Kitabı oku: «The Trouble with Goats and Sheep», sayfa 2
After she told me, I had joined her mother in a silent conspiracy of watchfulness. Tilly was watched as we ran under a seamless August sky; a breathless look over my shoulder, waiting for her legs to catch up with mine. She was protected from a baked summer by my father’s golfing umbrella, a life lived far from the edges of kerbs and the cracks in pavements, and when September carried in mist and rain, she was placed so close to the gas fire, her legs became tartanned in red.
I watched her without end, inspecting her life for the slightest vibration of change, and yet she knew none of this. My worries were noiseless; a silent obsession that the only friend I had ever made would be taken from me, just because I hadn’t concentrated hard enough.
*
The noise in the hall drifted into a slur of voices. It was a machine, ticking over in the heat, fuelled by rumour and judgement, and we stared into an engine of cooked flesh and other people’s feet. Mr Forbes stood in front of us, sailing a cherry Bakewell through the air and giving out his opinion, as warmth crept into the material of his shirt.
‘He woke up on Monday morning and she’d gone. Vanished.’
‘Beggars belief,’ said Eric Lamb, who still had grass cuttings on the bottom of his trousers.
‘Live for the moment, that’s what I say.’ I watched Mr Forbes sail another cherry Bakewell around, as if to demonstrate his point.
Mrs Forbes didn’t speak. Instead, she shuffled her sandals on the herringbone floor, and twisted a teacup around in its saucer. Her face had worried itself into a pinch.
Mr Forbes studied her, as he disappeared his cherry Bakewell. ‘Stop whittling about it, Dorothy. It’s got nothing to do with that.’
‘It’s got everything to do with that,’ she said, ‘I just know it.’
Mr Forbes shook his head. ‘Tell her, Eric,’ he said, ‘she won’t listen to me.’
‘That’s all in the past. This will be about something else. A bit of a tiff, that’s what it’ll be,’ said Eric Lamb. I thought his voice was softer, and edged with comfort, but Mrs Forbes continued to shuffle, and she trapped her thoughts behind a frown.
‘Or the heat,’ said Mr Forbes, patting his belly to ensure the cherry Bakewells had safely arrived at their destination. ‘People do strange things in this kind of weather.’
‘That’s it,’ said Eric Lamb, ‘it’ll be the heat.’
Mrs Forbes looked up from her twisting teacup. Her smile was very thin. ‘We’re a bit buggered if it isn’t, though, aren’t we?’ she said.
The three stood in silence. I saw a stare pass between them, and Mr Forbes dragged the crumbs from his mouth with the back of a hand. Eric Lamb didn’t speak. When the stare reached his eyes, he looked at the floor to avoid taking it.
After a while, Mrs Forbes said, ‘this tea needs more milk,’ and she disappeared into a wall of sunburned flesh.
I tapped Tilly on the arm, and a spill of Bovril escaped on to blue plastic.
‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘Mrs Forbes said they’re all buggered.’
‘That’s not very church hall-ey, is it?’ said Tilly, who still wore her sou’wester. She wiped the Bovril with the edge of her jumper. ‘Mrs Forbes has been a little unusual lately.’
This was true. Only the day before, I’d seen her wandering around the front garden in a nightdress, having a long conversation with the flower beds.
It’s the heat, Mr Forbes had said, as he took her back inside with a cup of tea and the Radio Times.
‘Why do people blame everything on the heat?’ said Tilly.
‘It’s easier,’ I said.
‘Easier than what?’
‘Easier than telling everyone the real reasons.’
*
The vicar appeared.
We knew he had arrived even before we saw him, because all around the room, conversations began to cough and falter. He cut through the crowd, leaving it to re-form behind him, like the surface of the Red Sea. He appeared to glide beneath his cassock, and there was an air of stillness about him, which made everyone he approached seem overactive and slightly hysterical. People stood a little straighter as they shook his hand, and I saw Mrs Forbes do what appeared to be a small curtsy.
‘What did he say in church then?’ said Tilly, as we watched him edge around the room.
‘He said that God runs after people with knives if they don’t listen to Him properly.’
Tilly sniffed her Bovril again. ‘I never knew He did that,’ she said eventually.
