The Move by Felicity Everett

Author:Felicity Everett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Douglas had disappeared from view now. Only one of the dogs, Diego or Frida, I wasn’t sure which, could still be seen, sniffing in the nettles by the side of the road, as though it had caught the scent of a fox.

15

As I rolled back the studio door, I told myself the nervous flutter in my stomach was one of anticipation for the potting I planned to do, rather than one of dread that some new voodoo tribute might await me. The hapless bird had, after all, been trapped and slow-cooked thanks to my oversight, not to some phantom stalker’s malevolence. I had worked hard to overlay my recollection of the event with Nick’s more plausible one, and had, for the most part succeeded, except when a sudden vivid flashback brought to mind the gape of the bird’s hollow eye socket or the rake of its inch-long talon against my skin. Then I would find my pulse racing all over again.

The first thing I did – to freshen things up rather than to release any bad bird juju – was to open all the windows, although it was disconcerting when a sprightly breeze sprang up, rattling the polythene around my clay and riffling the pages of my notebook until it skittered off the workbench onto the floor.

I’d expected my precious pots to be in pieces when I opened the kiln, but I hadn’t bargained for the hundreds of splintered shards I discovered, nor for the layer of clay dust that their shattering had left on its every plane and crevice. I could have cried, especially as it could only have been my mistake; it must have been. What random stalker would know how to adjust the temperature and switch off the override? They wouldn’t. And even though I’d been working this same kiln for over a decade, could have programmed it in my sleep, I couldn’t deny that my concentration lately had been on the patchy side.

It felt cathartic, sweeping the detritus out of the kiln, chipping away at the hardened splashes of glaze, poking into every hard-to-reach corner with my cloth. It reminded me of spring-cleaning Trenchard Street when the boys were young. I’d known I couldn’t compete with Nick’s ex in looks and charisma, so I’d put myself at his service instead – and not just in the bedroom. Naïve of me really to think that keeping on top of the housework would be any substitute for whatever dirty tricks she’d had in her repertoire, but for a while I’d given it a go – letting home-made cassoulet catch on the hob while I vac-ed round and plumped up cushions and lit scented candles in time for his homecoming.

I suppose if I’d known then that he hadn’t really chosen me – that when he’d left his wife in my seventh month of pregnancy, he hadn’t jumped, but had been pushed – I might not have bothered. But I was still pursuing the dream at that point. Nick might

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