Seven Days of Us

by Francesca Hornak

She found herself gazing at some bagged spinach on the worktop, the little leaves all cleaned and trimmed as if they’d never seen soil, until a quizzical look from Phoebe stopped her.

I covered Abu’s tiny body in a white cloth and said a prayer while I held his father’s hand. The prayer was for the man’s benefit. It would be difficult to believe in any god that afternoon.

But at some point, years ago now, he had become aware they were having sex because it was an occasion, as if she felt obliged to tick it off the list along with making a perfect Christmas dinner and festooning the house with bits of twig.

I always say this, you regret the things you didn’t do, not the things you did do.”

But that was the way it was at home, everyone sticking to a script, wheeling out the same exhausted anecdotes.

Olivia wondered why her mother had bought him a book on the one subject he knew inside out. But it wasn’t really about that, she knew. It was about going through the motions of giving each other more and more stuff, every year.

The way she could switch her anger off, for good manners, was formidable. It was a product of her breeding.

Her mother only told people to feed themselves if there was a crisis.

“Where’s Phoebe?” she asked, as he set the cup down on the dressing table. She fought her mother’s voice, telling him it would make a ring on the wood. He’d never understood about good furniture.

Each regret seemed to summon another, as if he’d turned over a log in his mind and revealed a writhing mass of wood lice.

Being half of a couple was the only thing that made her a grown-up.

It was like Emma couldn’t decide how to cope—she kept alternating between tears and a kind of forced normality.