Sometimes I struggled to take my gaze from her. She was almost transparent, as fragile as glass. ‘He said that if we find God, He’ll keep us all safe.’
Tilly looked up. There was a streak of sun cream on the very tip of her nose. ‘Do you think someone else is going to disappear, Gracie?’
I thought about the gravestones and Mrs Creasy, and the fractured, yellow lawns.
‘Do we need God to keep us safe? Are we not safe just as we are?’ she said.
‘I’m not sure that I know any more.’
I watched her, and threaded my worries like beads.
*
The vicar completed his circuit of the room and disappeared, as if he were a magician’s assistant, behind a curtain next to the stage. The engine of conversation started again, small at first, and uncertain, then powering up to its previous level, as the air filled with hosepipe bans and stories of vanishing neighbours.
It probably would have stayed that way. It probably would have run its course, and continued until people wandered home to fill themselves with Brussels sprouts, had Mr Creasy not burst through the double doors and marched the length of the hall past a startled audience. Silence followed him around the room, leaving only the click of a cup on a saucer, and the sound of elbows nudging each other.
He stopped in front of Mr Forbes and Eric Lamb, his face stretched with anger. Tilly said afterwards that she thought he was going to hit someone, but to me he looked as though all the hitting had been frightened out of him.
The words stayed in his eyes for a few seconds, then he said, ‘You told her, didn’t you?’
It was a whisper that wanted to be a shout, and it left his mouth wrapped in spit and fury.
Mr Forbes turned from their audience, and guided Mr Creasy towards a wall. I heard him say Christ and calm down and for heaven’s sake, and then I heard him say, ‘We haven’t told her anything.’
‘Why else would she up and leave?’ said Mr Creasy. The rage seemed to immobilize him, and he became a furious effigy, fixed and motionless, except for the flush which crept from beneath his shirt and into his neck.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘but if she’s found out, it’s not come from us.’
‘We’re not that stupid,’ said Eric Lamb. He looked over his shoulder at a sea of teacups and curiosity. ‘Let’s get you out of here, let’s get you a drink.’
‘I don’t want a bloody drink.’ Mr Creasy hissed at them, like a snake. ‘I want my wife back.’
He had no choice. They escorted him out of the hall, like prison guards.
I watched Mrs Forbes.
She stared at the door long after it had closed behind them.
Number Four, The Avenue
27 June 1976
The roads on our estate were all named after trees, and Tilly and I walked home from the church hall along an alley which separated Sycamore from Cedar. On either side of us, lines of washing stretched like bunting across deserted gardens, waiting for the whisper of a breeze, and as we walked, drips of water smacked a tune on to concrete paths.
No one realized then that, in many years to come, people would still speak of this summer; that every other heatwave would be compared to this one, and those who lived through it would shake their heads and smile whenever anyone complained of the temperature. It was a summer of deliverance. A summer of Space Hoppers and dancing queens, when Dolly Parton begged Jolene not to take her man, and we all stared at the surface of Mars and felt small. We had to share bathwater and half-fill the kettle, and we were only allowed to flush the toilet after what Mrs Morton described as a special occasion. The only problem was, it meant that everyone knew when you’d had a special occasion, which was a bit awkward. Mrs Morton said we’d end up with buckets and standpipes if we weren’t careful, and she was part of a vigilante group, who reported anyone for watering their gardens in the dark (Mrs Morton used washing-up water, which was allowed). It will only work if we all pull together, she said. I knew this wasn’t true, mind you, because, unlike the brittle yellow of everyone else’s, Mr Forbes’ lawn remained a strangely suspicious shade of green.
*
I could hear Tilly’s voice behind me. It drummed on the parched, wooden slats of the fences either side, which were beaten into white by the heat.
What do you think? she was saying.
She had been turning Mr Creasy’s words over since Pine Crescent, trying to fit them into an opinion.
‘I think Mr and Mrs Forbes are in on it,’ I shouted back.
She caught up with me, her legs fighting with the sentence. ‘Do you think they were the ones who murdered her?’
‘I think they all murdered her together.’
‘I’m not sure they look the type,’ she said. ‘My mum thinks the Forbeses are old-fashioned.’
‘No, they’re very modern.’ I found a stick and drew it along the fence. ‘They have a SodaStream.’
