Gilly had dropped the cake back on her plate and glowered.

‘Don’t sulk, either,’ Edie added. ‘Honestly, what are you? Five?’

Gilly had been about to answer back when she’d thought better of it. ‘What do you want me to do next, then?’

‘The only two shades you will have to work with when you start cutting the lino are black and white,’ Edie had told her. ‘I want you to take one of those sketches and think about how you’re going to make that work. Which parts should be white? Which parts should be black?’

Gilly swallowed her mouthful of cake. ‘Why only black and white? That’s got plenty of other colours.’ She pointed to the print of the lighthouse hanging on the wall.

‘That’s what’s called a reduction print,’ Edie had explained. ‘It’s a much more complicated process. You need to start off with the basics and make a simpler version. That means one colour will be the colour of the paper – white, for your first print – and one other colour will be the colour of the ink. Okay, so that doesn’t have to be black, but it’s probably the best place to begin.’ She tapped the pad again. ‘So – black and white. Have a go at it, kid. Your hour is ticking away. I don’t have all afternoon, you know.’

‘Yeah,’ Gilly had said. ‘Because your days are so packed, aren’t they?’

Edie had given her a warning glare, which Gilly ignored. She’d picked up her sketch of the way the telephone wires criss-crossed the street and realized that if she were going to make it a print instead of a sketch, it was far too complicated. Still, she liked the image. She liked the way it represented something looked at every day but never really noticed. In the end Gilly had decided to focus on the telegraph pole and the way the wires jutted out of it like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. She’d begun to redraw that single aspect of her original sketch on a clean sheet of paper.

‘When you cut into the lino,’ Edie had told her, ‘what you carve away will be the colour of the paper, which in this case will be white, and what you leave will take the black ink. Keep that in mind as you’re drawing.’

Now, a few days later, Gilly was actually proud of the sketch that was beginning to take shape. Edie had looked over her shoulder periodically, giving her tips on shading. Gilly had got used to these daily visits and had thought the days of Edie trying to get rid of her were over. Hadn’t she proven that she wanted to do whatever it would take to learn? But now Gilly wondered whether it wasn’t because Edie had thought she was mucking about that she didn’t want her here, but that she just didn’t want Gilly here full stop.

‘I thought I was getting better,’ Gilly said, trying not to feel hurt. After all, it wasn’t as if Edie was a friend, was it? She was only doing this because Gilly had forced her to in the first place.