Free Easy Peasy by Lesley Glaister Page B

– handsome.
    I thought I was in love with him. The love blossomed up in my heart whenever we sat, together with my parents, round the table and Daddy laughed at one of Guy’s jokes, or Guy leant respectfully forward to listen to Daddy’s advice. I felt approved of, grown-up, included. But when we were alone … At first it was good. We bought a flat in Highbury. Guy had the roof converted to a garden with a sun-lounge and Astro-turf where we could sunbathe naked, visible only to helicopters and low-flying planes. But I grew bored with Guy. I knew it when I found myself obsessively inviting people round to dinner or organising outings. The prospect of a weekend at home with only the two of us appalled me. ‘We’re never alone,’ he’d complain, and when I caught myself mentally adding, ‘Thank God’, I knew it was over.
    I could never have taken Foxy home to sit at the table with Daddy. I have never loved a person like I love Foxy. It is so intense … I don’t think I would wish to love like this again.
    If Foxy was gearing up to finish with me tonight then I have had a reprieve. Poor Daddy. One effect of his … he could not have foreseen. If she was going to finish with me then she still will. I must not be complacent. As if I ever could where she is concerned. She will have to wait now. How long … weeks? months? till after Christmas? till I am ‘over it’ whenever that might be?
    Over it? I don’t think I have started it yet. He is not really dead to me yet. And until then, how can I grieve?
    When I have a nightmare Foxy holds me and soothes me, her voice gentle in my hair. She holds me until the fear has begun to subside, until I feel too hot and then, although I still want to be held, I move away to my side of the bed. In the worst nightmares I kill people. I do it carelessly, without thinking much about it and then I realise. Often the person I kill is a child. Sometimes I carry the dead child with me for a time, even dressing it, bathing it, tucking it into bed, until I realise that it is dead, that I killed it, and that is when I wake with the fist-in-my-throat attempt to scream.
    Although Foxy is so lovely in the night about my nightmares, she does not want to hear about them in the morning. She’ll listen if I insist on telling her, but when I start trying to work out the meanings she gets snappy. Dreams mean nothing, she says, it’s just waste electricity crackling about in your brain. So now Connie and I swap dreams over our morning coffee. I recounted to her one of the child-killing dreams. I said: ‘It is a warning, I must not have a child.’ But no. She said that the child represented an aspect of myself. ‘What aspect?’ I asked. She pinched her cigarette-holder between her lips and leafed through her dream book. ‘A part of your psyche you have discarded or should discard,’ she said, which gave me something to think about.
    One night, after one of Daddy’s dreams, I got up. Hazel was at a pyjama party at Bridget’s house so I was sleeping in her bunk which she hated me to do. ‘You make it smell,’ she always said, if she realised, but I did not and I never ate biscuits in her bed so there were no crumbs for her to complain about. I preferred the top bunk anyway, but I liked to sleep in Hazel’s bed when she wasn’t there. I don’t know why. The scream was not so loud from the bottom bunk but it woke me all the same and for a second I could not think where I was, could not think what the dark thing looming above me – the top bunk – was. The scream yanked me from a deep sleep into a sweaty trembling wakefulness. Because I was alone I got out of the bed. I went and stood by the night-light. I picked one of Hazel’s stickers from a white spot. Quietly, I opened the door and peered out on to the landing. I could hear Daddy’s voice. He wasn’t screaming now, he was