The Girls of Summer: a Novel by Katie Bishop

Author:Katie Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

We eat on stools in the kitchen, Mum seeming to have decided the dining table isn’t worth setting up for just the two of us. Sitting alongside each other, it’s easier not to talk much, and we shovel down sausage casserole in near silence.

“I saw Caroline the other day,” she says eventually, our plates almost empty. “At the big Tesco in town.”

I don’t look up from my food. “Oh yeah?”

“She’s married now, you know. Two little kids. They look just like her.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Since our last day together in Greece, I had seen Caroline just once. It had been easy enough to avoid her when I arrived back. She had stayed on at sixth form while I had barely left the house, and when she went away to university exactly as planned, it had been a relief to know she was gone. But one day at the train station, I saw her on the opposite platform, a twenty-first-birthday balloon tethered to her wrist, a gaggle of girls I only vaguely recognized from school surrounding her, brandishing cans of cocktails. She had only seen me just as the train pulled in, and her delighted expression had wavered. By then I had been back for over two years, and I had briefly thought how different I must look, my hair unwashed and scraped back off my face, my clothes not quite fitting properly anymore. When the train drew away, they were gone, leaving behind a trail of confetti, pink and glittering as a breeze blew it along the length of the platform.

Our parents’ friendship had faltered after that, dinners at each other’s houses transforming into terse greetings at neighborhood watch meetings and pretending not to see each other in the supermarket, Caroline’s mum still resentful of me for leaving her daughter to travel back alone. The separation of the two families was cemented when my parents divorced and they could no longer even pretend that we would all have to have dinner again soon, when everyone was less busy.

“People act like it’s catching, your husband upping and leaving you,” Mum would say. “It turns out it isn’t you they want to be friends with, after all. It’s the idea of you. Living in a nice house and being friends with other nice couples.”

For once I thought her complaining might have been accurate.

“She asked after you,” Mum says. “I told her you would be back.”

I swallow, the food tasteless against my tongue.

“She wouldn’t want to hear from me,” I say. “Not after all this time.”

After the dishes are cleared away, we move to the living room. Glasses of wine are finished and refilled, and Mum already seems slightly less upright as she perches in her favorite armchair, the stiff-backed one that leaves little room to relax. There’s some talent show she likes on television, and I’m grateful for something for us to stare at until it’s an acceptable time to go to bed. On an advert break Mum asks me if my dad has called, the much-practiced question sounding painstakingly casual.

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