Tilly’s mum thought everyone was old-fashioned. Tilly’s mum owned long earrings and drank Campari, and only ever wore cheesecloth. In cold weather, she just wore more cheesecloth, layering it around herself like a shroud.
‘My mum says Mr and Mrs Forbes are curious people.’
‘Well, she’d know,’ I said.
Back doors were propped open in the heat, and the smell of batter and roasting tins escaped from other people’s lives. Even in ninety degrees, Brussels sprouts still simmered on stoves, and gravy still dripped and pooled on heavy plates.
‘I hate Sundays,’ I said.
‘Why?’ Tilly found another stick and dragged it alongside mine.
Tilly didn’t hate anything.
‘It’s just the day before Monday,’ I said. ‘It’s always too empty.’
‘We break up soon. We’ll have six weeks of nothing but Sundays.’
‘I know.’ The stick hammered my boredom into the wood.
‘What shall we do with our holidays?’
We reached the end of the fence, and the alley became silent.
‘I haven’t quite decided yet,’ I said, and let the stick fall from my hand.
*
We walked on to Lime Crescent , our sandals sending loose chippings dancing along the road. I looked up, but sunlight shot back from cars and windows and punished my eyes. I squinted and tried again.
Tilly didn’t notice, but I saw them straight away. A tribe of girls, a uniform of Quatro flicks and lip gloss, with hands stuffed into pockets, making denim wings. They stood on the opposite corner, doing nothing except being older than me. I saw them weigh out our presence, as they measured the pavement with scuffed market boots and chewed gum. They were a bookmark, a page I had yet to read, and I wanted to stretch myself out to get there.
I knew them all. I had watched for so long from the margins of their lives, their faces were as familiar as my own. I looked over for a thread of acknowledgement, but there was none. Even when I willed it with my eyes. Even when I slowed my steps to almost nothing. Tilly walked ahead, and I grew the distance between us, as stares filled with opinion reflected back at me. I couldn’t find anything to do with my arms, and so I folded them around my waist and tried to make my sandals sound more rebellious.
Tilly waited for me around the corner.
‘What shall we do now?’ she said.
‘Dunno.’
‘Shall we go to your house?’
‘S’pose.’
‘Why are you talking like that?’
I unfolded my arms. ‘I don’t know.’
She smiled, and I smiled back, even though the smiling felt unquiet.
‘Here,’ I said, and took the sou’wester from her head and put it on my own.
Her laughter was instant, and she reached for it back. ‘Some people just can’t wear hats, Gracie,’ she said. ‘It should stay where it belongs.’
My arm linked through hers and we walked towards home. Past matched lawns and carbon-papered lives, and rows of terraced houses, which handcuffed families together through chance and coincidence.
And I tried to make it enough.
*
When we got home, my mother was peeling potatoes and talking to Jimmy Young. He sat on the shelf above her head, and she nodded and smiled at him as she filled the sink with soil.
‘You’ve been gone a while.’
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to Jimmy.
‘We were at church,’ I said.
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Not really.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said, and fished another potato from the mud.
Tilly’s laughter hid inside her jumper.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I took two cheese triangles from the fridge and emptied a packet of Quavers on to a plate.
‘He’s gone to get a paper,’ said my mother, and she drowned the potatoes with a little more certainty. ‘He’ll be back soon.’
Pub, I mouthed at Tilly.
I unwrapped a triangle and Tilly took off her sou’wester, and we listened to Brotherhood of Man and watched my mother fashion potatoes.
Save all your kisses for me, said the radio, and Tilly and I did the dance with our arms.
‘Do you believe in God?’ I said to my mother, when the record had finished.
‘Now, do I believe in God?’ Her peeling slowed, and she stared at the ceiling.
I couldn’t understand why everyone looked towards the sky when I asked the question. As though they were expecting God to appear in the clouds and give them the right answer. If so, God let my mother down, and we were still waiting for her reply when my father appeared at the back door with no newspaper, and the British Legion still smeared in his eyes.
He draped himself around my mother, like a sheet. ‘How is my beautiful wife?’ he said.
‘There’s no time for that nonsense, Derek.’ She drowned another potato.
‘And my two favourite girls.’ He ruffled our hair, which was a bit of a mistake, as neither Tilly nor I had the kind of hair that could be ruffled very successfully. Mine was too blonde and opinionated, and Tilly’s refused to be separated from its bobbles.
