—
SHE’D MISSED Alex’s forties: “I’m in my fifties, now, Mum . . .” He didn’t look it . . . maybe he was lying, maybe your baby’s just always your baby. But she didn’t feel able to stay at home with her son who was now older than her. There was a lot she could’ve learned from him, she knew, but that would’ve meant staying in that flat where the temperature was so far below zero that the numbers were now meaningless. She didn’t feel able to send Alex away either. She washed. Not just her fringe, she washed all over. And she took a different outfit out of her suitcase and put it on. She didn’t say good-bye to Alex, but left him sleeping on a mattress they’d set up in the second bedroom, between the puppet stages, still makeless, though by twelve-thirty his presence would have faded away altogether. Jill locked the front door behind her and made two journeys: first stop work, to ask after her boys, the ones she still had hope for. The front desk warden made a few phone calls in a low voice with her back turned, then told her they were fine, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and wasn’t it tomorrow that she was due back?
“Good, yes, that’s right . . . see you tomorrow.”
—
JILL’S SECOND JOURNEY ended at home in Holland Park. On the train she thought about the likelihood that Vi would be there with Jacob. She’d been there in the camera shot with Jill and Jacob, however momentarily. His answer had still come to her, and when she got home the front door was unlocked and she found the house as dark and as cold as the flat she’d left earlier; it was twelve-thirty and she found Jacob slumped over the kitchen table with his headphones on. She took them off and asked him again: “What’s the hottest time of day?”
The answer, without verbal deadweight this time: “2PM . . .”
His arms around her, and hers around him, knots and tangles they could only undo with eyes closed. “You’re so warm.”
“About Presence,” she said. “Scrap it. Don’t do this to anyone else.”
“Agreed.”
—
JACOB MENTIONED ALEX once, as they were comparing notes. “I wish we had a picture, at least,” he said, and Jill knew what and whom he was referring to. She didn’t agree, but neither did she contradict his wish. It was his own, after all.
a brief history of the homely wench society
From: Willa Reid <[email protected]>
To: Dayang Sharif <[email protected]>
Date: November 12th 2012, 18:25
Subject: JOIN US
Dear Dayang,
Among Cambridge University’s many clubs, unions, academic forums, interest groups, activist cells and societies, there’s a sisterhood that emerged in direct opposition to a brotherhood. What this sisterhood lacks in numbers it more than makes up for in lionheartedness1: The Homely Wench Society. The Homely Wenches can’t be discussed without first noting that it was the Bettencourt Society that necessitated the existence of precisely this type of organized and occasionally belligerent female presence at the university.