.’ He blinks at the ceiling. ‘Why are we talking about this? God, if I knew it was going to end in a row I never would have…’ He stops.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Nothing.’ He shifts in the bed.
    â€˜You said I . I never would have…’
    â€˜Let’s not have an argument.’
    Suddenly it makes sense. ‘You and Maggie were in this together, weren’t you?’
    He sits up properly, concerned. ‘Look Tessa, she phoned me, ok? She phoned a few weeks ago, told me she thought it would be fun, and it was going to be a treat, and did I think it was a good idea. And I said yes. So she wrote the letter.’
    â€˜My own husband.’
    â€˜I don’t see the problem.’
    â€˜No? Then why did you blame it all on Maggie?’
    â€˜I did it for you, Tessa.’ He thuds the duvet for emphasis.
    â€˜No. You did it for yourself.’
    I throw off my side of the duvet, cross the landing to Pippa’s room and get into her bed. Behind my eyelids purple lava is bubbling. I try some diaphragmatic breathing, pushing my belly out on the in breath, but it doesn’t help and in a couple of minutes I open my eyes again. How are we supposed to sort out our relationship if he’s busy trying to turn me into someone else? Communication, in the corny language of therapy, that’s the word Valeria always repeats. We are supposed to talk honestly. But what’s honest about this?
    All around are signs of my disappeared daughter: a framed swimming certificate, her rows of spine-cracked A-level text books bleached by the sun, an empty bottle of perfume on the dresser. I pick up a discarded magazine and leaf through. Pages and pages of fashion; an actress under thirty who already looks airbrushed to within an inch of her life. More fashion. A double-page spread featuring the best and worst products for busting cellulite, complete with close-up photos of dimply thighs and bottoms: pinch a handful of skin and squeeze, do you see an ‘orange peel’ effect?
    I close the magazine, reminded of the afternoon I caught Pippa, hardly into puberty, with a measuring tape wrapped around the widest part of her thigh. The diets started when she was fifteen and I tried to talk her out of them, but they kept coming, one after the other, grim as prison wardens, each with a new set of restrictions, each making her pallid and irritable and tired. During her A-levels I left a copy of Fat is a Feminist Issue in her bedroom and found it again with a warning note: ‘Please don’t interfere.’
    I turn onto my side, thinking about Pippa and playing back the argument with Pete. How long has he wanted me transformed? Was it simply a reaction to Maggie’s idea? Another voice takes over in my head, a practical no-nonsense voice, reminiscent of Jean’s from camp. Come on old thing, stop feeling sorry for yourself . This voice usually straightens me out when things go awry, but tonight I don’t have the energy to listen. My mind lurches from Pete to Pippa, then floods with faces from the past until I fall at last into an uneasy dream.

6
    Woman in a Bath
    I woke up with pains in my legs and buttocks. The hood of my sleeping bag felt damp and my eyes stung from lack of sleep. After the men had vanished I’d stayed awake, enacting their return in my imagination, convinced of footsteps with every creaking branch.
    The walls of the