Beneath the Blonde by Stella Duffy

Author:Stella Duffy [Duffy, Stella]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 1997-09-26T14:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

With her LA flight leaving Heathrow at 3.30 that afternoon, Saz decided she might as well put the day to good use. She had been for her morning run as usual, though not for as long as before the tedious period of her recuperation. It had taken Molly hours of persuasion after the fire to convince Saz that she couldn’t run quite so hard and fast as she had before the burns. Her tightened skin and the scarring, especially on her upper legs, meant that she had to try various other forms of exercise to nudge her body back to the realm of peak condition she had come to expect. Days of swimming (and then plastering her legs and stomach with industrial strength moisturizer) were followed by new classes in yoga. Saz happily took to the swimming; after forty or fifty lengths she could emerge with some of the endorphin rush she had been used to getting from her morning run. The yoga was less successful. She stuck it out for ten weeks until the end of class lecture on “Breathing For The New Millennium” meant that she decided she’d rather suffer pulled burn scars than go through one more cat stretch ever again. Two weeks later, when her specialist gave her permission to return to running, she’d done so with unadulterated elation. After three months of working up to speed, Saz eventually returned to a slower but regular four miles in the early hours of every morning, her limbs gradually becoming her own as some scars faded to nothingness and others settled into being the new body that she was beginning to acknowledge as her own.

By eight-thirty Saz had finished her run, showered, special scar-moisturized, dressed, packed and was making a phone call to Carrie. Since their messy break up four years earlier Carrie had eventually become Saz’s friend, her tenant and, on occasion, a part-time, cash-hungry, freelance employee.

“I know it’s early to wake you …”

“Damn right it is, Saz. Better be good.”

“Come looking with me today?”

“Clothes, gifts or business?”

“Business. But it’s in town, so you can make it all that girl-shit too if you get a move on.”

“Only if you give me cash today. I’m broke.”

Saz, cradling the cordless phone between her ear and left shoulder, grabbed her alarm clock and threw it in her bag, “When aren’t you ever broke?”

“When I’ve just been visiting granny-bitch-queen-from-hell.”

“I really think you ought to view your visits to granny as a time to commune with the wisdom of the elderly, not make a fast buck.”

“You only think that because you don’t have any slobbering aged relatives of your own to put up with. Anyway, this is different broke. I’m taking Blair to Prague …”

“With no money?”

“Close. I’m taking Blair to Prague because the guy I’ve been life modelling for has this cousin with a travel agency …”

“Of course he does.”

Carrie ignored Saz’s sarcasm and continued, “And if I do six more free sittings for his class, that’s the rest of this

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