‘Are you staying for some lunch, Tilly?’ my father said.
He leaned over to speak and ruffled her hair again. Whenever Tilly was there, he became a cartoon parent, a surrogate father. He swooped down to fill a gap in Tilly’s life that she never realized existed, until he highlighted it so exquisitely.
She started to answer, but he had his head in the fridge.
‘I saw Thin Brian in the Legion,’ he was saying to my mother. ‘Guess what he told me.’
My mother remained silent.
‘That old woman who lives at the end of Mulberry Drive, you know the one?’
My mother nodded into the peelings.
‘They found her dead last Monday.’
‘She was quite old, Derek.’
‘The point is,’ he said, unwrapping a cheese triangle of his own, ‘they reckon she’d been dead for a week and no one noticed.’
My mother looked over, and Tilly and I stared at the plate of Quavers in an effort to be unremembered.
‘They wouldn’t have discovered her even then,’ my father said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the sme—’
‘Why don’t you girls go outside?’ my mother said. ‘I’ll shout when your dinner’s ready.’
*
We sat on the patio, our backs pressed into the bricks to keep us in a ribbon of shade.
‘Fancy dying and no one misses you,’ Tilly said. ‘That’s not very Godly, is it?’
‘The vicar says God is everywhere,’ I said.
Tilly frowned at me.
‘Everywhere.’ I waved my arms around to show her.
‘So why wasn’t He on Mulberry Drive?’
I stared at the row of sunflowers on the far side of the garden. My mother had planted them last spring, and now they stretched above the wall and peered into the Forbes’ garden, like floral spies.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps He was somewhere else.’
‘I hope someone misses me when I die,’ she said.
‘You’re not going to die. Neither of us are. Not until we’re old. Not until people expect it of us. God will keep us safe until then.’
‘He didn’t keep Mrs Creasy safe, though, did he?’
I watched bumble bees drift between the sunflowers. They explored each one, dipping into the centre, searching and inspecting, until they reappeared in the daylight, dusted in yellow and drunk with achievement.
And it all became so obvious. ‘I know what we’re going to do with the summer holidays,’ I said, and got to my feet.
Tilly looked up. She squinted at me and shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘What?’
‘We’re going to make sure everyone is safe. We’re going to bring Mrs Creasy back.’
‘How are we going to do that?’
‘We’re going to look for God,’ I said.
‘We are?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we are. Right here on this avenue. And I’m not giving up until we find Him.’
I held out my hand. She took it and I pulled her up next to me.
‘Okay, Gracie,’ she said.
And she put her sou’wester back on and smiled.
Number Six, The Avenue
27 June 1976
It was Are You Being Served? on a Monday, The Good Life on a Tuesday, and The Generation Game on a Saturday. Although for the life of her, Dorothy couldn’t see what people found funny about Bruce Forsyth.
She tried to remember them, like a test, as she did the washing-up. It took her mind off the church hall, and the look on John Creasy’s face, and the spidery feeling in her chest.
Monday, Tuesday, Saturday. She usually liked washing up. She liked to watch the garden and idle her mind, but today the weight of the heat pressed against the glass and made her feel as though she were looking out from a giant oven.
Monday, Tuesday, Saturday.
She could still remember, although she wasn’t taking any chances. They were all circled in the Radio Times.
Harold became very irritable if she asked him something more than once.
Try to keep it in your head, Dorothy, he told her.
When Harold became angry, he could fill a room with his own annoyance. He could fill their sitting room, and the doctor’s surgery. He could even fill an entire supermarket.
She tried very hard to keep things in her head.
Sometimes, though, the words escaped her. They hid behind other words, or they showed a little of themselves, and then disappeared back into her mind before she had a chance to catch them.
I can’t find my … she would say, and Harold would throw choices at her like bullets. Keys? Gloves? Purse? Glasses? and it would make the word she wanted disappear even more.
Cuddly toy, she said one day, to make him laugh.
But Harold didn’t laugh. Instead, he stared at her as though she had walked into the conversation uninvited, and then he had closed the back door very quietly and started mowing the lawn. And somehow the quietness filled a room even more than the anger.
She folded the tea towel and put it on the edge of the draining board.
