‘Oh, my!’ Rosaleen hunkered down and grabbed everything in a panic. Her dress lifted up her thigh and she had surprisingly youthful legs. Mum had twisted around in her chair to see, looked at me, smiled and then faced the window again. I tried to help Rosaleen but she wouldn’t let me, swatting me away and racing to pick up every item I reached for time and time again. I followed her down the stairs, like a puppy, almost nipping at her heels.

‘What did she say?’ I tried to keep my voice down so Mum wouldn’t hear us talking about her.

Rosaleen, still in shock from my attack was trembling and a little pale. She wobbled her way into the kitchen with the big tray.

‘Well?’ I asked, following her.

‘Well, what?’

‘What was that noise?’ Arthur asked.

‘What did she say?’ I asked.

Rosaleen looked from Arthur to me, her eyes wide and bright green, her pupils so tiny her green eyes glowed.

‘The tray dropped,’ she said to Arthur and then to me, ‘Nothing.’

‘Why are you lying?’

Her face transformed. Morphed into something so angry, I wanted to take it all back straightaway: it was my imagination, I had made it up, I was looking for attention…I don’t know. I was confused.

‘I’m sorry,’ I stuttered. ‘I didn’t mean to accuse you of lying. It just looked like she said something. That’s all.’

‘She said, thank you. I said she was welcome.’

I forced myself to remember Mum’s lips. ‘She said sorry,’ I blurted out.

Rosaleen froze. Arthur lifted his head from the newspaper.

‘She said sorry, didn’t she?’ I asked, looking from one to

the other. ‘Why did she say that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly.

‘You must know, Arthur.’ I looked at him. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Why would she say sorry?’

‘I suppose she just feels she’s being a nuisance,’ Rosaleen jumped in and spoke for him. ‘But she’s not. I don’t mind cooking for her. It’s no bother.’

‘Oh.’

Arthur clearly couldn’t wait to leave and as soon as he’d gone, the day returned to what it always was.

I wanted to have a look around the garage when Rosaleen was gone and I learned the best thing to do was to pretend you didn’t want her to go. That way, she was never suspicious.

‘Can I bring something over with you to the bungalow?’

‘No,’ she said, agitated, still annoyed with me.

‘Oh, okay, but thank you very much for offering, Tamara.’ I rolled my eyes.

She took out the freshly baked brown bread, the fresh apple pie. A casserole dish of something else and a few Tupperware boxes. Enough for a week’s dinner.

‘Well, who lives there?’

No answer.

‘Come on, Rosaleen. I don’t know what happened to you in your last life but I’m not the Gestapo. I’m sixteen years old and I only want to know because there’s absolutely nothing for me to do. Perhaps there’s somebody over there who I could talk to that’s not nearing death.’

‘My mother,’ she said finally.

I waited for the rest of the sentence. My mother told me to mind my own business. My mother told me to always wear tea dresses. My mother told me never to reveal her apple pie recipe. My mother told me to never enjoy sex. But nothing else came. Her mother. Her mother lived across the road.

‘Why have you never mentioned it?’

She looked a little embarrassed. ‘Oh, you know…’

‘No. Is she embarrassing? Sometimes my parents were embarrassing.’

‘No, she’s…she’s old.’

‘Old people are cute. Can I meet her?’

‘No, Tamara. Not yet, anyway,’ she softened. ‘Her health isn’t the best. She can’t move around. She’s not good with new people. It makes her anxious.’

‘So that’s why you’re always back and forth. Poor you always having to look after everybody else.’

She seemed touched by that.

‘I’m all she has. I have to take care of her.’

‘Are you sure I can’t help you? I won’t talk to her or anything.’

‘No, thank you, Tamara. Thank you for asking.’

‘So did she move closer to you so you could take care of her?’

‘No.’ She spooned chicken and tomato sauce into a casserole dish.

‘Did you move closer to her so that you could take care of her?’

‘No.’ She put two boil-in-the-bag rice sachets into another Tupperware box. ‘She’s always lived there.’

I thought about that for a minute while watching her.

‘Hold on, so that’s where you grew up?’

‘Yes,’ she said simply, placing everything on a tray. ‘That’s the house I grew up in.’

‘Well, you didn’t move far away, did you? So did you and Arthur move in here after you were married?’

‘Yes, Tamara. Now that’s enough questions. You know curiosity killed the cat.’ She smiled briefly before leaving the kitchen.

‘Boredom killed the fucking cat,’ I shouted at the closed door.

I sloped into the living room as I had done every morning and watched her scurry across the road, like a little paranoid hamster anxious for a hawk to swoop down and grab her.

She dropped a dishtowel and I waited for her to stop and pick it up. But she didn’t. She didn’t appear to notice. I quickly went outside and down the garden path, stalling at the gate like an obedient child as I waited for her to come running back out.

I bravely stepped beyond the gate. And then once I’d done that, I walked to the entrance of the grounds, expecting by now for her to have noticed her missing dishtowel. Red alert; there was an apple pie somewhere omitting heat. The bungalow was a red-brick boring-looking thing, two windows covered in white netting, like two eyes with glaucoma, and separated by a snot-green door. The windows seemed dark and even though they weren’t, the glass seemed tinted and only reflected the light from outside, showing no signs of life inside. I picked up the blue chequered dishtowel from the middle of the road, which was mostly always-mostly always, very dead-empty of traffic. The gate to the front garden was so low I could lift my leg over it. I thought it would be the safest way, or fifty years of rusted gate would give me away. I slowly walked up the path and looked through the window on the right of the building. I pressed my face up against the glass and tried to see through the horrific netting. After all the mystery I don’t quite know what I was expecting to see. Some great secret, a crazy sect, dead bodies, a hippy commune, some weird sex thing with a lot of keys in an ashtray…I don’t know. Anything, anything, but an electric heater in place of a real fire, surrounded by dodgy brown tiles and tiled mantel, green carpet and jaded chairs with wooden handles and green crushed-velvet cushions. It was all a bit sad, really. It was all a bit like a dentist’s waiting room, and I felt a little bad. Rosaleen hadn’t been hiding anything at all. Well, not quite: she’d been hiding the biggest home design disaster of the century.

Instead of ringing the doorbell I walked round the side of the house. Immediately as I turned the corner I could see that there was a small garden with a large garage, just like the one at the back of the gatehouse, at the bottom of the land. From the window of the workshed something sparkled. At first I thought it was a camera flash, but then I realised that whatever had dazzled my eyes and momentarily blinded me only did so each time it caught the sunlight. As I neared the end of the side passage I yearned to see what was around the corner.

Rosaleen stepped in front of me and I jumped, my scream echoing down the narrow alleyway. Then I laughed.

Rosaleen instantly shushed me, seeming jittery.

‘Sorry,’ I smiled. ‘I hope I didn’t scare your mum. You dropped this on the road. Just came to give it to you. What is that light?’

‘What light?’ She stepped a little to her right and my eyes were protected but my view blocked.

‘Thanks.’ I rubbed my eyes.

‘You best go back to the house,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, come on, can I not at least say hello? It’s all a bit too Scooby-Doo for me. You know, mysterious.’