‘Good morning, pretty lady,’ he said, a hand in her dark hair as he kissed her.

‘Good morning, handsome man,’ she replied.

She was a delight when she was like this, and he felt the fluttering down in his belly that came when he hadn’t seen her for a while, or when she was sweet and loving; when she had herself under control.

10

Time seemed to stand still, and when Stella looked at the clock in the living room it was always seven, every time. She wasn’t sure if that was seven in the morning or the evening, though. She had been hanging on all night for everyone to make a move to somewhere 26 they could dance, but nothing was happening; some of them had even started to dance in the living room. All of a sudden she was sick of it all and wanted to leave, but she was unsure if this was because there were no fun girls there, or because of the newsreader, who was always at her heels, trying to get her to talk, or just staring.

‘Come on, sugar. Give this one a chance,’ Anna A said in the tone of maternal concern the Annas always used when speaking to her, and she stroked Stella’s cheek. Stella could feel from her touch that Anna was as high as a kite, and it didn’t look like the party was going to shift to a nightspot anywhere. This was going to continue all the way through to Sunday morning.

‘Want another smartie?’ asked Anna.

Stella shook her head, sipped from the glass of water Anna handed her and sauntered back to the living room. Some of the girls were dancing and others were sitting on the sofa, including the newsreader, who seemed to have finally struck lucky. So at least she wouldn’t be following her from one room to another. The double doors stood open and Stella went outside onto the deck, taking breaths of outdoor air. Three girls were singing in the hot tub, their efforts undoubtedly sounding better to them than they did in reality. She could jump into the pot and join in the singing, or go into the living room and dance, but she had done all this before. And somehow in this dead time between seven and seven she felt faint and so overheated her head seemed about to burst. She went back inside, took her coat from the hall, opened the front door and stepped out into the cool silence.

The newsreader was standing on the steps, her scarf covering half her face as if she wanted to disguise herself, probably already feeling the regret that was inevitable after stepping through these doors.

‘Always the same crap,’ she said through her scarf. ‘I don’t know why I keep coming back. I don’t even like pills, or any other dope, for that matter.’ 27

‘Don’t you come mainly to stare at me?’ Stella said, buttoning her coat, aware of how soft the buttons were. She stood still and stroked them with the tip of her index finger. They were ordinary plastic buttons, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed before just how smooth they were.