The Wedding Party by Cathy Kelly

Author:Cathy Kelly [Kelly, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409179337
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2022-07-20T18:30:00+00:00

12

The Third Photo

Eden stood in her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her outfit was totally different to the one she’d worn for last year’s photo. In fact, she was so totally different from the person she’d been last year. So different, it was hard to imagine that the girl from then and the girl from now inhabited the same body. She’d been eighteen then, whereas now she felt about a hundred. She felt changed by life and knowledge. Changed by the secrecy. She wished she’d been able to tell people, but, how could she? There were some secrets people didn’t want to know. Secrets that therefore made shame bloom around them. When, in reality, Eden thought sadly, there shouldn’t be shame, there should be understanding and kindness. But secrecy flattened all that. It was like damp mould creeping through life the way it crept along her now blackened windowsill. Damp was clambering over the Sorrento again. Old homes were the worst, her mother said.

She tied her hair back and looked in the mirror again. Gone were the cute breast-enhancing shirts she used to wear. She didn’t want to be associated with that Eden. She wanted to start again, be the person she had been years ago, before excitement and craziness had been a part of her life. The manufactured girlband, which she’d joined after reading about it on a college noticeboard, had given her elegant, sedate clothes because that’s who she was in their vision. And now she wore those clothes in normal life too. It was like trying them on for size: high-neck blouses, long skirts. She felt like a suffragette from the turn of the last century, ready to fight for her cause.

Where she’d fought for her cause, but she had had to fight it alone, because Jimmy was no use.

She’d known he wouldn’t be. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she could see it on his face: shock and a desire to be as far away from her as was humanly possible was what she’d seen.

She adjusted her hair a little now and found her necklace. She liked the citrine. It was an unusual stone, could stand in for a yellow diamond. But then she wasn’t really into diamonds. No diamonds for Eden, she thought grimly. She’d have to buy them herself. She went downstairs out the back into the late summer sun.

The sun was shining through the trees, casting beautiful golden light on the back of the little barn where they took the pictures. When they’d started this years ago, the barn had been prettied up covered in twinkly lights and more of a cabana where Pops could serve drinks to people having parties outside. Now it looked faintly decaying like everything else about the Sorrento.

She took her place beside her sisters. Savannah was beaming into the camera. Eden loved seeing her twin happy. College had been the making of Savannah. She was blossoming under the business course, coming home at night to share new things with them.

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