Free Empty Space by M. John Harrison Page A

light, cobwebby film, a skin of dust supported by surface tension; perhaps the birds pottering about in front of her. She
    hoped it wasn’t the children.
    Carshalton is served by two stations; to reduce her chances of meeting the boy again, she decided against Carshalton Beeches and made her way up North Street to the other one. It was closer
    anyway.
    Arriving home an hour or two later, she discovered Marnie in the garden, frowning puzzledly over the contents of the flower-border at the base of the summerhouse.
    ‘I don’t know where all these have come from. Did you plant them?’
    Anna, who had anticipated having her house to herself and felt put out, first claimed to have no idea; then, feeling that she ought to show some kind of authority, though she hadn’t
    gardened for years, amended: ‘They’re exotics, darling. I think they’re doing rather well. Don’t you?’
    They were. Though none of them were tall, they occupied the little border with a kind of dense self-confidence. Slack, poppyish blooms predominated, but there was a form of lunaria too,
    and something that promised to uncurl into an oversized altar lily. The poppies had a curious brown metallic colour to their petals, which drooped from pale green fleshy stems, curved towards the
    top like the stems of anemones, as if they weren’t made to support weight. Between them, lower down, as thick as a lawn, you could see the pubic tangle of a single dark feathery growth
    – similar to yarrow leaves but finer in construction – which seemed to repeat itself at every scale; you soon lost your place in it. There was no point in admitting that the border
    had fostered no poppies before today. ‘They look as if they’re made of paper,’ Marnie said, separating the flowerheads with her fingers, bending the stems this way and that so
    that she could peer down between them – as if she had been thinking of buying them but was changing her mind. ‘Do you think they smell of anything? They’re very artificial
    colours.’ She stood back, stared up at the summerhouse, and seemed about to speak further.
    ‘Before you start,’ Anna warned her, ‘I’m not having it renovated, pulled down or redeveloped as a granny annexe.’
    Marnie looked disappointed but gave the most uncombative of shrugs. They stood there a moment or two more, listening to the liquid early evening notes of a blackbird in the orchard; then made
    the mutual if unspoken decision to go back into the house. On the way, Marnie said: ‘I thought we’d do omelettes.’
    ‘I hope you brought wine, Marnie, or you can bugger off.’
    While her daughter cooked the omelettes Anna made salad.
    ‘That box of old things you found?’ Marnie said. ‘I put them back in the summerhouse. They were just some old pin-badges and things from college.’ She laughed.
    ‘God knows what I was like,’ she said. ‘Early 1980s social science postgrad, fifty years too late. You’d have thought the world would change more in all that time.’
    Her career in contemporary economic history prompted her to add, ‘But the money went, I suppose.’ There was, she believed, no money without change; no change without money. She poked
    about in the back of the fridge where Anna stored, for periods of fourteen days to three weeks, very small portions of leftovers: half a boiled Maris Bard potato, two dessert spoons of frozen
    peas dried up in a saucer. ‘What’s in this awful bit of paper?’
    ‘It’s cheese, darling. Please don’t make faces like that. I bought it because of the name. But then I forgot the name. It was something like “100 yards”,’
    she decided. ‘It’s cheese. I bought it at the cheese shop in the village.’
    After they had eaten, they finished the bottle of wine. Marnie switched on the TV and surfed desultorily, sampling a reality show in which people were invited to queue for items they
    couldn’t afford to buy; then Ice Melt!, now in its fifteenth season; before fixing with an