Free Ninepins by Rosy Thorton

sensation of detachment was complete. For those brief moments she was nowhere; she was loosed from her earthbound self; she was free and adrift. It was terrifying and wonderful all at once.
    I am swimming .
    Â 
    They were lucky compared with many divorced couples, reflected Laura, as she screwed the car by jerking degrees into the last available residents’ parking space in Simon’s street. Though perhaps it wasn’t down to luck, or only partly so; they made the effort, for their daughter’s sake, and what had begun as conscious endeavour seemed to have fallen at some point into amicable habit on both sides. Whatever the reasons for it, picking up Beth from a weekend at her father’s house was no kind of hardship.
    She leaned across to reach in the glove box for a pen and the strip of guest permits, filling in today’s date in the next available box and propping it prominently inside the windscreen. Tessa helped matters, of course; outspoken, but warm and completely non-judgmental, Laura sometimes thought she would have been easier to be married to than Simon.
    Climbing out and clicking the lock, she walked along the terraced row to the tall, Edwardian townhouse which Simon had bought with the equity they’d managed to release from Ninepins – something, besides Beth, to show for eight years of married life. Property in Cambridge was far from cheap, and most of Tessa’s savings had been sunk into the purchase, too; the rest, she had no qualms about disclosing, was dwindling fast, being called upon at frequent intervals to bridge the gap between the mortgage and Simon’s unreliable earnings. Simon, who used to be private about such things when he and Laura were together – even sharply defensive, at times – just shrugged helplessly and grinned along.
    It was Simon who opened the door tonight, stepping back on to a pair of Fireman Sam wellingtons to let her into the hall. The mess was very much as usual: the coats heaped on the floor beneath the overladen hooks, the siding of plastic railtrack extending from the sitting room door. It was the silence that was a surprise.
    â€˜Are they out?’
    â€˜Thank the Lord.’ He passed a hand across his brow in a gesture which, she suspected, was only partly theatrical. ‘Come and have a drink, while we’ve got the chance.’
    He took out two beers from the fridge; Laura, who would have preferred tea, took one with a sympathetic smile. At least he remembered to fetch her a glass; Tessa, she had no doubt, swigged hers straight from the bottle, as Simon now proceeded to do.
    â€˜Cheers,’ he said, belatedly, as he lowered his bottle.
    â€˜Where have they gone? The park?’ It was where they went at all hours and in all weathers, whenever sanity required them to vacate the house. Tessa would disappear for a moment, then burst back in with armfuls of small anoraks and scarves and mittens and bundle them all up and usher them out and along the road, swinging Roly on to her shoulders and uttering exhortations about football and fresh air.
    â€˜God knows. Probably. They took the dog.’
    â€˜They took the – ?’ Laura sat down rather heavily on a kitchen chair.
    â€˜I know, I know. It was Tessa’s idea – or rather it was Alfie’s idea to start with, and he and Jack and Roly have been on about it every waking moment, until Tessa gave way.’
    â€˜But …’ Laura looked round at the collected debris of the kitchen: the table strewn with colouring books and lidless felt-tip pens and half of someone’s sandwich; the floor tiles sticky with nameless unwiped spillages – and, yes, she now saw, in the corner by the back door, the patch of spread newspapers and the bowl marked WOOF. Three sons under the age seven, a job which required Simon to attempt to work from home: were these not already enough?
    â€˜Dougie’s very sweet.’ He took another draught of beer and