Harold had been quiet since they’d got back from church. He and Eric had deposited John Creasy somewhere, although Lord knows where, she hadn’t even dared ask, and he had sat down and read his newspaper in silence. He had eaten his dinner in silence, and dropped gravy down his shirt front in silence, and when she asked him if he wanted mandarin segments with Ideal milk for afterwards, he had only nodded at her.
When she put it down in front of him, he said the only sentence to come out of his mouth all afternoon. These are peaches, Dorothy.
It was happening all over again. It ran in families, she’d read it somewhere. Her mother ended up the same way, kept being found wandering the streets at six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, breadbin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind, although Dorothy always thought losing your mind was such a strange phrase. As if your mind could be misplaced, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier, as if it was more than likely your own fault for being so bloody careless.
They’d put her mother in a home within weeks. It was all very quick.
It’s for the best, Harold had said.
He’d said it each time they went to visit.
After he’d eaten his peaches, Harold had settled himself on the settee and fallen asleep, although how anyone could sleep in this heat was beyond her. He was still there now, his stomach rising and falling as he shifted in between dreams, his snoring keeping time with the kitchen clock, and plotting out the afternoon for them both.
Dorothy took the remains of their silent meal and emptied it into the pedal bin. The only problem with losing your mind was that you never lost the memories you wanted to lose. The memories you really needed left first. Her foot rested on the pedal, and she looked into the waste. No matter how many lists you wrote, and how many circles you made in the Radio Times, and no matter how much you practised the words over and over again, and tried to fool people, the only memories that didn’t leave were the ones you wish you’d never made in the first place.
She reached into the rubbish and lifted a tin out of the potato peelings. She stared at it.
‘These are peaches, Dorothy,’ she said to an empty kitchen. ‘Peaches.’
She felt the tears before she even knew they had happened.
*
‘The problem, Dorothy, is that you think too much.’ Harold’s gaze never left the television screen. ‘It’s not healthy.’
Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.
Dorothy picked imaginary fluff from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘It’s difficult not to think about it, Harold, under the circumstances.’
‘This is completely different. She’s a grown woman. Her and John have probably just had some kind of tiff and she’s cleared off for a bit to teach him a lesson.’
She looked over at her husband. The light from the window gave his face a faint blush of marzipan. ‘I only hope you’re right,’ she said.
‘Of course I’m right.’ His stare was still fastened to the television screen, and she watched his eyes flicker as the images changed.
It was Sale of the Century. She should have known better than to speak to Harold whilst he was occupied with Nicholas Parsons. It might have been best to try and fit the conversation into an advert break, but there were too many words and she couldn’t stop them climbing into her mouth.
‘The only thing is, I saw her. A few days before she disappeared.’ Dorothy cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to clear. ‘She was going into number eleven.’
Harold looked at her for the first time. ‘You never told me.’
‘You never asked,’ she said.
‘What was she doing going in there?’ He turned towards her, and his glasses fell from the arm of his chair. ‘What could they possibly have to say to each other?’
‘I have no idea, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it? She speaks to him, and then a few days later, she vanishes. He must have said something.’
Harold stared at the floor, and she waited for his fear to catch up with hers. In the corner, the television churned the laughter of strangers out into their living room.
‘What I don’t understand’, he said, ‘is how he could stay on the avenue, after everything that happened. He should have moved on.’
‘You can’t dictate to people where they live, Harold.’
‘He doesn’t belong here.’
‘He’s lived at number eleven all his life.’
‘But after what he did?’
‘He didn’t do anything.’ Dorothy looked at the screen to avoid Harold’s eyes. ‘They said so.’
‘I know what they said.’
She could hear him breathing. The wheeze of warm air moving through tired lungs. She waited. But he turned to the television and straightened his spine.
‘You’re just being hysterical, Dorothy. All that’s over and done with. It was ten years ago.’
‘Nine, actually,’ she said.
‘Nine, ten, what does it matter? It’s all in the past, except every time you start talking about it, it stops being in the past and starts being in the present again.’
She gathered the material of her skirt into folds and let them fall between her hands.
‘Would you stop fidgeting, woman.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ she said.
‘Well, go and do something productive. Go and have a bath.’
‘I had a bath this morning.’
