1.

In the back garden in the middle of the night, my mum is burning roses. One by one, holding them by the ends of their long stems, thorns biting her fingers, she flicks open her lighter and holds the flame under the petals until they catch. The fire bursts the flowers open with a sound like wingbeats.

My sister Kate is standing stony on the patio, watching. I join her silently and she slips her hand into mine.

My mum, sitting on the damp grass in the dark, doesn’t notice. She just flicks open her lighter and holds another rose over the flame.

There are seventy-six of them. Fifty-five red roses from her wedding bouquet, dried and kept above her bed for over twenty years since she and my dad got married. Twenty-one fresh roses that she must have bought just to burn them. One rose for every year.

“How long’s she been out here?” I whisper to Kate under the sound of flowers and flames.

“Nineteen roses to go,” she mutters.

Inside the house the last of our dad’s things are in boxes and our mum’s been painting every room like the smell of Dulux Pale Meadow will cleanse the place of his presence. She’s even started on the furniture, buying spray-can bottles with names like Mediterranean Olive and Dusty Dawn and lugging chairs and coffee tables into the back garden to transform them.

Kate has taken to lying underneath the newly sprayed furniture and nicking small circles of paint off the bottom of them with her fingernails.

“So we remember what they looked like before,” she says.

I inch out into the garden, my sister still holding on tight to my hand. Mum has her back to me, eyes on the fire. The smoke stings. She’s surrounded by roses. Cut roses, dried roses, the ashes of the flowers falling to the ground. I lean down silently and steal one she hasn’t burned. Then Kate and I run back into the house before she can see us.

I shove the rose into my trousers and tell my sister to cover for me. “I’m going out. If Mum notices, tell her I’m sleeping at Melody’s with Radha.”

“Don’t worry,” Kate says. “I’ll look after her.” But that’s not what I said at all.

2.

It’s well past midnight and the walls around the playground are covered in wild writing. Tags and swears and initials, love hearts and body parts.

Half our year is out tonight, as well as a couple of rebellious fourth-years and even some sixth-years, drowning out the knowledge of their impending exams with drinks that only a handful of them are legally allowed to buy.

Up at the gate, Angel O’Rourke is adding to the graffiti. She writes in cursive that could be calligraphy and that has no place coming out of a purple Sharpie or going on to a playground wall with all the profanity and specific anatomy.

If Radha was here she’d roll her eyes to the cloudless sky and say something about how hard some people work on looking like a rebel, but Radha isn’t here yet and I’ve a rose in the belt buckle of my jeans and my belly’s full of Ribena and vodka because that’s what Matthew and Shane are drinking and Matthew and Shane are so literally tangled up in each other underneath the climbing frame that they don’t even slightly register that I’ve gotten up off the slide and left them to their makeout session and gone over to the gate of the playground to lean against the wall that Angel O’Rourke is writing on.