‘Well, go and have another one,’ he said, ‘you’re putting me off the questions.’
‘What about saving water, Harold?’
But Harold didn’t reply. Instead of replying, he picked at his teeth. Dorothy could hear him. Even over Nicholas Parsons.
She smoothed down her hair and her skirt. She took a deep breath to suffocate her words, and then she stood up and walked from the room. Before she closed the door, she looked back.
He had turned away from the television, and was staring through the window – past the lace of the curtains, across the gardens and the pavements, to the front door of number eleven.
His glasses still lay at his feet.
*
Dorothy knew exactly where she’d hidden the tin.
Harold never went into the back bedroom. It was a holding place. A waiting room for all the things she no longer needed but couldn’t bear to lose. He said the thought of it gave him a headache. As the years turned, the room had grown. Now the past pushed into corners and reached to the ceiling. It stretched along the windowsill and touched the skirting boards, and it allowed Dorothy to hold it in her hands. Sometimes, remembering wasn’t enough. Sometimes, she needed to carry the past with her to be sure she was a part of it.
The room trapped summer within its walls. It held Dorothy in an airless museum of dust and paper, and she felt the sweat bleed into her hairline. The sound of the television crept through the floorboards, and she could picture Harold beneath her feet, answering questions and picking at his teeth.
The tin sat between a pile of blankets her mother had crocheted and some crockery left over from the caravan. She could see it from the doorway, as though it had waited for her, and she kneeled on the carpet and pulled it free. Around the edge were photographs of biscuits to tempt you inside, pink wafers and party rings and Jammie Dodgers, all joining cartoon hands and dancing with cartoon legs, and she held on to them as she lifted the lid away.
The first thing she saw was a raffle ticket from 1967 and a collection of safety pins. There were Harold’s tarnished cufflinks and a few escaped buttons, and the cutting about her mother’s funeral from the local paper.
Passed away peacefully, it said.
She hadn’t.
But beneath the pins and the grips and the buttons was what she had come for. Kodak envelopes, fattened with time. Harold didn’t believe in photographs. Mawkish, he called them. Dorothy didn’t know anyone else who used the word ‘mawkish’. There were very few pictures of Harold. There was an occasional elbow at a dinner table, or trouser leg on a lawn, and if anyone had managed to capture his face in the frame, he wore the expression of someone who had been the victim of trickery.
She searched through the packets. Most of the photographs were rescued from her mother’s house. People she didn’t know, held within white, serrated edges, sitting in gardens she didn’t recognize and rooms she had never visited. There were Georges and Florries, and lots of people called Bill. They had written their names on the back, perhaps hoping that, if their identity were known, they would somehow be better remembered.
There were few photographs of her own – an infrequent Christmas gathering, a meal with the Ladies’ Circle. A photograph of Whiskey fell to the carpet, and she felt her throat fill.
He had never come home.
Just get another cat, Harold had said.
It was the closest she had ever come to losing her temper.
The photograph she wanted was at the bottom, a weight of memories pressed upon it. She had to see. She had to be sure. Perhaps, over the years, the past had become misshapen. Perhaps time had stretched their part in it, and bloated her conscience. Perhaps, if she could see the faces again, she would recognize their harmlessness.
They looked up at her from a table at the British Legion. It was before everything happened, but she was sure it was the same table – the table where the decision had been made. Harold sat next to her, and they both stared into the lens with troubled eyes. The photographer had caught them by surprise, she remembered that, someone from the town paper wanting pictures for an article on local colour. Of course, they never used it. John Creasy stood behind them, his hands pushed into his pockets, looking out from under a Beatles fringe. Sitting in front of John was that daft clown Thin Brian, with a pint glass in his hand, and Eric Lamb was opposite Harold. Sheila Dakin was on the end – all eyelashes and Babycham.
Dorothy looked at their faces, hoping to see something else.
There was nothing. They were exactly as she had left them.
It was 1967. The year Johnson sent thousands more to die in Vietnam. The year China made a hydrogen bomb, and Israel fought a six-day war. The year people marched and shouted, and waved banners about what they believed in.
It was a year of choices.
She wished she had known then that one day she would be staring back at herself, wishing that the choice they had made had been a different one. She turned the photograph over. There were no names. After all that had happened, she was certain none of them would care to be remembered.
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